Feminism burnt my toast

First there was the article in the Daily Fail.

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.

"The views expressed... are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline."

In this litigious age, guest publications about toothpaste tubes on Have I Got News For You probably feature many a disclaimer, but the Daily Mail must need them more than most. After all, even a police force that is itself still enormously sexist and racist might have to hold them to account if they printed their readers' comments without such equivocation. Of course, anywhere that invites public comment will draw its share of fuckwittery (just look at dear old CiF) but just how much responsibility should the Mail bear for the user-generated bile throughout their website?

Their Terms and Conditions make interesting reading. In amongst all the usual legalese about "waiv[ing] all your moral rights" by submitting content (that must really stick in their self-righteous readership's craw!) they also prohibit anything "threatening, defamatory, offensive, abusive, liable to incite racial hatred, discriminatory or" - of course - "blasphemous". This might seem reasonable enough, but for two things; firstly, the fact that they select what to publish, and secondly, that they deviate from their own guidelines.

Accurate journalism (forgive my inclusion of this phrase in a blog about the Daily Mail) depends upon reporting all angles of a given story, including those you don't like. This would excuse the decision to publish the gamut of submitted comments were there not such a clear, discriminatory bias; even with a wealth of objective and printable comments to choose from, the Mail consistently chooses to publish the most bigoted, even if this means repetiton of the unintelligible. Perhaps most tellingly of all, they would rather publish none at all than any that undermine the party li(n)e; the tale of Hans Blomberg's live televised sexual harassment of his co-host, for instance, remains conspicuously comment-free despite a number of cogent submissions made by various groups and individuals. Thus, although the Daily Mail cannot be held responsible for the content submitted, they are distinctly accountable for its editorial use.

On then to their supposed distaste for the offensive, abusive and discriminatory (I omit the small matter of "racial hatred" only for reasons of time, space and theme - feel free to submit your own treatises on this issue!) Prohibiting something in one's Terms and Conditions would seem to imply its unsuitability for publication, certainly on so controlled a basis as the one upon which Daily Mail commenting operates.

Behold, then, a few pearls of wisdom from merely the previous week that the Daily Mail considers neither offensive, abusive nor discriminatory*:

"She's quite hot, and just the right amount of stupid."

"Looks so much younger and really soft and pretty, just as women ought to be. Take note, girls..."

"people are losing their homes and havent got jobs and this silly women are having cash thrown at them... get some kids, a dog and a tubby hubby"

"Women should realise that men prefer long hair on women. Those who say they prefer short masculine styles are lying (to their wives/girlfriends with horrible short masculine hair)."

"As a red blooded male, I think [Cheryl Cole] looks fantastic, so get to the back of the queue all of you fatties."

"Single British women... are not comparable, most are overweight, bossy and lazy and oh, CAN'T cook"

"only a blind man would prefer UK women to what is the 'average' girl in Eastern Europe"

"There are Not many single women over 25 in the UK that are worth the effort 4 a relationship 2day. Wane be men/Power trippers/ drunks/pretentious, and all the problems they get into."

"Come on English women - start being feminine again!"

"British women...are too forward and not sophisticated."

"You only have to look at what British woman have become to realise why men are now looking elsewhere."

"Woman want their cake and eat it. Sorry ladies, you can do everything we do, but we can't have the kids so make a choice for crying out loud. is this why we have spoilt middle class kids running amok, spoilt little brats the lot of them. is this why marriages are falling apart. JOB OR KIDS not both."


And the award for Most Prejudice In One Post goes to:

"Although it may be easy for people to mock these guys i know exactly where they are coming from.
I am a guy in my early thirties not too ugly and doing fairly well for myself.
However, finding a woman in Britain who doesn't swear constantly, is fairly intelligent, keeps fit and healty and is not engrossed with chav celebrity pap is almost an impossibility !!!! and add to that pretty, single and can cook, no chance.

Its only a matter of time before they cotton on to this sort of business in Africa where i'm sure the women may actually be greatful."


*All comments quoted sic, much as it pains my linguistic sensibilities.

