Creativity Quote by Peter Dawson

“The hesitancy is in the detail, not the principal” is the kind of sentence that wants credit for enlightenment while quietly budgeting for delay. Peter Dawson frames himself as reasonable: he’s not against women in “the Open,” he’s merely stuck on implementation. That distinction does a lot of cultural work. It relocates discrimination from ideology to logistics, as if exclusion were an administrative oversight rather than a structure with gatekeepers.

The repeated appeal to “principal” (read: principle) is revealing. Principles are abstract, clean, and easy to endorse in public. Details are where power lives: qualifying standards, access to training, tournament rules, who gets invited, who gets taken seriously. By conceding the principle, Dawson immunizes himself against charges of prejudice, then uses “detail” as the stopgap that preserves the status quo.

“There has been no resistance” is also a carefully passive construction. Resistance by whom? Institutions rarely sign their names to barriers; they outsource them to tradition, to precedent, to “we never had cause.” That last line is the tell: it implies women’s absence was natural, not produced. “No cause to think about it” is less confession than alibi, a way of treating exclusion as a historical accident rather than a choice repeatedly renewed.

Contextually, it’s a classic mid-century modernization pose: progress, yes, but on timetable, under supervision, and only once the world forces the issue. Dawson’s intent is to sound fair-minded; the subtext is that fairness can wait until the paperwork is comfortable.