Time, gentlemen please! Men’s talk and male power at the Garrick Club

The male members-only Garrick Club was in the news last month after The Guardian got hold of its membership list. This revealed that a lot of men who claim to be staunch supporters of women in their day-jobs running big companies or the civil service have nevertheless shelled out large sums of money to join a club which does not allow women to be members.

Elite male institutions like the Garrick Club are bastions of “fratriarchy”, the modern form of male power which is exercised less through top-down formal structures and more through the fraternal bonds men form with other men of similar status. But the exclusion of women has never been just a ruling class thing. A hundred years ago Freemasonry, and in the US “fraternal orders” (the Elk, the Moose, the Eagles, etc.) played an important role in the lives of non-elite middle-class men; 50 years ago when I was young, British working men’s [sic] clubs, and even some pubs, enforced a “no unaccompanied women” rule. What is it that impels men, from high court judges to car assembly line workers, to seek out these all-male spaces?  

Some commentators on the Garrick affair suggested that the answer might be partly to do with language. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar told the Financial Times that men and women socialize differently: men bond by participating in shared activities, whereas women bond through friendships which are sustained by talk. Men can go to a club to read the newspapers in peace, knowing no one will be offended if they prefer silence to idle chat. Other commentators pointed out that men’s talk is different from mixed-sex talk: it’s the kind of talk that comes most easily to men, the kind that allows them to relax and “be themselves”. Some added that the same applied to women and all-female talk. If men sometimes sought out spaces where they could talk among themselves, that was not necessarily because they were hostile to women: it was simply an expression of the “natural” desire to spend time in the company of other men.      

This argument raises obvious questions. Is it true that single-sex talk differs from mixed-sex talk (and that the all-male version differs from the all-female one)? Is there anything to the idea that men and women can be more “naturally” or more “authentically” themselves when interacting with people of their own sex? In fact, these are not new questions: though for various reasons they’ve fallen out of favour, in the 1980s and 1990s they were hotly debated among researchers of language and gender.   

In the early years of language and gender research many empirical studies focused on mixed-sex talk: the main question they investigated was how social inequality between men and women played out at the micro-level of ordinary conversation. These studies uncovered a number of common patterns which are still (depressingly) common today–for instance, that men in mixed groups talk more than women, and that women do the “interactional shitwork” of providing support for men’s contributions. But by the 1980s some researchers were arguing that talk in single sex groups had been neglected. Studying same-sex conversations, they suggested, would show how men and women talk when power differences are not a factor, and they are free to follow their own preferences. Though these researchers didn’t use words like “natural” and “authentic”, the implication was that single-sex talk is, in some sense, the default case.  

If we take the long view, it’s probably true that single-sex talk was the commonest form of talk experienced by most people in most societies for most of history. This follows from the fact that most societies have historically allocated different tasks and occupational roles to men and women, and many have also practised formal or informal sex-segregation in non-work (e.g., religious, political and social) settings. That was certainly true of the community I grew up in 50-odd years ago: not only did men and women do different kinds of work, a lot of their socializing was also done separately. Even at notionally mixed gatherings, from large occasions like weddings to small parties in someone’s house, it was completely normal for the men and women present to split almost immediately into single-sex groups which then engaged in separate conversations.

Though younger women like me found this annoying, older women would say, if asked, that it was what they themselves preferred. Once I asked my great-aunt, whose husband was very active in his local masonic lodge, if it bothered her that he spent so much time doing something she couldn’t be involved in, or even know about. She rolled her eyes. “Of course I know about it”, she said, “and I can tell you, no woman on god’s earth would want anything to do with it”.  Men had a similarly negative view of women’s talk: I sometimes wondered if there was an actual law decreeing that any man who entered a room in which two or more women were conversing must say either “sorry to interrupt your gossip, ladies” or “what’s this, then, a mothers’ meeting?”

By the 1980s these attitudes were seen as old-fashioned, but since there was still a fairly high degree of segregation in the labour market, and people still tended to have more close friends of their own sex, single-sex talk continued to play a significant role in everyday life. And researchers who studied it generally agreed that there was an overarching difference between the male and female varieties. Whereas men’s talk was competitive and status-oriented, women’s talk was co-operative and egalitarian. Jen Coates, for instance, who analysed talk in both all-female and all-male friendship groups, reported that women developed topics collaboratively, and rarely observed the norm that only one speaker speaks at a time: compared to men they produced more simultaneous speech and more supportive interventions (like questions, brief comments and minimal responses).  

Some researchers related these patterns to what people learn about language-use in the formative years of childhood, when it’s typical for them to play in same-sex groups. Boys’ groups tend to be larger, to have a clear hierarchy and to favour physically active games with fixed rules; girls’ groups are smaller, more egalitarian and more focused on imaginative play. These differences, it was argued, develop different ways of talking. Playing in a boys’ group teaches you to compete for status, to give and take orders and to argue when conflicts occur. Playing in a girls’ group teaches you to share, to negotiate and to avoid open conflict. 

Some also argued (though this was more contentious) that the differences between boys’ and girls’ talk might explain not only the patterns observed in adult single-sex groups, but also the ones that had been found in mixed-sex talk. Perhaps what was going on in mixed-sex conversations wasn’t men exerting power over women, it was simply a clash between the styles men and women independently preferred. If the outcome favoured men, that was not because men were deliberately trying to dominate, but because speakers who’ve learned to compete for airtime, or deal with conflicts by arguing their point, are always going to win out over speakers who shy away from competition and back down in response to conflict. Both sexes, according to this argument, were just taking the habits they’d learned in single-sex groups into their interactions with the other sex, without realizing that the other sex did things differently. The unfortunate—but unintended—consequence was “male-female miscommunication”, a phenomenon analogous to the kind of misunderstanding that can arise between speakers from different cultures.   

Some readers will recognize what I’ve just said as a précis of the argument made by Deborah Tannen in her 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand. This book was controversial among language and gender researchers: many found Tannen’s generalizations too sweeping, while some found the analogy she made between cross-sex and cross-cultural communication disingenuous, glossing over the power difference between men and women. But in the wider world it was hugely influential. Not only was it a bestseller itself, in 1992 its ideas were repackaged in John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which went on to sell 15 million copies. By the early noughties its account of male and female communication styles was also being repeated in a new wave of popular science books with titles like Why Men Don’t Iron: The Fascinating and Unalterable Differences Between the Sexes, which argued that the differences were “hard wired” in the human brain.   

Tannen herself was neither a biological determinist nor an anti-feminist, but these noughties books had a clear anti-feminist agenda. Feminism, they were saying, had got it wrong: men and women were different by nature, and it was time we went back to organizing society in a way that reflected their “unalterable differences”. This literature had undertones of the “aggrieved male entitlement” which would later be expressed more openly by the misogynists of the online manosphere: it was obsessed with the idea that feminism had turned men into emasculated shadows of their former selves. Language featured prominently in that story: boys and men, it was claimed, were no longer permitted to express themselves in their own “natural” way, but were instead expected to follow female rules. In mixed-sex classrooms, for instance, boys were said to be disadvantaged by the emphasis placed on collaborative discussion and sharing feelings, which suited girls’ natural inclinations but were alien to boys. Some even maintained that language itself was alien to boys: according to Why Men Don’t Iron, “men’s brains are built for action, women’s are built for talking”. (In which case, I always find myself wondering, how do we explain the fact that so many men have written so many books insisting that words are not men’s thing?)   

For today’s language and gender researchers, who have long since abandoned the search for overarching differences between men’s and women’s language, these ideas are ancient history. But as recent commentary on the Garrick Club shows, they have not lost their hold on the popular imagination. Over the last 35 years they’ve been repeated so often they’ve acquired the status of unquestioned common sense. But among linguists they were never unquestioned, and perhaps this would be a good time to remind ourselves of the case against them.

One point many of Tannen’s critics made was that it didn’t make sense to think of single-sex talk as what men and women (or boys and girls) do when power differences are not an issue. In reality power differences are always an issue: if a society is organized on the principle that the sexes are different and not equal, and socializes its members accordingly, that will affect the way they behave in all contexts. It’s obvious, for instance, that what children do in single-sex peer groups is not unrelated to the roles their society prescribes for adult men and women. If it’s true that boys do things that teach them to compete and girls do things that teach them to co-operate, that’s hardly a random coincidence: boys are being prepared for roles in the public sphere, whose institutions are hierarchical and competitive, whereas girls are being socialized on the assumption that their most important roles will be in the private sphere of home and family, where they will be expected to maintain harmony and nurture others.

I say if it’s true, however, because research suggests that “boys and men compete, girls and women co-operate” is a considerable oversimplification. The way people talk seems to be influenced most directly by the activities they’re engaged in or the roles they’re playing. To the extent that the two sexes habitually do different things and play different roles there will also be differences in the way they talk, but if you observe them doing the same things you may find that the differences disappear. Studies of workplace talk have found, for instance, that when people of one sex enter an occupation previously reserved for the other, they adopt the interactional style that goes with the job: male nurses interact with patients in the same (caring and supportive) way female nurses do, and female police officers adopt the same (cool and unemotional) style as their male colleagues.

Interaction among male and female friends has also turned out to be less sharply sex-differentiated than earlier accounts suggested. In her book The Hidden Life of Girls, based on recordings obtained by following a group of girls for three years (they were 9 at the start and 12 by the end), Marjorie Goodwin noted that in some situations the girls were highly competitive and confrontational: when they played hopscotch, for instance (a girls’ game, but one with pre-established rules), they often got into arguments about what the rules were and whether someone had cheated. In my own work I’ve argued that male friends engage in gossip (even if they don’t call it that), which is similar in both form and function to the all-female talk described by Jen Coates. And recent research examining incels’ talk online has revealed that it’s not all misogynist rants and violent fantasies; incels also engage in long, forensically detailed discussions in which they compare their physical shortcomings and bemoan the repulsiveness of their bodies. Who else does that? In my own experience, teenage girls; my peers and I had very similar conversations in the communal changing rooms of 1970s clothes shops. And we did it for the same reasons incels do it: so long as everyone joins in, performative self-loathing is a very effective bonding device.  

Research findings like these should make us sceptical about the “men’s talk is different” defence of all-male spaces. If you look closely, it isn’t that different: both sexes use talking as a way of reinforcing in-group bonds (that’s not just a girl/woman thing), and both sexes also use it to assert and maintain status (that’s not just a boy/man thing). People don’t just have one conversational style which they take with them into every situation, they have a stylistic repertoire they can draw on to meet the demands of different social settings, groups and activities.    

What’s in that repertoire will of course vary depending on people’s life-experiences, which are not only affected by their sex. Institutions like the Garrick Club (or the masonic lodge, or the working men’s club) have never been spaces for generic “men’s talk”, but rather for talk among men whose other social characteristics (e.g., class, education, occupation) meant they had interests and experiences in common. In my great-aunt’s day, when opportunities weren’t remotely equal and segregation was the norm, most women’s experiences diverged significantly from those of their menfolk, but in our own time far more women, especially at the privileged end of the social spectrum, have led lives very similar to men’s. They’ve studied at the same universities, gone into the same professions, got jobs in the same organizations—and because of that they’re also more likely to have mixed social networks and close male friends. The kind of woman who’d be qualified to join the Garrick Club would have no trouble fitting in: what justification can there be for keeping her out?  

Perhaps surprisingly, some feminists have offered one: I’ve seen a few of them on social media arguing that if we want to defend women’s entitlement to all-female space, we must accept that men have the same entitlement to all-male space. For me, though, this argument has the same flaw as Deborah Tannen’s approach to language and gender: it leaves power differences out of the equation. It treats the two cases as parallel, when in fact single-sex space and single-sex talk have very different functions for the sex that dominates and the one that is dominated. If that is understood, then from a feminist perspective there is nothing illogical in defending the exclusion of men from certain spaces while criticizing the exclusion of women from others.

