Women Born In The 1950s

"I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn’t have dared to do it."

"Previously, I had felt a kind of energy in life, with moments of depression of course – but I read constantly, took notes, was curious about everything. Then it was gone … The breakdown knocked me out. Before, I walked barefoot in the street, I brought poor people home, I wanted to save the world. Imagine, I telephoned Amnesty International to try to get them to dig a hole to the other side of the earth, to Siberia, so they’d get out all the people imprisoned in the camps! I wanted them to have 10,000 Socialist Jews brought to Israel to change the government and make peace … But I wasn’t living there, and it’s for the Israelis to know what’s to be done. Not for us who live here, for the time being, securely. I want the days to end early. I go to bed at 5pm, at 8pm, with sleeping pills. Without complaining. That’s how it is. I cope with my illness. It’s an illness like any other."

"I sometimes think I should have made it after many other films, at the end of my career. [...] I remember saying to myself, how can I make a better film? But it was also exactly the film I had to make then. It says something about a woman, about a way of living a life, about life after the war. It was the first thing I had to pour out of myself. [...] I would have changed nothing about it."

"For many reasons, I believe more in books than images. The image is an idol in an idolatrous world. In a book, there’s no idolatry, even if you can idolise the characters. I believe in the book; when you immerse yourself in a huge book, it’s like an event, an extraordinary one."

"It came from what I saw as a kid, all those gestures of my mother. [...] That’s why the film is so precise."

"Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious [...] She didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour."

"[A male client of the lead character, a part-time prostitute, is stabbed with scissors near the end of the film.] In most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life. [...] This film is about his own life."

"[On the isms ("feminism, minimalism, structuralism") present in analysis of Jeanne Dielman.] I don’t think it’s minimalist, [...] I think it’s maximalist. It’s big! And if I did the film now I don’t know that it would be called feminist. It could have been done about a man, too. All those labels are a bit annoying [...] To name something is a way to possess it. I think it makes the film smaller. And O.K., maybe they are right, but they are never right enough."

"Delphine Seyrig complained that there was so much detail she didn’t have to invent anything."

"A lot of it came unconsciously. [...] When I wrote it, it ran like a river."

"[On directing Jeanne Dielman aged 25.] It’s not very modest of me, but I’m still so proud I did it at that age."

"Everyone thought, for example, that Jeanne Dielman was in real time, but the time was totally recomposed, to give the impression of real time. There I was with Delphine [Seyrig], and I told her, "When you put down the Wiener schnitzels like that, do it more slowly. When you take the sugar, move your arm forward more quickly." Only dealing with externals. When she asked why, I’d say, "Do it, and you’ll see why later." I didn’t want to manipulate her. I showed her afterward and said to her, "You see, I don’t want it to 'look real,' I don’t want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes." I only saw that after Delphine did it. I hadn’t thought of it before."

"When you read a text, you’re on your own time. That is not the case in film. In fact, in film, you’re dominated by my time. But time is different for everyone. Five minutes isn’t the same thing for you as it is for me. And five minutes sometimes seems long, sometimes seems short. Take a specific film, say, D’Est: I imagine the way each viewer experiences time is different. And on my end, when I edit, the timing isn’t done just any way. I draw it out to the point where we have to cut. Or take another example, News from Home: How much time should we take to show this street so that what’s happening is something other than a mere piece of information? So that we can go from the concrete to the abstract and come back to the concrete—or move forward in another way. I’m the one who decides. At times I’ve shot things and I’ve said, "Now this is getting unbearable!" And I’ll cut. For News from Home it’s something else, but I have a hard time explaining it."

"All evidence shows that there is a pattern of male-style offending in transwomen. This does not mean that all trans people are predatory, but this is not a fact women can ignore."

"There is no women's space or activity, from bathrooms to prisons to rape refuges to sports, that some male-bodied people are not lobbying to enter. The reverse, I note, is not happening. Male spaces remain sacrosanct."

"The Greens have suspended senior members who were writing a Green women’s declaration which understands that women's rights are based on biological sex. The rejection of biology or indeed reality by those who want to slow down climate change is frankly barmy. But then so is the promotion of fetishistic men in wigs who only recently were in fact Tory candidates. I am talking about Melissa Poulton, Bromsgrove Green Party candidate, formerly Matthew Viner, now declaring "herself" to be a proud lesbian and a purveyor of sissy porn (don't ask). Is Ms Poulton a true trans woman? I cannot possibly say as I don't have the forensic skills necessary. But I can make the comment that what I see is a blatant opportunist."

