Ann Widdecombe - Name and shame women binge drinkers.

[PurpleRomanesco]

Women

Sigh

Meh. She's a fool.

Ridiculous. Women, know your place . Being a drunken twat is not gender specific.

she's not worthy of a comment IMO.

I know, I know. It's ann again but she was actually on This Morning spouting this crap.

We all knew binge drinking is wrong, Wrong for everyone.

Her explanation for targeting women is that there had been a big rise in women binge drinkers recently and they are costing the NHS millions.

I have always found her voice especially unpleasant to listen to, if she comes on the radio I turn her off as soon as I can!

Though I despise Widdecombe I can't help wondering how much of the misogyny in the article is directly hers and how much of it is down to careful editing by a misogynist newspaper: she is quoted as referring to people who drink too much a couple of times, and it would seem strange for her not to have mentioned, at all, the amount of violence perpetrated by drunk men.

Mmm. I see what you mean, SGB, but she does mention women 'scantily clad' and in 6 inch heels. I think she's got a fairly gendered picture in mind.

What strikes me about this is that naming and shaming isn't likely to have any effect, is it? I doubt problem drinkers who're ashamed about it go in for binging in public.

Not having seen the original, I'm believing that she (and a lot of her audience) would be thinking "Boys will be boys", but girls must be something different. We're used to male drinking, with all its destructive results, but it's more of a novelty that women might openly be doing the same. If there are destructive results of women drinking, they're portrayed as being worse than whatever men have always done, and we could say that's Ann Widdecombe's attitude to women versus men, or say it's a result of the novelty factor, or some combination.

In the article the quotes from say

"?If the police carried out the occasional big blitz in the city centres on a Friday night, drafting in extra manpower and pursuing every single person who was drunk in A&E or incapable on the streets, then people going out specifically to get drunk would risk finding themselves in court on the Monday with their names and photographs in the papers.
?That might be a deterrent to the wilder stages of excess.?
Town centres are off limits for families and moderate drinkers, who feel intimidated by drunken revellers and worried about potential violence, she said.

She doesn't seem to have singled out women, but is talking about everyone. The paper seem to have made their own headline about it.

Shocker: paper picks up on women doing something wrong when men are doing it too / worse.