Feminist Misogynist -v- Positive Discrimination

If I am recruiting someone to work for me I want the best qualified, most experienced person who's personality appears to be a good 'fit' for the office.

If I am voting for who I want to represent my interests at national or local level, I look for someone who shares my concerns, morals, ethics and priorities and who will work hard on my behalf.

If I need someone to mow my lawn, to change a light fitting, to wallpaper my hall - I want the most skilled, qualified, enthusiastic person available.

I actually couldn't give a gnat's chuff whether that person is male or female, I just want the best.

The European Union now says I am not allowed to have the best. Not if the best is a man. No, I must apply equality to my decision, so that for every time I hire a man, I hire a woman the next time. EU enforces Positive Discrimination in the Boardroom

Now given the choice of who to decorate my home I admit that I'd choose my Mum every time - she's a fantastic decorator. But for electrical work I have two brilliant blokes who between them have 80-odd years experience, qualifications oozing from every pore, are very skilled and pleasant to have in the house. Next time I need a socket changing, should I scour the area for a female electrician to ensure that the Gods of Equality have been appeased? I think not.

Now obviously I'm taking my interpretation of the EU's latest diktat to extremes here, but how long until they try to impose such nonsense on every walk of life?

This week, the European Parliament voted overwhelming for proposals to force big companies to fill 40% of non-executive posts with women.

It does not matter to the EU that there is a man better equipped for the role. It does not matter to the EU that perhaps no women apply for the role. No, if 40% of your board aren't female you'd better get a couple of your directors booked in for gender reassignment surgery pronto or face the wrath of Brussels.

Germany, which has long objected to quotas, said it would force its companies to have 30% female boards by 2016. Well, let's be honest, we all remember those female East German shot-putters from the 1980s - you could easily pass off 30% of the men on any board of directors as one of them and never arouse any bureaucratic suspicion.
I'm all for women achieving high office. I'm all for equality. I'm all for the dismantling of the old boys networks and sexist practices. But we do women no favours when we advance them by discriminating against men. As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as 'positive' discrimination. Discrimination is always a negative force - it is always used to keep someone down. And I'm sure there will be the strident feminists who argue that for too long it has been women who've been at the blunt end of sexual discrimination and it's about time the tide turned. But in discriminating against men, we are turning ourselves into a female version of the very patriarchy that we claim to oppose.

When all is said & done, don't we all just want the best man for the job, regardless of whether she's actually a woman?

Feminist Misogynist -v- Positive Discrimination

Feminist Misogynist -v- Female Role Models

 Someone else - someone in a better position than me to comment and to do something about it - has said exactly what I'd say on this issue. This is rare and most welcome.

Miriam Gonzalez Durantez (that's Nick Clegg's decidedly better half to you & me) has called for people to "Stop labelling women as fluffy or scary" and called for more promotion of suitable role models for girls. I couldn't agree more. Funny then, that the story I've linked to is in the Daily Mail whose 'Femail Today' column which runs down the left-hand side of the web-page is full of stories about the women who should be at the bottom of every mother's list of people they'd want as role models for their daughters.

Katie Price - famous for getting her tits out, having a Pink Car (haven't we been here before?) and having 4 children to 3 different fathers.

Miley Cyrus - famous for shoving her arse in the face of a married man at the VMA Awards and getting near-naked at every opportunity in order to court controversy and gain publicity for her below-average music career.

Madonna - famous for getting various parts of her scrawny anatomy out at various points in her career (usually when public attention was dwindling), flicking between religions like most of us change our brand of chopped tomatoes and shagging a dancer young enough to be her son.

Lauren Silverman/Sinitta/Terri Seymour/Mezhgan Husseiny - famous for shagging Simon Cowell and not being able to let go when he gets bored of them because he carries on spending vast amounts of cash on them and letting them holiday on his yacht.

Any Kardashian - Let's face it, they're all equally vapid, vain and vile so no point in singling out one over the others. All married/had kids with rich and/or famous men to ensure a luxurious lifestyle going forward. You go girls - great example of how to get on in life.

