Monday, October 12, 2020

i just want to chime in a little on the nonsense in bc around some comments made by a female mp, which were construed as "sexist" by the media.

while the woman has apologized, i'm not following the critique.

her comments seemed to be less about the female ndp member and more about the male liberal member, and if there's a valid criticism in context, it may be more along the lines of trivializing unwarranted male reactions to relatively normal female behaviour. but, if the question at hand is the veracity of the observation that this old guy was getting off on the interaction, i see little reason to question it. there doesn't seem to have been an attempt to insult the female mla, so much as there was an attempt to mock the old guy for enjoying a young woman in his midst in ways she was clearly oblivious to - and i'd say that was trivializing something that should maybe have not been seen as particularly comical.

the fact that everybody on the call agreed with the premise of the old guy enjoying his good fortune, and that nobody pushed back and said "no, it wasn't like that", suggests that it wasn't a particularly outlandish thing to observe, whether the perception was intentional or not.

i would consequently suggest to ms. ma that intentions and outcomes can at times be a little different, and that maybe people perceived her behaviour differently than she intended. there's nothing wrong with that. but, if she's hypersensitive to those misperceptions, perhaps she should be a little bit more careful about how she conducts herself in the presence of aging straight men.