Stuart Jeffries

1 week ago | spectator.com.au | Stuart Jeffries

A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion Verso, pp.176, 16.99 In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God’s punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely their nakedness and their sexual desires.

1 week ago | spectator.co.uk | Stuart Jeffries

In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God’s punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely their nakedness and their sexual desires. But what the Pope meant, I think, is absolutely salutary for our age. Shamelessness is ubiquitous.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Stuart Jeffries

‘When I was a girl at high school,” says Christelle Oyiri, “we didn’t talk about plastic surgery. Now it’s normal for 18-year-olds to talk about what kind of lip-fillers they’re going to have. Something extraordinary has happened over the past 10 years.”What has changed? It’s not simply about keeping up with the Kardashians, though Oyiri recognises that the reality TV sisters have revolutionised the desires of some.

2 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Stuart Jeffries

Earlier this year, delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Gareth Southgate argued that in Britain today, too many boys and young men are suffering an identity crisis. They need better role models: only through emulating such figures can they reverse their own slump into academic underachievement, Andrew Tate-fuelled misogyny and feelings of worthlessness. The speech was widely praised. It seemed, if you'll forgive the pun, that the former England manager was shooting at an open goal.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Stuart Jeffries

In 2019, Sotheby’s sold a painting of a little girl with a conservative side parting, a Peter Pan collar and the most unflinching green eyes – which stare down the viewer. It went for $25m, which makes it Japan’s most expensive painting. And it is a knife crime waiting to happen. The girls gaze is as withering as those in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Her eyes follow you as inescapably as Lord Kitchener’s in the first world war recruitment poster.