Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Sunday 14 June 2015

Calling Laurence Fox and Kevin Whately!

Or rather, the producers of "Lewis".

Does this situation not seem like a tailor-made, (should I say "bespoke"?) milieu for an episode?
A group of pompous, nasty Oxford students?
They'd be so unlikable you'd really want one of them to be the murderer, less so that justice be meted out than to see the self-righteous child get her come-uppance; and then when one becomes a victim you have to confront your own blood-thirsty vindictiveness.
Damian Thompson meets James Hathaway!
The-
hard core of a feminist cult ...has gripped Oxford and makes life miserable for hundreds of undergraduates across the university. The cult uses Facebook to snoop on students who aren’t ‘proper’ feminists. It tries to force young women to use its extreme rhetoric and denounces them if they don’t.
Its digital tirades can poison college life. One young woman told me that new friends she’d made at Oxford suddenly shunned her in the dining hall after the word went out that she held ‘incorrect’ views on women’s rights. (She was so worried about repercussions that she asked me not to mention which area of women’s rights she felt strongly about.)
I’m going to call the cult ‘Country Living’. That’s not quite accurate: it’s actually spelled without the ‘o’, a gynaecological pun that’s the only evidence of a sense of humour you’ll find among its leaders. I reckon calling it Country Living will make them cross. Which, to be fair, is not difficult. These lasses are very, very cross all the time. If there was an Oxford blue for taking offence, they’d be champions.
Country Living is an internet cult that polices behaviour both online and offline. Its manifesto can be read by anyone who visits its page on the blogging platform Tumblr, which is mocked up to look like a 1970s student magazine. Here we learn that anyone can become a C-word, which is a badge of honour, not a term of abuse. Those four letters have been ‘reclaimed’ by the group. (Like feminists everywhere, Country Living does a lot of reclaiming.)
But to earn this honour you must pass tests as severe as the binge-drinking initiation rituals of an all-male Oxford dining society. You must promise to ‘accept that gender is a social construction and embrace its fluidity’. You must ‘recognise your place and privilege within intersectionality’.
Why are so many of the dumbest movements arising nowadays left-leaning? They give liberality a bad name.

No comments: