Norwegian Blue 🦜

By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air - Andrea Dworkin

[Geoff @kwoade]

@BBCNews How on earth does 'asked woman for kiss' become your headline?

[pinkdino @poz_woods]

I'm a straight woman. I'm not attracted specifically to penises and testicle, I'm attracted to men.

Yet strangely enough, every single person I have ever found sexually attractive was male. No exceptions.

Is that a bizarre coincidence?
Or is sexual orientation a real thing?

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

While it’s all been rather fun, I do hope @hughlaurie takes the time to read my @unherd article (I’m sure he can stretch to a subscription).

Because while his witty riposte was genuinely amusing, one point I make in the piece is that it was shared with his 1.2 million followers on X. I have around 38,000.

That creates something of an imbalance - particularly given that the responses to my original post were overwhelmingly warm-hearted and affectionate towards the show.

The result has been some fairly horrific trolling. It turns out House fans are even more abusive than trans activists (and that’s saying something).

I have enough experience of the media to take it on the chin, as the saying goes. But someone without my background might have found the experience far more distressing.

Link below 👇

[Ani O'Brien @aniobrien]

As a lesbian, I am so tired of this nonsense. I am tired of corporate Pride and activist Pride.

This week HelloFresh decided that the best way to celebrate Pride Month was to post jokes about preparing for anal sex and offering high-fibre recipes to help people "prep". They then doubled down with a discount code called BOTTOMSUP.

Inclusion! WOO! 🙄

The thing that frustrates me is that people like me have spent years defending gay rights against accusations that we are hypersexual, inappropriate, and incapable of ordinary family life.

That was one of the central prejudices gay people faced. For decades, opponents portrayed gay men in particular as sexually obsessed and depraved. They argued that homosexuality was all about sex rather than love, commitment, relationships and family. The fight for equal rights was partly a fight against exactly that caricature.

And now here we are. A major multinational company has decided the best way to celebrate Pride is to publicly discuss anal sex. What an achievement.

The same-sex marriage movement wasn't about sex. It was about love, commitment, and the ability to build a life with the person you love. It was about family and equality before the law.

Most gay people are not what the weirdos in the HelloFresh marketing department think we are. We go to work, pay bills, walk the dog, argue about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher, and try to build a decent life together.

You know... Normal things.

The overwhelming majority of gay people just want to be accepted and left alone. We want the same freedoms, responsibilities and opportunities as everyone else. We don't need multinational corporations making dirty jokes about us to feel "included".

What makes this even more ridiculous is that HelloFresh's core market is clearly not radical "queer" activists with blue hair and septum rings.

Their customers are overwhelmingly middle-class couples and families. Busy parents. Professionals. People with disposable income who want convenient meals after work.

How hard would it have been to make a genuinely wholesome Pride advertisement?

Two mums cooking dinner with their kids or two husbands hosting friends. A same-sex couple just making dinner together or flipping a coin to see who has to cook. A simple message acknowledging families and love. Instead they went with rectum jokes.

Somewhere along the way after the TQ+ hijacked our movement, Pride stopped being about acceptance and started being about performance. A small but influential group of activists have convinced themselves that being as shocking, vulgar and sexually explicit as possible is somehow brave and intrinsically "queer". They think boundaries of any kind are oppression including standards and decorum. They think manners are censorship.

The result is campaigns like this one and somehow people are shocked when there is backlash against us all.

I actually feel really sorry for gay men in particular because one of the oldest stigmas they have faced is the idea that they are dirty, promiscuous and defined entirely by sex. This campaign reinforces that stereotype.

If you wanted to design an advertisement that would make ordinary people roll their eyes and think Pride is ridiculous, or shield their children's eyes in horror, you would struggle to do better than this.

The irony is that HelloFresh's marketing department thinks this is progressive. It's regressive and distasteful. It takes decades of work by ordinary gay people who want to be seen as neighbours, colleagues, parents, partners and family members and reduces all of it to a crude sexual punchline.

The people who fought for our rights wanted dignity, but the people most enthusiastic about Pride today seem determined to turn it into a fetish convention with corporate sponsors.