A large body of research tells us that when men are in the room they dominate the discussion (even, oddly enough, in the mixed-sex classrooms where they’re allegedly disadvantaged by being wired for action, not talk). Men get more talking time, more attention to what they say and more influence on decisions made by the group. Excluding men from certain conversations is a way of giving women the space, attention and influence they are denied in mixed-sex interaction. It’s an attempt to counter sex-inequality rather than a means of shoring it up.

The exclusion of women from male spaces, by contrast–especially elite ones like the Garrick Club–does shore up sex-inequality. It serves to protect men’s traditional advantages in a world where they now face direct competition from women who they know are just as capable as they are. Those women can no longer be formally excluded from the spheres elite men inhabit (like the upper echelons of the civil service or the legal profession), but they can still be put at a relative disadvantage by being excluded from the informal networks where elite men bond, share information and trade favours.

So, although the motivation for it has changed (when clubs like the Garrick were founded men didn’t need to protect themselves from female competition), the exclusion of women from elite male institutions is still part of the apparatus that maintains men’s dominance in public life. That does not benefit women of any social status–it’s not just a problem for elite women if power is disproportionately held by men–and I see no reason why feminists, or anyone else who claims to believe in equality, should defend it. But if they’re going to defend it, they should at least be honest about their reasons, and stop insulting our intelligence by recycling old myths about men’s talk.  

Asking for it: language and affirmative consent

A few weeks ago a group called Right To Equality launched a campaign to change the law to require “affirmative” sexual consent—actively saying yes to sex rather than just not saying no—which was immediately derailed by a row about language. The problem was the same one Northwest Cancer Research ran into last November, when it tried to promote cervical cancer screening with a billboard featuring crossed female legs alongside the rape-myth-inspired strapline “Don’t keep ‘em crossed/ get screened instead”. Right to Equality’s ads alluded to another rape cliché: its “provocative” strapline, which appeared on posters over a close-up of a woman’s face (or alternatively on a T-shirt below the wearer’s face), was “I’m asking for it”.

This did not go down well. The Daily Mail‘ summed up the obvious problem in its headline “Sex abuse survivors blast… ‘insulting and triggering’, ‘I’m asking for it’ consent law campaign as they say, ‘This was what my rapist told me’”. And that wasn’t just the view from the Tory tabloids. An opinion piece in the Independent called it “the most offensive sexual assault campaign I’ve ever seen”, while a critical article in the New Statesman (aptly headed “No one asked for it”) judged it “troublingly misguided”.

By now it should surely be clear that women do not, on the whole, appreciate sexualized imagery and verbal innuendo in messaging on subjects like rape and cancer. They might find it innocuous in other contexts (in an ad for Cadbury’s Flake, say), but in this context they find it tasteless and offensive. So why do the adwomen–and they are, almost always, women–keep giving us these “provocative” campaigns?

As I said in my post about “Don’t keep ‘em crossed”, I think a significant part of the problem is that ideas about how language works which are taken for granted in the creative industries often misfire under real-world conditions. To creatives it may seem obvious that provocative slogans are effective (attention-grabbing, memorable, etc.), but in the real world viewers may react to provocation in ways which undermine the advertisers’ aims. For instance, if a young woman goes out wearing the “I’m asking for it” T-shirt, will the people whose attention she grabs think, “oh, cool, she’s subverting a rape myth”, or will they think she’s saying she’s always up for it? Will they want to engage her in a conversation about consent, or will she become a target for catcalling and lewd remarks? The short answer is, it depends: both those reactions are possible. But if you assume you’ll only get the one you wanted, and don’t consider other possibilities, you may find yourself in the embarrassing position of running a feminist campaign about rape whose most vocal critics are rape survivors.

While there’s always potential for a message to be read in different ways by different people, that’s a particular issue with messages which don’t make their meaning immediately obvious, but instead present the viewer with a puzzle-solving task–a long-established tradition in British advertising, which often uses allusion and wordplay to give the viewer the satisfaction of working out what the ad is saying. “I’m asking for it” belongs to that tradition. To work out what its designers intended it to communicate, viewers need to recognize the strapline as an allusion to “she was asking for it”, realize that changing the subject pronoun to “I” implies that the woman in this version actively wants sex, and connect that to the text below the image (“let’s change the law to require a clear yes to sex”) to derive the solution that “it” doesn’t just mean “sex”, it also means “consent”, and that double meaning is the key to the message. Undeniably, this is clever. But is everyone who sees the ad going to get it?

The answer, I think, is “no”. Some viewers will miss the point simply because they haven’t engaged for long enough to work it out (eye-tracking studies have found that the average time spent looking at a poster ad is 1.7 seconds). Others, however, will miss it because they don’t share the background assumptions which are needed to get to the “right” answer. To read “I’m asking for it” in the way the designers intended–as a subversive twist on an old rape-myth–you have to recognize “women ask for it” as a myth. And research suggests that quite large numbers of people, especially people under 25, don’t think it’s a myth, they think it’s a fact.

To be fair, the campaign has taken criticism of “I’m asking for it” on board, and has now produced some new posters with less “provocative” straplines (e.g., “only yes means yes”). But understanding how language works in real-world situations isn’t just important when you’re designing publicity for a campaign about affirmative consent. Similar questions about how language works are also raised by the actual aim of the campaign, making affirmative consent a legal requirement.  

Consent, of whatever kind, is obviously about communication, and that’s usually assumed to mean linguistic communication, which is thought to be less ambiguous, and so less open to (mis)interpretation, than other ways of signalling desire (e.g., through gaze, gesture or touch). What, after all, could be clearer and less ambiguous than the simple words “yes” and “no”? But as people who study everyday talk have been pointing out for years, in reality it isn’t that simple. The idea that if you want it you say yes and if you don’t you say no is at odds with what we know about how real speakers actually do things.

In 1999 the researchers Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith challenged what was then a ubiquitous piece of rape prevention advice–that if women didn’t want to have sex they should “just say no”–by pointing out that in reality it’s extremely rare for English-speakers to decline any kind of invitation or proposition by just saying no: most real-life refusals don’t even contain the word “no”. What people typically do is use a formula for refusal that involves some combination of hesitating, hedging, expressing polite regret and giving an acceptable, though not necessarily truthful, reason. For instance, if you don’t want to go for coffee with a co-worker you might say “um, I wish I could, but I really need to finish this report”.

Kitzinger and Frith presented evidence from focus groups that sexual propositions are not an exception to this rule: their female informants reported using the same refusal formula in sexual situations as in others (e.g., “[pause], I’m really tired and I’ve got an early start tomorrow, so I think I should probably just go home”). In their experience this was usually effective, and where it wasn’t, that was not because the man hadn’t understood it as a refusal, but because he wasn’t willing to accept a refusal. In those cases they said they’d be wary of using the word “no” because of its potential to make him angry and more aggressive. “Just say no”, Kitzinger and Frith concluded, is bad advice: it’s linguistically unnatural, unnecessarily blunt (since everyone understands the conventional formula), and in a tricky situation it may increase the risk of violence.

Saying yes isn’t as risky as saying no (since it will usually be what the other person wants to hear), but it raises the same question about how natural it is. Is it true that “only yes means yes”? Is continually asking for/giving permission to do things (kiss, touch, undress someone, penetrate them) a kind of verbal interaction people either do have, or could be persuaded to have, in reality—or is it an unrealistic and misguided thing to expect of them?  

I can’t claim to have a definitive, evidence-based answer, because for obvious ethical reasons there isn’t much data to base one on. We really don’t know much about how people “naturally” talk during physical sexual encounters. There has been some research on chatrooms where people who can’t see or touch each other use language to construct erotic narratives, and there are some studies of the fictional dialogue which appears in representations of sex (e.g., pornography and romance fiction). But it’s not clear how much this research tells us about the kind of “ordinary” sex-talk that isn’t scripted or performed for an audience.

It’s possible that it tells us something, though, since in the absence of more direct instruction (watching other people have sex, or practising it under the guidance of an experienced tutor) many people use fictional representations as templates for their real-life sexual encounters. Recently, for instance, there’s been concern about the extent to which young people are getting their templates from porn, a genre in which “consent talk” (i.e., explicit, ongoing verbal negotiation of what the parties do or don’t want) is not typically part of the script. Consent talk is also largely absent in representations where sex occurs in the context of romantic love. In romantic sex scenes what’s usually depicted is a quasi-mystical connection between two lovers which ensures that their desires are perfectly in sync: they don’t need to talk, their bodies just know. But if it isn’t modelled in the representations people use as sources of information and inspiration, how do they learn to do consent talk in real life? Is talking about it simple and straightforward, or is it something a lot of people struggle with?

In 1990 this became a real and consequential question for students at Antioch College, a small and “progressive” liberal arts college in Ohio, when the college introduced a new sexual consent policy as part of its disciplinary code (meaning that any student found in violation would face sanctions that included expulsion). The policy stated that consent had to be both affirmative and ongoing–explicitly sought and received for each discrete sexual act (so, no assuming that one thing “naturally” leads to another). As a spokeswoman for the college explained this to the media,

If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask. If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask. If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask.

The reason the college was making statements to the media was that the policy had caused nationwide controversy. It had been seized on by critics of campus “political correctness” (a major talking-point in the early 1990s) who decried it as an authoritarian attempt to limit adolescents’ sexual freedom– though at the same time they said the attempt was bound to fail, because no normal adolescent would take any notice. In 1993 I went to Antioch to investigate what was happening. I interviewed a number of people about the policy (mostly students, but also the Dean who oversaw its operation) to find out how they felt about it, what difference they thought it had made and what following it (if they did follow it) involved in practice.  

The students told me that while a lot of people they knew were not complying with the policy (and some were vocally opposed to it), there were also many who had embraced it positively. The main benefit everyone mentioned was making it easier to refuse unwanted sex without getting the pushback that had been common in the past. However, some students also said that being compelled to think so specifically about what they did or didn’t want, and then to verbalize those thoughts, had resulted in them having more pleasurable sex.

The Dean believed that the policy’s main value was educational. She was exasperated by the argument that college students didn’t need “sex lessons”: Americans, she told me, were in denial about the extent of young people’s ignorance. The workshops students had to attend when they arrived invariably revealed how little many of them knew, not just about consent but about sex itself. But the policy had not, she said, solved the problem of rape on campus, which in her view was still prevalent, and still significantly under-reported.

One student who had served as a “peer advocate” agreed with that assessment. The policy, she explained, was at odds with mainstream peer-group norms which put pressure on women to acquiesce to men’s demands, and to keep quiet about it if things went wrong. It was also a fairly common view that talking explicitly about sex-acts was embarrassing, unromantic and potentially damaging to a woman’s reputation (if she talks about it so freely, doesn’t that suggest she’s a bit of a slut?) The students who were most enthusiastic about the policy were feminists and other social justice types who had consciously rejected the mainstream heterosexual culture. At progressive Antioch those people were fairly numerous, but even there they were not a majority; on many campuses they would be a tiny minority.          

What Antioch’s experiment shows, IMO, is that it takes more than a written policy, even one backed up by serious disciplinary sanctions, to shift the linguistic and behavioural norms which are deeply embedded in a community’s everyday life. Redefining consent on paper is the easy part: the hard part is bringing what happens on the ground into alignment with that redefinition. The same point applies even more strongly to a campaign which wants to shift a whole society’s norms by rewriting the relevant legislation. Even if Right to Equality succeeds in changing the legal definition of consent, on its own that’s unlikely to be the game-changer they seem to think.

