I wasn’t going to talk about Thatcher, but the Daily Mail today is treating us to a spectacular trainwreck of a headline: “‘They danced in the streets when Hitler died too’: Drama teacher who organised Thatcher death parties remains unrepentant as it’s revealed she had NHS breast implants”
To which, I must admit, my first reaction was “Surely Maggie could afford to go private”.
If Daily Mail editors read more material that involved long passages of exposition talking about two people of the same gender (slash fiction for instance), they would be aware of the pitfalls of connecting the wrong subject with the wrong predicate in a sentence. Frivolity aside, though, it strikes me that this particular crash blossom is more likely to have its roots in our culture’s assumptions about who holds power rather than in the dubious reading habits of Daily Mail staff.
As a former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher may have had the “body of a weak, feeble woman”, but I rather suspect that in the minds of the Tory faithful she had “the heart and stomach of a king”. I’m not sure it even occurred to the poor sod who wrote that headline for the Mail that Thatcher, too, had breasts.
I may be reading too much into this, but I do think it illustrates quite nicely that for many in our society those in power and those with female bodies are still two very separate groups of people.