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Hello, it’s me: I was wondering if we could leave Adele alone
Adele has won an Oscar and 15 Grammy awards. She’s broken a dizzying number of world records and been named one of the most 100 influential people in the world by Time. She’s first-name-only levels of famous and a British cultural icon. She’s got so much money that, one year, she paid as much tax as Facebook.
While Adele’s body of work is impressive, it’s apparently not quite as interesting as her actual body. The internet has been fixated with the 32-year-old’s weight loss for a while now, but the Adele obsession went into overdrive this week after she posted a photo of herself on Instagram thanking people for the “birthday love” and expressing gratitude to essential workers. The post went viral and started a debate about whether cheering Adele’s new body is fat-phobic. It also sparked a Skinny Adele meme, which juxtaposes pictures of the singer with things like fried chicken and pizza and asks which you’d prefer. Which is problematic for a number of reasons; not least because it seems to be condoning cannibalism.
Readers who are familiar with the hellscape that is Twitter may have an inkling of what happens next. Right on cue, Jameela Jamil, who never misses an opportunity to opine on body image issues, strode into the debate. “Adele would hate this so much,” the actor and activist tweeted on Thursday, with a photo montage of Skinny Adele memes. “I’m so glad she isn’t [on Twitter] to see people weaponize her body against women. These memes are everywhere. This is so offensive. So destructive. So reductive. It encourages us to demonize and become afraid of food.”
Those are all good points. Nevertheless, one does have to wonder exactly how helpful it is for Jamil to have shared the memes with her 1.1 million followers.
You’d think that during a once-in-a-century pandemic that is devastating the world we’d all have gained a little perspective. You’d think that we might have lost interest in how much a celebrity weighs. Alas, policing female bodies and appetites is a timeless trend. We’ve been doing it since Eve was shamed for gluttonously eating that apple and, no doubt, we’ll be doing it until we get hit by an asteroid or the aliens arrive to put us all out of our misery. Despite all the progress there has been around gender equality much of the world is still more interested in what goes into a woman’s mouth than what comes out of it.
Jacob Wohl is at the centre of yet another fake sexual assault allegation
The pro-Trump smear artist reportedly paid a woman called Diana Andrade to pretend that Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had sexually assaulted her. Andrade initially went through with the plan but then had second thoughts and blew the whistle. Wohl, and his equally odious sidekick Jack Burkman, have a history of trying to (very badly) fabricate sexual harassment allegations against the likes of Robert Mueller, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren. Last year he claimed that Warren had paid for an S&M relationship with a twentysomething marine. Wohl is a complete joke but his antics do a lot of damage to the credibility of sexual assault survivors.
Betsy DeVos revises campus sexual assault legislation
The US education secretary (and owner of multiple yachts) has issued new rules on sexual assault in schools and colleges; equal rights groups argue these revisions “tip the scales in favor” of abusers and reduce the rights of survivors. The new regulations are expected to be challenged in court.
Love in the time of corona
That headline has already been used approximately 10 billion times so far in articles about romance during the coronavirus crisis. Now there’s a quarantine dating series with that name coming to a screen near you soon. I’m sure Gabriel García Márquez would be very proud.
Tara Reade calls on Joe Biden to drop out
Reade, who has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993, called on the presumptive Democratic nominee to drop out of the presidential race during an on-camera interview with Megyn Kelly. Reade also says she is prepared to take a polygraph test if Biden also takes one. (There’s a huge amount of controversy around the credibility of the polygraph, so I’m not sure that would really help anything.)
Women are being ‘tossed to the wind’ in birth control case
The US supreme court has been hearing arguments on whether the Trump administration can make it easier for employers to stop providing free birth control coverage in their insurance plans for religious or moral reasons. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that the government is attempting to “to toss to the wind entirely Congress’s instruction that women need and shall have seamless no-cost coverage”.
Men and women disagree about how much time they spend on chores
Nearly half of men say they do most of the home schooling during lockdown, according to a poll by the New York Times. Weirdly, only 3% of women agree their spouse is doing more.
The women battling to free Myanmar from meth
Mostly in their 40s and 50s, a group of vigilante women are apprehending drug traffickers in the jungle.
Gendered lockdown fueling hate crime in Bogotá
There have been at least 20 violent incidents against trans people in supermarkets during lockdown since Colombia started a policy in which men and women are allowed out of quarantine on separate days.
107-year-old artist survives Covid-19
Marilee Shapiro Asher also beat the 1918 Spanish flu when she was six. I’m not sure what her secret is but, for selfish reasons, I kinda hope it’s whiskey.
The week in pest-iarchy
Turns out all those rumours that “murder hornets” are invading America have been greatly exaggerated. Experts say coverage of the deadly bug has been overblown and they don’t pose “an existential threat to mankind”. So there you go: some good news for once.
