TIME to put down your pens of feminism and relax, Mesdames Steinem, Greer and Wolf: the women's movement has a new champion.
Yes, Jamie Oliver, bête noire of chip-loving schoolkids everywhere, has turned his attentions to equality and is calling on women to get out of the kitchen and force their menfolk to turn their attention to cooking.
While Siren is at constant pain
s to point out the battle for women's rights is far from over, she feels that Mr Oliver has rather missed the bandwagon on this particular issue.
However, she has a far more serious bone (free-range and organic, natch) to pick with the ebullient chef.
How has he suggested we women should achieve this goal of getting men to do more in the kitchen? Start a well-thought-out writing campaign targeting the letters pages of Nuts and Zoo magazines? Tie ourselves to the railings of No 10 (if there are any left that aren't already occupied by Dads Have Wombs Too campaigners dressed in disturbingly revealing superhero outfits)? We could throw ourselves under the King's horse – or perhaps Prince William's "borrowed" helicopter as the 21st century equivalent?
No, according to Mr Oliver "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".
Siren is struggling to cope with the empowerment of it all. Who needs rational argument and compromise when actually all we need to do is withhold nookie?
But quite apart from the seriously demeaning implications of the Essex boy's suggestion, surely this would be a lose-lose situation that would leave us with no sex life and no dinner?
No, hunger strikes and abstinence thankfully belong to days of feminism past.
Instead Siren suggests that if you can't be bothered cooking and want to get your man in the kitchen, take him there for sex and call out for takeaway delivery instead.
All round satisfaction and another blow struck for the sisterhood!
CRAFTY METHODSSiren believes that she is doing her bit when it comes to the environment – more than one dark morning has she been found on the pavement crying and swearing amid scattered newspapers and empty wine bottles after trying to carry too much to the bottlebank.
But now she's wondering if a girl can take recycling too far.
The director of a cemetery in Cudahy, Wisconsin, has been complaining of middle-aged woman taking flowers from graves to use in craft projects.
Butch Miller of the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery reported: "They help themselves to the flowers they think we're throwing away."
Miller said the women take care not to disturb mourners or others at the cemetery while they perform their work. "They're just extremely polite."
Next time Siren feels creative she may try her hand at producing an Antony Gormley-style art-installation involving leftover sausage rolls and fishpaste sandwiches from poorly attended wakes. She will of course, be sure to say thank-you.
BABE OUT OF THE CITYCan high fashion and the countryside ever sit comfortably together? Siren seriously doubts it.
A rural-living friend is still perturbed after she glanced out of her cottage window in the Borders early the other morning only to spot boyish supermodel Agyness Deyn, above, scuttling past the garden fence with a piglet clutched to her bony bosom.
Siren can only suggest that all that country air had gone to Ms Deyn's trademark blonde-cropped head. Gamine darling, not gammon!
LUCKY LADY• The winner of our Sex And The City competition in last week's SW is Sheila Wright from Edinburgh, who correctly answered that Mr Big's full name is John James Preston.
Sheila and a companion will be treated to cocktails and cupcakes at Forth Floor in Harvey Nichols, Edinburgh. Outrageous conversation and flirting with the bar staff shall be left entirely to their discretion.
The full article contains 664 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
