Mumsnet & Happy Hookers

By Claire of Bristol

Taken from http://bbwclaire.wordpress.com

I have been visiting Mumsnet again. I really shouldn’t go there so often because they’re guaranteed to get my blood boiling – but it’s a little bit …well, like picking at a scab, I suppose. You know you shouldn’t, it’s going to bleed, it will probably be painful and you’ll have to wait for it to heal all over again. But you still do it.

I have always known that I think rather more like a man than a woman on many subjects. I relate to men and usually have a fair understanding of their feelings, attitudes and reactions, whereas women often leave me completely lost for words, scratching my head and looking like Stan Laurel after Ollie’s dropped him in the doo-doos again. Visiting Mumsnet has reaffirmed that belief considerably. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that most women are mental.

Specifically, there is a poster there using the name ‘Dittany’. I reckon she ought to shorten it to ‘Ditto’, to be honest, since I’m convinced she has her argument against prostitution saved as a Word Document and simply employs the old ‘cut n’ paste’ technique when she wants to weigh in with an opinion! The shorthand version of her oft-repeated diatribe is that men who use sex-workers are rapists, and women who choose to be sex-workers have been so subjugated that they don’t know any better. When presented with the question ‘Am I only allowed to make my own decisions if they are the same as those that you would choose to make for me’? she goes strangely quiet…

What offends me the most is that in essence, her argument hangs on the belief that anyone who disagrees with her must be inherently stupid and cannot decide for themselves whether or not they are happy. This, rather naturally, grates on me a bit.

I am not stupid, nor blinkered. I know without a shadow of a doubt that there are some f**king awful things happening out there to women who are for whatever reason unable or unwilling to prevent what is done to them. But to assume that because it happens to some it is happening to all, is as ridiculous as it would be to believe that because some people dislike bananas, all people dislike bananas.

I am 37 years old and I have enough life experience under my belt to know when I am happy. It may not please these women to acknowledge the existence of the Happy Hooker but I’m here, I’m happy, and I’m going to keep on hooking as long as that’s true.

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• Mumsnet isn’t representative of the ‘squeezed middle’. It’s just a bunch of Guardian-reading, laptop-wielding harpies (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)