Sam de Brito’s All men are liars column gives me the shits. It’s tired, it’s predictable, and it’s very clearly women-hating.
Today’s unsurprising offering in the Sun Herald is called Absolutely fatuous. Not sure if that’s referring to women, or to de Brito.
How’s this for a theory? The more obsessed a woman is with clothes, shoes and handbags, the more utterly barren her interior life.
This is going to be fun.
This is not to suggest all fashionably dressed chicks are completely vacuous – but what he means is, they probably are – or that conspicuous consumers of womens clothing cannot be “‘spiritual” in a yoga-class, lighting-candles-for-their-dead-nana, feng-shui kind of way – which means if you go to yoga, miss your grandmother and believe in ancient Chinese spirituality, then you’re an idiot with no spiritual life.
See, Sam’s read about Avis Cardella, a former fashion editor who wrote Spent, memoirs of a shopping addict, and figured he’d add it to his anti-women armoury. He uses an example of just one woman who shopped to take her mind off her life, to dismiss all women as “absolutely fatuous”.
And while pissing on his column is too easy, I’m going to do it anyway.
But is it possible to have one’s moral compass in working order and spend $2500 on a handbag or own 100 pairs of shoes?
Does this apply to a bloke who owns a $2500 bbq? I doubt it. Because that would be an essential item, right? Rather than buying one from Kmart that does the job.
Can you make a worthwhile contribution to humankind if you waste half your life glomming over “what people are wearing” photo spreads and heeding the utterances of Anna Wintour or Garance Dore?
Bwah har har, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: Does this mean his All men are liars column is a worthwhile contribution to humankind?
Sam de Brito thinks all women are the same, and that’s what I have a problem with. (At least he seems to have stopped calling himself a feminist.) I know fashion editors who make monthly contributions to Médecins Sans Frontières. I know women who love shoes and also sponsor children through World Vision. I know women who won’t leave the house without a full face of make up, but who volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And just as de Brito uses one example to “prove” his point, I can use several to disprove it.
He then shows his elitist mentality by calling men who buy sporting memorabilia “truly sad members of my gender” and writes:
These are men so terrified of the void at their heart they fill it with statistics and arguments over who was the greatest goal kicker of the 1990s.
That’s one way of looking at it. The other way is seeing fans for what they really are: people who are really passionate about something. Is he really saying that having passion in your life makes you a spiritual vacuum? I hate sport, but I’d rather hang out a rugby league fanatic than with someone whose head is so far up his own arse he couldn’t smell a fart in a car.
Yes, there are many gals – gals? Who actually uses that word? – who know their designers and lead fruitful, productive lives, but I’m talking about the type of woman who actually believes owning a pair of hot pants and knee-high socks before anyone else will bring them happiness.
I challenge anyone to find someone who believes that being the first to own these things brings happiness.
He then says women with a “compulsive desire to shop” are simply “self-involved”. So, does this apply to anyone who does something compulsively, like, say, wash their hands, or is it just women who do things that Sam de Brito doesn’t approve of?
He then says something or other about dresses and shoes not being feminine, but I couldn’t be arsed working it out.
Oh, and I think he compulsively Googles himself, because “Sam de Brito” turns up in my search terms almost every freakin’ day. How embarrassing.
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