That’s just devastating, as a summary of his attitude.
But my god, it’s so fucking common! Every day there’s some tv bloke up before the beak for similar infractions, and every one of them defends it all as merely misunderstood, misapprehended. Pouting entitlement as in this case, or bleating a getout excuse (ADHD, mixing 2 Nurofen Plus with half a shandy, it being a weekday, etc etc 🤬)
The thing is, we ought not to be in this sexual politics mire any more. How can a man under 60 not have absorbed anything at all relating to R.E.S.P.E.C.T?
I swear, every damn step forward that had been made by around 1983 suddenly began to be rolled back, even erased from the record, and once again there was rekindled emnity and alienation between men and women, as a general strategy. Forty years later we find ourselves in a poisoned recreation of the 1950s, a social façade desiderating the supply of comfort and support to men, through the crushing of the status of women. By any means necessary.
Gerry Adams’ old sound bite fits well here, applied to the constantly plotting patriarchy: ‘They haven’t gone away, you know’.
It all reinforces what our sisters in Feminism stated from the start, which is that the movement would be a boon to men as well, freeing them from those gender expectations which perverted their fulfilment. That was by and large a casualty of 1980s reactionary pressure too, just like our own progress beyond performative femininity.
We’ve still got oblivious (and worse) predatory men, and cartoon womanhood as an aspiration, and it’s 2025! The dark side has regained far too much ground.
(I think it’s time for Dr Greer to descend from the dark heights above the stage, and in a blaze of outraged majesty reignite the embers of a fire lit over fifty years ago.)