The Glow of the Patriarchy
March 16, 2016
Via Tim Blair, who has an eye for these things, some momentous news from the land down under:
A Yarra councillor wants to see more ‘green and red lady’ pedestrian signals installed across the inner city to promote gender equality.
Well, obviously. It’s what your taxes are for.
Yarra Council announced yesterday the silhouette of a woman would be installed at a new pedestrian crossing in Richmond. Greens Councillor Misha Coleman said the initiative was a “unique and rare” way to display gender equity and she would like to see Yarra known for its ‘green lady’ signals. “I’m a mother of two young children and we always talk about waiting for the ‘green man’,” Councillor Coleman said. “From when kids are young enough to walk they are given an instruction by a man and it has never occurred to any of us that that is inherently so biased.”
The suitably empowering and bias-free signal can be beheld here. Apparently, it depicts Mary Rogers, the second woman in Australia elected to local government, circa 1920. And clearly it’s a vast improvement over the heinously oppressive stick figure previously in use, and which no doubt crushed the spirits of small girls across Australia and steered them towards lives of grinding gender conformity.
After attending several International Women’s Day functions, Councillor Coleman said women were “blown away” by the ‘green lady’ initiative. “I think the main reason was because ‘why didn’t we think of that before and why have we accepted [that] the man tells us whether to walk or not’,” she said.
Those of you picturing aggrieved feminists expressing their defiance of the luminously oppressive male silhouette by randomly blundering into the road - and into oncoming traffic - are very bad people.