Andrew Bolt: Feminists’ rage only highlights their glaring hypocrisy
The feminist movement once demanded women receive equal treatment. Now it seems organisations like the ABC are happy to provide a special protective instinct for women like Jacinda Ardern and Clementine Ford, while turning a blind eye to far more savage abuse of men, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Clementine Ford is called “Australia’s most prominent contemporary feminist”. What stunning proof that feminism has betrayed itself.
This movement once demanded women receive equal treatment. Now it demands women receive special protection, as if they’re as fragile as sexists always claimed.
Take Ford. She’s the kind of feminist who’s tweeted “kill all men”, and on Saturday complained that “coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough”.
This brand of feminism now attracts official support. Ford last year got a gig on the ABC, and Melbourne City Council this month gave her a grant to write another book.
But check out the double standards.
Last year, Ford joined another public lynching by the Left of Alan Jones, after he said he was sick of the global warming idiocy of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and wanted a sock stuffed “down her throat”. This was too much for the suddenly delicate sensibilities of Ford, who said she deplored such “verbal assaults” which were “sexist” and an affront to “human dignity”.
Last week, the Australian Communications and Media Authority claimed to be just as outraged, and ruled that Jones had breached broadcasting rules.
Seriously? What idiot thinks Jones literally meant someone should push socks down Ardern’s throat?
Mind you, I avoid such violent metaphors, and I wish Jones in his anger would, too. But the truth is that he’s actually far less “sexist” than many of his critics.
That’s because Jones abuses men and women alike. He doesn’t think women leaders are so delicate that he should be gentler with them when they fail than he’s been with male failures like Malcolm Turnbull, who he recently said “needs medication”.
Jones’ critics are different. Take the ABC, which last week falsely claimed Jones “reserved a special scorn for powerful women” like Ardern.
In fact, the only sexism here is the ABC’s own. It reserves a special protective instinct for women like Ardern, while it turns a blind eye to far more savage abuse of men.
For instance, one of the ABC’s newest presenters, Miriam Margolyes, like Ford, also seems to think this coronavirus simply hasn’t killed enough men, although in her case her beef is limited to the recovery of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“I wanted him to die,” she declared. ABC host Phillip Adams had a second world leader on his To Die list, tweeting: “Dear Virus. Now that you’ve found Number 10 (Downing Street) the address of the White House is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
ABC reaction? Zero.
See? You can wish the actual death of a male prime minister or president, and that’s fine. But if you say something merely figurative such as “shove a sock down her throat” about a female one, wishing only that she’d shut up, all hell breaks loose.
Here’s another example of this hypocrisy, again starring Jacinda Ardern, a feminist icon who seems to have journalists running a protection racket for her.
Ardern’s partner a week ago tweeted that he’d helped to dye her hair, and TV host Ryan Bridge asked Ardern if she was going grey.
She laughed awkwardly and stammered: “That’s not a polite question to ask. I’d say anyone — I was about to say a lady.”
Feminists raged. Social media blasted the question as “sexist”, reported Yahoo News. Whimn, a women’s internet site, fumed: “A man would never get asked if his hair was going grey.”
False. Countless media stories now jeer that US President Donald Trump dyes his hair, too.
Some reporters gleefully speculate that it’s a wig. Interviewer Barbara Walters even tugged at Trump’s hair to check, as did talk show host Jimmy Fallon.
Could any journalist pull at Ardern’s hair and keep their job?
Then there was Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat Speaker of the US Congress, who last week sniped that Trump was “morbidly obese”. Would the head of a major political party in the West dare say that of a female leader?
I’m not saying we should abuse women as we routinely do men — for their weight, hair or failure to die. I just note there are double standards that many feminists and journalists now fiercely defend. You can go hard and personal against a male leader, but not against a female.
Do not treat a female leader as you’d treat a man, because that would be sexist. Or something.