I enjoyed a discussion earlier this evening on BBC Radio Merseyside (link below) with the feminist blogger Holly Combe, with whom I had a discussion not long ago on BBC Radio 5 Live.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op5tC56O7yc
I respect Ms Combe as a debater, which is more than I can say for some of the other feminists with whom I’ve had radio discussions recently. A (lady) supporter yesterday emailed me to say she thinks two of those young ladies are ‘batshit insane’, and I suspect I know which two she was referring to. It hopefully goes without saying that I wouldn’t dream of employing such terminology myself.
In both of our discussions Ms Combe has sought to engage with counter-arguments – although her tactic of dismissing widely-available statistical evidence is a wearying feminist tactic – and she remained commendably calm. It’s not her fault, after all, that all the evidence bases support our arguments, and not hers.
Local radio discussions tend to be fairly short, and I became exasperated at one point about discussions of Diet Coke ads (although I understood the point the presenter was making about the objectification of men) and ‘man flu’, so I felt I had to get the discussion back onto more substantive subjects – the state’s failure to ensure reasonable parental access to children following relationship breakdowns, and domestic abuse/violence.