"At my former newspaper, there was a range of subjects that I and other mostly female journalists were not allowed to write about: what was going on at the Gender Identity Development Service clinic at the Tavistock, the scandal of Mermaids, the takeover of public institutions by Stonewall, the erasing of the word women from public language. In short, instead of having a debate about gender ideology or the attack on women’s rights that some trans activism involved, The Guardian just put its fingers in its ears and for some time refused any discussion. How did The Guardian enforce such censorship? Not by explicitly banning anything but by omission. It simply did not report on stories that ran contrary to its world view."

"When I raised the question of the competing rights between biological women and trans women in the paper I then worked for, The Guardian, my world went bonkers for a while. A trans person who worked at the paper (I never went into the office) who had already resigned earlier, resigned again and 338 staff signed an anonymous letter about transphobia in that organisation. I was not named except the person that the letter was leaked to indicated it was clearly about me. It all ended up with me choosing to leave a good job because I could no longer say what I wanted to say there. This is not a sob story. I was welcomed at the Daily Telegraph, who have honoured their promise that I would not be censored."

"I regularly ask these people a few questions. What is gender identity? When was it invented? At what age does it come into being? How is it different from stereotyped gender roles? How much money is to be made through surgery and lifelong hormones? What is the need for men who identify as women to make women feel uncomfortable? What happens when you want to have a child if you have been made infertile or in fact don’t have a womb? Do you just hire one? Is surrogacy the next phase of dehumanising women? I have yet to receive answers. The sheer anger of certain trans activists puts me in mind of men’s rights activists; they want what women have and that means access to us all. In response, there is still huge cowardice. The fear of being called transphobic means silence. Silence = Death, as we used to say when we were campaigning around Aids."

"Should you wind up in a car crash, private medicine will be as useful to you as homoeopathy."

"Before he died in 2018, a long-term user of the NHS who had motor neurone disease warned against insurance systems run by private companies. Stephen Hawking, for it was he, said the fairest way to deliver healthcare was the NHS."

"Stonewall had successfully captured every organisation and rewarded it for being "trans inclusive." What did this mean? Believing that womanhood was a feeling in a man’s head? Rewriting equality law so that people with male genitalia could now be in female prisons and rape crisis centres? Bad statistics were bandied about concerning suicide - all wrong and based on one tiny study. What has been censored on the Left is actual information, not opinions: information about puberty blockers, information about the number of sex offenders who claim to be women in prison, information about what JK Rowling actually said, information about trans athletes who have gone through male puberty, information about public attitudes. Most people are liberal and sympathetic to trans people, as we should be. When told most trans women retain male genitalia, they become more uncomfortable about females sharing intimate spaces with them."

"Everyone pays lip service to diversity, and the idea of a female leader, but the position of women in the party continues to be that they can be deputies, lovely assistants to the main act. Labour brought in women’s shortlists, overnight upping female representation, but how that would happen now I don't know – as they have tied themselves in ever more ridiculous knots by being unable to define what a woman is in order to appeal to their activists. They are confused about who has a cervix and whether womanhood is biological or just a feeling in someone’s head. At this stage we can surely define "woman" fairly easily: someone who can never be actual leader of the Labour Party."

"The emails then came pouring in from people who wished they could say what I had said. I wished people would stop calling me brave. Columnists are meant to be made of titanium; I felt more like papier-mâché. But the orthodoxy which demands that Mary Beard must refer to an ancient statue with a little penis as "assigned male at birth" is powerful. The no-platforming of feminist warriors like Kathleen Stock and Julie Bindel is abhorrent. I like freaks. I like fluidity. I just don’t like one set of rules being replaced by another. I was hurt that so many of my 'colleagues' denounced me, but I suppose everyone needs a hobby."

"Most people want the tiny percentage of the population who are trans to have the best lives they can. Living your best life would be one free of male violence. It is not feminists who murder trans people, although this might be the impression you would be left with if you relied solely on Twitter for your information."

"If the idea of women organising autonomously is transphobic you are walking into a cul-de-sac, which absolutely traps people in boxes that benefit the patriarchy. Because there is nothing the patriarchy fears more than women who no longer rely on male authority."

