Enjoy (video, 5:07).

Just published (video, 13:43).

Sad (video, 5:39). 1.7 million people have viewed this piece on Vice in six days, proving to those people – as if proof were needed – how ridiculous feminists (and by extension feminism) are.

Our thanks to James for this.

Our thanks to Stu for this piece on the BBC website, The start:

Wireless Festival has been criticised for a lack of women in the line-up for this year’s festival.

Singer Lily Allen said the “struggle is real” for female artists while Radio 1’s Annie Mac described it as “appalling”.

Only three women – Mabel, Cardi B and Lisa Mercedez [J4MB: We have all their LPs] – are among the 37 acts announced for the festival which takes place in July.

Wireless told Newsbeat it had no comment on the issue.

Stu writes:

Hi Mike, BBC making a fuss about lack of female artists appearing at Wireless festival, usual suspects Lily Allen and so on.

For most of this article the BBC insist that Wireless had made no comment on the matter, until the last line, quote below.

Wireless told Newsbeat it has no comment on the response to its line-up, adding that “tickets sold out in 24-hours”.

A nightmare of a story in today’s Mail on Sunday. The start:

Veteran MP Harriet Harman is hoping to capitalise on the ‘Pankhurst factor’ by making a bid to become Commons Speaker, Labour sources say.

Amid reports that John Bercow may signal later this year when he will stand down, Labour’s former deputy leader is understood to be planning to enter the race to succeed him.

In the year when Westminster is preparing to mark the centenary of the Suffragette triumph over voting rights for women, [J4MB: WRONG. The Suffragettes delayed female emancipation. We refer you to William Collins’s magnum opus Universal Suffrage in the UK – The Videos and Steve Moxon’s The Woman Racket (2008)] feminist Harman would be well placed to win support on both sides of the House.

Excellent.

A tip of the hat to the Daily Mail for posting a piece on its front page yesterday, following the revelation that prostate cancer deaths had overtaken breast cancer deaths. Another tip of the hat for covering prostate cancer again today, in pieces taking up the front page and the whole of another page – here.

A third tip of the hat to Amanda Platell, a columnist for the paper, for her comments on the subject – here. Also for these two short pieces, when you scroll down:

Manchester Art Gallery

One can’t help but wonder what will be the next piece of cultural vandalism as Manchester Art Gallery removes a Victorian painting of naked nymphs seducing a lad.

Perhaps they should remove the curator of contemporary art, Clare Gannaway, who devised this ridiculous stunt.

Radio 4’s Today Show

Radio 4’s Today programme has introduced a new item on their show, Puzzle For Today.

It’s devised to tax our brains with difficult teasers.

Such as: Name someone who had ever seen or heard of the BBC’s equal-pay crusader Carrie Gracie before her resignation as China editor.

Our thanks to Sean for this (video, 16:15).

A piece in yesterday’s Times by David Sanderson (Arts Correspondent) and Dominic Maxwell, emphases ours:

The writer Sir David Hare has bemoaned the constant refrain “about the need for strong women as protagonists”, saying he was sick to death of hearing about what he described as a boring cause.

Hare said he had the right to “represent all kinds of women”, adding that it was more important to show women on stage, television and film as “doing jobs equally, as the normality of the thing”.

In an interview for Times2 (J4MB: available to subscribers) he complained that “having just women who storm through the film or play being rude to everyone, and that’s called ‘strong women’, that’s not my idea of equality.”

Hare, 70, has won multiple awards and nominations for plays and screenplays after his first production appeared in 1970. He said that it was “very limiting to say you only want to see strong women”.

The writer was brought up primarily by his mother while his father was at sea. He said that as he had been surrounded by women all his life this might have been a factor in his creating substantial female roles throughout his career. “I have claimed, because I have written so many women, that I have the right to represent all kinds of women,” he said.

“If I want to represent a murderess, I want that right. Without being called misogynistic. Similarly I want to be free to portray silly women and weak women and clever women. I want to be able to portray all women. When we can portray all women equally, that will be equality.”

He added that he hoped in his canon he had “100 per cent avoided” presenting women as the “moral conscience of men’s actions” with girlfriends saying to men: “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, darling?”

Hare was speaking to publicise his first television serial, Collateral, starring Carey Mulligan and Billie Piper, which is due to be broadcast on BBC Two later this month. He said that episodic TV drama, in contrast with films where “the audience knows what the formula is”, still had the capacity to surprise.

“Whereas the huge popularity of episodic television is its shapelessness,” he said. “So to take Breaking Bad, an obvious example, you may have one episode that has only two or three people in it and entirely concentrates on the psychological relationship between those people. And in the next one you have suddenly got car crashes and people being shot, with huge numbers of people in it. You don’t know which way it is going. That’s what people love.”

This year Hare has one play, The Moderate Soprano, due in the West End and another, I’m Not Running, opening at the National Theatre. He said that he was not certain that his TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity for an American cable network would go ahead. He suspected that the $170 million needed was too high.

He added that awareness of his age was resulting in a splurge of writing activity. “I write quicker now because of the panic of death,” he said.

“I am writing at very high speed because I have a lot to write. Almost by definition I am nearing the end of my writing life. So it’s horrible. I am under the cosh. I have got to get some things down before it’s too late.”

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