I am not accustomed to agreeing with Liz Jones. Her writing is definitely typical of Daily Mail writers in that it seems designed to provoke and offend, and aside from that, she just seems slightly insane.
This weekend though, she wrote an article containing something which almost resembled a good point. It was also deeply offensive, but this is Liz Jones - you’re supposed to get annoyed. Her basic argument was (I think) that the honour killings we hear so much about in countries like Turkey are similar in some ways to the way Western countries perceive and treat women. We celebrate and are obsessed with purity, and we punish those who aren’t young, virginal and beautiful.
I *do not* agree with her logic that burying your teenage daughter alive because she spoke to boys on the phone is somehow the same as 19-year-old Emma Watson earning more than Meryl Streep. Her article does make that link, which is slightly sickening – the two things are in completely different leagues. And in analysing the treatment of women in Iran and Pakistan she’s claiming to be an authority on something she must know next to nothing about.
But while the battle for equality is in no way as desperate in the UK or the US as it is in some parts of the world, I do agree that it shouldn’t make us complacent about our own faults. The teenage Watson was the highest female earner in Hollywood last year. She’s one of only two women on the list of the year’s biggest earners, and the rest are older, powerful male directors. However you look at it, this is a symptom of a society obsessed with female beauty, youth and powerlessness.
I dislike Jones’ trivialising of suffering elsewhere in the world, but somewhere in the muddle of terrible judgement and bad logic, she has a point. It’s not an original one, but it’s certainly unusual to see it in the Daily Mail.
Plus, in writing about horrific recent cases of abuse of women, she’s raising awareness of it in a paper not exactly renowned for its strong stance on women’s rights. She might be overpaid and full of crap, but even Liz Jones has a point sometimes.