Helen Flanagan (and most other young soap actresses) - Famous for not being good enough at acting to be cast in a proper TV drama, film or theatre production, for wearing not many clothes, almost flashing their tits, shagging Premiership footballers then being surprised when they get dumped or two-timed.

Victoria's Secret 'Angels' - Angels, ha! There's a laugh. Famous for parading around in underwear giving male commuters uncomfortable trouser moments on the bus. Very angelic.

Various Supermodels - Famous for being skeletally thin & unhealthy, doing drugs to stay that way and encouraging eating disorders in young women. But stylish, very stylish, which makes it OK.

Katie Hopkins & Samantha Brick - Professional Bitches.

Now I know that there's no sensationalism in reporting how well Fiona Bruce reads the news, or what an incisive interviewer Mishal Hussain is, or how Teresa May has been sticking it to the EU on control of our borders, or how Carolyn McCall has steered Easyjet's share prices skywards or how Bettany Hughes has brought Classicism to the masses. But we owe it to ourselves and to our daughters to promote these women as the people to look up to, to aspire to be like. They should be given prominence in the media way before these vacuous bimbos and damaged attention seekers.

Ms Gonzalez Durantez is absolutely spot-on and I really hope that she is listened to and is able to use her position to bring about change. Not holding my breath though, frankly...

Feminist Misogynist -v- Female Role Models

Feminist Misogynist -v- Wraparound Childcare

Feminist Misogynist -v- Wraparound Childcare


The Labour Party are the 'party of the working person'. They want fairness, equality (so long as they remain more equal than the rest of us), for all workers to be paid a 'living wage'. You can't argue with that.

They also want 'wraparound' care for all primary school children between 8am and 6pm.

In an interview with the Guardian, the Shadow Women and Equalities Minister Yvette Cooper said childcare would be a "top priority" for Labour, as the party begins to set out its concrete policies ahead of the 2015 election.

"It's a really important issue for us and we want to go further than we have before," she said. "It's about supporting families, the economy and equality."

Hmmm. Supporting families by sending BOTH parents out to work all day and forcing them to farm their children out to day-care. Day-care which costs pretty much the same as someone on Minimum Wage will earn. Day-care which will substitute one-to-one attention from a loving parent with a handful of (predominantly) young girls overseeing a room full of kids, none of whom they have any emotional investment in.

Back in the 1950s, when the vast majority of mothers stayed at home to raise their children, Dr John Bowlby wrote of 'attachment' as the "relationship a young child has with it's main care-giver, usually the mother". How do we define 'main care giver' in the 21st century? Most mothers would insist that they are their children's main care giver, but if they drop the children off at school or nursery at 8am and collect them at 6pm as Ms Cooper advocates, spending perhaps 3 hours per day during the week with those children when the school or nursery has had them for 10 hours each day, how can they claim that title? 50 hours at school/nursery -v- 15 hours with Mummy - not much attachment there.

The relationship between a child and their primary care giver is immensely important, it really cannot be exaggerated. Professor Sir Denis Pereira Gray OBE writes that "a consistent, loving, parental relationship makes networks form in the developing brain which enable the child to handle stress in later life, achieve emotional self-control, and so relate sensitively to other people. These networks in the brain also influence emotional and physical health, such as obesity, in adulthood."

Scientific studies have also proved that levels of the stress hormone Cortisol are significantly higher in 3 to 4 year old children in day-care than those in a home environment. One study has found that the effect of day-care attendance on cortisol was even more marked in children under 36 months of age - showing that after five months in day-care, children who appeared to have 'settled' still had raised cortisol levels when compared to children spending the vast majority of time at home with a parent. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the loss of self-control and empathy caused by high cortisol levels may be passed on from one generation to the next, increasing with each generation - without wishing to exaggerate or scare-monger, we could be facing a future where children with stifled emotions grow into adults with no facility to empathise or show love to others - and the potential effects on society are frightening to contemplate.

