Go Burn Your Bridge

A post titled so perfectly that in a single pun it can summarise how I’m about to simultaneously talk about feminism and never get a job at any newspaper. Ever. In fact tbh I might as well forget a career in journalism because I seem to have slagged off everything that’s ever been printed- apart from Elizabeth Wurtzel- and soon I’ll have no other option but to apply for work at Poundland where I can give all my friends a staff discount on the Fruitella and then confuse everyone when I say “that’s 50p please” because darling decimals don’t belong in Poundland. I mean, that’s just like, the rules of feminism.

This past month I’ve been trying to write a 2,000 word essay about the F-word for Newnham College which sounded really easy until I realised Newnham is in Cambridge, as in the Cambridge. Cambridge Cambridge. Upon this realisation I had to cross out all the inappropriate vagina jokes and Fetty Wap references, so now all I’m left with are a few ideas being pushed around my plate like broccoli stems (because realistically no one eats the stems) (except the vegans), however it’s not all bad. In the absence of words, I’ve done lots of research, read plenty of articles and painfully scrolled through thousands of comments, until I realised: newspapers hate feminists. I wrote a post similar to this before about the general public but I didn’t realise the people bringing up factual news would fall the same way.

I guess I’d never properly considered this would be the case in the media because a) magazines always seem to pretty Fem-friendly (Cosmo babe I’m looking at you) and b) I didn’t know people actually used newspapers for anything more than wrapping takeaway chips, but looking at the amount of comments the online branches get, it seems papers- or e-newspapers at least- are still a staple part of your average Joe’s day. Why then do they seem to spend all their money on journalists incapable of writing headlines that don’t contradict themselves?

For example, if you follow me on Twitter and/or were awake at half eleven on Saturday night (which let’s be realistic here you probably weren’t because it was one of those weeks where a glass of wine and a few episodes of Friends later everyone but me was fast asleep before the watershed) you would’ve seen me tweet about this already, here’s an article about feminism I found in a paper- I’ll keep it vaguely anonymous as I can already imagine Susanna Reid’s receieved pronounciation waking the British public to the news that ‘In a recently deleted blog post, the author of HGHT declared how incapable the journalists- who 10 years later are now her colleagues- were’. The headline states ‘Feminism has gone TOO FAR’ with these super shouty stone-henged sized capitals, rather that or the journo’s cat fell on the caps lock button and they didn’t have time to rectify it before sending it to the editor. But why has feminism gone TOO FAR, I hear you ask? Because now it needs to help boys more. Anyone else realise that doesn’t make any sense? The headline translates to: Gender equality has gone too far because the boys aren’t equal- what they should really be saying is if inequalities still exist, then feminism hasn’t gone far ENOUGH (cheeky shout over thur). They should be celebrating that more girls are going to uni as well as encouraging more boys to enroll, instead of shouting headlines at us that don’t even make sense.

If you thought it was a one off sadly you were wrong, soon after I came across another anti-feminist article about how feminism had failed because men are now scared to help women- which is actually slightly ironic as surely the fact women have gained power in the workplace is actually a feminist victory? But what’s most annoying about articles like this is that they’re so uneducated about the movement they’re writing about, they make it seem like something it isn’t. If you knew nothing about feminism and you saw this article you would automatically assume it pits the genders against each other like Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots which is completely untrue. (Speaking of which, who’s seen the new #HeForShe website? It’s gorgeous http://www.heforshe.org/en) Also, statements like ‘gender equality has backfired’ literally make no sense because rainbow feminist utopia doesn’t exist yet, therefore unless the bullet’s ricocheted off the writer’s ego, there’s nothing for it to backfire from.

Last one I promise because I can tell this is depressing you- and this time it comes from a man that never grew out of his Mario phase (seriously though he’s got the cap and moustache combo to a T). Granted, it could be the editor has accidentally used a stock photo of a feminist above an article by a misogynist, but that seems rather unlikely as when you Google images of Chris Good lots of people with facial hair come up. That Waitrose Essentially proves it’s him. But even if it’s not, what kind of headline is that? It’s like writing a really intricate shopping list with details of where all the items are located and how high tax is on each brand of tampons and then purposely leaving it at home because you think you can do better without it. You can’t. And you don’t need to. Why fight equality with equality? Some people, eh.