Polly Toynbee in the Guardian shrieks today that pink ‘Girlification’ is destroying the ‘hopes of 1968’. She cites National Statistics Office numbers as showing that "women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. This is the motherhood penalty – and the more children a woman has, the wider the gap."

Let’s put to one side the obvious point that anything which destroys the ‘hopes of 1968’ has to be strongly encouraged. Take a look instead at the NSO site under Gender Pay Gap. Polly did not share with you a couple of other points:

"The gender pay gap (as measured by the median hourly pay excluding overtime of full-time employees) narrowed between 2006 and 2007 to its lowest value since records began …

Women’s weekly earnings, including overtime, were lower than men’s. This was partly because they worked fewer paid hours per week …

Although median hourly pay provides a useful comparison between the earnings of men and women, it does not necessarily indicate differences in rates of pay for comparable jobs. Pay medians are affected by the different work patterns of men and women, such as the proportions in different occupations and their length of time in jobs."

Hmm. So, the gender pay gap is the smallest it has ever been. And if you work less you get paid less. And if you exercise the Woman’s Right to Choose and choose to have more children, you are ‘penalised’ because you do not work? And all that is a problem?

Calm down, Polly!

Polly T is right on one point, viz that pink merchandising of girly stuff is pretty ghastly. I decided to be a male feminist and ruthlessly suppress Barbie "Think Pink!" junk in my house when our daughter was born.

But imagine my bewilderment when her first Barbie doll was bought for her by one of my right-on women’s rights FCO female colleagues.

In her despair Polly T asks how it can be that lapdancing is proliferating as socially acceptable entertainment for supposedly respectable men in certain circles.

Good question.

Maybe it is proliferating because grammatically challenged feminists argue that contrary to cliched stereotypes, pole dancing and other similar dance forms are extremely empowering. It (sic) builds your self esteem and confidence in your own sexuality.

So faced with all this I have decided to ignore all feminist shrieking and saw wood instead.

Come and join me, Polly. It’s empowering.

And quite unlike feminist ambitions going back to 1968:

People love chopping wood.  In this activity one immediately sees results. Albert Einstein