It's not easy being a middle-aged man these days. True, Alexander Carter-Silk's heavy-handed compliment to Charlotte Proudman about her LinkedIn photo was cringe-making. ("I appreciate this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture!!!") But did it really justify Miss Proudman's furiously indignant response, denouncing the message as "unacceptable and misogynist" and then posting the whole exchange on Twitter?
If the chap had done his homework, said Rachel Johnson in the Mail on Sunday, he'd have known this was a young barrister who self-identifies as a "#fearlessfeminist". Still, if she didn't want to be judged by her looks, why put up that pouting picture in the first place? And what about the comments like "oooooh la la la" and "hot stuff" she herself has made about sundry young men on Facebook? What Carter-Silk forgot, says Johnson, is that "hell hath no fury like a #fearlessfeminist complimented". He fails to understand "it is now haram for a man to comment on a female's appearance in any work context".
Equally at a loss last week was Jos Mourinho, or "poor Jos Mourinho", as India Knight called him in The Sunday Times. Setting off for the GQ Men of the Year party, he "sweetly" takes along his 18-year-old daughter, Matilde. Matilde "is wearing two grand's worth of velvet tuxedo dress by Balmain. Unfortunately the dress is crotchless and its neckline goes down to the belly button, which also means she isn't wearing a bra."
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Photos of the couple are a "masterpiece of the Mortified Dad" genre, says Knight, imagining the pre-party scene. "You, young lady, are not going out dressed like that.' Eye-roll. Wrong. I am 18 and I can wear what I like.'" The whole what-should-girls wear thing has become "an absolute nightmare": Mourinho may be handsome and rich, but when his own daughter goes out "bra-less" there's "diddly-squat" he can do about it.
Most parents of teenage girls face similar problems, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. Indeed, for some it's a struggle to stop their daughters "going out the front door on a Saturday night looking like the keenest new employee at the Den'o'Vice brothel". Nor are matters helped by the "highly sexualised world of pop and celebrity", which has "skewered teenage perspective on what is, and is not appropriate to wear". Moir quotes with approval the former Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, who says some of today's more outrageous female pop stars are like "sex workers" because they sell their music "bumping and grinding".
All this, of course, is a world away from Charlotte Proudman and that dreary little picture on LinkedIn. And yet, as Rachel Johnson says, in a way it's all part of a pattern. "I'm not surprised older men get things wrong." These days younger women give off such mixed messages that most men don't have the "first clue" what's appropriate or inappropriate.
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The Apprentice
Comic Relief Does The Apprentice
Sugar also reveals that he was BBC entertainment boss Jane Lush's third choice for The Apprentice job after Sir Philip Green and easyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou. "I was down the pecking order on her list something she would totally deny now, preferring to accept the plaudits for her brilliance in spotting Sir Alan Sugar."
"At 51, Fiona Bruce has worked all her life for the BBC and has complained to the council that a planned flat development will affect the peace and tranquillity she craves in her £8m home in Hampstead," says Kelvin MacKenzie in The Sun. "Somebody told me that the Today presenter John Humphrys has a £3m home in Chiswick's grandest square, plus a farm (as you do) in Wales. I'm sure other members of the BBC news team are doing as well Since you go to jail if you don't pay the licence fee, did you ever think your hard-earned money would go to buy such grand houses for employees of the state broadcaster?"
"A food bank has started a delivery service because users are too ashamed to come and pick up the groceries themselves," says Katie Hopkins in The Sun. "They can order supplies by phone and volunteers from the centre, in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, will drive them to their door, saving them the irritating problem of actually having to do anything..."
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