Red Light Politics

On the subject of two UK sports commentators who got fired this week for making sexist remarks about a woman linesman in a football (soccer for the American inclined) match, the Daily Mail had to offer their mandatory rancid commentary. This time, the piece does, at least, serve as a teaching tool as it exemplifies rather transparently, what derailing in politics and, more specifically, in feminist politics looks like. Sky sexism row: Why is it all right for women to be sexist about MEN? (I do like how MEN is all in caps to emphasize its importance, by the way; emphasis EMPHASIS actually mine):

You shouldn’t pass unflattering remarks about women behind their backs because it is not a well brought-up thing to do, and they needed to be told. I would never do it myself. Not because I am a feminist, but because I am a gentleman.[…]

Not that that’s anything new. To be a man in this country is constantly to have to apologise for oneself and to be ever so very careful about every sentence we speak or write which contains any reference at all to members of the opposite sex.

While at the same time, and this is the shame of it, we ourselves are fair game for women. While sexism from men is the outstanding social crime of the modern world, women can say absolutely whatever they like about us.

For make no mistake: sexism is alive and well in this country and applauded in all quarters — as long as it is practised by women. And they are allowed to say the most terrible, terrible things.[…]

I’ll tell you how. It is because pretty much from birth women are schooled by their mothers to deride men. They are sugar and spice, we are slugs and snails.

They are reflective and sensitive, while we run around kicking balls and shouting. And then as girls push towards puberty their mothers take them aside and tell them: ‘Boys are only after one thing!’

The great lie. All men want is sex. Not so. If anything, it is women who think only of having it off. Girls on average lose their ­virginity much younger than boys and have more sexual partners in youth.

As a teenager, I was ­terribly shy about sex and yet girls were trying to do it with me all the time. I used to run, literally run, from their bedrooms when they tried it on. And yet women are allowed endlessly to harangue us with our supposed lechery.

And it goes on and on and on, offering nothing of substance but a text book case of privilege denying tactics and antics. What bothers me the most is not that someone thinks like this (we see plenty of such ideas in blogs and assorted media), but that a mainstream news outlet offers this commentary without a shred of critical thought behind it. Because, this, this is how you actually perpetuate an ideology.