The effect of stress on children cannot be underestimated. Stress can damage the pre-frontal cortex of the brain which is associated with an impaired control of emotions, inhibition, attention span, memory and cognitive flexibility. Strange that until 30-or-so years ago no-one had ever heard of ADHD - a phenomenon which appears wholly related to the push for women to work and sub-contract childcare to outsiders.

Returning to Sir Denis, he states that "formal day-care substitutes care by parent who loves the child with care by someone who doesn't. By ignoring love, we diminish motherhood, and parenthood, and discount one of their most precious strengths." He concludes that "good parent-small child relationships protect the child from stress, especially in the first two years of life".

In the face of this evidence, how can any political party argue for increased day-care provision for children? The money which would be spent on this (and don't get me started on where that money is supposed to come from!) would be much better spent on a transferable tax allowance between married couples, enabling more mothers (or fathers) to remain at home caring for their young children for longer.

Feminism isn't about wanting to be just like men. It isn't about wanting to work 9-til-5, commuting an hour each end, abdicating responsibility for your children to someone else, flopping onto the sofa with a large glass of wine at 9pm having finally got the kids to bed and the washing up done (and the washing machine emptied, the next load set on timer for tomorrow, the wet clothes on an airer, tomorrow's school uniform set out, packed lunches made, homework checked, school letters read & cheques written, the hoover run around the living room, the kitchen worktops wiped, the dog fed, the cat put out and another 5 jobs added to the ever increasing 'to do' list).

Feminism is about the right to choose, the ability to choose. What Labour's socialist pseudo-feminism has given us is quite the opposite. It has encouraged three generations of women to want it all, expect it all, but in return for 'it all' - the nice house, the new car, the foreign holidays, the designer handbags, the glittering career - it has made us into slaves willing to sell our children to the lowest bidder.

"If I didn't work we couldn't afford a holiday" - so your absence for 46 weeks of the year is justified by 2 weeks in Tuscany glugging Chianti and screaming "don't splash Mummy's Kindle!" at your children.

"If I didn't work we couldn't afford the mortgage payments" - because the four of you really need a 5 bedroom house in the smartest part of town which is £50k more than an identical one half a mile away simply because of the postcode.

"If I didn't work we couldn't afford a nice car" - because anything less than a BMW X5 would be social suicide on the school run.

The western world has got it's priorities all wrong. None of this matters, the house, the car, the career, especially not the handbags. What matters is the well-being of our children and the gift of love and security which we owe them and which will ensure that there is a civilised society in the future. When 'wraparound childcare' means a mother wrapping her arms around her child because she cares, then we will have got it right.

Feminist Misogynist -v- Wraparound Childcare.


*with thanks to Mothers at Home Matter for their article on Sir Denis's WAtCh lecture which I have quoted from.

Feminist Misogynist -v- Stupid Governance

Feminist Misogynist -v- Stupid Governance

Today's post is nothing to do with feminism or women per se. It's a general rant but concerns something that affects both sexes equally. If that disappoints you, tough.

Why are the powers-that-be in this country so completely incapable of joined-up thinking? When one department has a round hole and another has a round post, it never occurs to either of them to say to the other "shouldn't we work together on this one?"

Point in case: The Royal Hospital Haslar in Gosport was closed 4 years ago. It was Britain's last Naval hospital and therefore owned by the MOD who decided that instead of having it's own hospital it should rely on the expertise of the NHS to treat it's personnel. After all, the NHS are the medical experts, the Navy do boats & stuff. Fair enough, sounds sensible at face value. However, the hospital was sold (to whom? I don't know) for just £3million and has lain abandoned ever since. Inside, the state-of-the-art medical equipment lies dormant, falling into obsolescence as the months and years pass by.

Two hundred miles (give or take) to the north of Gosport, lies Southport & Formby District General Hospital. Until my recent laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gall-bladder removal to you & me) I suffered from biliary colic caused by gall-stones and had the misfortune to visit the hospital's A&E department on three occasions due to the intense pain caused by the condition. What the A&E doctor really needed to do was an ultrasound scan of my upper digestive tract to see what my gall-bladder was up to and specifically, whether a stone had passed down the bile duct to the liver. In order to do that, he would have to admit me to the hospital where I would bed-block for 3 days waiting for an appointment with the sonographer as the hospital has only one ultrasound machine.

