Sexism is real. Don’t demean it, Diane
IF THERE is one thing guaranteed to annoy the female of the species, it is telling us that women rule the roost these days. There was jeering from all (male) quarters when Fiona Bruce got the Question Time gig, with Jeremy Clarkson claiming that women get all the top jobs at the Beeb these days and that anyone with cojónes didn’t have a chance. This about a corporation that was recently exposed as having a quite shocking gender pay gap. Nor is it overly blessed with women of a certain age on screen. Giving one decent prime-time job to a female doesn’t change that.
Sexism is (almost) everywhere you look and men don’t see it because it never happens to them. Recently I lost my temper about something and a man suggested I “have a little cry”. Unless they were the deliberate target of bullying can you imagine a man ever, ever being addressed in such a way? Even our Prime Minister is subjected to it: there has been real malice in the talk about how hopeless she is and her “humiliation”. Humiliation? There is another very different way of looking at this: that she is actually a heroic figure, doing everything in her power to reconcile various impossible positions and all out of a sense of duty and love of country. Her male predecessor scented what she would be up against and scarpered.
Which brings us back to Question Time. Another high profile woman MP has just been on, namely Diane Abbott, who was questioned about her party’s politics.
When challenged she lost no time in playing the race and gender card. Her treatment was racist and sexist, she said, and if there is one thing that irritates most women even more than male sexism, it is women claiming to be a victim of it when they patently are not. Diane Abbott was challenged because she and her section of the party, men and women alike, would bankrupt this country with the economics of the madhouse. It had nothing to do with her skin colour or gender. And it demeans the real victims of racism and sexism to make such spurious claims.
PEOPLE have been queuing up to share their “the day Prince Philip was rude to me” tales; alas I have no such anecdote. The only time I was ever near him was at a reception in Buckingham Palace and watched eagerly as he worked the room. I was looking forward to the meet-and-greet but ended up as the only person in the room who didn’t get the Royal handshake. Am I that obviously a journalist? And I’d been hoping for a gaffe!