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Belle de Jour: 10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009
"She followed the course so often ploughed by girls of our background, proclivities and age: a Women's Studies degree at a respectable-enough university followed by appropriately counter-cultural employment interspersed with periods of living off her moneyed parents. She has ironic items of clothing and names her cats after dead politicians. She not only listened to Nirvana the first time around, but thought they were overhyped poseurs then, too. In other words, she's a hipster. To say my life spun out in an entirely different direction is understating the fact slightly...
[She] makes some baldly ridiculous claims - the idea that before going on a date, you need to spread a man's contact details all over your flat and have a girlfriend ring up the next day to check you aren't maimed or dead being one such conceit...sorry hon, but only hookers do that. Get over yourself...
I was put off straightaway by this sentence, addressed to men:
Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones?
... It amazes me just how casually, and how widespread, the assumption is that men have things easy.
Go on, open a Sunday supplement today. How many pages in before you encounter some polly filler by a female columnist implying men in general (or her man in particular) doesn't pull his weight at home, while she majestically juggles family, work, and the burden of having a vagina which has the audacity to bleed once a month? How many pages before you encounter some self-flagellating male columnist admitting to same?
Let me state for the record that if being a man was easy, hookers wouldn't exist. Fact...
Bottom line, it takes a particular kind of self-consciously middle-class gynecentric view of the world to imagine that the only physical danger men face is in a war zone...
There are elements of male life that, as a woman, I am exempt from. For the most part this is reciprocal: in most situations they will never have a fear of rape. But I almost never enter a room worried about who is sizing me up for fisticuffs
... There are plenty of situations that read as 'Danger!' to men in which I would get a free pass. Because I'm a girl.
And let us not forget that the sort of men who exercise violent dominance over women do not only do that to women."