Boob Gate. Can you believe in 2021, after Me Too, International Women’s Day, the Caroline Flack and Britney Spears documentaries… that a ridiculous term such as "Boob Gate" is now trending online.
Can you believe that the case of two women who are in trouble with the law for refusing to quarantine after travelling from outside of Ireland is being referred to as "Boob Gate"?
Or that their status as mothers who receive social welfare supports is part of the narrative?
Or their ages, the number of children they each have, and where they live, is being used as a weapon against their characters?
Despite the reason for their travel being simply "for personal reasons", the fact that they travelled for a cosmetic procedure is now plastered all over the media, in print and online.
The general levels of utter disbelief that these "entitled single mothers" who are "sponging the system’"could afford such a trip shows us in not only a vile classist light but also as completely anti-women.
As usual.
Sure, none of us are happy with those who are flouting the rules and travelling abroad for unnecessary trips; in part, because we would love to be going anywhere ourselves and mostly because we want Covid to be suppressed.
But we all know of someone who has done it. The mate who snuck in at Christmas to see the family, or who got the ferry to introduce a new baby, or who came home for a few months while a parent or grandparent was dying.
Aside from the family-related visits that we somewhat turn a blind eye to, there have been other trips that we know people have taken. Friend’s dads who have hopped over to that apartment in Tenerife for a month, or the mate of a mate who snuck in a short honeymoon trip and didn’t quite tell anyone where he was.
We don’t like it, but we won’t lose our tiny minds over it. We don’t ask him where he got the money from, or where he lives, or how many kids he has. We don’t ask him if he is "on the welfare" so that we can decide for him whether or not that means he deserves to have a life that includes travel.
We don’t dare to dive so far into his personal life as to ask if he had any work done while he was away – maybe a bit of dental correction work, perhaps had a gastric band fitted or went for a few hair plugs – so that we could then plaster that information all over social media.
Do we? No, definitely not. Definitely not if that person was a man.
