Month: November 2013

Julie Bentley, Girlguiding UK chief executive: December ‘Whiny Woman of the Month’

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

A number of supporters and donors emailed us this morning following the transmission of an interview on BBC Breakfast with Julie Bentley, chief executive of Girlguiding UK http://www.girlguiding.org.uk/home.aspx. One of the few things I know about her organisation is that it’s sexist, as only girls and young women can join. The other major national organisation of a comparable nature and size is the Scouts http://scouts.org.uk/what-we-do/parent-faq/ which has allowed girls and young women to join for some time. So it’s ironic that Julie Bentley has the barefaced cheek to pontificate on the issue of sexism, but she does. Such people are utterly shameless. The BBC online report on her comments:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25138455

Most of the piece is laughable, but you’d have to go to some effort to beat this gem:

The report concludes that despite awareness of the difficulties they face, most girls remain positive, with 55% hoping to get to the top of their chosen profession, 70% wanting to combine a career and motherhood and 11% preferring a career over children.

So, only 11% of girls ‘prefer a career over children’ but 55% of girls are ‘hoping to get to the top of their chosen profession’. Yes, that makes perfect sense. Who’s putting such ridiculous expectations into girls’ and young women’s minds, when so few of them wish to prioritise a career over children? Toxic women like Julie Bentley, that’s who, by indoctrinating girls and young women into believing that whatever they’re unhappy with in life (their appearance, their career progression… and so much else) is directly attributable to men, often by exercising that formidable weapon against women and girls, sexism. The sexism faced by men and boys is of an altogether far more serious nature than that faced by women and girls, as anyone who’s visited The Alternative Sexism Project http://thealternativesexismproject.wordpress.com will know.

Men must do a lot more to protect girls’ and women’s fragile egos, clearly. To start with, let’s have unisex running events, where competitors’ starting positions on the track are related to their gender, level of fitness, weight, age etc. At the Olympic 100 metres final we’ll have morbidly obese chain-smoking 15-year-old single mothers with hacking coughs starting at the 90-metre point, thereby enabling them to beat Usain Bolt, and we’ll all pretend afterwards that they beat him on the basis of merit.

Women who see sexism everywhere need to grow up. We have more than enough Entitlement Princesses already, and we surely don’t need organisations such as Girlguiding training yet another generation of girls and young women to become whiny sexism spotters.

Two donors suggested that we make Julie Bentley the next ‘Whiny Woman of the Month’, and we like to keep our donors happy, so here’s her certificate:

131129 Julie Bentley’s ‘Whiny Woman of the Month’ award certificate

Tall Ukranian blonde (25) dates British ‘sleazy old man’ (63)… because he was ‘so persistent’

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

A gem in today’s Daily Mail, penned by John Stevens:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2514852/Canoe-conman-John-Darwin-told-Ukrainian-blonde-satisfy-woman.html

Now John Darwin is no paragon of virtue, it has to be said. But he’s 63, not a George Clooney lookalike, and to say he was being optimistic with regard to the toothsome Ms Avramenko (25) – her website photograph is in the article – would be something of an understatement. He bombarded her with emails over a period of time before travelling 1,700 miles to meet with her. She said to the Daily Mail reporter:

Some of his messages were disgusting. I only eventually agreed to meet him because he was so persistent. But I regret going to see him because he was just interested in trying to have sex with me.

I’ll be 56 shortly, and what I take from this story is that the key to landing a date with a stunning tall young blonde is persistence on the emailing front. I may be devoting less time to this blog over the coming few weeks…

A quarter of the female Tory MPs elected in 2010 could stand down in 2015

/ Mike Buchanan / 1 Comment

A lengthy but interesting article by Andrew Gimson for ConservativeHome:

http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2013/11/a-quarter-of-the-tories-new-women-mps-could-stand-down-in-2015.html

We know that most of the people wishing to become MPs are men. It seems that a disproportionate number of the MPs who leave after just one term are women. For all Andrew Gimson’s rambling  commentary on the latter ‘problem’, the reality can be summarised as this:

Family responsibilities and the pressures and frustrations of being an MP deter more women than men from becoming or remaining MPs.

So what solutions are proposed for this ‘problem’? Parliament long ago adjusted its hours to suit female MPs with family responsibilities, the taxpayer is funding crèches, but nothing is ever enough, is it? Now there’s serious talk about having part-time MPs, where two people (invariably women, we can be very sure) will share the responsibilities of the role. Do women not look at what Margaret Thatcher achieved before and during three terms as prime minister, from 1979, and see women as the ‘problem’? Women who are as capable and hard-working as men – such as Mrs T – will always do as well as them in politics as in other fields. That’s been the case for several decades.

Martin Samuel: ‘Crusade for women’s sport is just hypocrisy’

/ Mike Buchanan / 1 Comment

Now I’m not much of a sports fan, though I do enjoy American football, tennis – big fan of Maria Sharapova – and ladies’ beach volleyball. Accordingly, I’m woefully ignorant about sports, and would be a liability in this area for any pub quiz team. But you’d expect the Sports Minister to be knowledgeable about sports, wouldn’t you? I was unaware Helen Grant MP is the Sports Minister until J pointed me to the following insightful piece about her ‘crusade’ for women’s sport (it’s about three-quarters of the way down):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2513987/Andre-Villas-Boas-best-thing–elses-fault–MARTIN-SAMUEL.html

It seems having not the slightest interest in or knowledge about a subject is no barrier to a person becoming a minister… so long as the person’s a woman, anyway.

It took me a moment to recall the occasion on which I’d hoped to meet Ms Grant, but didn’t. It was at a fringe meeting held by Politeia near the 2012 Conservative party conference:

http://c4mb.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/the-politeia-fringe-meeting-at-the-conservative-party-conference/

Ms Grant was due to talk about the government’s drive to increase female representation on boards – I had some juicy questions to put to her in the Q&A session – but she was only at the event for only a short while before being called away. On the evening news I discovered the reason for her departure. She’d been called away to accompany David Cameron into the conference venue, a trivial matter covered by numerous film crews hungry for any footage. As a black female MP, she obviously ticked three boxes. What an inspiring statesman Dave is. We can but hope he won’t be the leader of the Conservatives for long after the 2015 general election.