Fiona Bruce Misses The Point

WARNING TO TIME-WASTERS - NO ADULT CONTENT BELOW.

If you think there are pictures of Ms Bruce here, you were misinformed. Blame Google.

Dear old Fiona Bruce.
 She spends 40 years looking down on the world from her stillettoes, and eventually comes to the reasonable feminist conclusion that every woman will have been sexually molested by the time she reaches 50. And apart from the also reasonable suggestion that the offenders be made to bite off their own testarossas, her solution is that women should be forever vigilant against this ever-present threat. Which again sounds reasonable enough, if a decade or three too late. Her book, published today, seems to be crammed with sensible Girl-Guide notes on how to not be robbed, swindled, forgotten, attacked or killed. Don't forget your keys, girls! In other words, on how to be as sassy, sorry 'Savvy' as she obviously is.
One bi-product of co-writing this book has apparently been to raise her awareness of the extent of casual, mundane, everyday, Carry-On style sexual assault. The disgusting, traumatising sort of event which women are supposed to laugh off.
As most women know, this is a universal experience, and therefore as a co-incidental guest on today's 'Wright Stuff', Fiona was part of a bemused panel which found that almost every woman in the studio had been molested at least once, and she which was forced to ask over and over:

'Why do they do it? Why do men feel they have the right to molest women in the street'

without anyone pointing out that women are perpetually offered for mental molestation on every street corner, almost always by depictions of women in the style of Fiona Bruce or Shobna Gulati.
There was even some loose talk about a campaign of sorts. Posters were mentioned, but only as a means of countering this menace, and not as part of the problem. Not one member of this highly savvy gathering of media folk were able to make the connection between the landscape of drooling, open-crotch posters, and videos of submissive women offering themselves for the price of a bar of chocolate, and the reasonable assumption on the part of the molestor that if women in general go along with the spirit of this transaction, then sex is a commodity which men are entitled to on demand. As the savvy young lady in the underwear promises:

'Christmas Kisses Guaranteed.'

 Any sort of campaign must take account of the fact that advertising does work, no matter what the advertising industry says, and that the image it regularly conveys of women is of being sexually available and vulnerable. Sexually desperate and vulnerable men will believe this applies to all women. But that would mean taking on the advertising industry and all the industries it pimps for. And what are the chances of that from people like Fiona Bruce and Matthew Wright, who have so much to lose?
The enemy of women is the money market which uses their bodies to empty shelves. Which creates the 48 sheet posters of them for mental molestation on every street corner.
The media classes seem totally unable to make the connection between their marketing of sex on demand, and the inevitable, resultant demand for sex. Which is not sex at all, but politics at its most basic level.
This of course is not the same as saying that all men will react that way - the gross Strawman argument of Dan Leslie and her mates at the Daily Wail, but some certainly will, and do. And some will take the next leap from groping on tube trains to serious sexual and physical assault. The reason why such 48-sheet porn should be taboo is therefore the same reason we regulate gun use.
In the meantime, the other effect of using sex to sell drain cleaner is to degrade women in general. To make them a bit less human. Which makes criminal assaults and abuse even more likely, but which also makes the law less likely to protect women in the first place, if laws define the acceptable norms of social behaviour.
So what we are seeing in Fiona's misgivings, and the findings of today's UN report on sexual harassment is a retreat from feminism and the triumph of the commercialisation of women. Too little feminism, not too much.