New Staggers Blogger Staggers in First Week

I think the New Statesman may be regretting its decision to hire a new blogger, Laurie Penny, who also writes the Penny Red blog. Today she posted a blogpost on the NS site which was in about the worst possible taste bearing in mind the events in Cumbria. Within an hour of it appearing, the NS web people pulled it, although the stub still appears. I won't reprint the whole thing, but what kind blogger thinks it OK to write this sort of crap at this particular time?

As a morose-looking sort of person, I regularly get instructed to smile by strange men in the street, and without wishing to criticise men’s indisputable right to pass public judgement on absolutely any woman’s appearance and demeanour, after a hard day too much of that sort of thing makes even the gentlest soul long to execute the scumbags with a great big gun.

Now there’s a videogame that lets you play out that fantasy.

The makers of Hey Baby have created an urban street simulation from the point of view of a woman walking home in the evening. As you shoot badly animated harassers to tiny, twitching pieces, headstones appear displaying their obnoxious comments. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it is cathartic...

“It’s definitely not feminist to fantasise about shooting men,” said Ellie Levenson, author of The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism, “although I can imagine it might be quite satisfying sometimes.”

"The game isn’t about mowing down men. It’s about male privilege, and how male privilege feels," said author and games critic Kieron Gillan. "

What if women, too, had bad thoughts and private daydreams too transgressive for polite society? What if we wanted to take bloody revenge on our oppressors? What if we wanted money, status and power? What if we wanted to create fear and havoc? What if we wanted to rule the world?

I have to admit that I have never been able to relate to the extreme feminist mindset - there's a surprise for you. And this sort of writing makes me glad. It seems rather sick to me.

UPDATE: She has rewritten the post to take account of the "insensitive" nature of the original. Good. Laurie Penny is a talented writer and I often enjoy her blogposts, but I think she will admit she went too far with this. I am sure she will do very well on the NS blog in the long term.