A LITTLE over two years ago I was deeply dismayed to discover I had lost a dozen long-standing Facebook friends and a handful of real-life friends following a disagreement about so-called ‘period poverty’.
They felt that government providing free feminine hygiene products to girls and young women was a great idea; many also felt this was ‘empowering’.
I tactfully argued that to my mind this is the opposite of empowerment, it’s teaching your people to expect a handout and suffer the indignity of it, and that said products cost less than £1 in budget supermarkets.
I went on to say that when I was a teenager in the 1980s, the small number of schoolfriends I had who lived in poverty were happy to babysit, wash their neighbour’s car or take on a newspaper round for things their parents could not afford to provide for them.
According to my former friends, these opinions illustrate that I am ‘evil, uncaring, and a typical Tory’. Evidently, mollycoddling the poor and ensuring that they remain victims is the only compassionate way to go in these enlightened times we live in. Clearly the new woke meaning of ‘empowerment’ has radically changed to suit the agenda.
Fast forward to now, and I recently placed an advertisement on eight local job sites on Facebook for a dog-walker. Each site has a healthy number of members in the high 40,000s and engagement is equally healthy. I am offering a rate of pay above the minimum wage per hour for only 40 minutes and have stated that the hours are to suit the applicant.
This is day ten, and I have not received a single response. I find it incredible that in the densely populated area I live in, nobody has a friend or relative, college-age or otherwise, who wants to earn almost £100 per week for less than seven hours’ work.
On reflection, maybe I’m daft to feel incredulity following the period-poverty spats, and I just need to wake up to the painful realisation that The Long March through the Institutions is now sadly complete, and that we live in an age of entitlement, skewed expectations, and a world where emotional infantilisation has distorted words and morals to the extent that the mere suggestion of working for pocket money is now a form of cruelty. What a time to be alive.
