What do you call a pop diva whose demands (allegedly) include the following when she’s on tour?
- All crew members have to wear 100% cotton.
- Alkaline water must be chilled to 21 degrees and served with $900 titanium straws.
- Bathrooms must have new toilet seats and red toilet paper at every venue.
- Hand-carved ice balls should be made after each show to cool her throat.
Well I think I know what I’d call Beyonce and it begins with a “B”.
But the word isn’t “bossy” obviously because that would be offensive and demeaning. So offensive and demeaning, in fact, that Beyonce wants it banned. And until it is she’s going to stamp and scream and kick her little feet and call the President at 3am and sack every male member of her entourage (or at least have them castrated) and nuke Texas and annexe the Crimea because, damn it, she’s not bossy herself at all, she’s just a strong, empowered, assertive woman in a patriarchal world of oppressive male sexism, is all.
Beyonce is being supported in the #banbossy campaign by similarly shy, retiring wallflowers including Sheryl Sandberg (that bosspants woman who runs Facebook) and Jennifer Garner (Mrs Ben Affleck) and, mysteriously – for she surely ought to know better than engage in cultural Marxist assaults on our language – Condoleezza Rice.
You may gather that I’m somewhat unconvinced by this campaign – and you’d be right. As I discuss in more detail in my latest Radio Free Delingpole podcast (with Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist) the reason girls are called “bossy” is because so many of them are bossy.
This politically correct campaign is as misguided as all those similarly well-meaning campaigns to rebrand disability with supposedly more attractive euphemisms. Calling someone “differently abled” does not make him less of a cripple.
Also, like so many of the left’s assaults on our language, it denies human nature. Women tend towards bossiness because they were designed that way. You see this tendency developing from a very early age.
Certainly, as soon as my daughter was old enough to express herself (from 18 months, maybe) she instantly began trying to boss me around. As a male, I recognised that this was entirely proper. That’s because without women to boss us around and keep us in order, we men would be rudderless, aimless and useless.
It’s women that keep our households in order; women (cf Lady Macbeth) who drive us forward in our careers; women who remind us to pack our passports before we go on business trips.
Without women’s bossiness the world would quickly fall apart. So get over it, girls. You’re the boss but let’s not kid ourselves you’re not bossy.