Calm Down, Dear; You're Being 'Butch'
Apparently conservatives the world over are unmitigated assholes...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/world/europe/26iht-letter26.html?_r=1
Eighteen months have passed since the “calm down, dear” moment, but Mr. Cameron has failed to live it down. At the time, Labour asked for an apology and described his words as “sexist, insulting and patronizing.” Subsequently, the put-down has encapsulated for many the party’s nagging problem with retaining female voters.
A poll showing declining support for the government’s policies on women, published by The Evening Standard last week, revealed that the proportion of voters who consider the Conservatives the best party to look after women’s interests has dropped to 12 percent from 20 percent since 2010, and the analysis pointed to the “calm down, dear” comment as persistently damaging.
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“The number of women who have lost their jobs under the government’s cuts has been twice that of men, and the statistics out today show that the number of female redundancies has been rising over the last few months,” the Labour politician Chris Bryant told the prime minister at the next question time session. “In addition, we now have nine departments with not a single woman minister. Now, I know the prime minister likes to think of himself as butch ... but what has he got against women?”
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Still, some older politicians have had difficulties adjusting to the arrival of new female members. The young Labour politician Stella Creasy was asked to get out of an elevator reserved for members by an older (Conservative) politician who assumed she was an office assistant. In this context, the suggestion — however fleeting — by the prime minister that leadership is about being alpha-male has gone down badly.
