Just a small piece of annoyance

This cropped up today. A rather bleak story of how a woman committed suicide, and I found myself wondering why the article was intent on mentioning very little apart from her being a working mother.

True there was a detail of her death, and where her body was found, about how she was a caring mother of three (about four times) and was just restarting work after maternal leave (about five times) and that’s it aside from her final text message. But from that there is precious little to piece together, and to fill this void in the article the Daily Male’s writer inputs a number of times that she was juggling a career and children. This is odd seeing as it seemed equally likely to be postnatal depression, which affects any number of mothers (from 5 to 25%) but the overall effect can be pretty severe in some cases. Such as with most forms of depression. And this was for the most part just added as an extra.

But, as I digress, for some reason I’m still drawn back to this point of a working mum. I got the subtle feeling (or as subtle as a brick through the window subtle) that the article was actually anti women working. The repeated use of mother and working with little reference to her life as well, made it feel like the author didn’t want women to build a career. But also the singular case would then be added the pantheon of hate this rag perpetuates in its readership. A similar tack is used with immigration. There was and will be a series of small stories ranging from the casual sh*te surveys the paper digs up to articles like this whereby a single event has happened and then be applied to the whole. There will be anecdotal type stories and pieces submitted by hacks hoping to earn a small living.

Finally this sort of thing is then topped up with irony as the columnists (a career perhaps) such as Liz where’s-my-horse Jones or Melaine You-either-agree-with-me-or-you’re-anti-Semitic Philips writing dithering codswallop about how either their ‘friends’’ lives have been affected by working or how their own ‘lives’ have been affected. And maybe have Peter the-c*nt Hitchins* write some dumb diatribe in his usual blathering way and then blame it on the government.

And hey presto you have the nation** wanting women to stay at home, tend to the children and house and be submissive to whatever the husband brings her. So yeah a minor annoyance but expect in a few weeks sudden articles on why women are happier as housewives and how women with careers are unhappy.


* Wasn’t feeling that original, was going to say how misogynist, regressive, bible-blinded, hate-monger but really that one word sums it up

**I.e. Daily Mail readers and the legions of commenters that scour the web and letters’ pages, in other words people whose opinion is as fair and balanced as a judge at a show trial.