Three days. One machine.

Southport and Formby DGH serves an area bounded by Crosby in the South, the Irish Sea in the West, the M6 in the East and the Ribble estuary in the North. It has the only A&E department serving adults in this area (childrens' A&E is located in Orrmskirk, a half-hour drive from Southport or Formby, but don't get me going on that one - actually, that IS a feminist issue and a blog for another day). The idea that a hospital in the 21st century serving a large suburban area should only have one ultrasound machine is frankly disgraceful.

I'm certain that hospitals across the land can tell similar tales of a lack of equipment and resources - we see stories in the newspapers all the time about the postcode lottery of treatments and people being sent hundreds of miles by ambulance to access the equipment or expertise required to treat their particular condition.

So why, when there is an empty hospital stuffed full of useable medical equipment, equipment badly needed by NHS Trusts around the country, hasn't someone from the MOD picked up the phone, called someone high-up in the NHS & said "I say old chap, could you use a state-of-the-art MRI scanner in any of your hospitals? How about a few x-ray machines? Half a dozen ultrasound machines? Operating theatre equipment? Only it's just sitting here doing nothing and you can have it free of charge."

Knowing the way this country works (or doesn't) it would take a further 2 years for the wheels to grind, the right person to obtain the information and act upon it, by which time the equipment would be obsolete and anyway, using equipment that has been mothballed for so long would contravene Health & Safety guidelines. It makes you want to weep.

Why is the hierarchy in the UK incapable of joined-up thinking? Why can they never think of asking if anyone has a round post for their round hole? Why is everything so fragmented that one department only deals with holes and another only with posts? Why are the people running those departments so blinkered that they never consider co-operating with the other?

As the example I'm steamingly angry about today is hospitals, I can tell you what the biggest part of the problem is.

Southport & Formby DGH  is run by the Sefton Primary Care Trust. Southport and Formby are in two different parliamentary constituencies, and Ormskirk (where childrens' A&E is, remember), whose hospital is also in the Sefton PCT is in yet a third. Three constituencies, three MPs - one LibDem, two Labour. Furthermore, the hospital lies within the Sefton MBC local authority. That covers an area from Southport to the Mersey. The Council is currently Labour controlled. Ormskirk is in the West Lancashire local authority which is currently Conservative controlled.  

The parliamentary constituencies don't talk to each other, the local councils don't talk to each other, the PCT doesn't talk to any of them. They are all so busy fighting among themselves for who is in charge, feathering their own nests, protecting vested interests and ring-fencing their own budgets that the needs of the patients never even cross their minds. They run the hospital like a business, not as a service.

You can repeat this for schools, cleansing, housing, highways, libraries, care for the elderly, vulnerable & mentally ill, planning, policing & emergency services - every aspect of society. Those who 'serve' do anything but. The wrong people are in charge. And until we find the right people - people who care about serving their communities' needs not about serving their own greedy agendas - then things will never improve.

Feminnist Misogynist -v- Stupid Governance  

Feminist Misogynist -v- Women Drivers

Hang on to your hats, this could be a bumpy ride.

Before we start, I'd better just make it clear that I am a woman and a driver. I do not hate myself, nor do I hate competent women drivers, of which there are many. But without sweeping generalisations my rant wouldn't have the same impact so here goes...

Why do you feel it necessary to embellish your car in a manner which actually turns it into something other than a mode of transport? Why has your car got eyelashes? Why is there a plastic flower in a little vase hanging out of your dashboard? Why are there cuddly toys obscuring your view out of the rear screen? Why are there pink fluffy cushions on the backseat preventing passengers from using it? Why is there a small shoe hanging from your rear view mirror distracting you from applying your mascara? And why, why, WHY is your car PINK? Are you Barbie? Is your head full of fluffy bunnies and cupcakes? Are you mental? This is a CAR, it's a ton and a half of metal capable of being propelled along the road at in excess of 100mph (if you can get your Ugg boot out from under the accelerator pedal where it's been wedged for the last 3 miles). IT IS NOT YOUR HOUSE, YOU DO NOT DECORATE IT AND MAKE IT FEEL HOMELY. Get a grip.