"The sight of the hard left coalescing around Julian Assange is indeed sore. Yet again, those most vociferous about human rights seem somehow not to see women's rights as part of the same conversation."

"Female oppression is innately connected to our ability to reproduce. Women have made progress by talking about biology, menstruation, childbirth and menopause. We won’t now have our bodies or voices written out of the script. The materiality of having a female body may mean rape or it may mean childbirth – but we still seek liberation from gender. In some transgender ideology, we are told the opposite: gender is material and therefore can be possessed by whoever claims it, and it is sex as a category that is a social construction. Thus, sex-based rights, protected in law, can be done away with. I know from personal experience the consequences of being deemed transphobic by an invisible committee on social media. It has meant death and rape threats for me and my children, and police involvement. I also know that the most vicious stuff takes place online and not in real life. Still, I can’t stand by. As Roman Polanski was being rewarded for his latest film at the César awards, Todd was being silenced."

"They say he has made the mistake of demanding the impossible – and they are right. He has demanded the impossible. But it wasn't a mistake."

"[On Russell Brand a year later] [T]he Jesus Clown is pilloried for being a dreadful influence on young people. If the youth don't vote, then policies that continue to punish them will be waved through by our decrepit politicians. Actually, the Jesus Clown is not what I call a young person, Lydon isn't, and I am certainly not, but the Clown has a reach, that's for sure. My 13-year-old adores him, and the part of me that is for ever 13 gets why. A lot of what he says is sub-Chomskyian woo, but these frustrations with existing political structures – they exist. Somehow it is always assumed that young people are naive idealists who, when they grow up and understand how things really work or don’t work at all, will buckle down and do the right thing. The right thing here means voting Labour."

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head"

"For a long time it was the view that because Africa didn't always write, or have written document for his history that means Africa didn’t document its history. That is not true"

"If you are always guided by passion and compassion, you will truly have a life of meaning."

"If situations arise where people feel that they have grievances, such grievances should be dealt with in the appropriate way with full transparency, using all the proper governance structures at hand."

"Achebe gave a voice to Africans for generations to come, including my own."

"There has been a way of seeing Africa in terms of poverty and conflict which has become a kind of shorthand for the continent that still persists today."

"There are rumours that Cruise is sufficiently advanced, spiritually, to levitate. Looking back, maybe Darcey Bussell never quite got her adulatory due, in 2012, for descending into London’s closing ceremony on a flaming phoenix."

"Around 75m years since a mighty intergalactic leader somehow triggered the existence of today's Scientologists, the interests of their religion and the rest of humanity seem finally to have aligned: in shared devotion to Tom Cruise."

"To be fair to the more entitled, self-pitying and tone-deaf representatives of the professional managerial class, there has probably never been a worse time to explain why you have an inalienable right to, say, a second home."

"Who are strangers to comment on a would-be parent exercising what is increasingly claimed, even if it requires the bodies of others, to be a right? Or on the choices of a surrogate mother, also assumed to be a free agent? It remains a mystery why the choice to gestate a stranger's child is almost never, if ever, taken by the richest 1%."

"Repeated arguments for a much edited or secular coronation, citing dwindling Christian belief as well as protagonists less obviously creditable than was Elizabeth in 1953, appear to have dented neither the church's coronation ambitions nor the palace’s matching enthusiasm for spiritual choreography and knick-knacks. Only the Koh-i-noor has been sacrificed, to be sensitively replaced at the religious ceremony by the largest diamond in the world, the South African Cullinan. With decorative crosses over them, such jewels "remind us", the prayerbook explains to the untutored, "that Jesus Christ is king over all"."

"If Labour’s responses to its woman problem (as [[Rosie Duffield|[Rosie] Duffield]] rightly calls it) can never compete with Tate's videos, its progressive approach to misogyny is arguably more instructive for men who would like to shut women up but cannot afford a Romania-based chick compound. Men who study, for instance, the conduct of Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle may even conclude that the manosphere could have done more to nurture, as he does, male belief that bullying and insulting women is indicative of moral superiority. For Russell-Moyle, when he brought himself to apologise for insulting and intimidating Miriam Cates MP (having previously barracked Duffield in the debate about the government’s section 35 order blocking Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill), the aggression only confirmed the purity of his sentiments."

