By Jess McCabe | 15 January 2008, 22:04

I was inspired to do another round-up post on the excesses of the Daily Mail’s ‘Femail’ section by this story by a self-confessed ‘female chauvinist pig’.

While Angela Epstein sheepishly recognises that what she calls “my latent male chauvinism” is not a good thing, she is unapologetic. Some choice quotes:

With a female pilot at the helm, my husband immediately made some comment about women drivers before returning to his crossword.

I, on the other hand, felt uncomfortable and found it hard to relax for the rest of the flight. All I could think about was this young woman - well, she sounded young - cradling 200 lives in the palm of her hand.

Of Hillary Clinton:

Could it be that Mrs Clinton’s mannish trouser suits and selfaggrandising, policy-driven speeches smack of the masculine touch - and what heterosexual woman wants fake machismo in power?

Of French president Nicholas Sarkozy:

Sarkozy’s tough take on social reform (along with his ability to bag a former supermodel) reeks of the kind of testosterone-fuelled power that makes a female electorate swoon.

And on her own daughter (whose attitudes have nothing to do with being brought up by this pair, of course!):

My chauvinistic feelings may be sourced in the fact that every girl inherits the princess gene which dictates her desire for a strong male role model to cosset and comfort her.

I see it in my three-year-old daughter who runs to her older brothers or her daddy when a dog barks at her in the park. She trusts them more than me to protect her.

Although this is probably the most woman-hating of everything published in Femail recently, as usual, it is not an isolated incident. We also have this story about how long fringes are “putting lives at risk”.

The reason? In a survey of 1,000 female drivers, 1% - that’s 10 women to you and me - “admitted they had had an accident or a near-miss or made a sudden manoeuvre after their vision was impaired by their hair”.

Of course, most people wouldn’t think that 10 ‘sudden manoeuvres’ merited coverage in a national newspaper, but if there’s a ‘women are flippant creatures, why are they allowed on the road anyway’ angle to be had, you can be sure the Mail will seize on it! You might be interested to know that there were over a quarter of a million road casualties in the UK in 2006. But we are concerned with 10 women women who didn’t have an accident. Great reporting, second best-selling paper in the UK!

And, no, this isn’t made up for by a sensible and interesting piece in which newsreader Selina Scott identifies how female presenters get dropped when they get older, while their male colleagues carry on broadcasting well into their grayer years.

So often you seen people coming through the system without a strong journliastic background, who haven’t covered a wide range of stories

Photo by marimoon, shared under a Creative Commons license