Holy hyper-sensitivity batman. A grandfatherly aged man (Keith Ashfield) pays a compliment that is politically incorrect and somehow it reflects his opinion that women can’t achieve in the workplace. Watch this.
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Faux outrage
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I wouldn’t have gotten from it that women can’t achieve in the workplace, but if they wanted to say it was sexist I could see that…however he feels about it personally the fact that he didn’t choose to say “You’re a great cook, whoever marries you will be a lucky man” or even “You’re a great cook, you’ll make a great wife one day”, but “You’re a great cook, you’ll make someone a wonderful wife one day” really comes across like women are just accessories to men and not people in their own right. Even talking right to her and trying to give her a compliment it was only in her relationship to a future hypothetical man that he could do that.
I try not to get caught up in looking for things to offend me, but I can see the male-as-subject/female-as-object sexism in that statement if I’m trying to analyze it.
thanks, Monika,
I definitely think it’s an old-fashioned thing to say. But saying “you’ll make someone a great wife someday” is simply not the same thing as adding “And you can never achieve anything else.”
I also tried to reverse the situation: Boy shows great strength in doing something, be it cooking or what have you and someone says “You’ll make someone a great husband someday.” We wouldn’t find that offensive, I don’t think.
It’s a double standard, of sorts.
At this point, I wouldn’t wonder that politicians just choose never to say anything that isn’t entirely and totally teleprompter scripted. Which is what political correctness and offense not commensurate with the crime engenders: silence.
As a society we are so mired in trivialities I sometimes think we need a cataclysm to make up wake up and figure out what is important and what just isn’t. Just when did it become the unquestioned law of the land that men and women’s lives have to be virtually indistinguishable from one another’s? Many women still cook for their families. Many men still shovel the snow and fix leaky pipes and do the heavy lifting. If a young man changed a tire for me, couldn’t I say, “Great job. One day you will be a great husband to have around.”
And why oh why is everything women once did devalued so much? My grandmother and great-aunts, none of whom worked after marriage, were artists of the home. They cooked and baked and canned and made jellies and quilted, knitted, sewed, embroidered, gardened, wrote wonderful letters and were matriarchs of the first order. I would love to be able to do half the things they could do, half as well. Dying arts because they have been deemed worthless as they were done for the home not the public space and for nothing.
Nuts to feminists on all this nonsense.