It is PSL season – that’s pumpkin spice latte, keep up – which also means it is pumpkin spice misogyny season. If you are not familiar, the idea is that there is a (predominantly male) tendency to mock the (predominantly female) enthusiasm for the arrival of spiced orange beverages at this time of year. It’s derided as “basic”, along with rhapsodising about crunchy leaves, chunky knits, big scarves, new boots and other seasonal Pinterest board signifiers. Women are dismissed as vapid sheeplike materialists, while men who make pour-over coffee that tastes like stomach acid in vessels that wouldn’t be out of place in a 17th-century alchemist’s workshop are discerning, rugged individualists.
The fightback challenges the way “girl” stuff gets derided and takes issue with the received wisdom that it is somehow admirable not to like what other women like. It also wonders whether a gritted-teeth commitment to cool causes men to deny themselves the simple joys offered by the stuff that gets sneered at.
I love “basic” autumn pleasures – leaves, jumpers, the lifting of my habitual miasma of summer dread, all the classics. But whether it is internalised misogyny or the pumpkin pie I ate as a catastrophically hungover teen, I am a PSL virgin. That needed to change, so I shelled out £4.90 for the smallest one and it gave me a violent rush of blood to the head even before the caffeine hit.
What can I say about it without dumping on other people’s pleasures? The cinnamon scent is exuberant, as if a Yankee Candle and a Lush bath bomb mated. Making something so sweet yet acrid requires mad skills. Plus, with that amount of sugar coursing through my veins, I reckon I could demolish the patriarchy single-handed (if I did it really quickly, before the inevitable clammy collapse). I probably won’t order another – the neon orange stain from where I dropped it on my chunky knit is enough PSL in my life – but I defend to the death your right to drink it. Now let’s do this #cosy #autumnvibes thing, British style: someone make a swede spiced latte, you cowards!
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist.
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