Lucy Ellmann Is Angry About Everything, Especially Men
13th September 2021
It has not a table of contents, but a ‘table of discontents’. The things with which Ellmann is discontented range from bras (‘Breasts are detainees — tracked, branded, interrogated, maligned, discouraged, and “supported”’) to Brexit (‘the apotheosis of age-old British self-hatred’). She is angry about electricity, which she calls ‘a kind of ethereal rapist, interfering with everyone’. She is annoyed that men eat so much pizza (‘just a big hot slippery blop of dough’), but also that people expend attention on healthy eating: ‘So much time is devoted to the self, there’s none left for society. Americans count the calories, not the capitalists.’
I don’t know who Lucy Ellmann is, to get a smackdown in The Spectator, but based on this excerpt, I may have to look her up.