Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 4.5% (59 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 13.5% (179 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 1.5% (20 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 0%
• Framing Effect - 26.7% (354 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

Article text

Nature worship can be lethal for women

Nature worship is a weird thing – especially in women.

You can perhaps understand what was appealing about a pre-industrial set-up for men, though I’m sure, as a die-hard modernist, I would find it unattractive no matter what sex I was.

As for ‘rewilding’ fans of both sexes – have they not seen *Jurassic Park*?

No doubt lulled into a false sense of security by the ghastly yammering on about the wonders of it in *The Archers*, according to a YouGov poll, a third of Britons would like to see wolves and lynxes reintroduced to the countryside, while a crazed quarter of us would like to see brown bears strolling around.

I wonder how they’ll feel when this exotic trio starts snacking on the family pet?

Thank goodness for the bloody-minded farmers, who make up the main pressure group against such insanity.

Similarly, in a female environmentalist, we see Gad Saad’s idea of ‘suicidal empathy’ gone gaga.

What was this other Eden like, before we ladies were dragged into the dark satanic mills?

The age of consent for sex for girls was 10; for marriage, 12.

Sex outside of marriage was forbidden, and when it happened, it was the unfortunate female who became an outcast.

Death in childbirth was common, ditto child mortality.

Women who chose to live without male protection were thought of as ‘witches’ – and being a ‘witch’ in those days wasn’t a giggle that got you loads of likes on Insta.

As *Vogue* put it in a hilariously po-faced piece a few years back:

*‘Being witchy is now something to aspire to.

“There is something incredibly empowering about people telling me I look like a witch”, says Daisy Hoppen, the founder of PR agency DH-PR, whose long black hair reaches to her hips and neatly partners a uniform known to Gen-Z TikTokers as Witchcore: black dresses, lace tights and black boots…’*

‘It’s easy to be cynical’, comments Vogue.

Indeed it is!

But not, apparently, if you’re a half-wit who saw *The Wicker Man* at an impressionable age and believes that pre-industrial rural life was one long romp.

You might have been better off reading the novels of Thomas Hardy to get a picture of the vale of tears that pre-industrial sex was for women.

Pregnancy could be lethal in so many ways that it seems incredible that the idea of ‘natural’ birth has such a hold over the modern NHS.

I’m not one for screeching ‘Sexism!’

at any bad thing any woman experiences, but would a man be asked to have, say, a prostate operation without an anaesthetic?

Would a cancer patient be treated by the NHS with homeopathy rather than the harshest, most aggressive drugs available?

But childbirth only happens to women, and since nature is so wonderful, females should embrace their inner goddess, squat and get on with it.

Of all the terrible stories that have been emerging from midwife Donna Ockenden’s reviews into NHS maternity services – the most recent of which looked at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust – the one I found the saddest was the woman denied medical intervention when she went into labour at home.

She was told that this would break ‘the oxytocin bubble’ which she and her imminent baby were forming in order to bond.

Her baby died, like so many others, so the ‘oxytocin bubble’ was neither here nor there, as it turned out.

Something needs to be done.

For a start, the weird crusade against Caesarean births must come to an end.

As Zoe Strimpel wrote of hers in the *Telegraph*:

*‘Why do we as a culture, from the NHS to women, continue to give the “natural” birth such clout and legitimacy?

When we’ve transitioned to so many other medicalised, safer technologies, the stigma and reluctance around the safe, pleasant, non-traumatic route of the Western medical C-section blows my mind.

I remember, when pregnant, reading a major study about how babies born to mothers who were relaxed and not in a traumatic situation ended up being calmer human beings.

Sharing in your mother's harrowing trial may not always be the best start to life.’

*

Treating women’s bodies as things that should be at the whim of nature – unlike men’s, which may be mastered by their owners – isn’t all at the level of the NHS maternity tragedy.

It can be merely irritating, but it still all adds up to a very unhealthy and somewhat sinister trend.

The modern obsession with bringing the private biological lives of women into the spotlight may have started out with the well-meaning intention of ending fear and ignorance, but it’s turning into something of an undignified circus.

A friend who works in the NHS found a ‘menopause suggestions’ box in the staff room asking for ideas about what to talk about in the quarterly menopause meeting, in which they read aloud things famous people had said about how positive menopause could be.

‘Get your nose out of my ovaries’ would have been my suggestion.

Of course, commercial concerns are never slow to see the chance to make a buck out of women who may be feeling the brunt of their biology.

Sanex has produced a perimenopausal body wash, doubtless full of special ingredients that will stop your hag-like skin from peeling off now that nature has finished with you, you dried-up old husk!

And now the Greens have got in on the act by proposing an extra 36 days of ‘menstrual leave’ for ‘all workers who menstruate’ – they won’t even say women.

As with their self-immolating alliance with ultra-conservative Islamism, it’s a contradiction bordering on the surreal for a Green to go along with the trans con, as Mother Nature, the cruel old cow, certainly knows what a woman is.

This public dissection of what used to be called ‘women’s troubles’ is totally in line with the idea of letting men use female public toilets – it disregards any desire for privacy, especially in the case of self-conscious young girls.

A friend brought up by a hippie mother still cringes at the memory of her first period, which was celebrated en masse while she straddled a ‘mystic’ stream.

‘Down There’ was how my mum used to refer ominously to my nether regions, and while I have no desire to return to overly prudish attitudes to sex organs, do we really need to be drawn a diagram at the least excuse?

It was started by the maddest bit of feminism, like the 1973 book *Our Bodies, Ourselves*, which advised us to get hold of a mirror and a torch and give ourselves a good old gawp at our vaginas, inside and out.

Never one to be outdone, Germaine Greer had suggested in 1970’s *The Female Eunuch* that we have a taste of our menstrual blood – ooh, a cheeky little vintage!

Fifty years on, it all just seems like a ruder form of navel-gazing.

Andrea Dworkin once said that, while the right believes that women are private property, the left believes they’re public property.

Neither is acceptable, and I was pleased to see Reform UK get trounced in Makerfield after the candidate talked trash about my sex.

But the misogyny of the left is craftier and shapeshifting, and the Greens have done a great job of conning young women in particular that ‘progressive’ thinkers have their best interests at heart.

More than 40 per cent of women under 25 are believed to be under the spell of the Tit Whisperer.

Hopefully, as they see more of life, they’ll realise that, as Lord Henry Wotton remarks in *The Picture of Dorian Gray*: ‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.’

But when it intrudes on matters of life and death, it can also be the most lethal.

**Julie Burchill** is a *spiked* columnist.

Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.