Woke activists and media only care about ‘victims’ who suit their agenda
Real victims don’t get a woke campaigning hashtag
The lifeblood of both news media and social media now appears to be permanent outrage verging on hysteria. This fire is constantly looking for new fuel to keep it going and ignite new sparks. On Friday 17th December Jeremy Clarkson provided such fuel with his Sun column in which he said he ‘hated’ Meghan Markle and that he dreamt about her parading ‘naked through the streets of every town in Britain.’ The outrage burns on, provoking endless discussions about misogyny and calls for Clarkson to be cancelled from working on all media platforms. In contrast another media story about another woman, whose victimhood is not a matter of debate, made the news without a scintilla of the impact of Clarkson’s ‘naked Meghan dream”. On 9th January the inquest into the death of Beth Matthews, a young woman who died in a secure psychiatric hospital last March made it into the news. In the following days the shocking failings in her care were exposed and the jury ruled last week that she had died from ‘suicide contributed to by neglect.’ As a patient with suicidal ideation all Beth’s post should have been opened and checked before it reached her hands. However she not only managed to order poison online but open the parcel containing it and swallow enough to end her life. It was also revealed that two other young women, Deseree Fitzpatrick and Lauren Bridges, had also died due to medical negligence in the same hospital ward that year. The news media ripple created by the death of these three women was swamped by the tsunami provoked by Jeremy Clarkson insulting one highly privileged woman.
Meghan Markle is the ultimate woke ‘victim’, the poster model for female oppression woke feminists can’t get enough of. All their newspaper articles, tweets and other social media posts are saturated with Meghan grievance, alongside a fixation on other famous female ‘victims’ like Amber Heard, Brittney Spears and even Princess Diana. Dr Charlotte Proudman, a barrister and Cambridge academic tweeted, ‘I stand with Megan Thee Stallion, Amber Heard, Meghan Markle, Princess Diana, Caroline Flack, Whitney Houston, Taylor Swift, Britney… every single woman who dares to speak up and is damned.’
The absence of mere female members of the great unwashed public is glaring. According to this new generation of woke feminists, lead by very vocal and media savvy academics, the way such women are treated by the tabloids and general public discourse is what we should all be focusing on. Changing the way certain famous women are talked about, (seemingly regardless of how they behave), is the key to ‘smashing the patriarchy’ and securing the rights and safety of all women everywhere. The very real danger such woke warriors pose to freedom of the press aside, it is the hollowness of their claim to care about all vulnerable women that must be exposed. While woke feminists obsess endlessly about the super privileged few, countless vulnerable women are seeing their lives painfully rot away and ended by mistreatment in the mental healthcare system of ‘our amazing’ NHS. Yet they’re not even worthy of a few tweets, let alone a Woman’s Hour interview, a newspaper column or the launch of a campaign for change.
Occasionally a member of the public will grab even the woke’s attention and persist in the media headlines. The murders of Sarah Everard and Zara Aleena are two examples of this. The fact that one was murdered by a policeman and the other by a violent criminal given too much freedom by probation services has rightly prompted wider debate and indeed outrage. However one has to also note that these women are both ‘the right sort of victim’. I will never understand why journalists and politicians come out with remarks like ‘this beautiful young woman had a great career/bright future ahead of her.’ Keir Starmer used exactly such words in last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions. What if a female, (or indeed a male), victim is unattractive and without obvious great prospects ahead of them? Does that make their death less tragic? Someone who is mentally ill, as opposed to having the new trendy ‘mental health problems’, will never be as media or woke friendly as a celebrity or even a beautiful trainee solicitor or marketing executive, (as Zara Aleena and Sarah Everard were respectively). True mental illness is ugly, distressing and doesn’t slide easily into any woke agenda.
