Then Humphreys had Rose Prince and Rosie Boycott (Spare Rib founder turned Fail writer) on the Today Programme. The issue:
FEMINISM KILLED HOME COOKING AND MADE CHILDREN FAT.
Germaine Greer has spent the last 30-odd years running around force-feeding cakes to children, and because Betty Friedan has personally kicked all women out of the kitchen and into the workplace, and forced them to feed their children ready meals (Susan Faludi was preventing all the men from lifting a finger, obviously) - your children are fat.
On R4, both Prince and Boycott seemed quite happy to point the finger of blame at women - even though Boycott was ostensibly there to argue against Prince's feminist-killed-healthy-eating rubbish - to the point where Humphreys ended up taking her part, saying
"I'm going to have to defend women here... because neither of you are doing it. You treat women as though they're incredibly gulible and vulnerable to all these pressures"
At the same time, both women agreed that it is difficult to criticise families; what they do instead is criticise women, saying that as women are the primary caregivers, it is up to them to make sure their children eat well. Women are the scapegoat. The problem is not that women don't give a shit about their children eating healthily, but that modern capitalism requires women to work - there is no married man's wage, and most people would agree that for an average family, two average wages are needed. And if both parents are working full time - or the family has only one parent - they may not have time to cook from scratch each and every day. They may not be able to afford lots of vegetables; hell, I find vegetables expensive enough and I live in a household with two (admittedly low) incomes and no kids.
In her Daily Fail article, Prince laments that
"The way we cook has to change if the gentle art of feminine food is to be revived."
As opposed to what - the tough art of masculine food? Cooking isn't gentle, it's hard bloody work, taking time and effort - even if, like me, you enjoy cooking. No doubt Prince wouldn't consider sweating, swearing when I drop a potato, or getting flour on my jeans particularly feminine - but cooking can and does involve all of those things. And I guess if my partner cooks, then what he makes is masculine food - even if it's cupcakes.
Both Crumbs and Jessica Reid on CiF have excellent rebuttals to Prince's (and Boycott's) nonsense as well, albeit from different angles.
******
In other Daily Fail news: send your sons to private schools, girls will get enough education to marry well at the local state school - because everyone knows that private schools are always better, state schools fail boys, boys need special treatment, and girls get on with it, and don't need an education anyway because all girls are fit for is marrying, having babies, and cooking (in a gentle, feminine way). No doubt "they will both go to university and everything will work out", so that's ok then.
The article quotes "social commentator"James Delingpole - climate change denier, he of the "men don't want paternity leave" and "gays aren't normal" bullshit, who writes for the Mail and the Torygraph - saying,
"Girls can always marry a rich man, ... If a girl is middle-class and reasonably educated in the state system, the chances are she will marry well anyway."Boys, like it or not, are much more likely to end up earning their family’s crust as the breadwinner. Girls, being more sophisticated, socially adept and devious, are much more capable of negotiating the complexities of the state system than boys. It may not be liberated or politically correct, but it’s true.’
"... the state system is woefully geared against boys. Almost all the teachers are female, and a kind of ideological feminisation has crept into the system.
‘Boys aren’t built to sit still and conform in class. They are boisterous - they need to run about and they need to be challenged. "
Oh, fuck off you tit.
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Wait...this was published in 2010?
ReplyDeleteIt reads like something from 1910!
I have nothing constructive to add because all this feminine cooking gubbins is utter crap but "Oh, fuck off you tit" made me laugh vigorously - which is one positive.
ReplyDeleteExcellent blogpost.
ReplyDeleteI will make sure to cook my dinner with a frilly apron and a feminine twirl of the spoon.... NOT!
Of course capitalism is the culprit in the lack of healthy eating - it's the companies who make the food who put all the sugar in it, isn't it?
How do you "deviously" "negotiate" the state schooling system? Because I went to state school, and I do not remember relying on my wits and cunning to overcome some sort of psychological assault course every day - I went to class in the morning, wrote stuff down, and left again in the afternoon. Where's the sophistication and deviousness in that?
ReplyDeleteHas feminism killed the art of home cooking?
ReplyDeleteAsk a chef
I listened to that Today programme clip... and I always thought a debate involved arguing two differing opinions. Silly me.
ReplyDeleteI actually like cooking - that's because I take after my dad, who did all the cooking in my family and also really liked it. But a man actually entering a kitchen is probably too radical an idea for the Daily Fail to entertain. I wonder what my dad would make of that "debate", but he probably doesn't speak English well enough to understand it. Which, in this case, is probably a very good thing.