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James Corden: The Ellen of 2022
It hasn’t been a very good week to be British, has it? It was pandemonium in the country itself and one of Britain’s most famous exports came to dishonor. I’m talking about James Corden, of course. The comedian, an English immigrant to Los Angeles, has made headlines for some particularly mean behavior. He showed up to eat at Balthazar, a fancy New York restaurant, and was mean to the servers, according to Balthazar owner Keith McNally. In one incident, he was extremely mean after finding a hair in his meal. In another, he became apocalyptic because the staff got his wife’s egg yolk omelet order wrong. Apparently there was a little egg white in it, and we can’t get any, can we?
McNally, who may have sensed a good opportunity for some gratuitous PR, didn’t hold back on his thoughts on Corden. In an Instagram post, he banned the comedian from his restaurant and called him a “little moron of a man” and “the most abusive customer to my waiters Balthazar since the restaurant opened 25 years ago.” Still, that abuse was quickly forgiven after Corden apparently called McNally to apologize. “Anyone magnanimous enough to apologize to a slacker like me (and my staff) doesn’t deserve to be banned from anywhere,” McNally later wrote. Man, apologizing is not magnanimous; it’s the least anyone can do!
The story really should have ended there, but Corden decided to continue by telling the New York Times that he had “done nothing wrong, on any level.” Corden said, “I feel so zen about it all. Because I think it’s so silly. I just think it’s below all of us.
It’s not below me, mate. I get that this is just stupid celebrity gossip and that there are bigger things to worry about in the world, but that’s precisely why I’m so deeply invested in the Corden drama. When the world is falling apart, celebrity gossip brings welcome relief. And there’s a lot of Corden gossip out there. As soon as McNally unleashed on Corden, the floodgates opened and many stories about Corden being “a little moron of a man” emerged. Becky Habersberger, who is married to a member of the Try Guys, shared a TikTok video of how she saw Corden yelling at a busboy in Los Feliz. People started sharing a Popbitch story about how Corden once ignored his baby crying for the whole of a robbery and left his wife to take care of the child (motive for murder). Everyone remembered the time he was seen getting close to Sean Spicer at an Emmys party. And the time he was rude to Sir Patrick Stewart.
The parallels between Ellen DeGeneres, who fell out of favor in 2020 after everyone decided she was a horrible person and her bubbly on-screen persona was a rip-off, aren’t hard to see. Indeed, there are plenty of people who already call Corden the “Male Ellen.” Corden may be the Ellen man but, unlike Ellen’s case, I’m not sure the allegations that he’s a bad job are going to put a massive dent in his career. Women, after all, are routinely held to higher ethical standards than men and more severely punished for the same transgressions. Studies have shown that people react better to anger from a man than from a woman. A 2008 study, for example, titled “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?” found that “both male and female raters conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals”. The study found that “while women’s emotional reactions were attributed to uncontrollable internal characteristics), men’s emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances.”
I don’t know where Corden’s career will go, but I hope he does well from now on. The English no longer need embarrassment.
Russian feminists help men avoid drafts
The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, 57 feminist groups in Russia banded together to form a group called the Feminist Anti-War Resistance or FAS. The movement is active in 100 cities in Russia and abroad and helps men avoid conscription. Like Black Lives Matter, FAS is decentralized. “It makes the FAS more adaptable and allows for new tactics and strategies,” a political scientist told DW. “The hydra has many heads, and if you cut one off, 10 new ones grow back.”
What a pregnancy before 10 weeks actually looks like
This revealing piece from the Guardian has deservedly gone viral.
The Woman Who Stalks Revenge Porn
Mia Landsem spends hours a day (unpaid) helping victims of revenge porn find and remove their images from the internet. I would say she is doing God’s work, but she is actually doing the work that highly paid leaders and politicians should be doing.
Women leaders are leaving companies at the highest rate ever
About 10.5% of female leaders (defined as those in management positions and above) left their companies in 2021 compared to 9% of male leaders: the highest rate of voluntary departures since McKinsey began collecting data in 2017. Burnout and the pandemic are largely to blame.
America has a shortage of black sperm donors
Black men make up less than 2% of sperm donors in cryobanks, reports the Washington Post. “The severe shortage forces black women who need donor sperm to make a painful choice: choose a donor from another race and raise a biracial child or try to buy sperm from apps and online groups. unregulated.”
“The stroller is just the most visible symbol of the ethos of consumer capitalism that saturates American pregnancy and parenthood,” writes Amanda Parrish Morgan in this fascinating article.
Why Bolivian lawmakers are 50% women
Quotas requiring half of all party candidates to be women were introduced in 1997 when only 9% of the country’s national parliament were women. Now, this requirement is part of the constitution.
The week in the patriarchy
One of the benefits of the brouhaha in Britain is that Larry the Cat, who is Chief Mouser of 10 Downing Street, has received the attention and adoration he deserves. The 15-year-old tabby has now outlived four prime ministers. “The King asked me to become Prime Minister because this nonsense has gone on long enough,” wrote Larry the cat in a viral tweet hours before Truss announced his resignation. Britain has officially gone dog-friendly: it’s time to bring a cat.
