The gentlemen’s agreement has been busted

Suzanne Moore on that boys’ night out for charity gropefest:

But this event has been going for 33 years. It was introduced by a Channel 5 baseball presenter called Jonny Gould, with the words: “Welcome to the most un-PC event of the year.”

Political correctness gone mad, you see, means that you cannot grope 19-year-olds who have been told to wear matching underwear under tight skirts while bunging some dosh to Great Ormond Street.

Indeed. Treating women like actual human beings as opposed to walking holes is suffocating politikul korrektnessss.

The detail is nauseating: the hostesses who have been tracked to the toilet and told to see the organiser if it’s all getting too much. The parading on stage of the girls. The hands up the skirts, and the strange business of attendees holding the women’s hands as though they were possessions.

It is a less exotic version of Jezebels, in The Handmaid’s Tale – except this was the Dorchester, and these men include politicians and business leaders who pay lip service to promoting policies of equality in the workplace.

They may even believe in equality in the workplace, while still expecting freedom for themselves to treat women as sex dolls in someone else’s workplace. “The women I see every day are colleagues; the women I see once a year at the Dorchester are up for grabs.”

And if you want a good cause, here’s one: equality for women. Indeed one might have thought, post-Weinstein, that getting your penis out in front of a student at a fundraising dinner is not the wisest of moves. But the gentlemen’s agreement that it somehow is has been busted. The cover is blown, to reveal that the top of society looks like a bunch of lowlife men who reinforce each other’s scummy behaviour. This isn’t about a few men, though. An entire structure enables this – one that turns giving to charity into a circle jerk over the bodies of young women.

Young women who are forced to sign an NDA that they haven’t been allowed to read.

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