As if you needed more proof that a) there is a horrible backlash against women going on and b) most of the media sucks in a major way, you have the purported Hilary Mantel-Kate Middleton feud. I have to admit that I had to look up who Kate Middleton was. Here’s a good piece from Catherine Scott in the Telegraph:

Hilary Mantel writes about historic royalty in its full, ugly glory. The public lap up her words and committees award her prizes for doing so – the Man Booker, twice, and most recently the Costa Prize. Yet when she dares to comment on a member of the current royal family all hell breaks loose. The Daily Mail has condemned Mantel’s “venomous attack” on the Duchess of Cambridge in her lecture for the London Review of Books, reading out of context such sentences as “her eyes are dead and she wears [a] strained smile” – even though this is actually a criticism of the painter who produced the Duchess’s official portrait – as evidence of a catfight between an embittered novelist and the perfect princess.

Yessiree, that’s how it always goes with old, ugly, dried up women who seethe–seethe!–with jealousy towards younger women. If an older women criticizes a younger woman’s work, it’s proof that she hates-HATES-HATES with the white-hot fury of the evil witch-queen the wee little Snow White in question, who is a sweet blossom of loveliness and, thus, whose work is beyond criticism. Besides, we all know women don’t actually know anything and can’t be authorities on knowledge or ideas or anything, so any disagreement between them must be over their relative sexual desirability to men! IT HAS TO BE!

Gah! It’s pretty clear doing a quick web search around about the controversy that most news outlets DIDN’T EVEN READ what Mantel said before recycling quotes taken out of context from each other.

Because, of course, why would you want to READ something a woman said?

Sickening.