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Insulting foam

1 Mar 11 | Re: Subtle, drip-drip demeaning

Take a look at this article about Prince William’s wedding from the Mail on Sunday and see if you can guess what it is about it that particularly gets my goat:

It’s a VERY royal wedding (Mail on Sunday)

It isn’t the newspaper’s failure to pass much of a judgement on the King of Bahrain’s ruling style.

It isn’t the servile sighing over minute details of the royal invitations.

It isn’t the baseless speculation about the Beckhams.

It isn’t the reminder that we live in a country where Prince William, who has done nothing except be born and then live for a few years, gets awarded the nation’s highest honour, the Knight of the Garter, which is itself a ludicrous non-honour made up by a silly king for a joke.

It isn’t the revelation that people will be permitted to attend the royal wedding in a lounge suit.

It isn’t even the split infinitive in the seventh paragraph that nabs my nanny.

No, what really bags my billy is the pink tab at the top telling me that this article comes from the newspaper’s Femail (women’s) section, meaning that in the eyes of the paper’s management, this kind of brainless fawning over royalistic trivia is the kind of thing that women - all women who read the paper - are meant to be interested in. You can complain quite validly about the tabloids’ irresponsible attitude towards female celebrity weight, or their gratuitous papping of ladies in bikinis on holiday, but in my view the Mail’s serving up of this nonsense as especially for women, as an example of a women’s issue, is far more pernicious and insulting.

Where’s Bidisha when you need her?

I now have no goats remaining, of either gender.

Posted by MISS CAROLINA WILELMINA AMELIA SKEGGS at 18:26

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