Georgia flynn

While marching aimlessly on a treadmill last night,  I had the dubious pleasure of watching a  Today Tonight segment posing a typically hyperbolic question: ‘is beauty really a curse?’.

For those uninitiated into the ways of Australian television, each evening the three commercial channels battle it out in a Hunger Games-style race to the depths of journalistic depravity. So, to be honest, there is something inelegant about critiquing the journalistic integrity of Today Tonight.  It’s kind of like quibbling about the quality of your Big Mac.  But, sometimes, even Today Tonight outdoes itself and broadcasts a segment so irksome that there is no option but to compose an outraged, shouty sort of blog post about it.

The single most frustrating aspect of this segment was that the central question was not invalid.  There is probably some value in reflecting upon the way in which women perceive other women, and way that dispelling a socially ordained sense of sexual competition would be in all our interests (if only to avoid what Madeleine Albright described in 2006  as the ‘special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’