Sex roles and stereotyping in a tragic context

Dianne Brimble is being remembered now, not as a discarded piece of meat, or a promiscuous woman who got unlucky, but as a devoted mother, a gregarious and well-loved women, who was modest, private and shy about being overweight.

That sentence probably sums up Mrs Brimble well, but I’m not sure what it says about “promiscuous” women or females who are sexually confident regardless of their weight.

Devine’s words suggest she’s pleased the right type of woman, particularly the right sort of plump woman, has triumphed.

At any rate, when Leo Silvestri, one of the eight “men of interest”, spewed out statements like “ugly fat dog” and “… I didn’t want to speak to her … breath, yuck, ugly dog, just go talk to someone else. Ring the RSPCA” in relation to the deceased, and by inference about women in general, it said everything about how insecure and shallow he is and nothing about Brimble.

None of this is to argue that women aren’t different sexually from men; but that recycling the sexual stereotypes of the past won’t necessarily get us any closer to the truth of what happened on the night Dianne Brimble lost her life.