Zoe Williams -

[Sizzlysausage]

Kate doesn’t want Prince George to go to Eton – and for once I agree with her | Zoe Williams | The Guardian

Sorry if there is another thread on this article by Zoe Williams which is rather extraordinary on a number of counts, but especially confusing is the following:

"Which isn’t to say that nothing good came of it – my experience of an all-girls’ school, followed by twice as long as a trustee of a prison charity, informed a lot of my politics, including why I became a transgender ally. Before I had thought seriously about trans rights, and the immeasurable preciousness of any human being with the courage to live their most meaningful and truthful life, I thought: “Wait, are you saying all-female spaces are kinder? Purer? Inherently less violent? More supportive? Are you joking? Are you out of your mind?”"

I think I might be struggling with my comprehension today - but I don't think gender critical feminists are necessarily saying all-female spaces are kinder or purer - although, yes, almost certainly inherently less violent. It seems like a conflation of different points flung together to construct a straw man argument and entirely misunderstanding safeguarding as a concept in the process. Is this deliberate? Or is she not able to see this? Baffling.

That happened to me too @Brefugee. My parents were convinced it was a better school and were surprised when I didn’t take to it at all.

I stopped reading her and OJ a good while back. But the last article I recall was a strange piece about her husband ' who is younger and prettier than me' . How embarrassing it was when people mistook him for her nephew or kid brother and whatnot. A sort of humble brag. Wouldn't have been out of place in Jackie.

Sorry to hear that. I hated my school for many reasons. But I can't deny that it turned out excellent and accomplished young women

When Zoe was on the Sky News with the editor of a Jewish newspaper she did an incredible amount of eye rolling and other facial expressions when he was talking. The interviewer thanked them for a respectful discussion but she was behaving like a teenager.

Her "ugh women" nonsense reeks with misogyny. Reminds me of a female relative of mine who says she hates girls night ot because "it's a load of screeching women" 😬😬. I win e when she says things like that but I m not sure the phrase 'internalised misogyny' would mean much to my relative. ZW probably knows what it means though 🧐

Yes she wrote an entire article (using the word loosely) about why tw should be housed in women's prisons. There's a thread on here.

She never fails to astound me, how can I get her job? Write a little random drivel in five minutes while watching netflix, then get paid handsomely.

I wonder if she consulted any female prisoners first before offering them up as cell mates? It seems unlikely…

You need really long arms with which to pull your opinions out of the orifice from which they originate.

Oh, and the Oxbridge degree soz.

Edited to say that I don't mean your opinions reside there! But it's certainly where ZW finds hers

Hmm as a journo I'd venture to guess that zw does not get paid handsomely, and if you want to maintain a london millenial wokerati lifestye then you need to churn out a hell of a lot of shit like this to make ends meet. I assume she is paid per piece or is obliged to produce x square feet of "opinion" 🙄 a week.

Which is why there is so much off-the-top-of-the-writer's-head crap cluttering up the internet and pages of newspapers. (A relative of mine worked at the Guardian for a bit, and she didn't buy herself a new pair of jeans the whole time she was there iirc)

I am a technical writer and I research my articles extremely thoroughly. Which is why I earn so little money I barely pay tax 😢

Saying that, im sure zw thinks she's so clever and insightful she doesn't need to think about what she writes anyway...

She's not a millennial. She's 50 years old. Old enough to have benefited from simply buying a house or flat in London many years ago and trading up every so often.

She's not a millennial. She's 50 years old. Old enough to have benefited from simply buying a house or flat in London many years ago and trading up every so often.

Zoe Williams home looks very nice

Ok fair enough! Just getting in a gripe about my own crap remuneration probably.

I did briefly wonder if she had a super fan on here 😂 Maybe she has a dossier on the chief editor.

I wonder if women such as Williams and Moran ever consider that back in Emmeline's day they would not have been out there, chaining themselves to railings, doing on marches and getting violently marched off to prison cells to be force fed. They would not even have been quietly cheering on such women, even if they felt unable/ too scared to join in such rallies themselves. Instead, they would have been loudly joining in with their husbands and other men as they condemned the suffragettes as irrational, violent and hysterical and staunchly supporting the society that did their utmost to suppress them, every inch of the way.

Yeah, but they wuz all white supremacists, innit? 🙄

Cherchez l'enfant.

I don't think Williams has nonsensical views on sex'n'gender because she's stupid, over-priveliged or doesn't understand. On the contrary.

Many have voiced the 'I just can't undertand' sentiment...and when I think that about someone who was previously sane in other departments, (and you have eliminated the possibilty of stupidity, ignorance or derangement) there has to be another reason, something that is deeply personal to her.

That 'something else' is usually a child or close relative who is busy transing. I'm sure that's how most people start spouting utter gobbledegook: they are held hostage by someone they love and whom they are probably incredibly worried about. The only believable reason for a formerly cogent, literate and vaguely amusing Guardian columnist to magically forget all about women's rights and to bare-facedly sell female prisoners down the river is that she is probably shit-scared about someone closer to home.

There are two types of handmaidens - your sell-out ideologues/idiots like Dawn Butler MP and Kate Osbourne...and then you've got the 'inexplicable' ones like Caroline Nokes or Emily Thornberry and Zoe Williams. I think the latter are the hostages.

The piece is hilarious! Mean Girls as the explanation for creating mixed-sex prisons, there's at least local erasures of privilege from being rich because Mean Girls and status competitions exist in expensive single-sex schools. Nasty words are as deathly as knives and fists.

If I wanted to be kinder (!) in assessing Ms. Williams' essay, I would give a slight nod to agreeing with her views that the female sex is not all flower wreaths and kindness and pink clouds and sugar and spices, and that the kindness women and girls are expected to provide does not rain equally on all types of people.

The female sex does not, in fact, exist solely to civilise the male sex as some Victorian writers suggested, and is not, in fact, always extremely kind or incapable of competition or risk-taking or aggression or just general nastiness of the kind all human beings are capable of.

But this does not mean that it should have no rights! After all, the male sex has rights.

formerly cogent

Really? I've never found her that. I'll give you 'occasionally amusing', but her columns have never demonstrated great intellectual depth or effort to me. Half-baked superficiality is certainly not limited to this topic.

The female sex does not, in fact, exist solely to civilise the male sex as some Victorian writers suggested, and is not, in fact, always extremely kind or incapable of competition or risk-taking or aggression or just general nastiness of the kind all human beings are capable of.

I agree, and I really object to the view that women and girls are inherently nicer than men and boys. We are not some kind of higher life form, we are fully fledged human beings with all the flaws and frailties that being human entails. And if Zoe Williams had left things there, then I might, for once, have been inclined to agree with her. But to go on to use that as an argument against women needing single sex spaces is, I think, either deeply stupid or really quite despicable, or both.

I think ZW's problem is that she always desperately wants to be seen as right-on, and she thinks embracing the TRA agenda is one way to 'look cool'.

Actually I know a few people like this, whose desperation to always appear cool and right-on completely blinds them to what's actually at stake with this issue. They'll cheerfully throw women under the bus in their pursuit of looking 'progressive'. 🙄

https://twitter.com/zoesqwilliams/status/1749738220282093624

ZW thinks Woman’s Hour gives too much time to GCs… not sure where she’s been for the last 5 years.

Dear god, she's SUCH an idiotic cool girl 🙄

I would pay good money to watch Helen Joyce v Zoe Williams! 😁

Do you think anyone at The Guardian will get the similarities with a letter from more than 300 members of staff protesting against Suzanne Moore? Do The Guardian or Zoe ever ask ‘are we the baddies?’