Lucy Vickery

Men behaving badly

issue 21 March 2015

In Competition No. 2889 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary novel written from the perspective of a female chauvinist author.

There are man-haters everywhere, it seems, from children’s telly to high culture. Charges of sexism have been levelled against the creators of the Daddy Pig character in Peppa Pig. Daddy is portrayed as a hopeless bumbling idiot while Mummy Pig is the embodiment of good sense. And Harold Bloom argues that there is ‘a strong element’ of misandry in Shakespeare (whereas misogyny, he says, is hard to find). Commendations to Sergio Michael Petro and Sandra McGregor. The winners take £30 each; Adrian Fry gets £35.
 

Looking down at the dead girl, Detective Inspector Malmsey vowed to find her killer, the catch in his voice signifying both his self-importance at the apex of a phallocentric hierarchy and the arousal of his flaccid libido by a woman whose passivity and unreadable blankness rendered her sufficiently undemanding for sentimental objectification.

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