"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"
"The way we cook has to change if the gentle art of feminine food is to be revived."
"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.
Having a slightly masochistic streak I'm occasionally compelled to pick up the Metro, the Daily Mail's ugly little sister, on the train into work. This rag usually offers a bit of bile to start your week with and this morning's edition was no exception, with the story of a woman who neglected her children and let her dogs starve to death while playing a computer game as its front page offering. (The story is covered in even more gory detail in the Fail itself). By the time I'd finished reading I was shaking with rage, but possibly not for quite the reasons the editors intended.
This seems at first reading to be a continuation of the Fails' bizarre crusade against the evil interwebs: the addictive game in question is called Smallworld, to which "she received an invitation from a friend on Facebook", and is "an online boardgame featuring characters such as wizards, dwarves, orcs and giants" – clearly such a tempting prospect it can turn an ordinary mother into a neglectful monster. Look a bit closer though and the story gets rather more complicated.
It seems the problems started when she lost her husband to a heart attack, after which she stopped taking care of her dogs and her house, barely managed to feed her children and started obsessively playing the game. That doesn't sound to me like an addictive game ruining someone's life, it sounds to me like someone with severe depression taking refuge in a virtual world from a life that's become unbearable. It sounds to me like turning someone with a severe mental illness into a hate figure in order to fit with their anti-Facebook agenda.
Apparently she got a ban on using the internet and keeping animals and a suspended custodial sentence. What I hope she also got is counselling, a lot of hot cups of tea and a lot of friends reassuring her that whatever she's done they still care about her. What she certainly doesn't need is a media-maddened mob who can't imagine themselves ever ending up in that position to tell her what she did is inexcusable, I'm pretty sure she already feels bad about it.
Honestly, in my more tinfoil-hatted moments I sometimes wonder why the Daily Mail puts so much effort into making sure we hate each other. Do they want us to be too busy squabbling amongst ourselves and bitching over biweekly bin collections that we won't notice when Paul Dacre peels off his fleshmask and leads his army of Martian Lizardmen to victory or something? Maybe it's meant to be reassuring. We're not like those people, the narrative goes. We're not workshy scroungers sponging off honest taxpayers, or underdressed sluts who go out and get themselves raped (or probably make it up anyway) or foreigners inventing tales of persecution to leech off the public services we pay for. We'd never get addicted to an absurd game "featuring characters such as wizards, dwarves, orcs and giants". And we're certainly not the sort of weak, pathetic people who get depression.
Only it's a lie of course. It's hard to find a firm figure but it's widely accepted that about a quarter of us will experience some sort of mental illness at some point in our lives. No matter who we are or how strong our work ethic may be, we can find ourselves sick or unemployed, we may even be assaulted whatever precautions we take. And sometimes, maybe in response to bereavement, maybe because of something else, our brains can do things we don't like and can't control. Life can be touch, and possibly the one thing I'd agree with the Daily Mail on is the need to look out for each other – this story probably wouldn't have ended so tragically if this woman's friends or family had noticed she wasn't coping and offered to help at the beginning. But a little understanding and compassion is what would promote that sort of society, not the judgement, mistrust and condemnation peddled by this paper.
In short, there's some indefensible behaviour here, but it's on behalf of the writers of this article, not its subject.
P.S. I should probably point out that I'm a dog lover (currently dogless due to circumstances rather than choice), and while the idea of letting your dogs starve to death makes me feel sick, I'm not so self-righteous that I can't see how someone with depression could let that happen.
I've just finished watching a documentary on Channel 4 called "Cutting Edge: Four Sons versus Four Daughters". I'm not sure it was quite as cutting edge as it appeared, although it did give some food for thought.
The opening mark that struck me was the mother of four girls saying people often asked her, on seeing she had four girls, "Are you trying for a boy?"; the documentary started as if it were about to start exploring gender attitudes and nature vs nurture debates. However, the producers chose conventional families - the daughters liked pink, took dancing lessons, and arranged flowers with their mother; the sons were competitive, played football with their father, and had toy guns.
Both families were, again, “ideal”; the mother was a SAHM (although the mother of four boys briefly mentioned a part-time job, it was made obvious that she was the primary caretaker) while the father worked in a masculine industry. Both families appeared affluent; they kept the de-rigeur middle-class chickens; the eldest son had his own car. Both were white.
These aspects of the families situations was not the main focus of the documentary, but it is important to remember the other aspects of social inequalities when examining one - their middle-class affluence undoubtedly affected the girls' access to ballet lessons and pony-owning, and the boys' access to after-school sports. As a result, their "girliness" or "boyishness" is affected by more than just their biological sex - which in turn affects how their parents relate to them, and nurture their children to fit a certain ideology.
The documentary's use of gender stereotypes is consistent; the father in the all-girl family (John) is henpecked and feels outnumbered, while the boys' father would want to have “sporty girls”. The boys’ mother (Karen) is looking forward to a “girlier” house, and being with other women. Women want the company of women; Men want sons to relive their boyhood through.
Karen & Steve – have sons
John & Marianne – have daughters
Both sets of parents equally uncomfortable with their "new" families; idea that boys much more rough-and-tumble is enforced from the outset as the sons put John through an obstacle course involving a trampoline and water guns. The girls, in direct contrast, give makeovers to both Karen and Steve (they are shown earlier giving their father, John, a makeover, which he calmly endures while being asked leading questions about whether or not he'd prefer to have sons). The girls help with cooking the evening meal – the boys don’t (though they do barbecue). Both mothers do the main bulk of the cooking and caring. The stereotypes continue - girls like shopping; boys like go-karting. Fathers like boys, Mothers like girls. A father is only one who can teach “a boy to become a man”.
Karen, mother to the four boys, comments to her new daughters “I think mums do too much for boys… I think girls want to do it, that’s the difference”; she is pleased that the girls help out in the kitchen, but instead of putting it down to routine, she appears to attribute their assistance to their innate femininity.
The documentary did raise some points – are parents creating their children to be what they expect children of that gender to be like? Do they see children of their own gender as a conduit to relive their own experiences? Would the outcome have been different if the gender stereotypes had not been so clearly defined between families, with tomboys and boys playing with dolls? Or if the gender roles of the parents had been less clearly defined.
At the end of their three days of family-swapping, the parents were urged to reflect on gender differences – but not about whether the behaviour of the children is down to personality or their own expectations of sons or daughters. They do not question whether girls require a mother, or if a male-identified parent is able to parent a girly-girl. The personality of the adults and their rediscovery of their masculinity or femininity - in relation to their family standing, their children's personalities in particular - is considered, again raising further questions as to the effects of nature or nurture on children's development.
Had the programme not reinforced gender roles so determinedly, the documentary could have explored a great deal more in terms of gender and children's gender roles; instead it raised more questions than it answered, and served to repeat the ideal of SAHM, breadwinner father, daughters who do ballet and sons who play football.
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