Part of Antioch’s problem was that the very explicit consent talk the policy prescribed evidently didn’t come naturally to most students. Even if we bracket the ones who opposed the policy for political reasons, many others perceived it as embarrassing or weird (even the peer advocate quoted above said that when she first arrived she thought it was “stupid”), while for some it was a turn-off, in conflict with what they thought sex should ideally be like. To become embedded in everyday practice, this kind of talk may need to be not just recommended, or mandated, in the abstract, but concretely modelled–and not (or not only) in sex education lessons, which also tend to be perceived as embarrassing and unsexy, but in the kinds of sexual representations people seek out voluntarily.     

But you might think that’s only marginally relevant to a discussion of Right to Equality’s campaign. Though their website suggests they do see championing affirmative consent as, in part, a cultural intervention, an attempt to promote “healthy and respectful relationships” by “highlight[ing] the importance of communication”, their primary aim is to change what happens when someone reports that they were raped. If affirmative consent becomes the legal standard, they argue, a man who, for whatever reason, didn’t explicitly request and receive a woman’s consent will have no excuse: he will no longer be able to argue in court that the complainant’s behaviour (she didn’t say no, she acted like she wanted it) gave him a “reasonable belief” that she consented. Will that not be a game-changer?

Unfortunately, I doubt it. However consent is defined in theory, in practice (as I said earlier in relation to advertising messages) people will still tend to interpret the evidence they’re presented with in a way that fits their own beliefs. If jurors in rape cases are still operating with the same beliefs as before, just changing the question they have to decide on from “did she say no?” to “did he ask and get a yes?” will not necessarily change the outcome. The facts will still often be disputed—the complainant will claim he didn’t ask, the defendant will swear he did—and there’s no reason to think it won’t still be the man whose account jurors prefer, thanks to the combined power of “himpathy” (the desire to give men the benefit of the doubt) and the still-pervasive belief that women “cry rape”.

But there’s another reason why I don’t see redefining consent as a game-changer. In the last few years the way the justice system deals with sexual violence has been the subject of quite intensive investigation (we’ve had a major Parliamentary inquiry and several expert reports), and what’s emerged is a consensus that the main obstacle to justice is not the way the law is written, but the failure of the system, which is both under-resourced and pervaded by misogyny, to enforce it. The scale of that problem would be difficult to overstate: as the Victims’ Commissioner Vera Baird said in 2020, what’s supposed to be one of the most serious offences in the book has instead been “effectively decriminalized”. When she made that observation only 1.5% of recorded rapes were resulting in a criminal charge; that figure has since risen, but only to a still-paltry 2.4%. And even the five in two hundred accused rapists who do get charged won’t all end up standing trial. Cases are now taking so long to get to court that large numbers of complainants are dropping out, and without their testimony the case collapses. In these circumstances it seems pointless to debate whether changing the legal definition of consent will increase the number of convictions. You can’t get a conviction without a trial, and you can’t have a trial without a charge.

What the present situation calls for is deeds, not words. Rather than campaigning to change what the law says, we should demand action to change what it does.

Fundy baby voice-shaming

Back in 2016, you may recall, there was an explosion of disparaging commentary about Hillary Clinton’s voice. It was shrill, people said, and too loud; it was harsh and flat and “decidedly grating”; it was the voice of a bossy schoolmarm whose “lecturing” or “hectoring” tone was widely agreed to be a total turn-off.  No one, they said, would vote for a president with a voice like that. 

As feminists immediately recognized, this criticism wasn’t really about Clinton’s voice. Her voice was just a symbol of everything her critics didn’t like about her, beginning with the simple fact that she was a woman who wanted to be president. The words her detractors used, words like “shrill” and “harsh” and “bossy”, are commonly used to express dislike and disapproval of “uppity” women, women who occupy, or aspire to occupy, positions of authority and power.  That these words have little if anything to do with what an individual woman actually sounds like is demonstrated by the fact that they’re contradictory—Clinton’s voice was said to be both “shrill” (high and piercing) and “flat” (low and monotonous)—and are applied to women who sound totally different (Greta Thunberg and the late Margaret Thatcher have both been described as “strident”). What “grates” is not the voice itself, but the temerity of the woman who raises it in public and expects others to listen to what she says. Calling her “strident” or “shrill” is a way of shaming her for that. Male politicians are not subjected to this voice-shaming: they may be criticized for any number of other things (as Trump was in 2016), but their voices rarely become an issue, because men’s right to a public voice is not in question.

I found myself thinking about this last week while watching another female politician being voice-shamed: Alabama Senator Katie Britt, who responded on behalf of the Republican party to President Biden’s State of the Union address. As you’d expect, she was critical of Biden; as you’d also expect, her performance attracted a lot of criticism from non-Republicans. But much of that criticism focused not on what she had said, but on how she had said it, and especially on her use of something called “fundy baby voice”.  

Here’s one example, written by Cheryl Rofer for the leftist blog Lawyers, guns and money:

I wasn’t going to watch the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech. But then social media posts started popping up: “What am I seeing?” “This porn sucks.” “Who is this?”

…a United States Senator who presents herself with a dipping blouse neckline showing a gleaming stone-encrusted cross, speaking in a breathy childlike voice from a darkened and apparently unused kitchen… 

…That bizarre voice is called “fundy baby voice.” It is cultivated by women in what let’s call the fundy bubble…they use it deliberately to signal that they belong to that bubble and all it implies about women – submissive to men, stays in the home, and certainly no attempt to control the relationship of sex to pregnancy.

…Her emotional presentation was also bizarre, with much too much smiling as she spoke about rape and household finances. But women are supposed to smile – men thought Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren should smile more. …Here was a woman who is willing to smile more, before our very eyes. And also to choke up her voice as if she was about to cry, to show us how very sensitive she is to others’ plights.

The way of speaking referred to here as “fundy baby voice” (“fundy” = [Christian] fundamentalist) is evidently in the process of being what sociolinguists call enregistered. Enregisterment happens when a linguistic phenomenon (usually one that’s been in existence for some time) becomes sufficiently noticeable to be identified, given a name (e.g., “Estuary English”, “uptalk”) and commented on. “Fundy baby voice” doesn’t yet have the same level of popular recognition as, say, uptalk: as last week’s commentary demonstrated, you still have to explain what it is if you’re writing for a general audience. But people who are aware of it can tell you not only what it’s called, but also who uses it (prototypically, white southern evangelical women), what it signifies (feminine submissiveness) and what its most salient characteristics are (it’s high in pitch, has a breathy or whispery quality and is produced with a smile).

The discourse through which a way of speaking is enregistered doesn’t just explain what it is: typically it does two other things as well. One is to construct a stereotype—a generic representation which captures what makes the way of speaking distinctive, but which is simpler and more extreme than any real-life example of its use. When I listened to Katie Britt’s speech, for instance, I realized that the descriptions I’d read had exaggerated some elements of her performance while leaving out others entirely. Her voice was definitely breathy, but not as high-pitched (or as southern) as I’d expected; I was also surprised by how much she used creaky voice (which is not part of the stereotype: it’s similar to vocal fry, associated with speaking at a low pitch, and it doesn’t sound sweet or babyish). The only thing I thought the commentary hadn’t exaggerated was her frequent and incongruous smiling.

The second thing this kind of discourse constructs is an attitude to the way of speaking that’s being enregistered. In the case of fundy baby voice that attitude is strongly negative, as you can tell not only from what is said about it (e.g., Cheryl Rofer’s description of it as “bizarre”), but also from the name it’s been given, which is obviously not neutral—it’s not a label you’d expect evangelical women to use themselves. Discourse about fundy baby voice is largely a matter of people outside what Rofer calls the “fundy bubble” criticizing the speech of women inside it. Which is not, of course unusual: commentary on uptalk, vocal fry and other alleged “female verbal tics” is also produced by people who don’t (or think they don’t) talk that way to criticize, mock or shame those who do. 

There are, to be fair, some exceptions: there’s a more nuanced take, for instance, in a post by the former Southern Baptist and now self-described “rural progressive” Jess Piper. Piper wrote about fundy baby voice well before Katie Britt made it a talking-point, and when she revisited the topic in the wake of Britt’s speech she reminded her readers that it isn’t bizarre to women like her who grew up with it:

I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was ingrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.

Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.

Whereas Rofer suggests that evangelical women use fundy baby voice “deliberately”, Piper points out that speaking is a form of habitual behaviour shaped by lessons learned early in life. Though she no longer identifies with the values the voice symbolizes or the community it signals membership of, she hasn’t been able to eliminate the habits she acquired during her formative years—habits which were modelled, as another ex-fundamentalist, Tia Levings, explains, by “older generations speaking in a soft baby whisper to the younger”, and reinforced through “an invisible reward system of acceptance and attention”. Girls learned, in other words, how to speak so that others would listen to them.

That is not, lest we forget, something that only happens in the “fundy bubble”. We are all products of gendered language socialization, which is practised in some form in all communities.  Of course, the details vary: when I was a girl what was modelled and rewarded wasn’t the “soft baby whisper” Tia Levings and Jess Piper learned. But it was just as much a linguistic enactment of my community’s ideas about “proper” femininity. Sounding “ladylike”, for instance, was constantly harped on: girls got far more grief than boys for things like yelling, laughing loudly, using “coarse” language, speaking with a broad local accent and addressing adults without due politeness. And the process continues into adulthood: it’s what’s happening, for instance, in all the modern, “diverse” and “inclusive” workplaces where women are told they sound too “abrasive” and need to “soften their tone”. At least in the “fundy bubble” the speech norms prescribed to women are consistent with the overtly professed belief that women should be sweet and submissive; they’re not enforced by bosses who claim they haven’t got a sexist bone in their body.  

Jess Piper thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to judge women like the ones she grew up with, who “used the voice because they were trained to use it”. They aren’t all terrible people: in many cases, she says,     

They are kind women who show up for others in sickness and in need. They take care of their families and their neighbors and their church sisters and brothers. They are living the life they feel called to lead—I give them grace and understanding. They are not out to harm others.

Piper does not, however, want to give “grace and understanding” to women like Katie Britt, who have real power and who do want to use it to harm others. “I am jolted awake”, she writes, “when I hear the voice dripping sugar from a mouth that claims to love all while stripping rights from many”.

If her point is that these women are hypocrites, then she’ll get no argument from me. But is it right, factually or morally, to make that argument only about fundamentalist women? Isn’t anyone a hypocrite who claims to follow Jesus’s commandment to “love thy neighbour as thyself” while preaching intolerance towards anyone who isn’t white or straight or Christian? Even the hypocrisy of a woman who forges a successful career in national politics while maintaining that women’s place is in the home is not hers alone: presumably women like Britt made their choices with the support of the husbands, fathers and pastors who, as Piper says herself, have more power within the community than they do. If those men are happy for some women to pursue high-powered careers because they think it will advance the community’s political goals, then they are hypocrites too. But by making a specifically female way of speaking into a symbol of the hypocrisy of the religious Right, we are, in effect, scapegoating the women.  

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t criticize Katie Britt. But it would surely be possible to hold her to account—for what she said in her speech, for her record of espousing repellent political views, and indeed for her general hypocrisy—without bringing her voice into it. Is the voice-shaming of right-wing Christian women by leftists and feminists not itself hypocritical? How is it different from what feminists objected to so strenuously in 2016, the voice-shaming of Hillary Clinton by conservatives and woman-haters?

Some feminists might reply that the question is obtuse: the two cases are obviously completely different. Whereas Clinton was criticized for flouting patriarchal speech-norms (e.g., that women should be nice, be humble, speak softly and wear a smile), Katie Britt and other fundy baby voiced women are putting on a bravura display of conformity to those norms: criticizing their way of speaking is therefore a feminist act. But while I do understand that logic, there are two reasons why I don’t accept it.

