Mail Day, part 12: Women!
Nearly there, my friends. Just this, and one more to wrap it all up, and then we're done.
I always struggle to understand why the Mail has such a high female readership, given that an awful lot of its content seems - to me, anyway, and I am a man after all - to be ladyhate. The Mail I chose to spend 50p on and buy contains Femail, a section so angle-grinder-in-the-face-ingly painful that you keep trudging through it, wearily sinking into the quicksand, fearing that you will be swallowed whole and will never be found again, except when some archaeologist a million years from now brushes a bit of mud off your skeleton and wonders why you died at a desk, surrounded by whisky and tea, with a monkey next to you, and a strange piece of crumpled paper...
That's just a straightforward "X has said this, I disagree with X" piece about when women should become mothers, but there are slightly more bizarre references to women throughout the Mail
Tattooed lady? What is this, a fucking Victorian funfair?
And then you get this:
To which I must apologetically reply: But I really don't give a flying one how you do it, I'm afraid.
There's an artilce about Claudia Lawrence, the missing chef from Yorkshire
who you may recall was the subject of a quite appalling atrocity of journalism some time ago in the Mail, under the pretence of helping to find her but really a prurient bit of sleaze which, as it turns out, probably wasn't true either, regardless of whether it should have been published at all. Back then, they described her as having '40 mystery lovers and a thing for married men'; now, the police say she had 12 relationships in five years. Hardly the same, is it? Ah well, we move on, I suppose; if you read the dead-tree Mail I imagine you've forgotten about that other story already, and don't have a way of checking, since you need to write a letter into a newspaper to find something rather than looking it up on Google.
There's a bit of tedious sniping at Kate Winslet
in which we learn that, apparently, "all famous women that appear to be holier than thou, who wear their gym kit and kabbalah bracelet with pride, are roundly disliked". Are they? I didn't know these rules of ladyhate. I really am behind the curve on this one, I'm afraid, so will read on for more tips on how to know which women I should hate and which ones I shouldn't. They say you live and learn!
In Femail there are articles by women who have the common touch
a quick hand-grenade lobbed in the general direction not of the evil Manuel-botherer Wossy but his wife Jane Goldman
and, as ever, something to feast on your insecurities like a nest of hungry ants pouncing on your marmalade-covered face
Is this really what women want? I can't honestly tell you, because I'm not one. Maybe it is. I'd be surprised if it was, but you never know. You just never know.
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March 19th, 2010 - 08:55
It’s not what I want. When I lived at home my dad always got the mail & I’d read it every day, I always skipped past femail section, it was boring, bitch and shit
March 19th, 2010 - 09:02
it isn’t what this woman wants.
i also am amazed by the popularity of the mail with women, when it so blatantly is full of women hating antics. and it encourages hostility between women, by slagging off other women. i don’t have many feelings towards kate winslet at all, other than that i DON”T know her so i DON”T know if she’s nice or not because it is NONE of my business. if sandra bullock’s husband had affair then that is none of my business either. it certainly isn’t news. and using jane goldman as a stick to beat jonathan ross with is just so pathetic, so humiliating – rage rant rage!
March 19th, 2010 - 09:03
The problem with the Mail is that it is subtly sexist so you won’t really see it unless you kinda analyse it. Besides, most women that read the mail are kinda sexist anyway (if that makes sense).
March 19th, 2010 - 13:30
Vikki, I wouldn’t call it “subtly sexist” (unless you were being sarcastic) because I feel bludgeoned with the sheer amount of ladyhate found in one single edition.
As for the female columnists, Allison Pearson used to be a writer that I actively sought out when she wrote for The Independent but since she moved to the Mail…yikes, that is scary evil stuff she now writes.
March 19th, 2010 - 09:36
I must admint I don’t understand why any woman would enjoy reading any of that either. It does seem to be just a bunch of pages telling you who you are supposed to like (nice married middle class ladies) and who you should hate (promiscuous – whether they actually are or not – fat, thin, independent, dependent, single …) Never mind, I think that list could go on forever.
Needless to say, I don’t hate fat women, thin women, Kate Winslet (she seems nice to me), Jane Goldman, or pretty much most other women. I don’t even hate that Iceland advertising mother, whats her name? Oh yeah, the Nolan woman. (Weird how no-one ever mentions that when slagging off Kerry Katona for it).
Female columnists are in a different league unfortunately. Most of them seem to have a button you push that just pishes out hatred and every female stereotype, therefore reinforcing the mail view of what women are and what they are meant to be. I do hate them a bit and sometime want to stab them in the eye with a big spoon.
Actually I am everything the daily mail hates anyway. Single mother (by choice even) to 2 kids by 2 different fathers (oh the shame!!!!). I even program websites on that scary interweb thing. I am clearly corrupt and a corrupting force, the modern face of this broken britain.
Pretty sure I’m not their demographic, the thing is, what woman in her right mind would be?
March 19th, 2010 - 11:34
I’m a woman and it’s certainly not what I want to read. The most rage-inducing articles are the ones that appear every week or so, which are along the lines of ‘feminism destroyed this country and women don’t even like it anyway because we’ve quoted some woman massively out of context and used it to completely change the meaning of what she said’. My personal favourite was ‘Germaine Greer is responsible for this country’s downfall’ or something like that.
However, women are just as capable at being sexist as men are – just because we’re women doesn’t mean we’re not equally susceptible to the patriarchal social conditioning as men are. Sad, but true, and explains why the Mail is still popular with women – because the women that read it believe everything it tells them. Remember that when the suffragettes and -gists were campaigning for the vote, a good number of women opposed them.
March 19th, 2010 - 12:48
Women who believe that the crumbs from the table are all they can get will fight viciously over those crumbs.
March 21st, 2010 - 16:59
@badhedgehog — what? Colour me confused.
I’m a woman and, as all the other women above have stated, Femail is not something I want to read. Even the fucking title pisses me off. Femail! The lady section for ladies! Don’t worry about all that nasty, complicated news – this is the section specially designed for you. Read here about why you hate Kate Winslet! Yeah, it really fucking pisses me off when women go to the gym, or have beliefs, or succeed at something and win a thing. But thank god, when they do succeed and win a thing, their husband has an affair with a tattooed harpy! Tattooed! I nearly fainted with the shock of seeing those inky, unfeminine stains. But then I read a story by a baroness, and felt much better.
And that lady who has a job and children and a husband was sailing pretty close to the wind when it came to earning my ladyhate, but fortunately she finds it all a terrible struggle, so perhaps I will just wish I could be more like her instead. Thank god we have the Femail section to tell us these stories though! because I’m sure no man has to worry about the difficulties of being a husband, father and working man, and that must be why there are no such stories about men in the rest of the paper – the non-female (or do I mean non-Femail? My womanly brain is all confused) news-y parts of the paper.
Stupid jerks. I’m sure there are women who like that stuff, just like there are men (and women) who probably lap up the race-baiting, bin-hating dross in the rest of the paper. It’s a bit depressing that women are given a special ladyzone for gender-specific hateful nonsense though. Another reason not to buy it.