One of Gloria Steinem’s biggest problems, says The New York Times, was that some people considered her too attractive to take seriously. Newsweek called the feminist crusader a “life-size counter-culture Barbie Doll”; Clay Felker of New York magazine admitted he commissioned a piece from her because she had “great legs”. Gay Talese noted, in front of her, that every year a pretty girl comes to New York pretending to be a writer: “Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.” She outlasted them all. For half a century Steinem, who has died aged 92, was the organising force and public face of second-wave feminism, dragging women’s concerns from the kitchen into the boardroom, the courtroom and the bedroom. “In my heart, I think a woman has two choices,” she said. “Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.”

Born in Ohio in 1934, Steinem spent much of her childhood nursing her mentally ill mother in a rat-infested house. She made her name with Ms magazine, launched in 1971 as the first glossy publication run entirely by women. Plenty were sceptical – the anchorman Harry Reasoner gave it “six months before they run out of things to say” – but all 300,000 copies of the first issue sold out in eight days. Steinem challenged women’s place in society with biting satire: if men could menstruate, she wrote, “they would brag about how long and how much”. Her star dimmed somewhat in 2000 when, after years of criticising the institution of marriage, she married the South African businessman David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale. But she was unrepentant. Asked in old age about passing on the torch of feminism, she said she was keeping it, thank you very much, and “using it to light the torches of others”.

🥰🤣 Steinem was never short of male attention, says The Telegraph. Her lovers included film director Mike Nichols, economist JK Galbraith and even the macho writer Norman Mailer (who, she noted, failed to perform). Such was the interest in her sex life – she said she achieved her first orgasm at a masturbation workshop – that in 1969 she felt moved to issue a statement: “I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger.”

THE ISLAND ESTATE Eilean Righ, set within Loch Craignish on Scotland’s west coast, is known as “The King’s Island”, says Country Life. In the 1930s it belonged to Sir Reginald Johnston, tutor to Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, who personally granted the 261-acre island permission to fly the imperial Chinese flag. Today there are two three-bedroom houses, along with outdoor amenities including a boathouse, two slipways, a soundproofed shooting range and a helicopter hangar. It’s home to abundant wildlife, with residents and visitors including deer, otters, dolphins and golden eagles. Oban is about an hour’s drive once you’re on the mainland. £6.5m. Click on the image to see the listing.

I don’t want to jinx it, says Elle Jones in The New Statesman, but I think this may have been “the summer that self-optimisation died”. When the productivity influencer and podcaster Steven Bartlett lamented in June that drinking a couple of glasses of wine had “ruined” three days of his life – he said he slept badly and “podcasted worse” – there was a huge backlash. The BBC radio host Greg James urged followers to join his “anti-optimisation/Bartlett cult”; TV presenter Laura Jackson noted that “people are so busy tracking life we’re forgetting to actually live it”. On social media, an “incipient counterculture” is growing. Users celebrate grainy camcorder videos of messy 1990s office parties, call for the return of the “three-martini lunch” and watch clips of elderly Mediterranean people living the good life: olive oil on everything, wine with lunch, “calories be damned”.

Optimisation is framed as an act of freedom, to control your own outcomes. What people are realising is that all those flashing notifications – that you’ve slept poorly because of that pint of beer, or failed to fulfil your arbitrary daily step count – are more restrictive than freeing. Perhaps more importantly, optimisation is “just not cool any more”. Now that access to physical perfection has been democratised – anyone can buy Mounjaro or get their teeth done in Turkey – the tastemakers are shifting the goalposts and emphasising the importance of a “natural” look. The pursuit of perfection is increasingly associated with Mar-a-Lago wives and bonkers Silicon Valley executives like Bryan Johnson, known for injecting himself with his son’s blood plasma and tracking his night-time erections. This is especially true in Britain, a nation that “laughs in the face of the self-serious”. Here, the earnest wearables obsessive will never be as appealing as the lackadaisical rebel, “put to sleep by a lunchtime glass of wine”.

“I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.”
Joan Rivers

Let us know what you thought of today’s issue by replying to this email
To find out about advertising and partnerships, click here
Been forwarded this newsletter? Try it for free
Enjoying The Knowledge? Click to share