Last month, the British Museum briefly found itself in hot water on Twitter/X. Some feminists took exception to a jokey post they’d made suggesting that their new exhibition about the Roman army, which Ben Stephens reviewed for the Herald in the March edition, was a good place to come for single girls looking to meet eligible bachelors.
The criticism was not especially coherent, but the essential problem was that the BM had implicitly acknowledged two truths that we are not meant to mention nowadays. First, that men and women have, on average, different interests, and that an exhibition devoted to how the soldiers of Rome campaigned and fought was likely to attract more men than women. Secondly, that women might want to proactively take steps to meet a man with a view to forming a long-term relationship.