First, it is my belief that when anyone sets out to shame a woman for something they wouldn’t shame a comparable man for, be that her marital status, her sex-life, her weight, the clothes she wears or the sound of her voice, that is, by definition, sexist. It relies on the existence of a double standard which feminists should be criticizing, not exploiting—especially if we’re going to criticize it when it’s used against us.

Which brings me to the second point. Making high-profile women the subject of endless public commentary about how nasty or stupid or babyish they sound is a form of sexist language-policing that has a negative effect on all women. Not just the ones who really are nasty or stupid; not even just the ones who are individually subjected to criticism. What gets said about those women is intended to teach the rest of us a lesson—to make us more hesitant about speaking publicly, more self-conscious about our speech and more cautious about how we express ourselves. If we think that’s a problem, we can’t pick and choose which forms of it to be against. We can’t argue that it’s OK when the targets are reactionary anti-feminist women, but totally out of order when they’re on our side of the political fence.

Any woman who chuckled at the tweet quoted by Cheryl Rofer—“this porn sucks”, a reference to the fact that fundy baby voice has things in common with the more overtly eroticized “sexy baby voice”—should remember that ideas about how women should or shouldn’t speak are many and varied, and available to be used by anyone who feels the urge to put a woman—any woman—in her place. You may not talk like Katie Britt, but you almost certainly talk in some way that someone somewhere could decide to mock or shame you for—because the basic problem, whether you like it or not, is one that you, like every other woman, share with Katie.   

None of this is meant to imply that feminists shouldn’t be critical of the norms which define “feminine” speech: what I’m saying is that there’s a difference between critically analysing those norms and criticizing, mocking or shaming women whose speech exemplifies them. I (still) don’t understand why language-shaming is so often seen as acceptable when other kinds of shaming are not. If feminists wouldn’t criticize a female politician by making disparaging comments on her appearance–for instance, saying that Marine Le Pen looks like an old hag and Giorgia Meloni dresses like a bimbo–it’s odd that they don’t seem to have similar scruples about mocking the way women’s voices sound.  

But even if you don’t share my reservations about voice-shaming women whose politics you don’t like, in this case it could be seen as a trap. When we ridicule Katie Britt’s performance (as Scarlett Johansson did in her “scary mom” parody on Saturday Night Live) we may actually be doing her a favour, politically speaking, by treating her as a joke rather than a threat. On that point we could learn something from the great Dolly Parton, who has often said that she built her career on being underestimated by people who couldn’t see past the surface trappings of her femininity—the elaborate wigs, the breasts, and indeed the voice (high, sweet and southern accented)—to the inner core of steel. Katie Britt and her ilk may not share Dolly Parton’s values (or her talents), but they are no less ambitious and determined; the threat they represent is real, and we underestimate them at our peril.

Gender, talking and The Traitors

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t yet watched episodes 1-6 of The Traitors UK but you plan to do so, don’t read on

I didn’t watch the first series of The Traitors (I’m not generally a fan of reality shows where people compete for money), but the buzz it generated made me curious enough to start watching the second, which the BBC is showing this month. It’s now reached the halfway mark, and I’m still watching. If you’re interested, as I am, in the way people talk–and more specifically in how gender affects group interaction–this show offers plenty of food for thought.   

In case anyone’s unfamiliar with the format, here’s a quick rundown. Twenty two players are gathered in a Scottish castle and sent on “missions” where they work in teams to earn the prize money they’re hoping to win. A small number of them have been secretly assigned the role of Traitors, and if any of them make it to the end they’ll take all the money, leaving the non-Traitors (“Faithfuls”) with nothing. By that point most players will have been eliminated: the Traitors murder one Faithful each night, meeting in secret to choose their victim, and there’s also a daily Round Table meeting at which the whole group banish someone they think is a Traitor (or in the case of the actual Traitors, someone they want the others to think is a Traitor). This process starts with an unstructured group discussion, and ends with each person casting a vote: whoever gets the most votes must leave, revealing their true allegiance (Traitor or Faithful) on their way out.

Verbal communication plays a central role in this game: to succeed, players need both the ability to read people (paying close attention to their actions, demeanour and–crucially–their speech) and the ability to speak persuasively in a group (since decisions require majority agreement). Individuals will vary in how they approach these tasks and how skilfully they perform them, which is partly a question of experience and temperament. But what happens in group talk isn’t just about individuals: it’s also affected by social factors.

Gender is one of those factors. A large body of research on interaction in mixed groups tells us that

• women typically get less talking time than men: they speak up less, get called on less, and are interrupted or talked over more.
• women who talk as much and as forcefully as men tend to be more negatively evaluated than either men or less talkative women: both sexes may regard them as pushy and “abrasive”
• women’s contributions to a group discussion have less influence than men’s on the group’s decisions.

These patterns, which put women at an obvious disadvantage, have been found in a range of settings, including school and college classrooms, workplace meetings and small group deliberative discussions. Are they also in evidence on The Traitors?

Let’s start with the question of who’s getting most airtime. In a group of this size you’d expect to see variation–some people talking a lot and others saying little or nothing–but while I haven’t been through each Round Table discussion with a stopwatch, I think it’s clear that the least vocal participants have been predominantly women (e.g., Evie, Meg, Mollie, Tracey). At the other end of the spectrum, the pattern is less clear-cut. The players who’ve spoken frequently, at length, and in decisive or challenging ways, have included both men (e.g., Ant, Zack) and women (e.g., Kyra, Ash and Diane). That raises the question of how these more dominant speakers’ contributions have been received. Have assertive women, as research might predict, paid a higher price than men for speaking out?

Diane emerged early on as one of the most confident and forceful speakers, but she quickly came under suspicion (she was one of three candidates for banishment in a tense split vote during the first week), and after narrowly escaping elimination she became more cautious about how often and how decisively she intervened. But the Traitors continued to regard her as a threat. In episode 5 she was on their shortlist for murder, and in episode 6 she became their target (though at the time of writing we don’t know if they succeeded in eliminating her—this has been left as the second week’s cliffhanger).

They had already murdered Kyra, following an early Round Table where she was widely judged to have been one of the most influential voices in the room. Unlike Diane, Kyra was not suspected of treachery: what sealed her fate was the Traitors’ concern about her evident ability to sway the group.

Ash is a slightly different case: she was, in fact, a Traitor (the only woman assigned that role), and it didn’t take long for the group to become suspicious of her, mainly because they thought she talked too much; her eagerness to find out what other players were thinking via informal chats in smaller groups was interpreted as “stirring”. Once the others began to mobilize against her, her fellow-Traitors, not unreasonably, concluded that she was a liability and supported the group’s decision to banish her.   

But it’s not just outspoken women who’ve been targeted: some of the quiet ones (e.g., Sonja, Meg and Tracey) have also been eliminated. In the second week four players were condemned by the Traitors to spend the day in a dungeon; the others were told that the next murder victim would be selected from this group, but whoever won that day’s mission could choose one of them to save. Among the Faithfuls there was general agreement that the condemned four probably included at least one and possibly two Traitors, who’d consigned themselves to the dungeon in a bid to misdirect the group. This theory was correct: the condemned group included two Traitors, Ash and Paul, along with two Faithfuls, Meg and Andrew. But most players assumed the men were both good guys, and that the Traitors must therefore be the women.

In Ash’s case this made sense, since her allegedly excessive talking had already aroused suspicion. In Meg’s case, however, what people claimed to find suspicious was the opposite, how little she talked. Her reserved demeanour and near-silence in group discussions became a sign of her duplicity. The inconsistency of the group’s reasoning was a good illustration of the classic double-bind whereby women can be criticized whatever they do or don’t do. If they don’t speak out they’re judged as weak and “lacking authority”, but if they do they’re accused of being aggressive and overbearing.

After the mission-winning team chose to save Andrew, and the whole group then voted to banish Ash, the remaining Traitors had no option but to murder Meg, thus revealing that she was not, in fact, a Traitor. It’s possible they would have chosen Andrew if he hadn’t been protected. But as a number of people pointed out on social media, once Ash had departed it began to look as if they were deliberately going after female players. On their first night as an all-male group they drew up a shortlist of three women (Charlotte, Diane and Tracey), and ultimately chose to murder Tracey. It was unclear why: like Meg, Tracey tended to listen rather than speak, and despite her claim to have psychic powers, which she herself held responsible for the Traitors’ decision to kill her, she obviously had no idea who they were.

On the following day the Traitors targeted Diane, whose outspokenness made her, arguably, a more logical choice than Tracey. But their general preference for female victims (so far they’ve selected four women and one man) does not seem entirely logical, given that the only people who’ve shown any sign of suspecting them are men. While two of these men (Brian and Ant) have now been banished, three others (Jaz, Ross and Zack) remain. Jaz has aired suspicions about Paul at two Round Tables so far, and has voted to banish him once. The others haven’t voted against him, but they’ve all at least hinted they suspect him.

Paul’s survival speaks to a feature of the game that is not directly related to gender: the way discussions have been affected by groupthink. Most players have been markedly reluctant to diverge from what they take to be the prevailing view, and one view which has thus far prevailed is that Paul, identified in an early poll as the most popular group-member, cannot possibly be a Traitor. That conviction should not have survived the revelation that Meg was a Faithful: after she was killed and Ash was unmasked, suspicion should logically have fallen on both Andrew and Paul. But at that day’s Round Table neither received any votes. A far less obvious proposal garnered more and more support as the discussion went on: its subject, Jonny, ended up with 12 votes against him out of a possible 17. On the following day Andrew did receive two votes, but Paul received none. Jaz expressed suspicion about him, but ultimately voted for Andrew (Paul, meanwhile, voted for Jaz: it remains to be seen whether anyone has picked up on the significance of this). Though the vote was less decisive than it had been the day before, half the players chose Ant, who was duly banished.   

After learning that they’d eliminated yet another Faithful, some group-members did start to ask if they were giving too much weight to their feelings about other people, and too little to less subjective kinds of evidence. Though the short answer to that question is yes, I’d say the deeper problem is their unwillingness, in most cases, to interrogate either established preconceptions (e.g., that Paul is not a traitor) or the arguments which are made in group discussions (e.g., that there was a dramatic change in Ant’s behaviour after the first night). Many Round Table discussions have reminded me of the famous 1950s “conformity experiment” where the psychologist Solomon Asch found that most people who heard a series of others giving the wrong answer to a question (these others were in fact confederates who’d been instructed to answer wrongly) reproduced the same answer, despite knowing it was wrong. The format of the game relies on people’s tendency to want to fit in with whatever group they’re part of: if players were less prone to following the herd the daily banishment votes would often fail to produce a clear loser. So far, that’s only happened once: most votes—three out of five—have been landslides.    

In the game as in real life (where people who witness bullying and harassment often don’t intervene, even though they disapprove), players who do dissent from the majority view may feel that challenging it openly is too dangerous. Jaz, for instance, has twice voiced his suspicions about Paul in group discussion, but he has avoided pressing the point too strongly, and has not consistently voted to banish Paul. Presumably he reasons that if he can’t persuade a majority of the others to support him—an uphill task, given that so many players think Paul can do no wrong—he will just be making himself a target. If he did become the Traitors’ next victim that might point the remaining Faithfuls in the right direction, but from his perspective it would be a bad outcome–it would mean he was out of the game–so it’s rational for him to minimize the risk.   

