Zoe Williams on the male pill

[carefulvulvadriver]

Apols if there is already a thread on this - I couldn’t see one.
Last time I looked ZW was one of the chief “TWAW“ for the guardian. Yet in yday’s piece on the male pill she cannot help but acknowledge profound biological differences between men and women. Funny that. Wonder how long it will take her to recognise the flaws in her own logic.

“The contrast in perceptions of male and female hormones is fascinating: masculine traits, both positive (vigour) and negative (violence) are so intrinsically linked to testosterone that it’s almost the wellspring of masculinity; to block it would mute the essence of a man. There is none of that romance around oestrogen, whose core brand is that it puts women in a bad mood for no reason – far from encapsulating femininity, it is seen as separating women from our true selves, in which we’re in a good mood.”

the article is lazy, unresearched wittering nonsense, but still interesting to note the intellectual bankruptcy of her views.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/19/contraceptive-pill-men-side-effects-women-pregnancy

I no longer read the Guardian, but I caught sight of one of her pieces this week declaring her support for low-traffic neighbourhoods.

Because Laurence Fox is against them, and she's pro-anything he's against.

It's a reasonably light-hearted column, but I suspect with more than a grain of truth; her reasoning really is that lazy and juvenile.

Used to really like her stuff. Can't work out whether I've changed, or she has.

The essence of a man

She's still a believer it seems...

But agree about the poor research, the entire premise of the article is that the male pill works like the female one, by suppressing sex hormones, but that's not how these new pills work.

A poor grasp of the issue all round...

I used to have a lovely mug, that had 'the Guardian. Wrong about everything, all the time'. That's how I feel about zw

I like low traffic neighbourhoods but it's nothing to do with Laurence Fox!

Haven't read Zoe Williams since she went full twaw. I think , looking back , she's been phoning it in for a few years now?

I'm sure she would argue very trenchantly that what she says here is not inconsistent with her TWAW poition, but it is hard to read the article without taking it to acknowledge that there is a group - biological women - who are treated differently from another group - biological men - in respect of how we regard the significance of the sex-specific hormones operating on their bodies.

Her final sentence is particularly striking: Controlling access to abortion is, rightly, seen as a bid to control women at the most fundamental level of self-determination: if it were recast as an attempt to control everyone’s self-determination, there might be more pushback.
Controlling access to abortion is being recast as an attempt to control everyone's self-determination, by people who claim that it isn't only women who become pregnant. To claim, as ZM plausibly does here, that it is specifically a bid to control women is to acknowledge the existence of a specific sex-based group with a unique political and social position.

I'm imagining she would say something like 'Well of course I accept THAT. I've only ever objected to the silly women who don't want transwomen in their aerobics class.
But all that the silly women have ever been doing is asserting the fact that there IS a specific sex-based group with a unique political and social position, and that we need to preserve the conceptual apparatus to identify it where appropriate and necessary. It's the ZWs of this world that mischaracterise that assertion as some kind of moral panic at the gym.

She also links to what she calls a small scale qualitative study and then quotes percentages from it. Zoe: qualitative studies don’t usually cite percentages. You didn’t read your link properly or perhaps just didn’t understand it. It was a self selected sample of 54 men and 134 women plus a qualitative study of 34 respondents.

Anything Zoe Williams writes tends to be poorly researched puff.

However going by the interior design article she did a week ago, this has got her an extremely nice and expensive house.

Imagine being Zoe Williams though, and knowing you could have been Hadley Freeman if you just had an ounce of intellectual integrity.

Williams is one of the laziest writers I know. She relies on her wordsmithing skill (which I do think is quite good) to coast her out of any corner, and how she has managed get away with it for so long at a national newspaper would in any other circumstances be a mystery.

She is a strange hybrid of "serious columnist" and lifestyle-pages filler.
It isn't really her fault: 'Columnist' is an odd role - explicitly to do with providing readable content rather than reporting facts or providing analysis. Newspapers do more and more of it because it is cheaper than news gathering, and because we live in such an opinion culture.
I guess that the level of self-confindence that you need to have in order to be a 'columnist' rather than a more traditional journalist probably isn't highly compatible with conscientious self-monitoring/self-doubt.

You've got to hand it to ZW. Her work life balance must be awesome, because if you ever stumble across her writing about a subject you are knowledgeable in, it becomes clear she does absolutely no research beyond possibly chatting to her similarly backgrounded mates. I kind of admire her for it as well as being jealous that I never had the Oxbridge self-belief to do her job. She's readable because she writes well but so infuriating it's not usually worth it.

And yes, a hypocrite. Surely the male pill is any pill taken by a man duh? And surely, because we don't want to think of the hysterectomies and vaginal atrophy caused by cross sex hormones because "ewww transphobe" there are lots and lots of of men with vaginas taking the regular pill.

She's becoming like Adrian Chiles and his drivel

Has she discovered the menopause yet? I assume not because, as soon as she does, she'll start her own column in the Guardian about it, just as she did when she became the first woman to ever have a baby and a job. It will contain zero facts or research but, I have to concede, will probably be annoyingly readable.

She's a hard-of-thinking wazzock.

the article is lazy, unresearched wittering nonsense

Oh, surely not.

Floisme · Today 09:22

Has she discovered the menopause yet? I assume not because, as soon as she does, she'll start her own column in the Guardian about it, just as she did when she became the first woman to ever have a baby and a job.

Ha hah! When Woe Zilliams had her kids, she swore in print that she wouldn't just write about kids and then did just that for several years.