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Of Fluffy Females and Split Infinitives

July 3, 2009

pink-legs

Seasoned media observers have noted the tendency of the Mail, every now and then and only when strictly necessary, to visit lashings of negative PR on the poor old impoverished BBC. This story fails to scotch this belief, with the Mail eagerly picking up on claims made by the Fawcett Society (who they? Ed.) that the BBC is stuck in a ‘1950s mindset’ in which women are portrayed in passive or ‘fluffy pink’ roles. A Ms Rake of the Fawcett Society says that children’s programmes are the worst exemplars of this trend, for, as the Mail has it, “the young girls watching are exposed to too many examples of weak women”.

Interestingly, the Mail refuses to designate Ms Rake as ‘Ms’, preferring the quaint and gender-bound ‘Miss’. Linguists, whether feminist or not, will also be horrified by this sentence:  “Equal opportunity activists claim the corporation has failed to properly implement legislation aimed at driving out inequality from the workplace.”

We look forward to further examples of campaigning feminism from the Mail – and hope that its journalists mind their split infinitives in the future.  Meanwhile, here is a Revolutionary picture of a Mail journalist’s legs.


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