“Saddest that, in one paragraph, neither gender is shown any respect.”
Recently, my colleague Carl Kinsella and I were asked to participate in the RTÉ documentary, Asking For It: Reality Bites, to be presented by the author Louise O’Neill.
The documentary centred around Irish attitudes to sex, to how sexual assaults are reported (or not, in too many cases) and to the rape culture in this country that allows certain men to cloud the straight-forward issue of consent.
It was, deservedly, very well received.
Having written a number of pieces around sexual violence, consent and the hazards of social media when it comes to people’s most private moments, Carl and I were asked to offer our opinions as to why too many men are thinking about women in entirely the wrong way.
We were happy to engage with such a forward thinking documentary, and to sit down with an author who has written so eloquently, and so often, about the issue of consent.
And then you get this.
Source: The Irish Independent
Somehow, despite Louise’s deliberately provocative attempts to throw us off our game and reduce us to jabbering, human erections – by having the cheek to put on clothes that morning, no less – we blundered our way through.
It’s sad, really, that the writer of this review has such an embittered view of men that he would think, for a second, that O’Neill’s choice of clothing would have even a moment’s effect on the content of the interview.
Sad, really, that because he may have been distracted by O’Neill’s wardrobe that he clearly paid no attention to what we had to say about the attitudes of certain men towards women.
A pity that he feels that all women strategically choose their outfit purely to beguile us poor, gullible, salivating ‘young male journalists’ (I’m 37, by the way, but thanks for that) rather than wear what makes them happy in a given moment.
Saddest that, in one paragraph, neither gender is shown any respect.
But let’s not let that spoil what really was an excellent documentary from Louise O’Neill, whose defiance was augmented by such articulate and compelling women as, to name two in particular, Niamh Ní Dhomhnaill and Kate Harding.
This conversation is going, we hope, the right way.
Meanwhile, show as much shoulder as you like.
Carl gets the last word.
Get your shoulders out for @oneilllo pic.twitter.com/U5dNbFFQuX
— Carl Kinsella (@TVsCarlKinsella) November 5, 2016
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