Victims & Pronouns

Two recent news stories have rattled my cage, both of them examples of the distorting lens provided by woke media bias.

One: I find it offensive to genuine victims of sexual abuse to refer to the women associated with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as ‘victims of abuse’ when most of them were in their twenties at the time of the relevant events and were what a previous age would have referred to as ‘courtesans’, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as ‘a prostitute or paramour, esp. one associating with noblemen or men of wealth’.

Two: I find it offensive to women in general to refer to the Canadian high-school shooter as ‘she’ when the attack was actually carried out by a biological male who merely self-identified as female.

And another thing…

Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s comment that the UK has been ‘colonised by immigrants’ has been roundly denounced by almost everyone except those on the so-called far right. Personally I find the comment fair and reasonable. Granted, the word ‘colonise’ brings with it certain inappropriate and unfortunate historical connotations, but it could be argued that the word is being used here with its secondary apolitical meaning of ‘to migrate to and settle in (a place), usually in large numbers’.

Coincidentally, I’ve noticed that in recent TV shows featuring members of the British public (The Apprentice, Traitors, Deal Or No Deal) approximately two-thirds of those participating might be described as non-white. Twenty or thirty years ago I imagine the proportions would have been quite different, with perhaps two-thirds of participants being described as white. An unscientific test no doubt, but one that’s surely indicative of current demographic trends.