Since the “privilege doesn’t exist” nonsense doesn’t go away from my dashboard (and I am glad that is the case, because I take great pleasure in reading the myriad ways in which people will challenge the concept), I will add to the hoopla by pointing to this article. If I ever needed an example to illustrate concepts like mansplaining, privilege, patriarchy, kyriarchy, etc., this would probably be it. Courtesy of Kevin Myers, Modern women don’t give a damn about grim tales of oppression from whiny media minnies.
It’s a long (and boring) article, so I will just quote the beginning to provide a taste:
The female sex falls into two distinct categories. The first is that of the women I personally know, who are bawdy and girly and talk about food and fashion and clothes and sex and breasts and like dirty jokes and gossip and celebrity magazines.
And then there is this other female sex, who are funless and dour and oppressed and always being picked on by society and by men, and whose existence I know of only because I am told of them by the minnies in the media. It’s not that I seldom meet the Second Oppressed Sex, I NEVER meet them.
Now if David Attenborough described animals as inaccurately as the media minnies described women, then he would have become a street-sweeper, and, better still, one who couldn’t tell the difference between a banana peel and a wet haddock.
So, take the latest non-scandalous scandal which has got PricewaterhouseCoopers in a tizzy: the pictures of its young female employees who were rated by male employees for their looks.
Okay, I showed the pictures – which also appeared in just about every Irish newspaper, and quite rightly, because they’re spectacular – to some female friends, and the general response was: Well, a good-looking bunch, but she’s better looking than her, but not as nice as her. And that’s what we all do: look at women for their appearance. If you doubt that, just open any women’s magazine, edited by women, for women, and what do you see? Pictures of beautiful women. That’s what both sexes have in common: an eye for young attractive females.
The “female sex”. I cannot really get past that. It now has become mental flotsam that I shall carry with me while I go around doing my daily errands.
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