"Or take comfort from Gideon's [George Osborne] "We are all in this together"? The last election was the most regressive for women I can remember. Women appeared as trophy wives, or not at all. The consequences of that are that this government – this new way of doing politics – is hitting women and children the hardest. Women are suffering most from the cuts that men are making. Just look at the figures. This makes me very angry indeed. Which I know may increase "visible signs of ageing", but it's way too late now. Feminism has been dumbed down into politeness and party-political promises for far too long."

"How well it still works. The advancement of Etonians by Etonians, as if to compensate for the lost years of grammar school premiers, became so normalised after 2010 that it was never addressed as an actual scandal – as it might have been had the fraternity been exposed as freemasons, or ex-miners, or members of the same betting syndicate."

"Disastrous in every other respect, the recent revival of Etonian premierships did have a solitary benefit: a related succession of damning memoirs and studies of and by Etonians. When combined with the staggering failures of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, they conveyed one overwhelming message: the threat from this school is enough to justify some targeted form of vetting. It was ignored, of course, and the result is Kwasi Kwarteng. If additional checks seem extreme, it has become clear that a general and well-founded suspicion of Eton, the academy also known as charity 1139086, offers the public little protection from its faultier products, partly because it considers them the flower of its system."

"With hindsight, we can see that if Cook's loyalty to his facial hair did not actively foreshadow his later determination to stick to his principles, it was, in the intervening years, a sign that some important part of him would never be a smooth, New Labour man. While Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, Alistair Darling and Geoff Hoon all recognised that hairiness is inescapably associated with woolly, unreconstructed leftiness, Cook stayed firm. After he completed his speech on Monday night, he sank back into a veritable hedge of springy backbench furze, a brigade of hedgehogs led by Jeremy Corbyn and Frank Dobson, whose beards, now that Cook's has joined their number, are recognisable as individual acts of in-your-face defiance. In fact, with this week's principled resignation from the shadow front bench of the only bearded Tory, John Randall, New Labour's Tebbit-like suspicion of hairy ministers ought to become, if anything, more intense. While Blunkett's beard is explicable, there must now be suspicions that Charles Clarke's stubble is nothing less than a signal to disobedient backbenchers that he will not be long in joining them. Resignation or the razor, Clarke; the time has come to choose."

"As Mrs Blair never speaks in public other than about solemn matters, far removed from personal grooming, the only reason we know about [beautician Bharti] Vyas's handiwork must be because Vyas is apt to mention it. So much so that these days Vyas's name is rarely to be found, in her extensive media appearances, without some reference to that ultimate respectability-clincher, Mrs Blair's patronage. Is it possible to imagine a more compelling recommendation for a miracle-worker such as Vyas, a woman who believes that drinking "magnetised water" can "help control", among other things, cholesterol levels, obesity and hay fever? While, a few years back, the patronage of the Duchess of York would instantly confirm to any right-thinking woman the idiocy of whatever she touched, the invocation of Mrs Blair's name has precisely the opposite effect. If Mrs Blair, as the duchess once did, went and sat on a stool beneath a home-made pyramid, we should remark on the impressive, if unproven results of regular pyramid-shelter, rather than speculate on the mental agility of the sitter."

"Reasonably sitting around waiting for equality while empowering oneself with some silicone implants does not really seem to have worked wonders, does it ladeez? Postfeminism – as personified by the Sex and the City generation – basically confused sexual liberation with shopping: a mistaken strategy even within its own market-driven terms. So we live on a permanent diet of crumbs from the table. A woman over 50 gets to be on TV! Whoopdiwhoop! It's a victory, sure, but is that all there is? It's time to wake up and smell the skinny latte. A woman is murdered in Bristol and the response is to tell women to stay at home?! For their own safety. Though no one thinks it's a woman doing the murdering. A curfew on men would be considered a monstrous idea, even though most women live with internalised curfews anyway."

"Like my detractors, The Guardians letter-writers did not explain why Suzanne was mistaken. That poses a worrying question for democracy that neither universities nor The Guardian seem interested in discussing: who gets to decide who is no-platformed or silenced in the supposed interests of "inclusion"? Disagreement isn't tantamount to discrimination: Suzanne was clear she wanted trans people to have the right to "live the best lives they can"."

"Her writing is unafraid to challenge groupthink or ridicule tribes. It can often be infuriating, partly because she's so damn good at it. I have disagreed with many of her opinions over the years. Suzanne, 62, even once had the audacity to make a minor criticism of a book I'd written."