Re The Adele Situation, I Wanted To Know What Exactly She Said That Caused The Backlash And I Found This

New York Post

Good on Adele for celebrating female — not gender-neutral — achievement

Her crime? In picking up Artist of the Year at last night’s Brit Awards, she lamented the loss of male and female categories, saying:

Re the Adele situation, I wanted to know what exactly she said that caused the backlash and I found this excellent article (disclaimer: the New York Post is a right-leaning news source. I think this article is pretty spot-on but I’m not necessarily endorsing the site or even the author. Do your own research).

Safe to say “I am woman/hear me roar,” would never be recorded today.

Just ask Adele, best selling artist in the world, savior of a dying industry, now the woke mob’s latest target.

Her crime? In picking up Artist of the Year at last night’s Brit Awards, she lamented the loss of male and female categories, saying: “I understand why the name of this award has changed, but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really, really proud of us. I really, really am.”

That’s it. That’s all. But for that she’s been slandered a TERF — a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Really, the only thing Adele should be catching grief for is postponing a multimillion-dollar Vegas residency at the last minute.

There’s been a push of late to make arts awards gender-neutral. The Brit Awards may have been the only high-profile event to make the leap, but there are calls to erase “Best Actress” at the Oscars and “Best Female Vocal” at the Grammys — part of an overall movement to make gender irrelevant.

For a Gen X-er like me, the pride taken by women in rock — from the 1990s riot grrrl movement to Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, Lauryn Hill, Liz Phair and a generation of women pushing sexual, political and economic boundaries — is not that long ago.

And it’s not like feminism has won. Women still make less money than men. We are still fighting for our reproductive rights. Still we are underrepresented in tech, politics, finance, film, and, according to a 2021 McKinsey report, all sectors of management.

Here’s what women couldn’t do just 50 years ago, in America: Get a credit card. Serve on juries. Take birth control pills if single (a huge slice of the market!). Get pregnant without fear of losing our jobs. Attend an Ivy League school. Refuse sex with our husbands.

Women have fought for a lot. We’re still fighting. We get to be proud of how far we’ve come.

As should Adele, a vanishingly small kind of global music superstar.

Consider what Courtney Love told Dazed & Confused magazine in 2016:

“There’s maybe 30 [female stars] if you count pop stars,” she said. “Think about that — on the planet. Rock stars, I don’t know — I’ve never really sat down and counted female rock stars. There’s a few, there’s 10, 15 . . . but throw a TV out on the balcony, the same stuff that Keith Richards did, the same stuff that Jim Morrison did, the same things that Bono did — that we all forgot about — yeah, I think I get judged by a double standard a lot, but that’s just the way it is.”

Adele is a grown woman singing about her experiences as a woman. Why should she be expected to defuse or deny what, essentially, is her superpower?

For all the crap she caught on Twitter, others came to her defense — a sign that we are possibly, maybe, beginning to emerge from an understandable state of overcorrection.

“Thank you @Adele,” tweeted author and refugee advocate Onjali Rauf. “For speaking the 2 words being vilified. Woman. Female.”

A Spectator op-ed by educator Debbi Hayton was similarly effusive, thanking Adele for risking the fate of J.K. Rowling and other women who “have been pursued and persecuted mercilessly, simply for standing up for their sex. Adele’s message to women and girls was inspirational.”

Thirty years ago, Kurt Cobain opened the 1990s in a dress. Who would have thought Adele’s speech, embracing and affirming her womanhood, would be considered just as transgressive today?

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

Has anyone watched Euphoria on HBO? Thoughts? I watched the first episode and while it is a deeply unsettling show, it portrays so much of the unique pressures gen Z is under. I'm aware it has a transgender girl in it, but I wondered what people's thoughts were on how both that and the the main character's drug addiction is portrayed and how it maybe even plays into the underlying factors that can contribute to dysphoria and drug dependence (as two separate issues).

Thoughts?

Also thr fact that they mentioned "don't wear white" twice. Brides (and grooms) should be the stars of the wedding, not anyone else. Don't wear white, or offwhite, or tan, or cream.

The rule about "if you weren't invited, you're not welcome" sounds like a great boundary to me!!

Why are people acting like this rules are ridiculous? This wedding sounds nice.

(Rule 8 means to ask her mom decor questions and not her. Not like "my mom can make you change your hair")

The eleventh commandment should be to fact check what you read, especially if it looks like clickbait or if it looks like something very one-sided or black and white. Nothing, nothing, no issue political or societal can claim to be one hundred percent right, or correct, or ethical according to only one source. Always fact check. Always look at both sides of things if the sources are available.

Yes, because the other guy tried to overturn our democracy. Get a fucking grip.