There are two bountiful sources of news fodder without which the media would be left scratching to fill schedules: reports about the British royal family and reports from the latest scientific and academic research.
Though the former are largely uncorroborated tittle-tattle and the latter exhaustively corroborated through randomised control-group protocols, both sorts of news have pretty much the same impact: really?
To start, as is always tempting, with cake: King Charles is recently reported to be rigorous about having his cake and eating it. He and Queen Camilla have a slice of cake every day, and keep going on the same cake until it’s finished. This, if true, shows admirable thrift and character, since if anyone could afford to bin stale cake, it’s a king and queen.
However, older reports ‒ never decisively refuted ‒ insist that the king also requires a selection of softish boiled eggs to be presented for his breakfast, from which he selects the most ideally set. Whatever becomes of the rejected eggs, this is the opposite of thrift and character – to the point of being curiously brattish.
Reports of his requiring his own special toilet seat to accompany him everywhere make similarly unedifying reading. Refusing to be parted from a beloved dog or childhood toy is endearing. Insisting on one’s dunny seat never leaving one’s side is simply peculiar, and raises the question: what quality in a privy lid could possibly inspire such loyalty? We commoners deserve to be let in on this.
The net effect on most readers is a nullity. Clearly, at least half of what’s reported is piffle, and after a while it’s all filed in the “whatever” silo.
Newly released scientific research also portends cheering news about cake: we can all have it and eat it and still remain fit, even if our consumption makes us fat. A study led by a German endocrinologist has affirmed that there is such a thing as metabolically healthy fat folk.
Bracket that with another respectable new piece of research, that 22 minutes every day of exercise can stave off premature death in the sedentary, and most news consumers, while tempted to celebrate with a sit-down and a round of lamingtons, will be nonplussed.
Since what feels like the dawn of time, the science presented has been that we need 20 minutes of puff-making activity just three times a week to minimise the risk of early death, but that fatness portends certain premature death irrespective of activity.
Health professionals have been more emphatic every passing year about weight being more a determinant of healthiness than activity. That the relative proportionality of these bedrock perils might be less robust than present doctrine decrees is confounding – to those heavily invested health professionals more than anyone. They must feel like devout atheists suddenly transported to a Pearly Gates lecture from St Peter to the effect of, “Sorry, dears, I’m sure you meant well.”
Still, there’s another deathless source of media space-filler that’s easier to reconcile in its perversities: the poll. A new British Social Attitudes survey shows only 9% of people think housework should be the preserve of women, compared with 48% in the same survey in the late 1980s.
So, surely the answer to the obvious next question – is housework divided equally in your household – would be 91%, as consistency would suggest. But no, it turns out only 37% of respondents said chores were equally divided in their homes. As the surveyor summarised it, women still do most of the yakka.
What this unambiguously tells us is that, although most men have heroically evolved beyond centuries of sexist social conditioning in the span of 50 years, more than half of them still choose to be absolute bums.
