Bits #29
books Tinder, the Anora controversy, Gen X Hollywood, heterofatalism + how the spornosexual got swole. Plus, 2 great podcasts + why caring should be cool
Goooood Friday evening to you! I have effed my back (carrying too many children up too many stairs) and so I am high on painkillers. I hope this newsletter reads accordingly.
Books are now so damn hot, they might just get you laid. New Tinder data reveals that there’s been a 16% increase of reading mentions in bios year on year, with the term ‘Book Boyfriend’ rising by 77% in January. Bios include “Just a book girl looking for her irl book boyfriend ”, to “Trying to be your perfect book boyfriend” (Joe Goldberg, is that you?) Unsurprisingly, this is mostly a Gen Z trend.
I’m thrilled to be interviewing two of our most vital contemporary authors, Natasha Brown and David Szalay1, for this year’s Charleston Literary Festival. I have their latests novels—Flesh and Universality—ready on my bedside table. After reading this and this, I cannot wait. I hope to see some of you there!
This conversation between Cate Blanchett and Bella Freud for Freud’s podcast, Fashion Neurosis, was surprisingly moving: both had mothers who made all their clothes (even their knickers) to save money, which marked them out at school. Of her classmates, Freud (who was raised by a single mother, Bernadine Coverley, who was just 18 when she was born) says thoughtfully, “I felt the burden of their contempt”. It’s stayed with me all week.
I’d never even heard of Ione Skye before reading this interview with her in The Sunday Times Style, but I am now gasping to read Say Everything. Skye was hot on the Gen X Hollywood scene: best friends with River Phoenix, teenage girlfriend of Anthony Kiedis (she later married a Beastie Boy) and her brother Dino dated a young Gwyneth Paltrow—who, at just 21, had a rock solid confidence and a mean girl-ish air. I need more more more!
Ione Skye with River Phoenix and Matthew Perry, 1988 (I think) I very much enjoyed a piece in the latest issue of Esquire (magazine only) by Max Oleander, ‘Everyone must get swole’, which is an update of his piece for the same magazine in 2014, on the dizzying rise of the spornosexual (coined by cultural critic Mark Simpson in 1994, for a man “who was unashamed of wanting to look good”.) Back in 2014, ‘mediated masculinity’ was a new phenomenon; a decade on, “the sporno ethos has broadened to the generation above”—with 60% of British men in their 50s and 60s now working out—to become ‘inescapable’. A funny and thought-provoking read on the “Gymshark-infested waters” of modern masculinity.
I loved Hermione Hoby’s piece for BookForum, ‘Reader I Divorced Him’, on the recent spate of fiction championing divorce as liberation. I read a bunch of the books cited (Liars, Splinters, All Fours) in a short period of time and found myself sort of ennuied afterwards, so I found Hoby’s criticism of literary ‘heterofatalism’ (such a great term) particularly salient. Also interesting is Haley Nahman’s short podcast in response to Hoby’s piece, on why not every heterosexual relationship is “the patriarchy”. We all know that heterosexual relationships don’t often allow for female self-expansion, but the idea that marriage is always a subjugation—and that a divorced woman is always the more enlightened party—feels as regressive as what came before it.
Lorraine Kelly got the Simon Hattenstone treatment—which meant I finally got the skinny on the whole ‘Lorraine is not really Lorraine’ headfuckery of 2019, which I have thought of more often than is sane. She also talks about the shit she gets for taking Fridays off. The woman is in her 60s! Let her work a flipping four day week. Let us all!
Ever wished there was word for a really slappable face? Me neither, but joyously, there is: backpfeifengesicht is a German word for a face that is worthy of being slapped. The only thing that puts me off using it daily is that I cannot spell it.
If you liked my interview with Nussaibah Younis the other week, then I recommend her piece in the latest issue of Grazia (magazine only) about removing her headscarf aged 21. Losing her faith led to cat-calling which, while “an improvement on Islamaphobic abuse” was still ‘terrifying’. It also led to a new and unexpected vulnerability:
“If I wasn’t single because of the headscarf, it must have been because of who I was as a person. I felt unlovable and desperate for validation in a way I’d never felt when I wore the hijab.”
The conclusion from the comment section under my mini essay on With Love, Meghan, is that Sophie Dahl needs to bring her cooking show back. And while we are at it, her column in House&Garden. Dahl (who also writes heavenly children’s books) is so captivating on both page and screen, I could read her on paint drying and still be charmed.
I recently read about an app, Epowar, that keeps women safe by tracking spikes in heart rate and erratic movements. Epowar creator, E-J Roodt, came up with the idea whilst studying at uni after realising that she needed two hands to set off her rape alarm. Before setting out on a journey (solo, late at night, say) you log your route and select emergency contacts you would like to track your progress. If the app detects an attack, a critical alert it sent to the contacts, and the app immediately starts recording. A brilliant invention.