I said earlier that this aspect of the group dynamic wasn’t directly related to gender, but it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that the player who attracts most loyalty, respect and admiration from other players of both sexes is a man rather than a woman. Mixed groups of all kinds are more likely to view men as the outstanding performers and most qualified leaders. And Paul is the kind of man who often gets propelled to the top of the pecking-order: a white manager in his mid-30s (old enough to have some gravitas but not too old to be considered dynamic), he’s confident, well-groomed and physically attractive by mainstream standards. Though departing players, amazed to be told that he’s a Traitor, have commented that he’s “playing a blinder”, it might be more a case of the others playing a blinder for him—projecting onto him the positive qualities they associate with men of his type, whether or not he’s done anything concrete to demonstrate those qualities. At the moment his position seems fairly secure: though a couple of the players do suspect him, the women, in particular, are still behind him.  

Was it a mistake for the Traitors to kill off women who gave no sign of suspecting them, like Meg and Tracey—and even Diane, who was more suspicious of Ant and Andrew—while leaving men who did have suspicions in play? Possibly; it’s also possible that what motivated them was, as some social media commenters thought, just basic sexism. On that point I’m currently agnostic, but if they go on murdering women I’ll change my mind, because at this stage it’s not a rational strategy. If I were Paul I’d want to protect my loyal female supporters and concentrate on removing actual threats. I’d resist the temptation to murder Jaz immediately, while making every effort to turn the group against him; I’d probably aim to pick off Zack and Andrew first (since both have already attracted suspicion) and I wouldn’t try to squash the doubts some people are now having about my fellow-Traitor Miles. If Ross survives he’d be next on my list.  

What about the remaining women? Almost all of them are less vocal and/or less challenging than Jaz, Zack or Ross. Evie and Mollie are virtually silent; Charlie and Charlotte are a bit more assertive, but not consistently enough to be influential. In a way this has worked to their advantage, by keeping them off the other players’ radar; if any of these four last long enough they could be part of a winning group (though only, of course, if all the Traitors have been unmasked). Jasmine, by contrast, jumps in more readily and is capable of being challenging,. But she doesn’t seem likely to rock the boat. For one thing she’s one of Paul’s staunchest supporters, and for another she hasn’t been great at winning the other Faithfuls’ trust. Her keenness to claim the shields which protect individuals from the next night’s murder has led to a perception of her as self-centred, not a team-player. If the Traitors are derailed, it may happen with the women’s support (apart from Charlie they all have an unbroken record of voting with the majority), but I doubt whether any of them will take the lead.    

I’m not suggesting that women (or anyone else who isn’t a straight white middle-class man) can’t win. In the first series of The Traitors two of the three winners were women. But there are probably fewer ways for them to do it, because so many strategies are less socially acceptable and more negatively stereotyped in women. The belief that women are or should be kinder than men and more attuned to others’  feelings makes people less tolerant and more suspicious when women like Jasmine behave selfishly (though in a competition you’d expect all players to put their own interests first) or when they are strongly critical of others (what’s seen as forthright in men becomes bitchy in women). Women whose contributions command attention in a group are also more readily seen, like Kyra, as potential threats.

Since in this series the Traitors were mostly—and are now exclusively—male, I do think it’s possible that both gender stereotyping and the dynamics of mixed-sex interaction have played some part in protecting them. But so has capricious decision-making. If The Traitors shows anything, it shows that most of us are much less good than we think we are at reading other people. It’s not that the producers have recruited a particularly dense set of contestants: the audience-members who’ve taken to Twitter to complain that they’re obtuse and stupid seem to be forgetting that as viewers they already know who the Traitors are, making it easy to read their behaviour as treacherous. Lacking that information, the Faithfuls have relied on “gut feelings”–a phrase which suggests they’re accessing some deep-rooted, instinctive wisdom, when in fact what they’re accessing is a collection of prejudices, stereotypes and normative expectations which lead, as we’ve seen, to illogical and inconsistent judgments.

Would the Faithfuls do better if they were more aware of their biases and made a more conscious effort to resist stereotyping and groupthink? Maybe; but it isn’t easy for any group, let alone a group whose members barely know each other and who are operating in an unfamiliar environment, to detect the traitors in their midst. If liars and dissemblers were so easy to spot, the quest to unmask them wouldn’t fill 12 episodes–and the world would be a lot less full of successful spies, fraudsters, con-artists and people like Jaz’s father (who turned out to have a second family). Our need to trust other people, and be accepted by them, makes all of us vulnerable to deception and betrayal. The Traitors exploits that: it may be light entertainment, but underneath the kitsch exterior its heart is dark.       

2023: forward to the past?

It’s that time again: the time when commentators of all kinds look back at the last 12 months, and pick out what they see as the most significant trends or the most memorable moments of the year. This blog’s annual round-ups have tended to be variations on a few well-worn themes; the details are different every year, but the overall trends are much the same. In that respect, as what follows will make clear, 2023 was fairly typical; but one thing several of the issues I’ve picked out have in common (something the title of this post alludes to) is an oddly “retro” vibe: they’re cases where an old form of sexism has been reinvented or repackaged for new times.             

1. Tech troubles

This year’s lists of WOTYs (words of the year) were dominated by a single theme: most major English dictionaries agreed that 2023 was the year of artificial intelligence. Though Oxford (which put its shortlist to a public vote) ended up crowning rizz, a slang term derived from charisma, Collins went with AI and Cambridge chose hallucinate (in the AI-related sense of “make stuff up”). Merriam-Webster’s choice, authentic, reflected concerns about AI’s capacity to deceive by mimicking or producing believable simulacra of real people: deepfake was also on its shortlist.

Feminists have their own concerns about recent developments in AI, ranging from the way large language models amplify sexist biases in the massive datasets used to train them to the implications of AI “companions”, whose increasing popularity I wrote about in May. But this year’s events reminded us that some of women’s most pressing technology-related problems are not new—and are still not getting the kind of serious attention, either from the tech companies or from policymakers, which we’ve seen being given to AI.  

In January, when the New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern unexpectedly resigned, there was speculation that the misogynist abuse and threats she’d been subjected to had played a significant part in her decision. Another female leader who resigned in 2023, the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (though she clearly had other reasons for stepping down) spoke publicly both about her personal experiences of online abuse and her fear that it was driving women out of politics, or deterring them from entering in the first place.

We’ve known about this problem for some time. In 2016 a cross-party campaign (fronted by Yvette Cooper MP) was launched under the slogan “Reclaim the Internet”: it aimed, among other things, to pressure the tech companies to do more. But this initiative evidently did not achieve much. In 2017 a survey of women MPs found that one in three had seriously considered quitting because of the volume of abuse they received, and in 2019 a significant number chose not to seek re-election, citing abuse as a reason for their decision to stand down. Like tech’s other big misogyny problems–one being the ease with which violent and/or supposedly illegal pornography can be accessed online, by children as well as adults, and another being the proliferation of extreme misogynist content which is then promoted to young men on mainstream platforms like YouTube and TikTok—this one seems to be getting worse.          

2. Women beware women: the political rise of the female anti-feminist

But there’s one type of female politician who had a good year in 2023: the right-wing woman whose rhetoric is even more extreme, reactionary and authoritarian than that of the men around her. Though in most cases her main selling point is nationalism/racism, she will often position herself explicitly as a female anti-feminist, extolling women’s traditional domestic roles while making her own status as an exception, a woman in a position of public leadership, more acceptable by adopting one or more of the archetypal personae through which female power has historically been understood (mother, iron lady/warrior queen, seductress or “pet”). As a type she is far from new, but she has managed to reinvent herself: her politics may be backward-looking, but she presents herself as a thoroughly modern woman.

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the “post-fascist” Brothers [sic] of Italy who is now the Italian prime minister, is a notable case in point. She has described herself as first and foremost a mother, and has emphasized her Christian beliefs, but she has also exploited her relative youth and sexual attractiveness in a way that sometimes makes you wonder if she’s trying to establish the bimbo as a new political archetype. She once posed for the media while holding a pair of melons to her chest (a reference both to her last name and to the slang meaning of “melons”, which is the same in Italian as in English), and at a NATO summit in 2023 she cut short a press conference on the grounds that her high heeled shoes were killing her. Like Marine Le Pen (who improved her performance in the last French presidential election by adopting a softer, more maternal image), Meloni seems to know what she’s doing: polls suggest that her brand of femininity is seen by many women as “relatable”.

The antifeminist female politician has also become a significant figure in the British Tory party, whose internal wars were, regrettably, a major driver of our national politics in 2023. She isn’t a completely new phenomenon (the obvious precedent is Margaret Thatcher), but I can’t remember a time when so many women were talked of on the Tory right as potential leaders. In some cases antifeminism is incidental to their political brand (Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, for instance, are more notable for being the rabidly anti-immigrant children of immigrants), but one of this year’s rising stars, the 41-year-old backbench MP Miriam Cates, brought it squarely into the foreground, underlining her status as a woman to watch with a speech at the NatCon conference which identified falling birthrates (she didn’t say “among white people” but that’s generally assumed to have been her meaning) as an “existential crisis”. Too many young people, she said (this obviously meant “young women”) were going to university and having careers instead of babies. (Footnote: Miriam Cates has a degree from Cambridge University and a career as a politician; she does also have three children, but given the demands of her job as an MP we can assume she delegates most childcare to someone else.)    

But as troubling as it is to hear this kind of rhetoric from an elected British politician, we Brits don’t seem to be in much immediate danger of being led by fanatically right-wing women. Their most senior representative in government, Suella Braverman, got the sack in November (prompting a reshuffle that brought a more traditional figure, “Daddy” David Cameron, back into the Cabinet). Meanwhile, the official inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic underlined the point that real power still belongs largely to the same privileged male public-school-and-Oxbridge types who have ruled us since time immemorial. The language these men used during the crisis (as revealed by the WhatsApp messages they exchanged) gave a good indication of their arrogance, laziness and hostility to any woman who raised concerns. The testimony of Helen MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant in the Cabinet Office at the time, was an incisive, albeit belated, contribution to feminist criticism of Boris Johnson’s monumentally incompetent and self-serving administration.

3. Misrepresenting male violence

Another subject which continued to make national headlines in 2023 was the high prevalence of violence against women, and the extent to which the justice system is failing women who suffer it. Since Sarah Everard’s abduction and murder by serving police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021 there has been a steady flow of new revelations about police officers either perpetrating crimes against women or covering up for colleagues who had done so. But while the media have been instrumental in bringing these cases to public attention, an academic book published in April, Alessia Tranchese’s From Fritzl to #MeToo, showed that their reporting of sexual violence is itself part of the problem, contributing significantly to the climate of disbelief, victim-blaming and “himpathy” (making excuses for male perpetrators) which enables so many violent men to evade justice.

Tranchese’s analysis of the language of rape reporting in UK newspapers provides clear evidence that language which implies that women who report rape are lying is not only still the norm, it has actually become even more entrenched in recent years. One of the developments that has helped to entrench it is the “celebrification” of news coverage since the 2010s: stories about male celebrities accused of rape or sexual assault are getting more space in newspapers, and these men are particularly likely to be given the “himpathetic” treatment. While it’s often assumed that #MeToo put a stop to this, Tranchese’s data suggest that its effect was in fact quite limited, and that the backlash that followed (which she documents in detail) may have entrenched the problem further.

Her point was demonstrated in September of this year, when a documentary that aired allegations about Russell Brand prompted a flurry of complaints that Brand was being unfairly subjected to “trial by media”. This view was expressed by commentators across the political spectrum, and none appeared to have noticed what Tranchese had pointed out: that women who report being raped or sexually harassed by a popular celebrity like Brand (or even one as lacking in “rizz” as Prince Andrew) are routinely put on trial by the media, in reports which implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—represent them as sluts, gold-diggers, vengeful obsessives and liars. Yet this form of “trial by media” does not raise the same concern that it might interfere with the pursuit of justice through the proper channels: it’s familiar, unremarkable and taken for granted. From Fritzl to #MeToo was not the most enjoyable feminist book about language I read this year (that accolade goes to Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue), but in political terms it was probably the most important.   

