David Willetts is the Shadow Universities Secretary, and this week, is winning a special award for being a singulalry sexist nincompoop. He wins said award for his recent speech claiming that the family is threatened by a rise in the number of young women attending university.
According to Mr Willetts, the 10% difference between the gender when it comes to university education is threatening the family- men can no longer ‘bring home the bacon’, which means marriages break up, the family as an economic institution fails and well won’t somebody please think of the children.
I’ve no problem with Mr Willett saying that 35% of men vs 45% of women attending university is something that needs addressing. I’ve also no problem with him pointing out, that the overwhelming majority of young people Not In Education, Employment or Training (NEET) are young men , and that perhaps we need to examine the causes of this and do something about it.
What does vex me mightily is his claim that this is the fault of women- that women wanting to improve their lives and undertaking higher education, something denied to them for hundreds of years, is to blame for these young men’s lack of higher education. That somehow women improving themselves destroys the very fabric of our society, when I would have considered it to , logically, improve our society and improve the economic stability of the family. His notion that there is only a finite amount of education to go round is disturbing and as Jess at the F Word pointed out based on a disturbingly middle class presumption that no one from the working classes might want an education, and that rather than panicking that more middle class women are accessing higher education, we should instead examine why more people across the board aren’t accessing university level education.
I find the Conservatives to be a generally depressing political party- as far as they are concerned people deserve everything that ever happens to them, and it isn’t the job of the government to help anyone, because well if they can’t sort it out themselves they don’t deserve the help anyway. They uphold ridiculous ‘traditional’ views of gender roles and seem to think that the only way a relationship or a family can function is if the man (because in Tory land no one is gay and if they are they are very discreet about it and don’t presume to have families!) has a nice job and works hard to bring in the money and his nice little wife stays at home and bakes and sews and deals with the children. The children will of course, be terribly nice, polite children who do their homework and don’t get into fights or take drugs and only the children of unemployed, drug abusing single mothers who don’t deserve any government help at all, will ever get into a trouble at school or with the police. Anyone outside of those norms is well, nontraditional, and thus threatening the security of ‘the family’ and thus the very fabric of society as we know it. Which means we should all sneer at them and denounce them and come up with special policies to keep them and their kind on their little council estates and living in the poverty they so rightly deserve.
I expected better really. Unrealistic- but seeing as Mr ‘call me Dave’ Cameron and his cronies looked to be seriously considering some family freindly, equality based policies – I was hopefull. Now I’m despondant. It’s just all going to be the same classist, sexist, racist shite as always. So don’t vote for the Conservatives people. Becuase like their American counterparts, they’d cheerfully see us all living back in some unrealistic vision of the 1950’s where men are men and women are unpaid domestic labour and baby machines, kept forcibly uneducated, sexually repressed and slaves to their biology.