But, having made your car all homely, why do you then proceed to treat it like a litter bin? Having put a gorgeous outfit on for an evening out, when you pick me up I do not want to wade through 6 inches of detritus in the footwell, I should not be in fear of the myriad stains on your passenger seat, I should not exit the car with a half-eaten child's lollipop stuck to my arse. Is your house like that? (*makes mental note to decline offer of a coffee later in the week)

All of this becomes even more terrifying in light of the latest trend in 'must have' cars for women. It was bad enough when women restricted themselves to 'cute' cars like Micras, Corsas, Fiestas and convertible 307s. Now you have a Barbie-obsessed airhead who thinks her car is a boudoir on wheels hustling the streets in 2 and a half tons of Teutonic 4x4. You live in a 3 bedroomed semi-detached in suburbia. You have to drive 10 miles to find the nearest farm track. Tesco's car-park is as close to 'off-road' as you'll ever get. And yet you've just GOT to have a BMW X5, an Audi Q5 or a Mercedes ML220 or you're NO-ONE. What would the other school-run Mums think if you turned up in a mere BMW 3-series? It'd be social suicide. That grip I mentioned earlier - really; Get it.

Ah, you're thinking, she missed out stickers from that rant. Well they are accorded a whole paragraph of their own. Your car is not 'Mum's Taxi' as you do not have the appropriate hackney carriage licence from your local authority and do not charge your offspring for their lifts to dance class. There is not a 'Babe on Board' - you are 43, overweight with a bad bleach job and you are wearing a velour tracksuit - the word 'babe' has not applied to you for quarter of a century, if ever. If there is in fact a 'Baby on Board', what the hell do you want me to do about it? Should I drive differently because you have reproduced? Or perhaps you want me to make allowances for your bad driving because you've managed to pop one out? Did they do a quick lobotomy while you were in labour in the clear knowledge that no one would ever notice? Do you want a medal? Are your Child Benefit payments and Tax Credits not enough? And finally, YOUR CAR IS NOT POWERED BY FUCKING FAIRY DUST although if that were possible it'd probably be a damn sight cheaper than a litre of unleaded.

I'm feeling better already for having got that lot off my chest.

And now we move on to the sins of the female driver whilst the car is actually in motion.

Things you should not do whilst driving:-

• Apply make-up or do your hair.
• Look at your passengers whilst talking to them - look at the bloody road you airhead.
• Talk on your mobile phone.
• Send and read text messages.
• Wave your arms in the air whilst singing along to your fave music - the steering wheel is there for a reason.
• Bimble along the motorway in the middle lane at 60mph thinking you're being 'safe' when in actual fact you're being a dangerous obstruction.
• Argue with Sat-Nav Lady (Sat-Nav Lady always knows best, especially when she tells you to drive your pink Nissan Micra into a reservoir).
• Pull out in front of me at a junction and then not get a bloody move on, especially when there's not another car in sight behind me for 3 miles.
• Drive at 45mph regardless of the actual speed limit.
• Park on the zig-zag lines outside school because you'll only be there for 5 minutes and little Amber-Jade can't possibly walk an extra 10 feet to get into the car for the 400 yard journey home.
• Wait for a gap the size of the Ark Royal before pulling out at a roundabout or junction.
• Stop at the bottom of a motorway slip road.
• Drive on the motorway at all
• Drive when I am on the road in your area - just keep the hell away from me.

