Convenience Big Store: Billie Eilish is selling albums, not feminism

6 May, 2021

In the headlines

The Tories have a 10-point poll lead over Labour going into today's "high-stakes" elections, says Politico. A Conservative "hat-trick" in the Hartlepool by-election and the Tees Valley and West Midlands mayoral races would be a "famous victory for Johnson and a proper shocker for Starmer". It's all pretty moot given that we might be at war with France by teatime, says Patrick Maguire in The Times: two Royal Navy gunboats have arrived in Jersey as a feud over post-Brexit fishing rights escalates. The US has backed a temporary suspension of patents for coronavirus vaccines, first proposed by India and South Africa.

Comment of the day

Billie Eilish is selling albums, not feminism

I'm not sure I understand Billie Eilish's style of feminism, says Finn McRedmond in The Irish Times. For years the 19-year-old singer has worn oversized clothing to obscure her figure. Now she's on the cover of Vogue, "transformed into full pin-up mode, replete with corsets, stockings, latex gloves and a shock of blond hair straight from Marilyn Monroe's playbook". This rebrand, we are told, is an empowering, feminist decision. Really? Ultimately, Eilish is a businesswoman with an album to sell – and, as she knows, the female body is "a powerful marketing tool".

Who can blame her? It's not unusual for female singers to rebrand themselves, and nowadays, thanks to the likes of TikTok and Twitter, they have to do it more often than ever. "Social media is eviscerating our attention spans and feeding our calls for pop stars to present new versions of themselves as quickly as possible." Eilish, and Vogue, assure us it was her decision to shake up her image. Of course it was. In the environment we have created, what choice did she have? Just don't pretend it has anything to do with feminism.

Read the full article here.

Is the US slowly turning into China?

Despite George Orwell's "grim prophecy" that "all nuclear superpowers would end up as slave states", the differences between America and the Soviet Union were always clear, says Niall Ferguson in The Spectator. But can that be said of the US and China? America "seems to be following in China's footsteps". In March, President Biden even proposed a western version of Beijing's Belt and Road global infrastructure project. That's in addition to his domestic spending plans, which come to almost $6 trillion. The Biden version is "Chinese in conception as well as in scale", and will permanently increase the role of the federal government.

But copying China puts us on "the path to perdition". Last year many western countries introduced strict Chinese-style lockdowns to cope with Covid. Instead we should have followed Taiwan's approach, which combined mass testing, contact tracing and isolation. And there's an "obvious risk" that vaccine certificates could morph into digital identity cards, which China has been using since 2018. The biggest problem is the illiberal "wokeism" that has infected western institutions. This "low-level totalitarianism" shows how "informing, denunciation and defamation" can flourish in a democracy. Big tech companies can even cancel the President of the United States. If China wins the Second Cold War, its victory will probably have begun when Americans decided to imitate the Cultural Revolution.

Read the full article here.

Inside politics

Keir Starmer has more to worry about than the Hartlepool by-election, says Paul Waugh in HuffPost: Tory regional mayors in the West Midlands and Tees Valley also seem set for re-election. The incumbent in the latter post is Ben Houchen, whose "upbeat narrative of green jobs and investment" has endeared him to voters – and to the PM. On a trip to Teesside in 2019, Boris Johnson got on so well with the mayor that he missed the last train back to London. A senior Tory tells Politico that Houchen, 34, could even be a future PM: "His price is rising faster than Bitcoin."

Gone viral

After four failed attempts, one of Elon Musk's SpaceX rockets made a successful landing yesterday evening on the Gulf Coast, Texas. The Starship, which the entrepreneur one day hopes to send to Mars, reached an altitude of nearly 33,000ft – about the same as a passenger plane – before turning sideways into a "belly-flop" position. But where other Starships have exploded on touchdown, this one managed a gentle landing.

Zeitgeist

Students at Liverpool University have succeeded in expunging William Gladstone's name from a student accommodation block, says Jawad Iqbal in The Times, based on his father's ownership of 2,500 slaves. But the four-time Liberal PM never owned slaves himself and became a vehement abolitionist, describing slavery as "the foulest crime" in British history. He also extended voting rights to millions of Britons, among other progressive reforms. The university building will now be named after Dorothy Kuya, a communist activist. In this "upside-down world", it is "perfectly OK" to name a building after someone whose beliefs associate her "with the political enslavement of millions".

Snapshot

Noted

Mothers' names will now be added to those of fathers on marriage certificates in England and Wales. The reform comes alongside the replacement of written marriage certificates with an electronic system. The Home Office says the changes "correct a historic anomaly", but @WhoresofYore, a Twitter account devoted to the history of sex, is more excited about the archival implications: "Historians of the future rejoice!!"

Snapshot answer

It's the first inhabited fully 3D-printed home in the world. Two retired shopkeepers from Amsterdam, Elize Lutz and Harrie Dekkers, moved into the 1,010 sq ft house this week. It consists of 24 concrete blocks, which were printed by a large robotic arm then fitted together, and took just 120 hours to create. "It has the feel of a bunker – it feels safe," says Dekkers. Watch how the house was made here.