Text sourced from Miranda Devine’s Daily Telegraph column of the same name (16/12/2017), and its comment thread.
Whole poems used to be written in praise of Miranda Devine. But feminism changed all that. Chivalry isn’t dead, it’s just late to the meeting: it’s been holding the door to the boardroom since 8.55am, unheeded. Harvey Weinstein snuck in while chivalry was sleeping standing up. We need to understand the role that feminism played in empowering men like that. When modesty is stripped like a tablecloth from underneath a banquet, that’s when Harvey charges in for the feast. Pigs like Weinstein were only allowed to continue because of the cowardice of other women who wanted to get their initial leg-up (no pun intended). Dating has been replaced with joyless gadgetry – flicking off all those :( faces with a finger. In meat-space, women are flesh and blood, and men are flesh and blood, but real courtship isn’t about flesh or blood. Sex and connection are decoupled. No one meets anymore in bars or at sports games. No meet-cute is had watching The Bachelorette. Miranda interviews a man, a bit of a dreamboat, whose book will bring back chivalry. I still show respect for women and give my seat on the train to women, but now it is out of protest rather than obligation. Feminists can at least say they stopped the dreamboats. The author says Tinder is a sausage-fest for the unfaithful. I’ve heard that Bunnings is a weekly sausage-fest for lesbians. If you want to be a real man, take her out. She’s not an e-conquest. (That’s when you rort AOL with a second Internet trial CD.) If I am polite it’s because of the training instilled in me. May I please have my cookie? Chivalry isn’t dead, it’s just been criminalised. Now you can’t give up your seat or hold a door or buy a gal a drink without being dragged off to feminist prison – in pink pussy cuffs. Why don’t those frightbats speak up to the real criminals? That Harvey Weinstein sure wouldn’t have gotten far if only women had acted sooner. And now they won’t shut up. Every second guy is a Weinstein. They’re so busy, no one’s writing Miranda her hard-earned poems in the comments. Not that many little girls dream of being a Daily Tele columnist when they grow up and, anyway, the femmos will all die out when they can’t find husbands to help them make more little feminists.
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