When The Daily Mail are challenging the concept of 'Happy Hookers', you know something has changed

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www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5376077/Amsterdam-call-time-myth-happy-hooker.html

When the daily mail are representing women's voices better than the left wing press, you know the world's gone mad

It's a good article.

I think it is too. It reminds me of a passage in one of Bill Bryson's books - one where he's travelling Europe - and he says that the whole concept of Amsterdam's liberality is like someone who's argued themselves extensively into an untenable position. You have to keep arguing, even though you know it'a fundamentally wrong.
I work in a large, inner city primary school where we regularly have parents arrested for involvement in human trafficking. It's fucking awful.

The DM have been fairly robust in their condemnation of the release of that Worboys man too (as much as I have seen, anyway).

I shouted at the Guardian and nodded fervently at the Mail on the same day a couple of weeks ago. It's bloody disorientating.

Some of the comments on the article are horrendous.

Can you imagine? You would never see this article in the Guardian.

We really are living in strange times. The so-called progressive left has entirely abandoned women.

My children (in their 20s) regularly call me out for seeing things in a left / right way. They think it's narrow, unhelpful and doesn't take society forward. They cite the continual arguments about Brexit as an example.
They've also 'peaktransed' so we are able to have some good discussions.
Reading the Times rather than the Guardian has also exposed me to different arguments / reasoning.
I still don't like the Mail but that article was good.

I notice that Sanchez Manning, whose byline is on the article, is also the person who writes most of the Mail's gender critical pieces on transactivism. So an ally there, I think.

It is a good article.

They’ve also today covered the feminist protest against self ID transpeople using the woman’s pool at Hampstead

Some of the comments are horrendous but when you sort them into the ones that have had the most likes (by thousands of votes)they are overwhelmingly pro the article.

Anyway, it's a strange old world where the Guardian repeatedly throw women under a bus and the Daily Mail has me nodding in agreement.

Yes, although remember that they are coming at it from a different angle. The DM hates women, especially women who do not conform to stereotypes. They also hate trans people because it totally goes against their middle-England puritanical stance. They also hate prostitutes because they are also immoral. I haven't read the happy hookers article so I am not 100% sure what angle it is coming from, but the DM is not a gender-critical paper. It just hates anything that is different.

Maybe read the article first Susan

I've found that the MoS (actually separate to regular DM) is a lot more balanced with regard to women's issues. Regardless of the feelings around the DM their readership is huge so it's getting the GC message out there one way or another. I just wish more papers were approaching it too.

I have skim read it now. It's hardly award winning journalism but yes, they have exposed the seedy underbelly of prostitution in Amsterdam. But they have never ever been pro-prostitution to begin with. The problem I think is if women think the DM is an ally because of its critique of trans rights. It's such a horrible misogynistic paper that it should never be considered any form of female ally. Its deep seated hatred for women drips from every word it prints. Sometimes its convenient for them to appear to support the feminists who are also gender-critical, but it doesn't truly support them at all.

I think in a way the Daily Mail are quite savvy. I think they were one of the first, if not the first, to really utilise online content and clickbait articles.

They have had some awful editorial agendas against women, especially celebrity women so I don't think for a moment they are pro women but they will position themselves as populist. So if they think the wind is blowing towards a general backlash of gender politics I have no doubt they will jump on board.

The DM can be contradictory. Whenever I see people frothing over the more questionable articles it prints I remember Stephen Lawrence.

It's a good article. I'm pissed off that Brexit will leave Mary Honeyball out of a job.

Sadly, the articles in the side bar are as objectifying as ever.

While I welcome articles like this O’d be VERY wary of seeing them as an ally. They erase my Rose McGowan/‘Cis’-critical/feminist-supporting comments as fast as I can make them but the likes of the ‘haha, you lefty feminists had it coming’ under the Hampstead Ponds article are left standing. It’s good click bait for them.

In answer to SusanBunch, I'd just note that this is the Mail on Sunday. It does tend to have a very different slant on things from the Daily Mail. So bear that in mind. Plus, let's give credit where it's due. This is a good article, whichever paper it appears in.

The Mail will never be an ally to women.

That is precisely why it is so shocking that even lukewarm articles like this one cannot be found at a supposedly liberal, progressive and "feminist" publications such as The Guardian.

It doesn't make the Mail look good. That's not the point.

It exposes The Guardian for how bad it actually is. That is the point.

I think that's exactly it, Lang

I'm also always reminded of the comment one of the Aunts makes in The Handmaid's Tale "You framed it all in terms of freedom to, we're offering you freedom from."

And of course it's a false dichotomy - we should have both freedom from sexual violence, and the freedom to frame our own sex lives as we wish.

The Mail and their ilk occasionally campaigns for "freedom from" harassment (usually framed in terms of "would you want this happening to your sister/daughter/wife?") What they're rarely good on is "freedom to."

I like the fact that this article is actually prepared to say "British men are among the worst" - all too often (Allison Pearson in the Telegraph) the right wing press applies a racial/xenophobic definition of rape: white and British and accused of rape = "I fear for the future of my sons, facing false accusations of rape from these hussies"; not white, not British - "well of course they did it and it shows how corrupt their culture is, and that rape is a rare crime only committed by monsters who are not like our people."

That's a very good point re Stephen Lawrence, Grim

Yes, it is a good point. In recent years, I've paid much closer attention to the DM than I used to. And the truth is, it really is a mixed bag. Some bits of it are appalling - the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant stuff; the objectification of women; the silly obsession with women's bodies in Femail; the virulent demonisation of anyone who disagrees with them on Brexit, such as Gina Miller. Yet, much more often than you'd expect, they run pieces of very good investigative journalism. Some of their more serious features, such as the ones on health, can also be excellent.