In the assize of popular mores, the crimes of feminism have ranged entire the access from man-hating to hairy armpits, but one particular sin has all been singled out because unrivaled derision. It namely constantly said that feminists can't take a praise. They can't eligible into size naught trousers, either, and probably can't even cook. But worse than all of that - they can't take a joke.
The dictate of humorlessness has stalked the women's action from day one, and it is, in my experience, a uniquely telling arms. The maximum committed feminists I know can withstand whichever sum of abuse - ideological, personal, political. But phone them po-faced, and see them dissolve into girly froths of giggles, desperate apt prove they're no. It was in this strategic spirit that many women, myself comprised, determined a when ago to find the phenomenon of the footballer's Wag not repellent but agreeable.
Blanket scope of the Wags' World Cup excesses final summer familiarized us all with the chief tenets of Wag-world - the insatiable shopping sprees, the backbiting rivalries, the coldly calculated shape campaigns. But we told ourselves it was fair a bit of harmless fun - a tongue-in-cheek self-parody. If we still struggled to muster much plausible emotion for Posh, there was forever Coleen McLoughlin to fall back above - Liverpool's rags to riches girl-next-door who pedals a Bentley, marts for a alive, but is universally worshiped for having remained, so it is said, "down to globe".
So we perhaps shouldn't be also startled to study that the Foreign Office has hired Spurs striker Jermain Defoe's fiancee, a model alleged Charlotte Meares, to jot A Wag's Guide To Travel for the FCO website, dispensing invaluable tips to the petticoat passenger. It covers every believable emergency, from damaging a Jimmy Choo heel to packaging the wrong in-flight pulchritude products.
With their unerring instinct to case up the bad tree, the Tories have doomed the lead as "a consume of taxpayers' money", and "frivolous". As Meares's fare was "titular",
herve leger pre fall 2011, this is hardly a public monetary disgrace - and whether it truly were "frivolous", it would actually be fine. But in fact, for the FCO itself reports, "These pages are the most used chapter of the website, getting hundreds of thousands of kicks. We are trying to approach youth travelers, in particular young women. We want to get their attention, and this has proved very successful."
I wager it has. For a lot of aspirational young women, the Wag identity and lifestyle represents the ultimate in petticoat completion, and for such their highest aspiration. In reality, Wag mores is not that diverse the world of the 18th-century courtesan - a ruthlessly competitive commerce between loveliness and ######, and wealth and position - and merely confirms numerous men's long-held suspicion that women can be bought, and are only really agreeable for shopping.
Roy Keane got it very bad last week, when he claimed that Wags were agreeable too mighty. A reserved woman who depends ashore her male for anything, and on her looks for keeping clutch of him, is less powerful than almost anyone I know.
Wag culture can be read as the logical cessation of a whole range of trends - lad mag ########, somebody culture, rampant consumerism, commercialization of football, and so forth. But it is, ahead of, a lesson in what happens when we don't take ourselves seriously ample, for fear of seeing uptight.
At some point we ambition have to stop smiling. When teen girls can dream of not higher fulfilment than to be someone's girlfriend,
christian louboutin men sneakers 2011, and the government issues advice on how to deed therefore, it's not comic anyone extra. If the choice for women have to be to lack either a sense of humor or a sense of their own dignity, it should be pretty easy to choose. I would rather, on balance, be humorless than vacuous.