Originally published December 21, 2017.
Today I made a batch of Anzac biscuits.
I looked up a recipe online, and read the blurb without really thinking. It was all about how in WW1 women baked these Anzac biscuits and sent them off in care packages for their men at the front. I was in the kitchen setting out ingredients before I connected the dots of what I had just read, and began laughing.
Here’s the paragraph, by Rebecca Varidel, for SBS Food. See if you can spot the joke:
“While, thankfully, home baking is now more egalitarian and enjoyed by both sexes, at the time of World War 1, making biscuits was part of a woman’s home duties. Shipping biscuits to the soldiers overseas as part of “care” packages was seen as part of a woman’s role in supporting the war effort.”
Do you get it? Read very closely. In the bad old days, men went to war, and women dutifully baked biscuits for them. Thankfully, in our enlightened modern age, although men still go to war, women are no longer expected to bake them biscuits. Much better.
It’s almost as good as Hillary Clinton claiming that women are the primary victims of war.
Of course, I realise that this was an off-hand remark. Rebecca Varidel probably had her mind on delicious Anzac biscuits, and didn’t realise what she’d just said. However, why not judge her on the Feminist Law of Microaggressions? According to SJWs, an act of microaggression, while small in itself, betrays an underlying and problematic attitude, and I find this toxic feminism very problematic. In fact, I’m offended. On behalf of every member of the human race who has ever existed. That multiplies my personal offence by billions, so you know it’s important.
It’s not women who are expected to go to war. It’s not women who take on the dangerous, dirty and generally undesirable jobs. It’s men. It was that way in WW1, and it’s still that way today. Men are still the ones expected to step up to bat when we need some unpleasant violence performed on our behalf, but “thankfully” in this enlightened age, they can bake their own biscuits too. Why do we need to show them any appreciation at all? That’s totally sexist.
They can make their own biscuits. We don’t owe them a thing.
Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle.
This, boys and girls, is why I am not a feminist.
Also, the biscuits turned out great.
