Mumsnet full of inane females according to Petronella Wyatt

[scaryteacher]

www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/9115575/The-state-penalises-women-who-are-childless-and-unmarried-I-might-be-single-but-Im-not-a-failure.html

Methinks she protests too much and should get out more. Isn't she the one that had a thing with Boris?

what hackmum said, basically

what a load of self obsessed mememememememeeeeeeewhataboutmmmmeeeeeee drivel

and you're not anyone in journalistic circles , surely, unless, Saint Julie of Birchall has had a pop at you.

Laughing at Hackmum's post and feeling a little guilty

I want to have lunch with her made-up friend.

And what a waste of wine.

AIBUqatada ... do you reckon she came up with SAC in the expectation that someone would say, 'ah, she's a sad old SAC' and then she could have them for ageism? We'd better not do that then.

"Banal as this is, why is there no equivalent for childless women? Don?t we need support? "

But Pet, you can come on here and ponder names in a banal fashion for your children if you want to. I promise you, 'the State' won't give a rat's ass, much less penalise you for it.

And maybe your 'friends' "deny [you] the succour of their dinner tables" because your chat is rubbish and you sleep with ropey men.

Just sayin

Inane, yes.

That article is bollocks, it made me a very tiny bit sad for this woman if she really believes what she writes.
Meh

can anyone help me,I can't find my social and economic status

Petronella's friend said I would have this if I got married and had children

for the record I now have neither so they can stick that in their pipe and smoke it :o

MamaMary you're probably right. I think I am too naive in believing everything that is written about in these sort of "middle class social commentary" pieces.

The friends and their comments have to be made up... Surely no-one really makes such ignorant, contemptuous, arrogant and rude comments in RL and still has friends to show for it?

If they are real people I wonder at Pet's self esteem that she actually associates with people like this and then gives credit to anything they say.

Maybe her male friend was joking and she didn't geet the joke that would be a lot like me

Did you leave it in the car, quiet? That's where I am always finding lost things.

I think she may have a teeny point there, single childless women are hardly celebrated or embraced in today's society, but she does it in such a whiney foot stamping way it makes me want to slap her. Have some back bone woman, whining gets you absolutely no respect.

I think what the article does show though is that she has some particularly shit friends especially the one who categorises her friends in to useful and not useful groupings.

And Julie Burchill is a bitch. 1-0 to Petronella on that score.

I have met people who say similar things. They didn't know I was a single mother at the time. Perhaps they would have been more circumspect if they had? I don't think she is making that up.

I'm not sure there's such a difference between the 'status' of single men and single women, neither am I convinced that having kids bestows 'status'. I'd have said the only group which loses status in the kids/partnership permutations is single mothers.

I think she needs to seriously question her judgment - clearly her friends are either barking mad or vile. I cannot imagine any one of my friends or acquaintances saying (or even thinking) that they can't afford to have people round for dinner just because they're nice.

I'd say, Petronella my darling, you need some new friends!

Yeah, maybe there are people like that. But why would you be friends with them?

The useful/not useful division of potential dinner-party victims guests sounds very characteristically upper-class, one of the things that makes me think that posh people need all the money they can get as compensation for the pain of living in their own psyches. I used to know people who referred to acquaintances as "good value" and "not good value," which of course made me instantly feel like I was a very bad bargain indeed.

I did once lose a job because I was single and childless. The boss decided to keep on the married man with a child, because, and I quote 'he has a family to look after'. I am still speechless about this twenty years later.

That said, she is a daft mare and she talks shite.

As a SAC, paying a mortgage of £350 a week, not to mention utility bills and council tax, the maximum I am able to claim in benefits is £65. Were I married with a child I would receive £283. So would my spouse, if he was also unemployed, bringing our state-funded income up to £567 a week. Just having a baby entitles one to comparative wealth.

LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL etc

I don't characterise dinner party guests as useful/not-useful. Does that mean, despite my cut glass English accent and playing of polo*, I'm not upper class?

[* I have technically never played polo but I have stick and balled, once, on an actual horse, and I have read Polo by the excellent Mrs Cooper, enough times to know it off by heart]

Actually laughing at Woolly's quote.

Petronella, I have a husband AND a child and I would be entitled in the same position (and have been after redundancy as it happens) to the princely sum of £65 per week too and NO MORE because of the presence of the husband and his income. I also got child benefit but the kid will keep on insisting on being fed, clothed and housed and that £20 per week doesn't cover those additional expenses.

If I had been a single woman living on my own I would have been entitled to MORE.

Presumable you only pay 75% council tax as a sole occupant Ms White?

WhatWillSantaBring, are you sure that you've never invited good old Giles Hetherington-Bletherington to your dinner party solely on the grounds that it is useful to have a young man who is good-natured about having to escort the odd supernumary SAC into the dining room?

Who is Petronella Wyatt and should we care what she thinks?

She bonked Boris? The woman is an idiot. She can quote me on that (That's FRONTPAW of London).