When another motorist does something stupid and makes me cross, nine times out of ten it's a woman driver. This makes me doubly cross because I know that most men think that ALL women drivers are as bad, which means that they think that I am the same. And it reinforces the old stereotype - "Oh dear, women drivers, eh? Terrible!". I hate being stereotyped. I hate people making the assumption that because I'm female I'm a bad driver. I've done trackdays in various sports cars, had tuition from CAT Driver Training, driven Porsches around Silverstone, kept up with the boys across the Mountain Circuit on the Isle of Man, driven the Monaco Grand Prix circuit. I used to ride motorbikes and be amused when I took my 'lid' off and heard the gasps of the blokes when they realised I was a WOMAN and had the temerity not to be perched on the pillion seat. Now I'm offended when I step out of a sports car in the pit lane and get the same gasps. We're supposed to have moved on, we're supposed to be striving for equality, a woman's place is no longer necessarily in the home, we're in boardrooms, up mountains, winning Olympic medals, running football clubs, topping the rich lists - but put us behind the wheel and "Ooh, woman driver, watch out! Ha ha ha!" Ha. Ha. Ha. Do I look like I'm laughing?

Ladies, you are doing the female sex no favours with your automotive antics. So please, get rid of the tat, concentrate on the job in hand (that's DRIVING, just to be clear), treat driving a car with the respect and gravitas it deserves and then, who knows, not only will you get better at it but you might actually enjoy driving rather than seeing it as a means of getting from A to B. And I might be able to enjoy driving without the fear of you piling your X5 into the back of me at the traffic lights because you're too busy dancing to One Direction, talking to your mate Mandy on the phone, changing little Tyler's nappy, plumping your cushions and wiping the McFlurry stains off your velour tracksuit to have noticed that the lights have changed to red (or Scouse Amber as we call it around here).

Raise your game, girls. if we want equality we have to prove that we are in fact EQUAL and that means 'just as good', not 'almost as good but please make allowances because I have breasts'.

Feminist Misogynist -v- Women Drivers.

Feminist Misogynist -v- The Breastapo

For some time now I have been irritated by the notion of the 'Sisterhood'. The idea that women should be supportive of women just because we share a chromosome.

For some time I have been thinking about starting a Blog about why women are so bloody annoying in ways men can only dream of.

For some time I've needed a catalyst to finally push me into venting my spleen publicly about the utter, utter idiocy of the 'fairer' sex, my 'sisters', those of us allegorically modelled from Adam's rib.

So what has finally pushed me over the edge? This.

Woman asked to stop breastfeeding in a public swimming pool

Now the stupidity, bloody-mindedness and lack of consideration for one's fellow humans in one person is nothing new. The fact that this woman thought that a swimming pool full of other people's urine, saliva, blood & verrucas was an appropriate & hygienic place to breastfeed her baby is bad enough. The fact that it never occurred to her that other people wouldn't want to swim in anything that leaked out, or worse still in the vomit of her child should he 'sick up a little' is no surprise.

What really galls me is the sad inevitability that she sees her self as being victimised and has gone to the papers with her story and this in turn has stirred up the Sisterhood, the militant feminists, the professional protestors and professional victims who blight society with their strident opinions and refusal to be reasonable.

The vast majority of comments on the websites of the daily press are firmly against breastfeeding in a public pool for the reasons I've outlined above. But then enter the 2% of shrieking harridans proclaiming that if they want to breastfeed their child naked on a beach whilst standing on their heads then they have every right to do so!!! Oh, wait a minute, bad analogy, sorry ... 

I absolutely support the right of women to breastfeed their children. I have no problem with them doing it in public so long as the circumstances are safe and hygienic for the child and some decorum is observed. I have spent time with breastfeeding friends in cafes, art galleries, cinemas, on public transport, on beaches & in parks whilst their children were fed and never copped an eyeful of nipple. It is quite possible to breastfeed publicly without offending even the most conservative prude.

Women should be encouraged to breastfeed, it shouldn't be treated as shameful or embarrassing. But the militant "I'll get my tits out any time I want and you patriarchal oppressors can't stop me!" brigade set the cause back, make mothers more reluctant to feed in public in case people think they're 'one of them' and give true Feminists a bad name. They don't want to be equal, they want special treatment and more than anything, they want to have their own way - without argument - in everything.

So, there you go. Rant #1. Feminist Misogynist -v- The Breastapo