Once again, Grace Dent has written the kind of column that should have all intelligent people running around the room cheering and air-punching. I had only made it as far as this paragraph:
Sotomayor spent 2010 transforming judicial thought on the “right to remain silent”, while Gaga was probably dancing about a stadium – nips out and wearing backless chaps made of tampons – hooting: “Woo! Leetle monsterz. Female empowerment!” This sort of irony is par for the course in list-land
before I was madly in love with every comma and pledging to call my first born daughter Grace in her honour. Then she got me with this:
Oh pipe down, you female transorbital neuroendoscopy specialists at the back, Coleen has a children’s book deal and will almost certainly help choose the colour of the cover
and I realised that I must start petitioning someone for statues of Ms Dent to be placed as warning beacons where teenage girls congregate, such as outside Top Shop changing rooms and near bus stations when the local boys’ schools are chucking out. I feel like I have been banging on about this since those far-off days when Posh took back Beckham after the Rebecca Loos ‘episode’, but what the hell are we teaching girls by our examples, that it really doesn’t matter how much your other half disrespects you by chasing other women so long as he keeps buying you nice things to compensate?
And should it follow that Hillary Clinton is less powerful now that her name is on the desk in her own right, than she was in the days when she had unlimited access over the pillows to the guy in the top job? I would love to see someone suggest that to her face, as I think I would probably enjoy watching her tear that person a new one – therefore aren’t I lucky that just this exact scenario already went down:
Good on her, too. We have reached a pretty poor pass when women are prepared to forego a place at the table in lieu of a position or three between the sheets. Nor should any good men be made to feel unsettled by such rhetoric as lads, it is just as much in your interest to declare yourself a feminist if you have a mother, sister, daughter or wife whose horizons are being narrowed by this bullshit.
The problems of the world cannot be resolved simply by one side winning the battle of the sexes. They require a balance between the hunter-gatherer stuff you do so well and the empathy and intuition that we bring to the table. Any society which leaves the serious business to the men, while the women stand pouting on the sidelines is soon going to fall apart at the seams, because, as a great philosopher once wrote, it may be a man’s, man’s, man’s, world but it sure as hell wouldn’t be nothing without a woman. Isn’t that the truth.
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