Magic Statistics

Peter Jenkins, newly independent MLA for the Klondike riding, gave an interview to the local CBC radio station earlier this week. The topic was supposed to be Mr Jenkins’s legal problems arising from his unpaid $300,000 business loan, but he got away from that ASAP. He told the CBC reporter that his business, a hotel in Dawson City, had gone south because of the government’s mismanagement of the economy. (Note: This was the government in which Mr Jenkins occupied a cabinet post until a week before.) Then he let loose with one of the most comical howlers ever heard around these parts. Here’s the excerpt from the interview:

REPORTER: How much would your hotel be worth?

JENKINS: I have not a clue. If it’s on a going concern basis there’s one hotel already up for sale in Dawson City and it’s been on the market now for about five years. It has no market value. The market is very seriously depressed and the visitor industry has been going backwards since 1998 across the whole Yukon. I guess you can refer to the Yukon economy as what I’ve been told it’s now called a wonder bra economy, no visible means of support.

The reporter can’t believe his ears.

REPORTER: Sorry, you said wonder bra?

JENKINS: Economy.

The reporter still can’t believe his ears.

REPORTER: Just to be clear?

JENKINS: Yes. No visible -.

The reporter finally regains his composure.

REPORTER: Do you think that’s a fair description of the economy?

The transcript of that CBC interview isn’t available online, but the Whitehorse Star led off its report on the interview with: "The Yukon is currently living in a 'Wonder Bra economy,' says Klondike MLA Peter Jenkins." That link is, unfortunately behind a subscriber wall. The story was the newspaper's print edition of Wednesday, 7 December, under the byline of Julia Skikavich.

Mr Jenkins’s phrase "what I’ve been told it’s now called" is, as far as I know, bogus. I’ve been living here over seventeen years, and I’ve never heard anyone say anything that dim-witted. (But maybe I don’t hang with politicians enough.)

And it's being led by women who were on the leading edge of feminism back in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Sweden, for years the poster country for equality between the sexes, a new feminist party gained enormous momentum last year by objecting to the increase in violence against women and the gap between women's and men's salaries. This autumn, however, the feminist initiative fell into disarray after the movement embarked on a radical direction, rendering negative feelings that some have dubbed an antifeminist backlash. [hyperlink added]

A similar backlash has now hit neighboring Denmark, too. Denmark is one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, where paternal leave is becoming increasingly popular and 75 percent of women have jobs. Yet in a new book, 12 prominent and influential women - artists, intellectuals and politicians - from the golden age of feminism in the '60s and '70s wonder whether gender-equality has gone too far. The women interviewed in What Life Has Taught Me, by Ninka-Bernadette Mauritson warn against "totalitarian feminism," which they think might wreck harmony between the sexes: Men need to be men and women, women, they now say. Some of the women regret their earlier militant insistence that men should be soft and sensitive and want back the prefeminist "real man."

A good life is a life with a man who is unabashedly a man, according to this group of feminists born around 1945.

Their generation spent their 20s burning bras, dumping high heels and crashing buses while paying only 80 percent of the fare - since women were paid less then. Now they say they want men with broad-shouldered attitudes, men who can admire them and whom they can look up to - even from the high heels that are back in vogue.

"Golden age of feminism?" Not so golden now, is it?

via ¡No Pasaràn!