Show, don't tell...

There is an adage in screenwriting that is as easy to say as it is hard to do; show, don’t tell. Many a budding scriptwriter has found it impossible to avoid jarring exposition in their dialogue: “Oh hey, Marjorie, who was that you were talking to just now?” Marjorie replies “That was my brother. He’s just returned from an expedition in Borneo, where he contracted malaria...” As you reach for the remote control any interest in the story has faded away; the audience has to do its part and having the plot handed over on a plate is of little use to anybody other than teenagers and devotees of the one-dimensional Fast and Furious franchise. What you don’t have to work for, at least a little, is often worthless.

Shouting about your ‘rights’ and demanding that your first-world grievances be heard isn’t showing, it is telling, only louder. And it’s not very endearing. At the #WomensMarch in Washington Madonna declared (screeched would be more appropriate) a ‘revolution of love’ and then went on to say “Fuck you!” to all the people whose cooperation the women’s movements will need in order to get anywhere, namely men. Even while appropriating and monopolising loving and caring as the exclusive preserve of womenkind she was encouraging the sisters to disrupt, disobey and disavow the democratic process.

So, a mixed message then? It seemed so. For one thing, what was it they were really marching about? Women in the first world already have pretty much all the rights that are going. Granted, the abortion thing is a difficulty in the US but you have religion to blame for that. Cure yourselves of those irrational beliefs and you’re sorted, to which end eliminating islamic extremism would rather seem like a bloody good idea. Oh, but no, some of you donned impromptu hijabs to show how very little you understand about the modern feminism you claim to espouse.

But really, what is their beef? As Katie Hopkins wrote: “... a shared sense of victimhood is not sufficient to make change happen. And at its most fundamental the unifying cause for these collected individuals is that they are not men.” And that really did seem to be all there was to it, an opportunity to utter some primal screams, dress up as vaginas and generally make the place untidy; which is a tad ironic, when you think of it. As for those glass ceilings, they’re not going to smash themselves and there’s no point in expecting the men to do it for you. But we still don’t know what they were really protesting about, or why.

The almost entirely left-leaning fanatics seemed to be incandescent with rage about inequality and division and every other imaginary slight they could shoehorn into the proceedings. But would they have been protesting if all the things they demand were already in place? Surely if the ill-defined equality they seek, if they were already safe and secure, there would be no mob offensive. Surely, if after eight years of the Lord God Obama all their prayers had been heard and answered, they would be content? Show, don’t tell, ladies; who really let you down?

Wall of vaginas? Or queue of cunts?

For all the rhetoric, when you look beyond the hotch-potch of hypocrisy and imagined hurt what you see is a mob that appears to be protesting about the impotence of their own anger. They were showing that, no matter what, they will demand more and if they ever get their hands on all that is tangible, they will further demand the nebulous. Whatever they imagined they were telling us, the message was lost as we just saw a parade of angry, mostly privileged women protesting for the sake of protesting. Never mind bringing down Trump, the only thing destroyed here is their own credibility.

The back end of the bonkers bus...

Some days you wait ages for one thing to write about and other days, three come along at once. I was thinking about writing a serious statement of how I would fix the world – again – but while that thought was forming, a far better starting point plopped into my metaphorical in-tray. The world can wait; this is seriously funny shit. As is so often the case we all owe a debt of gratitude to @Skip_Licker for unearthing the genius Karen Ingala Smith, who describes herself as ‘working to end male violence against women and girls’.

While we were all waiting for the bonkers bus to arrive we played the perennial favourite game Mission Statement, prompted by @MarkGSparrow with this real life beauty: “ 'Recycling The Past For The Future' An utterly inane and ridiculous mission statement seen on the side of a truck on the M4 just now.” I followed with: ‘Synergising articulate solutions going forward’ and ‘Incentivising change through diversity’ but @nby83 ended the game with the unchallengeable ‘dynamic innovation through collaborative blue sky thinking’. See? It’s all bollocks and all so easy. It’s just a joke, but with Karen we struck no-joke gold.

Remember she was working to end male violence against women and girls? Well, one way mighty be to stop coming out with rubbish like this: “Refusing to see the stabbing of Anne Maguire in the context of male violence against women is a political act.” As so often, this utter lack of self-awareness is funny in itself, but it also parrots (geddit, geddit?) Monty Python and reminded me of the sketch in which Terry Jones as Karl Marx describes the struggle of class against class as a political struggle. Obviously as this particular struggle happened IN a class, Karen may feel she has a strong point, but forget political ‘struggle’, there’s political capital to be had.