4. Back to bullshit

One issue this blog has returned to regularly since 2015 is the never-ending flow of bullshit about women’s language masquerading as wisdom or science. There was something of a slowdown during the pandemic, but by the beginning of this year normal service had been resumed.

In January I spotted what looked like a new riff on the familiar theme of How Women’s Language Holds Them Back, in a Harvard Business Review article headed “Research: men speak more abstractly than women”. Which is a problem, apparently, because “our studies have shown that people tend to associate abstract language with power and leadership”. So, if you want to be seen as a leader, try waffling vaguely about “intangible concepts”. And if you’re wondering how that fits with another common piece of advice for women—namely, “cut out the fluff and be direct”—let me remind you that this kind of logical thinking will get you nowhere. On Planet Bullshit the only rule which applies consistently is that anything women do–or are said to do–with language can and will be used against them.

Later in the year I revisited the more familiar bullshit claim that women are incapable of forming a sentence without using the word “sorry” after stumbling across some training materials which set out to cure trainees of their addiction to the S-word by confronting them with the shocking fact that in the course of her life the average woman will apologize no fewer than 295,650 times. And where did this statistic come from? Why, from a survey conducted by an online florist! Whose purpose, needless to say, was not scientific but commercial: it was designed to persuade us that, since verbal apologies have been rendered meaningless by overuse, we should consider buying “apology flowers” instead.  

In July one of the world’s leading newspapers, the New York Times, took the unusual step of publishing an op-ed in which the writer Adam Grant (a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton Business School) defended women’s use of so-called “weak language” as a rational choice, given the evidence that women who follow advice to speak directly and assertively are liable to be judged “abrasive”, “strident” and unlikable. It’s an argument that feminist linguists have been making for decades; but perhaps now that a man has made it, people might actually start taking it seriously.

5. (M)adwomen: reinventing sexism in advertising

As annoyed as I get about bullshit advice (especially when it makes use of garbage “research” like the online florist’s survey while resolutely ignoring the existence of actual research on language and gender), my most rage-fuelled post of 2023 (and also the one that got most page-views) was about another old chestnut, sexism in advertising: more specifically, the way the use of verbal innuendo and sexualized visual imagery has spread from its original home in ads for products like women’s underwear to charity-led campaigns about women’s health.

Once again, this was not the first time I’d broached the subject. In 2021 I criticized a campaign which claimed to be raising awareness about cervical cancer screening by urging women to post a cat picture online, choosing a longhaired, shorthaired or hairless cat to show whether their pubic hair was “bushy, bare or halfway there” (cat = pussy, geddit?). Could efforts to encourage women to have smear tests get any more tasteless? The answer, it turns out, is yes: in Manchester in November, North West Cancer Research unveiled its latest campaign, featuring 3D images of disembodied female legs alongside a slogan its creators described as “playful and a bit cheeky” (though I’d call it “demeaning and a bit rapey”): “don’t keep ‘em crossed, get screened instead”.

A lot of people who objected to this campaign assumed it must have been designed by men, but in fact it was produced by a female-led creative team at an agency whose website stresses its feminist credentials. Unfortunately it is part of an industry whose feminism leans heavily on half-baked ideas about “empowerment” and sexual “agency”: hence the assumption that using sexualized words and images in the context of cancer prevention is witty and “edgy” rather than offensive (except of course to dried-up old prudes who haven’t caught up with the latest thinking). For this agency’s next awayday I’d recommend a daytrip to Tate Britain, whose current exhibition of late 20^th century British feminist art, Women in Revolt! might help them understand why those of us who remember the 1970s (that golden age of sexist advertising) aren’t impressed. The issue isn’t that we’re old: we’re just puzzled and disappointed to see younger women reinventing a wheel we spent our own youth trying to put a spoke in–partly [irony klaxon] so that future generations would be spared the relentless sexism we grew up with.

6. Books, old and new

Speaking of late 20^th century feminism, November brought the sad news that Dale Spender had died. Though her contributions to the women’s movement were many and varied, particularly in her native Australia, in Britain she was probably best known as the author of the 1980 feminist classic Man Made Language, in which she argued that using a language made by men forces women to internalize and reproduce a male-centred view of the world. My post about Spender explained why I didn’t (and still don’t) agree; but it also explored the reasons why her book spoke so powerfully to many feminists, and reflected on the way it challenged me to formulate my own ideas coherently (a process whose end result was my own first book). It isn’t always the writers you agree with who inspire you, and you don’t have to agree with other feminists about everything to admire and respect their contributions.

Though I can’t compete with Spender’s lifetime output of over 30 books, I’ve written a few more since the 1980s, and the most recent of them, Language, Sexism and Misogyny, was published just before Christmas. It’s my attempt to assess what’s changed—and what hasn’t—in the 50 years since language became a serious subject of feminist study; it covers many of the subjects I’ve written about on this blog, and it’s aimed at a similar kind of audience (i.e., it’s not just for specialists in linguistics). If anyone who’s reading this post would also like to read the book, you can find the details here.

As ever, I’ll end by thanking everyone who’s visited Language: a feminist guide in 2023, and all the other feminist researchers and writers who’ve contributed to this year’s posts through their published work or their suggestions and recommendations. And whatever may happen in 2024, I hope it will bring you at least some of what you wish for.    

Remembering Dale Spender

Sometimes on this blog I write about feminists who had interesting ideas about language before the 21st century: women like Suzette Haden Elgin, the linguist and science fiction writer who created a women’s language, Láadan, and Marie Shear, the editor and language commentator who defined feminism as “the radical notion that women are people”. I write about these women knowing that many readers won’t have heard of them; their stories illustrate how easily the work of women can fade into obscurity and be forgotten.     

This post is about someone who understood that problem well: the Australian feminist Dale Spender, whose death at the age of 80 was announced last month. Spender devoted a great deal of time and energy to recovering the forgotten contributions of once well-known female thinkers and writers. She saw this as a political act: as she said in her book Women of Ideas And What Men Have Done To Them, “unless we can reconstruct our past, draw on it and transmit it to the next generation, our oppression persists”. For me Women of Ideas was the most successful of Spender’s books (not that I can claim to have read them all–she wrote or edited more than 30). But many feminists will remember her best as the author of Man Made Language. First published in 1980 and now regarded as a feminist classic, it was the book that established Spender’s reputation. It also played a significant, though complicated, part in my own development as a feminist linguist.

When Man Made Language came out I was both a student of linguistics and a politically active feminist. But those two parts of my life were completely separate. I didn’t know that anyone was doing feminist research in the subject I was studying: in the three years I’d already spent studying it none of this work had ever been mentioned. Then, one evening in 1981, someone in a local women’s group I belonged to turned up to one of our regular weekly meetings brandishing a copy of Man Made Language. “This is amazing”, she said: “we should read it and talk about it”. And it was by reading Spender’s book, not for an academic seminar but for a discussion in a women’s group, that I discovered the work of the first generation of feminist linguists, anthropologists and communication researchers.

One reason I hadn’t read it earlier was that I knew academic linguists didn’t think much of it. If they paid it any attention at all, they dismissed it as naive, ill-informed and trivial, the work of a writer who (a) was not a linguist, and (b) had an obvious political axe to grind. Though these critics spoke in the measured tones of what I’d now call “gentlemanly sexism”, it was clear to me that they were grinding axes of their own: they resented Spender both for trespassing on “their” turf and for her radical (or as they saw it, “manhating”) feminist views. Nevertheless, I deferred to their expert opinion, and felt no compulsion to read Man Made Language for myself.

When I did eventually read it, I found I agreed with some of the linguists’ criticisms. Not all of them, however. Though I wasn’t convinced by Spender’s answers, unlike the gentlemanly sexists I didn’t find her questions trivial. In fact, her book made me want to explore those questions further, and that led me to start writing what became my own first book. That book helped me to get my first academic job, and set me on a path that I would follow for the next 40 years. So, although (or indeed because) I was critical of Man Made Language, the book both inspired me and ultimately changed my life.  

At the time, being young and arrogant, I didn’t give Spender the credit she deserved. I don’t mean she deserves credit for kick-starting my career (I’m not quite that self-absorbed), I mean she deserves credit for the impact Man Made Language had on a whole generation of English-speaking feminists. Since her death a number of my women friends have recalled reading it as “a lightbulb moment”: it put questions about language on the feminist agenda in a way no single book had done before and arguably none has done since. Not everyone who read it agreed with Spender’s arguments, but it challenged those who didn’t, like me, to come up with their own alternatives. A less radical, less provocative book would not have had this galvanizing effect.

So, what was Spender’s radical argument? It’s summed up in her book’s three-word title: she argues that the languages we all use were created by the dominant sex, men, and that they represent human experience from a perspective that is both male-centred (reflects men’s ways of seeing and interpreting the world) and masculist or patriarchal (assumes the superiority of men to women). In the Introduction she puts it like this:

One of our fundamental rules for making sense of our male-dominated world is – predictably – that the male represents the positive while the female, necessarily then, represents the negative. …Each day we construct the world we live in according to these man-made rules. …And one of the crucial factors in our construction of this reality is language. Language is our means of classifying and ordering the world: our means of manipulating reality. …Yet the rules for meaning, which are part of language, are not natural; they were not present in the world and merely awaiting discovery by human beings. On the contrary, they had to be invented before anything could be discovered, for without them there is no frame of reference, no order, no possibility for systematic interpretation and understanding.

I don’t dispute the point that many (if not most) languages exhibit male bias, but I’ve always had trouble with the idea that this is because men invented the “rules for meaning”. Are there, in fact, “rules for meaning”, and if there are, does it make sense to think of them as “invented”? Presumably Spender can’t have thought that the rules for meaning were decided at some all-male committee meeting thousands of years ago, but when and how are they supposed to have come into being? And how were men able to impose their rules on the entire speech community, preventing anyone who experienced the world differently (and in particular, the women who made up half the population) from using words to express their own reality?    

My own view was, and still is, that no one invented the rules of meaning, and no one can control the use of language in the way Spender suggests. It’s true there are some kinds of language (most obviously, formal published writing) which can be regulated quite strictly by people with institutional authority; it’s also true that until recently that authority belonged overwhelmingly to men (or more exactly, to a privileged subset of men). Historically it was those men who wrote the dictionaries and grammar books which define “correct” usage, who created the technical vocabulary of specialized domains like science, and who controlled, as printers, publishers and editors, the most influential or prestigious channels through which writing circulated publicly. Those facts explain why male perspectives dominated public discourse for centuries. But it doesn’t follow that men control “language” or “meaning” in general: we don’t need to believe in some mysterious male power to dictate what all words will mean for every language-user in every context. 

In fact, there are good reasons to reject that belief. Most of what we know about our native language(s) and the rules or conventions for using them is learned through everyday (mainly spoken) interaction which is not subject to institutional control. A lot of that learning takes place in childhood, and typically it is women and older girls who are primarily responsible for the linguistic socialization of children. And why would women or girls who spent more time talking among themselves than to men or boys (a pattern which was probably the norm in most cultures for most of history) have been unable to use language in ways that reflected their shared experience?

Another thing we don’t need to believe in is the kind of “strong” linguistic determinism Spender espoused in Man Made Language—the view that language sets limits not only on what can be said, but also on what can be thought. As she explained in the Introduction,

While at one level we may support or refute the myth of male superiority – it being a matter of political choice – at another level we are unaware of the way in which it structures our behaviour and forms some of the limits of our world. 

