Read and Weep

The tragic letter below appeared in the Herald last week and has been a source of much amusing conjecture in my office and with visitors.

First however; Doetie and Keizer are Dutch names while Riverton, lying half an hour or so on the coast 40 minutes to the west of Invercargill, is one of New Zealand’s most remote villages. It sits on a pretty inlet although I’m told it gets knocked about regularly by Foveaux Strait storms. It’s the sort of place a mass murderer on the run might seek out.

So here we have a woman, presumably appalled by the splendid fun-loving liberality of today’s Netherlands, escaping to soak in misery at the bottom of the world. It’s hard to believe and a more probable explanation is far from leaving Holland she’s a fleeing South African Boer, people renowned for their religion-soaked bleakness.

Doetie’s expressed objection is to the word “Women” for a magazine aimed at women in its contents. This, for God’s sake she says is sexist. It’s simply unbelievable.

Well the other night in a standard getting-out-of-hand end of days drinks session in my office, we were graced with the presence of a well known journo, a couple of senior politicians and some lawyer mates and an entertaining hour was had conjecturing about Doetie in search of an explanation. Ultimately a consensus was reached.

Top of the bill was insanity. No other explanation seemed as possible. A close second was extreme stupidity.

More enjoyable was contemplating her recreational interests.

Does she, we wondered, occasionally venture into the big smoke, namely Invercargill, and stand outside women’s dress shops protesting about their sexist contents? Has she been banned from pharmacies for causing a scene at their cosmetics section? Is she petitioning the Council to remove the disgracefully sexist sign “women” from women’s public toilets and if not, why not?

God help us should she find out about the Olympics and their numerous shocking sexist events such as the women’s high jump, women’s marathon, women’s discus and literally hundreds of other shamefully sexist events.

And if she objects to the word WOMEN being applied to women’s products, what else might she be outraged by? We had fun conjecturing on that.

Does Doetie (she should Anglicise it to “Dotty”) launch protests outside bookshops as prejudicial to blind people, abuse the local electoral office for its prohibition against children being able to vote, bitch outside Chinese restaurants for their racist menus? – The mind boggles at the possibilities.

Is there a sunny side to all of this? Consensus was quickly reached on that, namely imagine being married to her, and not being so, all of our spirits soared.