Tuesday 18 October 2011
Anti-capitalist lesbian nurses who eat children while disrespecting the elderly
What has feminism done for us? It may have given you "legal equality" in some countries, "the right to vote", and all that jazz, but it also gave us divorce, single-parent families, and Loose Women. It "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians". (My Gay Best Friend has that quote written on her bedroom wall.) According to James Naughtie, the voice of my alarm clock as Radio 4's breakfast show host, it has also led to the death of politeness.
Basically, it makes us uppity. Uppity child-murdering lesbian witches, who are rude while they're destroying capitalism.
But you knew all this already.
In other news, the Quality and Care Commission has reported that half of all elderly patients in NHS hospitals are receiving substandard treatment, speaking of a lack of "kindness and compassion". The details are horrific - there are stories of plates of food left in front of people who cannot eat without assistance; incontinent patients left unwashed for hours; people being given the wrong medications. They evoke a widespread lack of respect for patients' dignity and wellbeing.
Various explanations have been put forward for how such a toxic culture can have evolved. Too great a focus on targets; excessive paperwork leaving little time for patient care; budget cuts and short-staffing, among many others.
But we all know what the real reason is.
You do know, right?
If you didn't guess "feminism", lose ten points and hand in your Misogyny Bingo Card.
Damn you, feminism! You have made nurses "too grand to care"! You have made them believe that a traditionally female occupation is in fact a highly skilled job, requiring years of academic study as well as intense practical training - so now they think they're too fancy to "skivvy"! Whereas in fact they should be well aware that "nursing is not a job, but a vocation", best exemplified by the great Florence Nightingale, and performed through a "sense of duty ... rather than any self-interest". So, rich girls should do it for the goodness of it, I guess, not because they need to do anything as worldly as earn a living. Only in the 80s, says the delightful Ms Philips, did dirty feminists start trouble-making, suggesting to nurses that "caring was demeaning".
In Deathmatch CQC: Feminist Nurses vs The Elderly, you will notice that there are only two groups of people in the whole world. You will notice that The Elderly are never feminists; that feminists are never caring; and that disrespect for elderly people in no way draws on wider narratives about the low importance placed on vulnerable and disabled people, which is definitely not critically analysed by the social justice movement which encompasses feminism... you will notice, basically, that Melanie Philips is totally right and that feminism is to blame for literally every single thing that has ever happened in the world. Ever. The end.
It's interesting that Melanie Phillips's followup post on her blog--which is basically three letters from readers, included "in the hope that this will further inform debate and bring about very necessary change"--never mentions feminism at all as the root cause of all the evil that pervades nursing care in the NHS. OH, wait: there is one allusion to it; the letter writer says:
ReplyDeleteI don’t agree with you that nurses got too big for their boots, or that they felt that the tasks were undermining them. Certainly feminism in my experience had little or nothing to do with the Project 2000 changes, which transferred the teaching to university classrooms. It had more to do with cost cutting in that nurses now have a bursary (far less then what we earned).
Huh. The main argument of the original article seems to have been dropped by the wayside. I wonder why.
Well, no cause for worry, I suppose. We know that that we can still blame feminism for high taxes, the low sperm count of men in Los Angeles, and presumably, the Fukushima reactor meltdown, so we're all good.
The writer of this post is a complete moron!!!
ReplyDeleteI was going to give elaborate explanations of why his/her reasoning is completely flawed with a what -does-feminism have-to- do-with- the-price-of-tea-in-China analogy, but then I realized that it would be a futile attempt given the clear baseless detastation of feminism or anything that empowers women. Too bad time machines don't exist. The Dark Ages would've suited him/her perfectly!!!