Last night I watched a piece of highbrow fluff on the ABC – The Worst Jobs in History – the Dark Ages. I usually like watching Tony Robinson – best known as Baldrick on Blackadder – but I found this program profoundly irritating.
At a time when most people lived in small community groups when everyone pitched in (for example, making a wattle & daub house was not a specialist job, just part of what you had to be able to do as a serf), all the jobs shown were ones which were done by men. I don’t know enough about the dark ages to know exactly what women did; but it’s hard to imagine that there weren’t some pretty horrible jobs in there.
I thought I was being oversensitive, until there was a little speech about the Vikings, “they weren’t just pillagers, they didn’t just come and rape our women” and I realised that this was, indeed a program written by men for men.
It was shocking. I changed the channel, even though the remote control is lost and it involved me getting off the lounge.