In the pages of the Observer, a new niche agony is detected:

Is it ever acceptable for a feminist to hire a cleaner?

Needless to say, it starts off quite dramatically,

The day my cleaner used to visit, I would return home in the evening to the smell of Dettol mixed with Tania’s sweat, to a clean kitchen and bathroom and a drenching sense of guilt.

Gratuitous drama and drenching guilt aside, I’m not entirely sure why hiring a cleaner should obviously be more fraught than hiring, say, a gardener or roofer. And it occurs to me that if you can smell someone’s perspiration above the odour of cleaning products, said person may require some kind of medical attention.

The piece, by empowered feminist author Sally Howard, continues in high gear,

It was the same unease that greeted me when I collected my son Leo from his nursery – a national chain disproportionately staffed by women of colour – or bought clothes from a mainstream clothing outlet that relies, as many do, on female garment workers in the global south.

For the kind of middle-class feminist who as recreation writes for the Observer, life is apparently an endless moral torture inflicted by minor, everyday events, or at least an exhausting theatre of pretending to be tortured by minor, everyday events. Which of the two constitutes a more harrowing and nightmarish existence, I leave to the reader.

For [my book, The Home Stretch], I spent time under cover with the women who clean Britain’s offices and homes. I picked used tampons off bathroom carpets and scrubbed bathtub tidemarks and sauces spattered across kitchen walls; and I discovered a few things.

That some women are so messy and antisocial that bloodied tampons are left for others to step on? Is that a permissible feminist thought?

I learned that fashionable householders’ preference for less-effective eco and homemade cleaning products doubles cleaners’ labour.

No laughing at the back.

This isn’t someone who barely squeaked through her degree. She was celebrated as the best there was at her school.

Janice Fiamengo ponders the mental state of a feminist and openly misandrist social worker. 

Kristina Agbebiyi, the lady in question, was hailed as “student of the year” by the University of Michigan’s social work department for her “commitment to political activities,” her embodiment of the “professional ethics of social work,” and for her “contribution to the positive image” of said field. Repeatedly boasting of a hatred of men is, we learn, not only a “commitment,” “a way of life” and a “revolutionary task,” but something to applaud. A credential of some kind. It “isn’t a game,” says Ms Agbebiyi.

Update, via the comments:

Readers may find themselves marvelling at how someone so fêted, and who evidently expects no challenging of her pronouncements by either peers or employers, nonetheless exults in theatrical victimhood and insists that she is “living oppression from the inside.” That the supposedly radical politics of which Ms Agbebiyi is so proud is usually an ostentatious leisure activity, an indulgence of the privileged, somehow passes unremarked. Though I do like the description of Ms Agbebiyi as a “narcissistic self-infatuate.”

Needless to say, the cause of this alleged “oppression” isn’t made clear, let alone persuasive. Apparently, it’s now the custom to invoke victimhood, as if it were a goal, a basis for acclaim, without actually specifying what it is that’s supposedly oppressing you. After browsing the lady’s Twitter feed, the best I can deduce is that the fact that prisons exist, at all, anywhere, is an unendurable burden on Ms Agbebiyi’s tissue-paper psyche. We should, it seems, wish for the “abolition” of prisons and “the ending of cops.” Because the world would be so much better if rapists, carjackers and sociopathic predators could act with impunity, uninhibited by even a small risk of punishment.

Some of Professor Fiamengo’s previous adventures in feminist psychology can be found here and here. 

Or, When Your Colossal Sense Of Entitlement Doesn’t Quite Pay Off.

1. A gathering of radical minds.

It’s a “people’s assembly,” you see; but with very few people. Apparently, it’s hard to do radical ecomentalism, denouncing modern life and the use of fossil fuels, when it’s cold and you have no heating.

2. A slight delay.

One of the gathered titans suggests the formation of “a learning circle on decolonising Extinction Rebellion and our minds.” To pull in the punters, no doubt.

3. Alas, the situation has not improved.

Perhaps the protestors’ appeal has become, as they say, more selective. Also, spare a thought for the local residents, the ones having their minds decolonised, whether they like it or not, thanks to the combination of amplifiers and dogmatic morony.

Via Holborn.

The vast majority of people worldwide, as well as millions in the UK, do not have their needs met – let alone live lives of luxury from which air travel and weekly shopping sprees could be painlessly stripped out and replaced for example with dance lessons. 

Why, yes, I am reading the Guardian. How could you tell?

The paper’s leader writer, Susanna Rustin, is very much troubled by thoughts of impending catastrophe and is keen for your routine shopping – for groceries and maybe a pair of shoes – to be replaced, “painlessly,” with forms of “artistic expression and creativity.” Like dance lessons. It would, of course, be “a reordering of society.”

When so many of the pleasures that we take for granted in the west, and that are desired by billions of people who do not yet have them, are so carbon-intensive, it is surely incumbent upon us to think very hard about the things in which we take joy and meaning that are less demanding of energy and resources.

Because “dancing and singing could be part of the solution to the climate emergency.” It says so here.

If capitalists, politicians and scientists have so far not found the answers – and the global mass movement of people called for by Greta Thunberg and others is, despite recent progress, still proving elusive – could the creative arts possibly provide one means to break the impasse? If the climate emergency is seen as the consequence of a failure of imagination, then this would seem to make sense.

We will save the planet with our expertise in jive, quickstep and Viennese waltz.

this would seem to make sense.

Though presumably we may have to gyrate without shoes.

Steven Malanga on question-begging “equity” and its corrosive effects:  

The equity movement presumes that any unequal results in society reflect structural or institutional racism, even when officials can’t identify any actual discrimination. To redress these purported inequities, the movement demands that every city department’s mission, and every major decision in local government, be looked at from a racial-equity perspective. In practice, this has meant mandatory bias training for municipal and school employees, in order to root out “policies that work better for white people,” in the words of one advocacy group, and laws passed in a number of cities that limit what employers can ask job applicants (about any past criminal history, especially), as well as other measures. […] The basic, but highly dubious, assumption behind these reports, and the equity movement generally, is that no possible behavioural differences among ethnic or racial groups might account for different life outcomes. 

Some of the examples of “equity” education are rather boggling in their evasions. Mr Malanga also discusses the “equity” approach to school discipline, which was predictably disastrous, and mentioned here and here. As I said at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else. 

And – not entirely unrelated – Lee Jussim on the dysfunctions of academia – in neologism form:

Equalitarianism: A dogmatic, quasi-religious belief that all groups are equal in all traits that matter, usually accompanied by the belief that the only credible source of group differences is discrimination and outrage at anyone who suggests otherwise. Often accompanied by the belief that women and minorities are inherently or essentially more virtuous.

Emotional imperialism: The strange belief that your feelings should dictate someone else’s behaviour.

See also the subsequent comments, in which Quillette readers suggest additions. For instance,

Ovaryaction: the compulsion to create neologisms such as manspreading, mansplaining, and himpediment, attributing flaws by individual men as representative of all men to buttress the assertion of systemic, institutional oppression of modern, Western women by the bogeyman known as patriarchy.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.