Lana Del Rey released a track in 2014 entitled “Fucked my way to the top” which in an interview in Complex magazine (and reported in the Daily Mail) stated was in part at least autobiographical.
You can buy a book from Amazon called Honey Money” in which Dr Catherine Hakim extols the notion that women can progress their career by exploiting what she describes as ‘erotic capital’. In Hakim’s estimation, for all young women, and in particular those who are without other benefits – financial, intellectual, situational – an entirely legitimate form of self-advancement should consist in their getting the best out of – if you’ll forgive the pun – their assets. It is pretty evident that the meaning of that word in the context is the same as what the Daily Mail normally describes as ‘ample assets’ on women with an upper quartile bra size, of which more later.
Forbes magazine – a reputable publication grumpy understands, reported a few short years ago that a survey of hiring managers reported that seven in 10 (72%) said beauty was an asset to women in the workforce. Why ? How so ?
And no less than Ivanka Trump, prior to her elevation to political power, said in an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, that women should “emit sex appeal on the job to make them more alluring” In other words, if you’ve got it, flaunt it – the ‘it’ being sexual attraction.
In a more recent issue of Cosmopolitan, females were encouraged to make known to a man they they were attracted to by ‘invading his personal space’ and ‘touching him and making it look like an accident’ – all acts for which MP’s are being cast into outer darkness and career oblivion.
That, or course was then, a few short years ago when feminism was about how to exploit and dominate men with sex (watch the Spice Girls Wannabe video), as opposed to the current day which is about MGM (as opposed to FGM) i.e. castration of any man who might presuppose that a woman might have some interest in him.
The Daily Mail illustrates perfectly the current schizophrenia about sex. On 29.10.17 – taken as a random day – it featured (as usual) multiple photographs of ‘celebrities’ annotated with captions such as “puts on a busty display” / “flashes her ample assets” / “flaunts her pert derriere” / “flashes ample cleavage” / “flashes her underwear” / “showcases her ample cleavage” / “suffers wardrobe malfunction” / etc. and 50 other references in the same tone of flaunting, grappling, sizzling, displaying, showcasing, flashing and so on.
Yet on BBC’s Newsnight on 02.11.17, more than half of some high minded entourage agreed that merely ‘looking at a woman’s breasts’ constituted harassment.
It simply illustrates in Grumpy’s view that certain (predominantly female) politicians and others with some vacuous and overstated point to make, exploit the media’s wish for crisis and scandal by disconnecting from reality.
The 50 odd ‘celebrities’ in the Daily Mail on that day did not expose their breasts, underwear or ‘pert derrieres’ by accident or for their partners in the privacy of their home; they did it in front of a camera deliberately or by posting to twitter to titillate ( no other word for it) in order to advance their ‘careers’ and to enrich themselves. They know that sex sells., and exploit their sexuality ruthlessly. Kim Kardashian has made countless millions by parading her almost naked, absurdly large, butt to mostly slavering males whose testosterone has defeated their rationality and common sense.
From The Sun Newspaper in July 2014, encapsulating the Spice Girls ethos, Kate Hopkins wrote “If a woman is really good-looking, that is a power. If she has found a way to make men like her, she should utilise it.” and “If a female employee can flip that around and be the dominant one, albeit by luring him into bed, then more power to them.” Or Lucy Kellaway in Biz News – “Flirting is a tried-and-tested way of getting ahead at work.”
This was how it was, and the current clutch of irritating harridans screaming about an allegedly a unidimensional perspective of power balance between the sexes were nowhere to be seen.
In spite of this self evident truth that women are equally capable of manipulating men by using sex for their own ends when it suits them, various band wagon riding, sanctimonious female MP’s and others appear on television in a state of righteous and gratuitous arousal from destroying someone’s career and life, not in the courts, but by allegation without due process. If they truly believe that no normal woman would ever, at work or elsewhere, flutter her eyelids when it would result in benefit for them, they are surely living on Planet Zargon.