Anyone who is particularly fond of sweeping sexist generalisations (and really, who doesn’t just love the suggestion that all women are shoe-obsessed chatterboxes, for instance, while all men are emotionally repressed sports nuts?) was in for a treat in the Daily Telegraph this past week.
Recently, the paper featured an article by Sabine Durrant, baldly headlined: “Are men boring?” A ramble through a heap of anecdotes, shot through with science, Durrant’s article initially found that “a straw poll among friends and relations would suggest the contention is so irrefutable that evidence is barely necessary”; she then unpacked a slightly more balanced argument. This tonal shift wasn’t enough to quell Neil Tweedie, who rebuked her in the paper the following day: “For your information, Sabine, men often find female conversation less than scintillating.” All pretty nebulous and sniping, which was hardly surprising: implications that one sex is more intelligent, witty, sympathetic, moral or interesting than the other do tend to be objectionable.
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