Monday 28 February 2011

Sometimes even my bookshelves make me cry

After a long day, a long bath, and a very speedy supper, I came back into my bedroom: I thought about all the things I really should be doing - burning the latest 30 Rock and Parks & Rec for lunchtime viewings; putting a clothes wash on; plucking the hairs out of my chin; hell, even blogging - and thought, "nah, real life is just not as interesting as reading the next chapter right now", and curled up under my duvet to return to Fever Pitch for the sixth time like the sleepy little obsessive I am.

And the next chapter, of course, was Nick Hornby's treatise on how women are just not as obsessive as men.

I wish, maybe more than anything, that people who don't know a lot about biological essentialism and the nature/nurture debate and gender roles and the complex interplay between hormones and expectations and brain lateralisation and kids' tv and muscle distribution and parenting styles would have the common decency to just shut the fuck up on this kind of thing. Sod off, Nick. Big kids are talking.

The flat-out, unabashed, blazingly obvious misogyny rarely fills me with such despair as the casual sexist who can lay whole fields of academic research to waste with the classic, unassailable line: "Men and women are just different, though".

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