The sex war raged on for a while as the chicks had hot flushes and the man-hating taps were turned up full. In the ensuing flood of vitriol the fact that a teacher’s life had been tragically lost was itself lost. Far from being a force for good, this level of spittle-flecked feminism is unhinged enough to see male oppression in everything. But better yet, their utter lack of any sense of humour, proportion or their own idiocy is a wonder to behold. That whoosh? It’s the sound of the point going right over their heads. It didn’t take long for the hate which propels these single issue sirens to surface.

You would like to think, wouldn’t you, that such obvious, self-harming lunacy would be the province of a few deranged idiots whose parents didn’t spend as much time with them as they should but you’d be wrong; they are everywhere. Yesterday, without even a pause for silent reflection, the zero-hours ‘media campaigner’ in Ed ‘Beaker’ Miliband’s office came up with the monumentally crass bandwagon insincerity of: “The killing of Anne Maguire was an appalling act. My thoughts are with her family, the school and those pupils who witnessed the attack” . Maybe that intern is a feminist as well as an insensitive idiot?

Woman's Hour

The radios in my car, my office and my kitchen are tuned to BBC Radio 4. I love it because, despite all the repeats and the fact that every time I’m driving the sodding Archers manages to elbow its way in, I get to hear all sorts of wonderful things I would never otherwise choose from the schedules. Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time is always fascinating, as is The Moral Maze. Every now and then I catch Any Questions and sometimes even Any Answers. And if I remember, I like to cook along to the comedy slot at half past six every evening.

One of my serendipitous guilty pleasures is Woman’s Hour. It’s like pausing outside an open window during a Women’s Institute coffee morning and hearing snatches of conversation about topics you never even knew existed. Yesterday, as I was driving through the beautiful North Yorkshire countryside, the chatter was all about haute couture and looking pretty. This is as it should be and three cheers for the little ladies, I say.

At least they weren’t worrying their pretty little heads about gender equality issues – unlike one little girl’s complaint about McDonald’s Happy Meals. Dismayed at the apparently sexist slight of asking an eleven year-old child if she wanted a girl toy or a boy toy she wrote a stern letter in which she asked if it would be legal “to ask at a job interview whether someone wanted a man’s job or a woman’s job?”  Well silly, of course there are daddy and mummy jobs and always will be; you can’t expect mummy to catch the spiders can you? Just as you can’t expect daddy to give a toss about wedding planning. I’m sure she’ll grow out of it once she starts Secretarial College, or Nursing School.

Now I’m all for a bit of feminism, me. The world needs ‘the fairer sex’ because otherwise we’d never have curtains or fresh bed linen. So it was refreshing to hear that all is well and Jenny Murray and friends were happily discussing lovely clothes, just as they should. I’d far rather the girls spent their time chattering about proper feminist issues such as embroidery, hair, aromatherapy and horoscopes but over the years I’ve seen a disturbing trend towards an altogether uglier side; I wonder if you’ve noticed it too?

Every now and then, marauding metaphorical gangs of angry, stocky, short-haired women, makeup free and wearing sturdy boots, crop up in the media to further a frightening agenda of what can only be described as Scary Feminism. Like drunken gangs of losing football supporters the best way to deal with their threatening behaviour is to ignore them. Just close those pretty curtains and make some more tea until they’ve moved on. Chat about kittens and knitting and you’ll soon feel so much better.

What the scary feminists simply don’t understand is that the matter of gender roles has long been settled. You can always go off and make a spectacle of yourself by rejecting tradition if you like but in the main we all know how it should be. Men make all the big decisions in the world, such as whether we send space probes to Mars and how we tackle climate change. Men decide on important international affairs, such as foreign policy, quantitative easing and whether to spend £100billion to build a brand new giant national train set. These are matters women need not worry about.

Imagine letting her choose the curtains?

Women should stick to the little decisions. Such as: where you will live, how many children you will have, what you will eat, wear, drive and watch on TV… Where you will go on holiday, when you will go to the doctor, what furniture you will have, how the house will be remodelled, who your friends will be, how much you will drink, which parties you will go to… Where and when you will retire, how much time you will spend in your shed, what goes where in the garden… Gender equality, dear? Trust me, I listen to Woman's Hour - we haven't a chance.