A recent episode is instructive of the dementia of our age.
A rather pretty young woman by the name of Charlotte Proudman goes out and makes herself look especially pretty, and hires a professional photographer to make her look even prettier, and then uses the picture for her LinkedIn profile. I am not usually a fan of short-cropped hair styles, but she has a rather attractive look even if her hair is a bit helmet-like. She clearly spent a good time styling it.
The said young lady sends a LinkedIn invite to an older male barrister (as they are called in England), who calls her picture “stunning” and says that she “wins the prize for best LinkedIn picture I have ever seen.”
Unprofessional? I suppose, although of course, as a traditional sort, I don’t think women should be working alongside men anyway except in limited roles. But, I am a professional in the modern age and like all professionals, I must make certain concessions to professionalism, and not commenting on women’s appearance is one of them. The man’s comments were not necessarily sexual in overtone, and may have simply been polite or avuncular.
The girl admonished the man, not for being inappropriate, but for “objectifying” her and being “sexist.” This 27-year-old youth then goes on to parrot the garbage she learned in her many years of education, so-called: “The eroticisation of women’s physical appearance is a way of exercising power over women.”
It reminds me a bit of a rather crude cartoon a boss of mine once had on his door. It was a picture of a woman in a plastic surgeon’s office, saying “I want you to make them so big that I have to yell at men to stop staring at them.” Indeed, in this case we have a picture of a woman who goes out of her way to make herself beautiful, and then gets mad when someone notices she’s beautiful.
Moreover, she is trotting out good old Marxist theory, as she learned in college. When you hear the word “power” used by anyone other than an electricity executive, you know the speaker has been indoctrinated by Marxism and its tendency to reduce all human relationships to power relationships which need to be equalized. Calling her picture “stunning” is hardly erotic, and men noticing the physical beauty of the weaker sex is not the modern invention of power hungry patriarchs, but is as old as time. (Remember why Menelaus invaded Troy?) But the poor girl can only see this as an injustice that needs, not only a personal response, but a broadcast to the whole world. And in our day and age, this means she gets to advance her career on BBC while the poor elder barrister is embarrassed in front of the entire known universe.
She seems to not have much beyond a pretty face anyway, if she has bought into this sort of nonsense and has this kind of desire for retributive publicity. As I heard said once in Denny’s, “My compliments to the photographer.”
Mors Sanctorum 