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

Honestly, if you're a Labour MP who's a long-term but totally secret Terf, and you're still making foolish ignorant statements about the EHRC code to save yourself, do you really think women who've you've watched being bullied by the LP over the years will keep yr secret forever?

[MrMenno 🇳🇱🏳️‍🌈🎶 @MrMennoTweets]

Thinking you're a woman because you're "submissive" doesn't make you a woman - it makes you a misogynist

[MrMenno 🇳🇱🏳️‍🌈🎶 @MrMennoTweets]

@SamanthaNiblet4 No

I will not call a man a lesbian

I will not call a woman a gay man

It’s not ‘good manners’ to lie and to deny what homosexuals is

[Reem Alsalem UNSR Violence Against Women and Girls @UNSRVAW]

This is deeply troubling.

I hope New York will step away from this move!

I wrote about the push to eliminate the word “mother” and mother-related terminology in law and policies; how it is linked to the devaluation of motherhood and women overall.

I will be presenting this report on “violence against mothers” to the UN Human Rights Council in a few weeks.

[Sam Morgan @CrunchAlias]

If you're a man who thinks genital inspections would be the only way to stop you going in the women's toilets, because otherwise you're just going to sneak in, you are exactly the kind of man who needs to be kept out.

[Jools @JoolsJuevans]

Did you ever think you'd live to see the day where a WOMAN leading the largest Union in the UK with the largest number of women members would argue against women's right to single sex spaces in the workplace?
No me neither.
Find a better union ladies.
Also the guidance doesn't cover workplaces, it's not even relevant, that's covered by separate legislation. Absolute clowns.

[Legal Feminist @legalfeminist]

A Scottish primary school broke the law by failing to provide single-sex toilets: DE and FG v West Lothian Council.

[Nicky 🍀OFAB♀️KPSS @Drusilla451]

Single sex spaces are not 'unworkable'
We've had them for decades and until 5mins ago no one thought they were controversial
Then a group of males decided that female only spaces, services and sports were 'hateful'
StonewallUK added 'T' and started training out 'Stonewall Law' adding PCs that didn't exist to the Equality Act - erasing sex and sexual orientation
Suddenly sex is 'complicated' women, girls and same sex attracted people never existed, never had sex based rights and the law as it has existed for 16yrs under the EA is 'unworkable'

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

Women, leave Unison and join the @DarlingtonUnion!
As well as the sheer ignorance of this statement - complete misinterpretation of the law/guidance/code relating to workplaces (see @akuareindorf) - why would you still give your hard-earned £ to a union that centres a few men..?

[Emma Harriet Nicholson @Baroness_Nichol]

A big Trades Union seems ignorant on Employment Law

[Jane, Empress of the Known Universe (not GP)🏳️‍🌈 @blablafishcakes]

Someone sent me this. Another classic of the genre 😂 He has no idea who Naomi is 😂

[💙Fiona Macdonald @Fiona44444]

I have good news. I'm delighted to share that Judge Campbell refused PCS Union's strike out application rejecting their argument that my indirect discrimination case had no reasonable chance of success. You can read my update here: https://t.co/6tWcRAFZK5

[💙Fiona Macdonald @Fiona44444]

Please take time to read about women organizing in PCS Union. They have laid motions on VAWG and spoken out against motions challenging the EHRC code of practice. Support their important efforts by listening to a speech and reading one motion they tabled. https://t.co/FZaAgLoF0j

[Helen Staniland @helenstaniland]

@ZackPolanski Male adults *should* be excluded from female spaces where women and girls are undressing. Why would you believe otherwise?

[Anna Maria Junus @JunusAnna]

"Men are in danger from being in men's spaces."
"So let's send men into women's spaces so that men won't be in danger!"
"Won't that put women in danger?"
"Who cares?"

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

The Fire Brigades Union stands ‘firmly in solidarity with trans, non-binary and gender diverse members.’

But not, apparently, with women who wish to undress - or use the toilet - without males present.

This union appears to be unaware that being forced to share facilities with male colleagues may cause ‘fear’ for women.

Or that they also have the right to ‘respect and dignity’ at work. And for their employers to follow the law.

Extraordinary.