Beth Matthews was a very beautiful young woman who was attractive to the media in that she had a large social media following and popular mental health blog. It is not unduly cynical to surmise that it is because of those attributes that her death hit the headlines at all. After all the deaths of Deseree Fitzpatrick and Lauren Bridges on the same ward only got into the news because of what happened to Beth. Even now there has been merely a passing mention of Deseree choking to death in her sleep due to inappropriately prescribed medication and Lauren’s suicide. And of course none of the woke feminists tweeted that they ‘stand with’ these women, let alone demand an enquiry into the people and systems that killed them. After all, according to the woke world view all nurses, doctors and carers are angels, so best to just ignore evidence to the contrary and hope it all goes away. It’s ‘only’ impacting people who burden society and most would rather forget about.
The woke warrior silence was also defending after the shocking BBC Panorama programme that exposed the horrific abuse of mentally ill patients at Manchester’s Edenfield hospital. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001ckxr It especially focused on women on the female only ward. Patients were assaulted, mocked, humiliated, insulted, bullied, kept in isolation for weeks, deprived of even basic comforts and generally treated in the most inhumane way imaginable. For me, having experienced 6 months of inhumane treatment in a psychiatric unit myself, watching this was a struggle. However I challenge anyone not to struggle to behold such cruelty enacted on some of society’s most vulnerable by those who are entrusted with caring for them. Some staff were sacked and there was the usual ‘lessons will be learnt’ meaningless response. Health Minister Will Quince said what he been uncovered did ‘not meet the threshold for an independent inquiry.’ No doubt that threshold would have been crossed if one of the patients had been misgendered.
It gave me hope that the BBC would even do an investigation into the mistreatment of the mentally ill by the hallowed NHS, even if it was limited to one hospital. However their programme on Beth Matthews was simply a moving tribute to this brave young woman’s life without any substantial criticism of the medical professionals who caused her death, let alone further investigation or a call for an inquiry. Moreover news and social media have not deemed her, Desiree and Laura’s deaths good enough fuel for their outrage fire. Likewise the other countless ‘unattractive’ mentally ill or disabled women and indeed men who are languishing in clinics and hospitals across the nation, often neglected and abused, are not worthy of outrage whether from the mainstream media or other woke activists. It’s on a par with the widespread unwillingness to discuss the so called grooming gangs scandal.
Beth Matthews’s death hit me in a very raw, personal way. When I spent 6 months in a secure psychiatric clinic my post was opened and checked due to safety protocols. However I soon realised that much of the so called ‘necessary’ regime was punitive rather than caring. Having your letters read and parcels unwrapped even when, as in my case, the patient is not deemed to be at risk of self harm is not a caring act. Furthermore I had to ask for my embroidery scissors to do my cross stitch but then they stayed with me unsupervised for days and even weeks. So much inhumane awfulness happened in that clinic - having to fight to get a glass of water outside meal times, being watched on the toilet and in the shower, being mocked, being shouted at, being fed excessively through a nasal gastric tube causing agony to my deficient digestive system . . . It’s enough to say that I left with a sizeable portion of trauma added to my pre-existing trauma and illness. I am but one of countless other victims of what poses as mental health ‘care.’ Beth survived jumping off a bridge and the NHS helped her recover from that huge physical trauma. But she couldn’t survive the neglectful NHS treatment of her mental trauma. On the 1st October 2021 she tweeted, ‘if I ever lose my battle to depression, know that I fought, know that I tried.’
It’s not Beth’s fault that that her battle was lost but rather the fault of a society that turned its back on her and a health service that harmed her, as it does far too many others. Good Morning Britain’s Adil Ray jumped on the woke outrage bandwagon with several anti Jeremy Clarkson/pro Meghan Markle tweets. In one such tweet Ray referenced Meghan’s claims to have been suicidal and said, ‘Thinking of every woman or man who are in pain right now. Please remember we have got you.’
Yet he and his woke fellows were silent on Beth Mathews, Desiree Fitzpatrick, Lauren Bridges and the Edenfield Hosptial scandal. Their concern for the mentally ill is as fake as Kim Kardashian’s derrière. The social media hashtags and campaigns for change are limited to those the woke deem worthy and useful for an ideological agenda obsessed with the appearance of ‘virtue’ rather than improving the lives of the most vulnerable.
Nobody cares about us Romy. 12 months until I get the treatment I need for my complex ptsd. So.