A language which incorporates man-made semantic rules like “male is positive, female is negative” makes it impossible to conceptualize femaleness positively.

But what this line of argument always leaves unexplained is how the person making it can think outside the linguistic box they claim the rest of us are trapped in. How do we reconcile Spender’s own ability to conceptualize femaleness positively, and to assert that man-made language distorts reality, with the argument that language structures our thinking and determines what we perceive as real?   

In fact Spender doesn’t argue that consistently. After making the observation I’ve just quoted about the way our everyday use of language reproduces a male view of reality, she goes on:

Some of us, however, have decided to stop. We no longer wish to give substance to the patriarchal order and its integral component, the superiority of the male. We have started to formulate different rules for classifying the world, rules that are not based on the assumption that the proper human being is a male one and that female is a negative category. We have begun to codify the meaning that woman is an autonomous category and we are beginning to make this version of the world come true.

This implies that man-made language does not, in fact, prevent women from noticing and rejecting its male bias. They can decide to stop following men’s rules and substitute their own. Far from being controlled by language, Spender is saying that women can choose to take control of it.

Is it really that simple, though? The paragraph I’ve just quoted reminds me of the famous exchange in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass where Humpty Dumpty insists (in the face of Alice’s polite scepticism) that words mean whatever he chooses them to mean. The problem with this isn’t that Humpty Dumpty can’t choose to use words in novel and unconventional ways (he can and he does): it’s that his ability to communicate through language depends on other people’s understanding of the words he uses. If he wants his interlocutors to grasp what he means, there are limits on how far he can stray from the norms of his linguistic community. He can’t just ignore what everyone else thinks a word means and unilaterally impose his own, completely different definition.

But it’s also a mistake to think that definitions are set in stone, or that conscious efforts to change them are automatically doomed to fail. The history of such efforts suggests that they’re most likely to succeed when they are linked to wider shifts in social attitudes and practices. The word marriage is an obvious recent example: where the law has changed to permit same-sex marriage that has also changed the way the word is used, making it very unlikely that its traditional meaning (“the union of a man and a woman”) will be its primary meaning for future generations–however vocally religious conservatives insist it should be. By contrast, when the organizers of the first “slutwalk” proposed to redefine a “slut” as “a woman who is in control of her own sexuality”, they were accused of being out of touch with reality: the punitive attitudes expressed by the word slut had not changed enough to make “reclaiming” it feasible or desirable.

One of the things I found frustrating about Man Made Language was its tendency to swing between the extremes of strong determinism (man-made language imposes a male view of reality on everyone) and voluntarism (we can simply “decide to stop” deferring to man-made rules). Apart from being, on the face of things, incompatible, both these views (IMO) oversimplify the way language works.

But my biggest disagreement with Spender was more basic. I don’t believe that “man (or men) made language”, and I don’t think there’s anything liberating about what that belief implies–that language does not belong to women in the same way it belongs to men, and that women will therefore find it harder than men to put their thoughts, feelings and experiences into words. Though Spender’s version of this argument is framed in a different (i.e., feminist) way, to me it still feels uncomfortably close to the popular “deficit model” which holds that women’s ways of using language are inferior to men’s.

Women are constantly told, by all kinds of self-appointed experts, that there are problems with the way they express themselves verbally. Their speech is said to be “weak” and “lacking in authority”; according to Naomi Wolf they don’t get firsts at Oxford because their written sentences aren’t bold enough. In the past male critics dismissed women’s literary writing on the grounds that its subject-matter was “trivial” and its prose style “flowery”, while linguists and lexicographers had their own version of the “man made language” story, in which men were, as Otto Jespersen put it in 1922, “the chief renovators of language”,: their use of language was creative and innovative whereas women’s was conservative and conventional. There was, Jespersen commented, “a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions”.

These claims are based on prejudice, not evidence: they are examples of the “male positive, female negative” thinking Spender criticizes. And I’m not suggesting she herself believed women’ were inferior communicators. But unfortunately, many people–including many women–do believe that. I thought the thesis that language was made by and for men might end up just reinforcing women’s feelings of inadequacy, while distracting attention from the most significant communication problem they face–which is not the way they speak, but the way they are heard (or not heard) and judged.

But my reservations about Man Made Language put me at odds with most of the feminists I hung out with in the early 1980s. Whereas I found its arguments too sweeping, for them it was the book’s bold and uncompromising stance that made it so inspiring. Unlike previous popular treatments of language and sexism, which addressed a mainstream audience from a liberal, equal rights feminist perspective, Man Made Language spoke to grassroots activists who were more aligned with radical feminism. In those circles it was very influential: it undoubtedly started some important conversations, and for that we should be grateful to Dale Spender.

I met Spender only once, at a conference in the early noughties where we were both invited speakers. She was about to leave when we ran into each other, and was wheeling a large purple suitcase which matched her trademark purple outfit. I hadn’t actually sought her out because I thought it might be a bit awkward, but if she knew I had criticized Man Made Language she gave absolutely no sign of it: I found her open, friendly, likeable and funny.  

Pondering this encounter later, I remembered a TV “debate” on Man Made Language which had pitted Spender against the linguist Randolph Quirk. He was enormously condescending, but Spender refused to be provoked or cowed; instead of trying to argue with him, she just kept repeating what she’d said in the book. Since in a debate you’re supposed to try to refute your opponent’s points, not ignore them, the result was a bit of a car crash, and at the time I found it excruciating to watch. But after meeting Spender I saw it more as a case of someone practising what she preached. She wasn’t interested in playing what she saw as a male game, or in bolstering Quirk’s sense of his own superiority by engaging seriously with his criticisms.

If I’d been in her position I’d have been impelled by my own vanity to try to win the argument. But I don’t get the impression that Dale Spender was vain. In person she didn’t expect you to defer to her status as an Uber-Famous Feminist (and I’ve met plenty of famous feminists who did). She was a tireless promoter of other women’s ideas, not only in her own writing but also as an editor of encyclopedias, book series and the journal Women’s Studies International Quarterly.

Though I disagreed with Dale Spender about some things, I admired her for her conviction, her energy, her optimism, and her commitment to preserving the words and achievements of women for the benefit of future generations. What she did for other women of ideas, I hope we, and those who follow us, will do for her.  

Don’t keep ’em crossed: how not to get ahead in advertising

The photograph below, taken at Manchester Piccadilly station earlier this month, shows an installation commissioned by North West Cancer Research to encourage more women to get screened for cervical cancer. Which is, of course, a worthy goal; cervical cancer screening can save lives. But when I first saw this photo, what I mostly felt was rage. I was so angry, I immediately reposted it with a critical comment on Twitter/X. Evidently this struck a chord: within a couple of days my tweet had racked up 134K views and prompted numerous replies from other women who found the installation “awful”, “crass” and “disgusting”. In this post I’ll take a closer look at what the problem with it is—and why that problem is so common in women’s health campaigns.

The installation consists of five large display boards arranged in a line. Mounted on each of the middle three boards is a disembodied pair of crossed female legs. They’re like the legs you see on mannequins in the hosiery sections of department stores: long, slender, and carefully positioned for aesthetic effect. They begin at the top of the thigh and end in Barbie-style feet wearing high-heeled court shoes. They are “diverse” insofar as they represent a range of skin colours, but there is no diversity in relation to age, body-size or personal style. The imaginary woman these legs belong to is clearly young, slim, and conventionally feminine. On its own the visual element of the display could easily be mistaken for a lingerie ad: it’s far from obvious what legs have to do with cervical cancer. But the connection is spelled out in the verbal message, which is split between the two outer display boards. Both parts address the viewer directly and in the imperative: on the left, “don’t keep ‘em crossed”, and on the right, “get screened instead”.

While there are many things to object to about this installation, the thing I found so shocking that it rendered me temporarily speechless was that injunction “don’t keep ’em crossed”. It’s offensive because the crossing and uncrossing of a woman’s legs is a well-worn metaphor for sexual continence or incontinence. That’s the real reason why girls are taught that it’s “ladylike” to sit with your legs crossed (and “unladylike” to sit with them apart): while this is often presented as a matter of aesthetics or good taste, what it’s really about is modesty, in the sense of chastity. By adopting a posture that completely conceals her genital area, a woman signals that she is not available for sex.

The flipside, of course, is that the uncrossing of a woman’s legs becomes a sign that she is open to sexual propositions. When I was growing up in the 1970s people often said, about both rape and unwanted pregnancy, that all a woman had to do to prevent it was “keep her legs crossed”. This was a commonplace form of victim-blaming and slut-shaming, but it also had a flipside which might be called “prude-shaming”. The woman who did “keep ’em crossed” could be accused of denying men access because she was “uptight”, frigid and sexually repressed. Which is also what “don’t keep ‘em crossed/get screened instead” implies—that it’s uptightness that stops women from getting screened.

This sexualization of a medical procedure is offensive in its own right, but if the aim is to increase the uptake of screening it also seems strategically ill-conceived. If women are really deterred from getting smears by a prudish reluctance to open their legs, then surely it would make more sense to try to take sex out of the equation, and talk about smear tests in the same way you’d talk about any other medical procedure involving the probing of a bodily orifice. These are, after all, quite numerous: if sexual references are not a staple feature of campaigns encouraging men to get their prostates checked, why should they have any place in campaigns about cervical cancer?  

I say “campaigns”, plural, because the NHS and cancer charities have form for this. In 2021 the health app myGP ran a bizarre online campaign suggesting young women could remind their social media followers about the importance of regular smear tests by posting a picture of the type of cat (long-haired, short-haired or hairless) that best represented the current state of their pubic hair. The cat, obviously, was code for the explicitly sexualized term “pussy”. And it’s not just cervical cancer that gets this treatment. One Twitter commenter reminded me that in 2020 the Sun newspaper, which for several decades was famous for featuring a daily topless pin-up photo on page 3, ran a campaign to encourage breast self-examination whose title and slogan was “CoppaFeel!”. And in Canada a campaign to raise awareness of ovarian cancer renamed women’s ovaries “ladyballs”: its slogan was “have the ladyballs to do something about it”.

These campaigns persistently use the register of laddish banter, sometimes in combination with the visual language of pornography, in which women are reduced to their component body-parts (and often, as in this case, shown without faces, the most individualizing and emotionally expressive parts of the human body). It’s as if the designers are incapable of viewing female bodies from anything but a heterosexual male perspective, or of talking about diseases that affect thousands of women (some of whom will die from them) in anything but a laddishly jokey way. Does that not suggest an extraordinary level of obtuseness about, or indeed contempt for, women’s own experiences and feelings?

But if you’re assuming that the “don’t keep ‘em crossed” campaign must have been developed by men, I regret to tell you that you’re mistaken. The PR agency North West Cancer Research used, Influential, is led by women; a report on the website of Prolific North, a hub for digital and media professionals in the north of England, makes clear that women dreamed up those disembodied legs and came up with that repulsively rapey strapline. What were they thinking? Karen Swan, a director at Influential, explained to Prolific North that

We wanted a campaign that was playful and a bit cheeky in order to grab our audience’s attention, so the strapline “Don’t keep ‘em crossed” was perfect.  

Cara Newton, head of marketing at North West Cancer Research, agreed, saying they’d wanted a campaign whose launch would create what she described as a “real moment”.

When I first saw the installation I did have a “real moment”, of the Proustian variety: it transported me straight back to my teenage years in the 1970s, when “playful and cheeky” sexism was ubiquitous in popular culture. Some of the older women who commented on my tweet also made that connection, drawing comparisons with 1970s British favourites like the Carry On films and the Benny Hill Show. One recalled a piece of health messaging that makes Influential’s effort seem almost tasteful: when she had her first child in 1979, there was a poster in the maternity ward promoting breastfeeding with the message “Breast is best, and Dad can suck on the empties”.

