This is a piece I wrote for work experience in college a few months ago.
Over the last few weeks, political correctness has taken a turn for madness. Andy Gray and Richard Keys lost their jobs last week for 'sexist' remarks made off-camera about the female linesman, Sian Massey. They were sacked for a harmless jibe.
'In all fairness, women don't know the offside rule.' That's the kind of quip men make to each other when watching sport. Banter like that happens all the time, outside of sport too, between both genders.
Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson makes plenty of jibes about the ineptitude of women drivers. He has yet to be sacked by the BBC. There's an entire TV show, 'Loose Women' dedicated to women talking about how stupid men are. It hasn't been cancelled.
So where is the line drawn? It's not okay to say women don't understand the vaguest rule in football (some referees have yet to fully grasp it) but it's okay to say they can't even drive a car? Obviously, if this is the way, there can't be a line, only different levels of tolerance.
The sexism argument is dominated by those with the thinnest skin, they shout above the other voices and take centre stage. This is where it is taken too far: when people get offended by the slightest remark. And when it is taken too far we go into the territory of ultra feminism or ultra masculism. And either of these mean that anything anyone says about the opposite gender can be considered as sexual harassment. Society can't work that way, there is a fundamental flaw in that logic whereby an alternative opinion becomes a criminal offence. It's insane.
What's really interesting, about the latest instalment of the gender-equality debate, is the hypocrisy of those who have fuelled it. The Sun, Karen Brady and Sky Sports have all condemned what Gray and Keys said. So if the Sun is anti-sexism, then their page-3 girls were hired for their expert opinion on current affairs. Karen Brady must agree because she writes in the Sun and her columns, fighting for women to be taken seriously in the business world, would lose credibility if that were not the case. And the 'Soccerettes' of Sky Sports must obviously be brilliant football analysts.
If the sexism argument was looked at through androgynous eyes, it would appear as ideology. Men and women are simply too different to treat each other as entirely equal. That isn't the only flaw in the argument, the people that argue it with the most venom are not innocent of sexism or double-standards and there is not a clear line between what's sexist and what isn't.
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