Dame Denise L’Estrange-Corbet was given her title last year for ‘services to fashion’. It has since been discovered that her clothing company has been putting ‘Fabrique en Nouvelle-Zelande’ (‘Made in NZ’) tags on clothes that were made in Bangladesh. According to her reasoning, that should be all ok because the tags themselves were made in NZ! Oh, and also ‘99%’ of her products are made in NZ so that somehow makes it ok to claim the rest that weren’t made in NZ actually were. The clothing items in question were said to have another tag at the collar saying they were made in Bangladesh, but those tags were not the ones prominently displayed on the clothes. Instead of acknowledging her wrongdoing in misleading customers and misrepresenting NZ around the world, Dame Denise was incensed and she implied a threat to discontinue her ‘commitment to New Zealand’ because someone had dared to call her out.

The ‘99% of our products were made in NZ’ claim may also be inaccurate and hopefully someone will check that out.

Many men, especially survivors of Family Court proceedings, will recognize the style of Dame Denise’s reasoning. Excuses for breaching parenting orders and depriving children of time with their father usually involve similar dishonesty and self-serving irrationality. Being called out for bad behaviour towards the children’s father or towards the children usually results in self-righteous anger and subsequent retribution in various forms, whereas honest apology and acceptance of wrongdoing is very rare.

When men are found to have behaved badly, feminists bray to remove from them titles and awards they have previously merited and any great contributions those men previously made to the world are deliberately sullied and devalued. For example, male artists have their works removed from galleries and have art awards removed even when their bad behaviour was of absolutely no relevance to their art. In the case of Dame Denise, her bad behaviour was/is directly relevant to her ‘services to fashion’, but where are the calls to deprive her of her title? Oh sorry, we forgot, that only happens to men.