What does he mean by 'if they let mumsnet return to being a parenting forum no-one would care anymore'?
Is he implying that we can only talk about certain topics?
A friend forwarded me this interesting article this morning from LA Times (December 2017) which seems apposite:
'Tracing the roots of misogyny to ancient Greece and Rome with Mary Beard'
(extract)
"The classicist Mary Beard opens her book “Women & Power” with a scene out of the Odyssey. Penelope leaves her room to approach the assorted suitors who more or less occupy her mansion, waiting for her to give up on long-lost Odysseus and marry one of them. When she requests they stop singing such songs, she is met with resistance from the youngest male there: Her adolescent son, Telemachus, chastises her. Return to your room, he tells her; public speaking is for men.
“I read the Odyssey for 20 or 30 years before I noticed the line,” Beard says. “At a certain moment you just say, blimey, that is a founding moment in Western civilization! And I’d read it however many times and not recognized it. And here we are in the first book of the poem and we have this moment: saying speech is male, and silencing a woman.”
Adapted from a pair of lectures Beard delivered for the London Review of Books Winter Lecture series in 2014 and 2017, the twinned essays in “Women & Power” (Liveright) take on what Beard calls, in the book’s introduction, “the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment: politics in its widest sense.” Speech and power are inextricably linked, and male silencing of women is present at the very core of our cultural DNA." (continues)
www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-women-and-power-20171228-story.html