TV chef Jamie Oliver tells women to stop having sex with husbands who refuse to cook
As the Good Book says, there’s nothing new under the sun. So, in 411 BC the Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote a play, called Lysistrata. This from Wikipedia:
Led by the title character, Lysistrata, the story’s female characters barricade the public funds building and withhold sex from their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War and secure peace.
Now, back to the present, and to the ever-entertaining workings of the mind of TV celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver:
Jamie Oliver believes that women should abstain from sex with their husbands or boyfriends to punish them if they refuse to cook.
“Men are driven by sex,” the celebrity chef said this weekend at the annual Hay-on-Wye festival. “So the best way for women to get their men into the kitchen would be to stop having sex with them until they start to cook.”
I have to say I like Oliver. He enjoys what he does and he is serious about it but he is never so obsessively devout that he becomes dull. Also, he’s not one to measure stuff in half-teaspoons or single grains of rice, or microscopically small drops of fluids. When Jamie talks about a splash of this or that, he splashes. I do appreciate that in a cook.
Also, he’s also always on one Crusade or the other – and as far as I know he’s never even bombed the smallest hamlet in the course of one of them. He’s been involved in training underschooled kids to become chefs, he’s campaigned for better school meals and against factory farm chickens. He’s a busy boy, is our Jamie.
Mind you, the school meal campaign wasn’t all that successful and most people still go for the cheapest piece of meat available in their local supermarket. So, when it comes to campaigning Jamie Oliver is more of a Quixote than a Napoleon.
Still, you could say the same of Aristophanes. In his day the old playwright was about as popular as Jamie is now but even though people enjoyed his Lysistrata piece, there wasn’t much of a follow-through in terms of sexual power politics – but then, when it comes to the old ‘Make love, not war’ message, world history has never been much of a hippy.
So, I’m afraid Jamie’s latest Crusade will not change things much either – neither in England’s bedrooms nor its kitchens. Which is a bit of a pity but, as the old sage had it, ‘Such is life and it gets sucher every day.’ Come to think of it though, maybe there is room for at least a sort of olive branch, when it comes to cooking and the war between the sexes:
Breakfast in bed, anyone?
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