"Bad Mother" Bad Science from the illustrious author of "A Playdate with Death"

The wittily-named Femail (geddit? geddit? just in case we hadn’t twigged that the rest of the paper is a tad male-dominated) is always a fine emetic read, but they really hit the jackshit jackpot recently with a guest spot from author Ayelet Waldman. Her article – here comes the train, little baby, because it’s really quite a mouthful – “Why it can be good to be a bad mother in a world where modern parenting has become hideously competitive”, unleashed on 28/05/09, boasts like all the best literary works an impressive twist in its tale, achieved chiefly by beginning quite reasonably.

The byline is deceptively encouraging as "Ayelet... argues that no woman is a perfect mother, and the sooner someone stands up for Bad Mothers the better". Was infiltration complete, I wondered on a first reading - had common sense, like MRSA and pig flu before it, finally destroyed the moronic inferno from within? Alas not; the Daily Mail is simply as incapable of balanced reporting of its own content as of the outside world. “Stand[ing] up” for anyone is by no stretch of any imagination (and lord knows their readership’s is a fevered one) what the charming Ms. Waldman proceeds to do.

I must confess, I have yet to delve too deeply into Waldman’s back catalogue, though there have been some passable reviews for her most recent works, such as Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, if not for her earlier Mommy-track Mysteries series (distinguished, if that’s quite the word, by distinctly Goosebumpesque dust jackets and worse titles than you can shake a B-movie at). But from reading articles such as this and the scintillating “Truly, Madly, Guiltily”, I really don’t envy her editor.

The plain and plaguing fact is, she just doesn’t know what she’s on about, as like the proverbial Blackadderian pencil she bounces pointlessly from one self-contradiction to another, without any apparent sense of, well, contradiction. It’s hard not to feel her next franchise should be a Mommy-track pantomime when mummy-bashing is at once “utterly unfair – because… no one hurls criticism like this at fathers” (OH YES, IT IS!) and yet sound grounds for a newspaper article because “so-called Good Mothers can be downright bad for their children” (OH NO, THEY’RE NOT!) until she remembers that it’s really “time we all accepted ourselves for… mothers who do our best” (OH YES… etc). This is no logical pre-empting of a counter-argument to reassert one’s original point; she just can’t make up her muddled mind.

Indeed, the more I eviscerate this article and research its author, the more inclined I am to agree with the reviewer on www.librarything.com who describes her debut novel, Nursery Crimes, as “Waldman's forum for rather nakedly communicating her own opinions and preferences [in a] self-indulgent, amateurish” manner. So far, so livejournal, and it wouldn’t really matter but for one thing; her petulant insistence on dragging feminism down with her.

Waldman is clearly dissatisfied with various things. Maybe it’s her kids, maybe it’s her mother (both get a good raking over in the article) or maybe she just likes a good moan – but none of these is justification for this cack-handed and irresponsible attack on the movement that gave her the voice to deride it in the first place. Like a Pantomime Dame approaching a banana skin, Waldman repeatedly misses her own points; oh yes, it is awful that parenting pressures are centred so one-sidedly on women, that the workplace has not yet caught up with gender equality, but oh no, it’s not her mother –sorry, feminism’s– fault.

The feminists of Waldman Senior’s generation did indeed “[sacrifice] much to give [women today] the opportunities they never had”, such as the right and expectation to work. So far, so fair – until she erroneously blames them for the fact “the workplace isn’t conducive to being a working mother”. If earlier feminists “were convinced they had sorted everything out for their daughters” they have been proven wrong; but they are not culpable for the work they started not yet having been completed. Neither the fact that Waldman’s own feminist ideals were shattered by “punishingly long” hours and missing her firstborn, nor the truth that some women probably do feel they had “better jolly well be Good Mothers” to justify the sacrifice of giving up their careers, are any indictment of feminism, but rather of the very forces it challenges. In attacking the effects of patriarchy and blaming them on feminism, Waldman pulls off a truly extraordinary non-sequitur.

But why? To spout such nonsense generally requires either acute stupidity or spite. In a Harvard graduate it is hard not to suspect the latter, particularly given her repeated reprobation of a mother depicted as the kind of Crazy Feminist™ Pat Robertson so feared. But actually, I don’t care why – and nor should anyone give a shit about Sophie on the swings or anything else Ayelet Waldman says or does or writes so long as she uses personal neuroses to legitimise sexism. You’d think such a self-trumpeting Former Classmate Of Obama’s might know better.