The 38-year-old mum-of-three insisted it is “wrong and unnecessary” to involve gender when marketing generic food items, and said there were plenty of other words that could have been used to describe the steak’s large size.
The immediate thought that springs to mind is ‘grow up and get over yourself.’
This is a woman complaining over a steak being named “Big Daddy”.
Mark has provided us with wisdom there. The further is that there seems to be, in the human species, a certain amount of whingeing that has to be done. Evolution is true and all that. Now that she’s not facing the 25% cache of each of her kids dying by 12 months, the 50% chance of each popping clogs by puberty, that insistence upon whingeing requires a target. She – the kids – aren;t going to starve, they’d be damned unlucky to be swept away by a flood, a plague, even if the bloke buggers off for a younger model they’ll still be housed, fed etc.
On any historical – or even global – standard she’s nowt to worry about. But that insistence on worrying still exists.
My general view is that this explains much of modern life. The endless whingeing over trivialities – gender, sparkly dressies for prop forwards, 5% inequal8ities in male and female pay, that – well, read The G opinion pages. There’s just so little left to worry about but there’s still that human assistance upon having something to worry about. Because worrying is a survival characteristic.
The Law of Conservation of Fretting.
The problem can be distilled down to the fact that we are not telling enough people to Get Fucked often enough.
Type I and Type II behaviours:
Type I is worrying about a sound in the long grass and taking evasive action. There’s a 1 in 1000 chance it was due to a sabre tooth tiger looking for dinner.
Type II recognises that there’s a 999 in 1000 chance that it was the wind or a rodent that made the rustling noise and says ‘no worries’ and carries on hoeing.
We are descended from Type I.
“Because worrying is a survival characteristic.”
yes.
There’s plenty of real stuff to be worried about. Worry about our energy supplies, the migrants on Kent beaches, the state of housing, crime, education, healthcare, and transport.
Alas you can’t just pass a law to make healthcare better, but you can legislate for equal pay; so that’s what gets done. MPs and activists pat themselves on the back for a legislative job well done; while the executive keeps crumbling.
We are descended from Type I.
Well, sorta, Bongo.
I’m also descended from type 3. Those who get together with their mates to go and make those f+++ing sabre toothed tigers extinct.
That’s how I got to be apex predator.
Lions? Sod ’em.
Sussed this out years ago. People have their own dissatisfaction quotient which is invariable irrespective of their circumstances. So some people will always find something to bitch about. Even if they have to go out of their way to look for it. I had a father like that. He’d have crossed a thousand miles of empty desert to complain about the noise from the neighbour.
“The further is that there seems to be, in the human species, a certain amount of whingeing that has to be done”.
I saw a meme the other day essentially saying “Those people who have been moaning about the winter will very shortly start moaning about the summer”.
A lot of it is down to powerlessness. “Big” problems cannot be influenced : wars, famines, natural disaster etc. It is one reason that Brexit was such a shock to the Establishment, because people saw a chance to change something and took it. That won’t happen again…
So people concentrate on the little things which are mostly irrelevant : parking, Enid Blyton, Union Jacks on butter instead, but which they believe that they can change. This also explains climate change activism – it is the delusion that direct action and small changes to our lifestyle will have an effect on something beyond anyone’s – even Al Gore’s – control.
( Same goes for government eg banning plastic straws, lightbulbs, internal combustion engines etc )
Never forget that Caroline Criado-Perez was rewarded with an OBE and an extremely prosperous lifestyle for her broadly similar Karen-ness about the toxic masculinity of banknotes.
I still don’t understand what she was complaining about. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an English banknote that didn’t feature a portrait of a woman.
(Might see a few in the next year or two, of course!)
“Caroline Criado-Perez”
Never heard of her. Googles….
Born 1984! She’s a damn child!
Dear Mr Worstall
Too much time, too little to do.
In past times she would be damned pleased when Big Daddy brought the mammoth steak to the cave, even if he scrawled “Big Daddy” on it.
Happy New Tax Year.
DP
Sounds about right. Douglas Adams had a bit about it in Hitchhiker’s, didn’t he? People buying artificial broken legs because they didn’t have anything else to worry about. If only we’d gone down that route instead.
Mind you, it would explain all those blokes chopping their wangs off…