So. I wrote a book about modern fascism as a backlash to LGBTQ rights and women’s liberation. It breaks down why this happened, how we fight the new misogyny, and how we win.  You might find it useful.  amazon.com/Sexual-Revolution…

PSA: Sex workers and sluts are not why men treat women poorly. Blaming women who are simply living our lives, not hurting you, for misogyny broadly out there in the world is, itself, misogynistic behavior.

I’M 40 TODAY. And if you would like to help me celebrate, I would love nothing better than if you’d subscribe to my Substack. It means a lot to me. And just for today, I’m doing a 40% sale for new subscribers: lauriepenny.substack.com/p/b…

I’M 40 TODAY AND VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT. If you are over 40 and have sensible advice to offer I would be even MORE excited :D

'The Voynich manuscript is untranslatable! It's a mystery!' 'Actually it turns out to be about female sexual health.' ... 'IT'S A MYSTERY.'

I’ve just spent a solid week at WW2 resistance training school and I might never be the same. I don’t know if it’s the profound sense of moral purpose, the historical vertigo, or just the effect of fresh air and regular mealtimes.

Ngl I appreciate the strategy of hallucinating back at the AI interviewer

‼️ @PennyRed on Britain’s failure to confront its imperial history in 2017: “If you ask British people who voted for Brexit what their major fear is, their fear is that people will come to our country and take our things.” After describing Britain’s own history of colonial conquest: “It just doesn’t compute.” Nearly ten years after the referendum, one of Brexit’s least examined ingredients remains Britain’s dysfunctional relationship with its own history.

First Dolly, now Tim Curry. This is horrendous. All we can do is keep the memory of these icons alive. Who would we be otherwise? What kind of world would we be leaving for Keith Richards?

Give this girl an Oscar for best actress, best supporting actor, best screenplay, best supporting actress, best actor and best film editing.

The 2020s are a disabling place to live. Modern life makes it harder for people with certain traits to function. This does not sit comfortably with the Protestant Work Ethic. I wrote about the ‘The Great ADHD Myth’, here- lauriepenny.substack.com/p/t…

Ayoung man who has lived with different kinds of disadvantage all his life is elevated to a position of  influence and privilege. In this position he is exposed to consistent, merciless attack, until there is no way back. It ends in death. Summarised like this, it has an almost archetypal quality. The proverbial Martian observer would very likely catalogue it with the rituals of sacrificial scapegoating chronicled in many pre-modern societies – the outsider selected for both sacred dignity and ritual humiliation so that some existing order can be consolidated by an act of collective violence. One of the many things we ought to be reflecting on in the wake of the shocking and tragic events leading to the death of Jason Arday is the nature of the shaming rituals of modern culture, the careful gradation of verbal violence from judicious headshaking through to unbridled, annihilating, joyous venom. The philosopher Bruno Latour wrote that “we have never been modern”; it is sometimes alarmingly clear that we have never been “secular”. We still repeat the ceremonies of public humiliation and cathartic sacrificial violence. A debased media culture and the fever-ridden jungle of online comment are just another iteration of habits deeply rooted in human society-building. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we have outgrown any of this. On the contrary. The mechanisms of scapegoating are all around us – and are not confined to the political right. Well-meaning efforts to offset the myth of the scapegoat can easily end up colluding with the process. As has so often been pointed out, tokenism sets people up to fail. Unless change is systemic, thought through, and unless it is intelligent about risk, emotional cost and the specific vulnerabilities of individuals, it is simply sucked into the magnetic field of the sacrificial drama: exalt or highlight the victim, then punish and expel. Rowan Williams: The shaming of Jason Arday newstatesman.com/politics/so…

Wealthy white men with neurodivergent traits still struggle- but they tend to find the neurotypical world safer than autists with less social privilege. The reason for stereotype of autism as a middle class white male thing is that *those are the people most likely to make it*

The backlash against autistic and ADHD visibility is about class, and gender, and race. Especially in the UK. It’s about who gets to be different. I wrote about this last week: lauriepenny.substack.com/p/a…

I wasn't aware that Professor James Orr, Restore Britain's head of policy, hosted Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, which argues that 'black people are less intelligent than white people partly for genetic reasons ' at Cambridge University in 2021. bylinetimes.com/2026/08/18/t…

‘Maybe the issue is that people with autism and ADHD should not be allowed in academia’ If this is the cope you’ve chosen, I’ve got bad news for you about academia. In better news, you’re ready to be the villain in an Oscar-winning movie.

RT @melissasigodo: Parts of Jason Arday’s life were ridiculed in the press but now a Byline Times investigation says it has found records,…

I know some ‘gender critical’ feminists have been perseverating for years over what to do about fascist entryism. Some have been privately torn about it for a long time- but drawing attention to it felt like self-sabotage. The question is- what will those of conscience do now?