Commercial advertisers in this period often used wordplay that gave their ads a sexist/misogynist subtext. Below, for instance, is an ad for the UK hosiery brand Pretty Polly in which a sexualized image of women’s legs is given a witty caption–“for girls who don’t want to wear the trousers”–that has both an innocuous reading (“for women who prefer wearing skirts”) and a sexist one (“for women who want to be dominated by men”) which is also a dig at feminists, with their presumed desire both to dominate men and to look like them. Influential’s installation is very obviously in this tradition: it uses the same combination of visual imagery (disembodied legs/high-heeled shoes) and verbal innuendo.

Back in the day, this kind of thing certainly grabbed feminists’ attention: it inspired complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency, stickering campaigns on the London Underground (“this advert degrades women”) and illegal spray painting of graffiti on street hoardings (Pretty Polly was one target for this form of activism, as seen below).  

It may be because I’m old enough to remember this that the “don’t keep ‘em crossed” campaign makes me so angry. How did we get to the point where women designing a women’s health campaign in 2023 can reinvent the wheel of 1970s sexism without apparently seeing a problem? Even if they were genuinely unaware of the connection between uncrossed legs and rape, why did they think a cancer prevention campaign needed to be, above all, “playful” and “cheeky”? Why is it still assumed that you can’t get women’s attention by addressing them as serious human beings?       

If you did want to take a more serious approach, one thing you’d need to do would be to think seriously about the reasons why many women are reluctant to be screened. Both in this campaign and in myGP’s earlier cat-themed effort, the key problem is assumed to be embarrassment, and the solution is to joke women out of it. But while embarrassment may be a factor, it’s certainly not the only problem. As many women who commented on Twitter observed, for a non-negligible subset of women the smear test is particularly daunting because of its potential to trigger memories of sexual assault and/or traumatic experiences giving birth. Women who avoid screening for trauma-related reasons are hardly going to be receptive to the “cheeky banter” approach.

Another thing that makes women hesitant is their knowledge that screening is often painful. Some Twitter commenters recalled occasions when they had said they were in pain and been ignored or told it was their own fault for not “relaxing” (the “uptightness” problem again). One woman healthcare professional who had been on both ends of the speculum described that instrument as “grim and bitey”, and wondered why more resources had not been devoted to improving its design, which has barely altered since it was invented.

In this particular case women may not have to endure the pain for much longer. Almost all cervical cancer is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and since a vaccine against HPV became available the case-rate among women young enough to have been offered it has dropped dramatically. Recently the NHS announced that it hopes to eradicate the disease by 2040. Which will, if it happens, be very good news. But it will not solve the larger problem, which is the longstanding tendency, now well-documented by research, for medicine to take women’s pain less seriously than men’s.

Hysteroscopy, for instance, a procedure used to investigate symptoms that could indicate uterine cancer, is typically performed in NHS clinics without pain relief (other than the over-the-counter painkillers women are advised to take beforehand), though it is so painful that it is not uncommon to have to abandon the procedure midway through. Colonoscopy, by contrast, a comparable investigative procedure which is also performed on men, is usually done under sedation.

It isn’t only women’s pain that gets dismissed as trivial. NICE, the body which approves NHS treatments, recently issued guidance suggesting that women experiencing menopausal symptoms like insomnia, mood swings and brain fog should be offered cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). So, either they think the problem is in women’s minds, or else they think women should be satisfied with a treatment that helps them cope with their symptoms as opposed to one (HRT) that relieves them by targeting the cause. As one woman asked, will they also be recommending that older men with erectile dysfunction should be offered CBT rather than Viagra?  

This systemic sexism is the larger context in which health messaging for women needs to be seen. The problem with campaigns like “don’t keep ‘em crossed” isn’t just their crassness: even if the form of the message were less offensive, if its content still boils down to “stop being a prude and get a smear test” then it will still be treating women who avoid screening like irresponsible silly girls, while ignoring the evidence that many are deterred by their prior experiences of being patronized, insulted, dismissed or blamed.    

That said, there’s no getting away from the crassness—and that part of the problem could easily be fixed if the producers and commissioners of health messaging for women simply decided to stop using sexualized language and imagery. It isn’t just feminists, or women over 50, who find this inappropriate and offputting. Women may also object to it for religious or moral reasons, or because they find its humour tasteless, or just because they don’t see how it’s relevant. In Canada, some women criticized the 2016 “ladyballs” campaign for insulting their intelligence; one wondered if a campaign about testicular cancer would refer to men’s testicles as “brovaries”. Yet the marketing and PR professionals remain convinced that their “provocative” and “cheeky” approach is the right one. Why are they so wedded to the idea of sexing up cancer? Do they really know their audience, and do they actually care what it thinks? 

In that connection I find it interesting that Karen Swan’s comment, quoted above, begins with the words “we wanted a campaign that…”. By “we”, presumably, she meant the creative team at Influential. And what agencies like Influential want from a campaign isn’t always what’s most effective for the target audience. Of course they have to pay attention to the client’s brief (if they didn’t they’d find it hard to stay in business), but they also want their campaigns to be noticed and evaluated positively by their peers. And for that purpose, being provocative has its advantages: a campaign that generates controversy is also one that gets attention.  

This strategy was famously used in the so-called “bra-wars” of the 1990s, when rival bra manufacturers and their advertising agencies competed to produce more and more “daring” ads. First we had the Wonderbra “Hello, boys” campaign, which put supermodel Eva Herzigova’s breasts almost literally in the viewer’s face: the giant billboard version even prompted fears that it would cause traffic accidents by distracting male drivers. Then came Gossard’s even more provocative depiction of an underwear-clad model reclining in what appears to be a haystack over the line “Who said a woman can’t get pleasure from something soft?”. This thinly-veiled allusion to erect penises attracted so many complaints that Gossard was forced to switch to “when a firework is smouldering, stand well back”.

This change in language was forced on Gossard by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the body which regulates print and billboard advertising in Britain, and which adjudicates complaints about it from the public. But overall, their response to complaints about the bra-wars ads was surprisingly restrained. Gossard was only required to remove the “something soft” reference, while complaints about “Hello, boys” were dismissed altogether. The ASA’s adjudication said that “the copy lines invest [the model] with a particular personality and sense of humour”–or in other words, “Hello, boys” was not offensive and dehumanizing, it was just “playful and a bit cheeky”.

By contrast, a couple of ads which took a similarly playful and cheeky approach to men’s underpants, using close-ups of the model’s crotch area alongside jokey captions like “Loin King” and “Full Metal Packet”, were judged to have breached the ASA’s rules about “taste and decency”. Women’s breasts might be a legitimate subject for cheeky humour, but men’s penises were no laughing matter. Asked about this apparent double standard, an ASA spokesperson said: “The Authority reacts to prevailing standards. To some extent we live in a sexist society, and to some extent we reflect that”.

But by the mid-1990s it had also become possible for the makers of sexist ads to deploy a different argument, one that wasn’t about humour or playfulness–that using sexualized images of female bodies to sell products was not, as 1970s feminists had argued, degrading to women, but on the contrary, empowering. The women in the ads were not mere objects, they were agents; far from displaying submissiveness, they were making a statement about the power of female sexuality. The bra-wars ads might look to the uninitiated like 1970s sexism on steroids, but in fact what they represented was an “edgier”, more modern form of feminism. If you couldn’t see that a supermodel in a Wonderbra was the ultimate symbol of female empowerment, that was probably because you were a middle-aged, pearl-clutching prude.

This line went down well with the art-school/cultural studies crowd, and “Hello, boys”, in particular, is still remembered as “iconic” and “groundbreaking”. But that assessment overlooks an interesting if less well-known postscript to the bra-wars story. Both the UK companies involved, Gossard and Playtex (the makers of the Wonderbra), changed their marketing approach dramatically after realizing that the “iconic” bra-wars campaigns had done more to enhance the ad agencies’ prestige than to increase sales of the product being advertised.

In 1996, when Playtex announced that a new campaign for their Affinity range would feature the “elegant” but “accessible and clean-cut” Helena Christensen, the company’s account director at Saatchi and Saatchi explicitly related this change of direction to the controversy around Gossard’s “something soft” ad, saying “we don’t want to offend or upset women, which I think these ad campaigns do.” When a woman later became marketing director at Gossard, one of her first actions was to sack the agency that had created “something soft”, explaining, “I want to advertise to women, not men”. Even if they weren’t offended, market research showed that women were unimpressed by sexy poses and suggestive straplines. What they most wanted from a bra ad was “a good representation of what the actual bra looks like”.

Though this backlash against hypersexualized, controversy-courting bra ads was described in one report I read as a return to “the ethos of a bygone age”, in reality it was more like a return to the basic principles of marketing: if your aim is to sell more bras you should design your advertising for the people who actually buy bras. And that principle also applies to women’s health campaigns. To the professionals who design them it may seem obvious that effective advertising is “provocative” or “edgy”, and that sexualized imagery is “empowering”: those ideas are simply the water today’s creatives swim in. But if the reception of “don’t keep ‘em crossed” shows us anything, it surely shows it’s time to pull the plug.  

Many thanks to everyone who commented on my Twitter thread    

Daddy’s home

It’s a truism that all political careers end in failure. But last week the former prime minister David Cameron, a man whose career we might have thought was a textbook illustration of that principle (he resigned in 2016 after calling and then losing the referendum that led to Brexit), made an unexpected comeback. In his latest rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Tory Titanic, Rishi Sunak appointed Cameron to the position of Foreign Secretary. This didn’t please everyone in his party, but some Conservatives were delighted to learn that, in one MP’s much-quoted words, “Daddy’s home”.

That reaction was widely mocked (the word “cringe” was used a lot on social media), but for me it raised an intriguing question about the use of gendered language in politics. Who, politically speaking, is “Daddy”?  

In the past I’ve had more to say about “Mummy”, because the use of maternal labels for female politicians is a cliché of modern political discourse. The Mother is one of the traditional female archetypes (others include the Seductress and the woman warrior or “Iron Lady”) which are used in patriarchal cultures to make female authority intelligible. It’s most popular on the political Right, where it resonates with conservative ideas about women’s nature and social role, and it is often embraced by women leaders themselves. In Germany, for instance, Angela Merkel was originally given the nickname “Mutti” by her opponents, who intended it to portray her as an overbearing nag; but she was able to turn it into a more positive symbol of her motherly concern for her fellow-citizens and her determination to do what was right for them. In the most recent French presidential election, similarly, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen softened her previous hardline image by promising to govern like a “mère de famille”. And though Margaret Thatcher’s main persona was the “Iron Lady”, she also presented herself, when it suited her, as a down-to-earth housewife and mother.

In 2016, after David Cameron resigned, the ensuing Tory leadership contest featured two women candidates, Andrea Leadsom and the eventual victor Theresa May, who were both referred to as “Mummy” in private exchanges among MPs. At a time when the Brexit referendum had divided both the party and the nation, Mummy’s appeal lay in her reputation as a firm disciplinarian: she would sort out the squabbling children and restore some much-needed order. At first glance “Daddy’s home” has a similar vibe, casting the former prime minister as a father-figure whose wise counsel will put a divided and chaotic government back on course. But despite the obvious linguistic parallel between “Daddy” and “Mummy”, politically there are important differences between them.

“Daddy” is not as “natural” a persona for a male leader as “Mummy” is for his female counterpart. Familial labels in general are less commonly used for men in politics, and when they are used the implications are not always positive. In cases where they are positive, the term of choice tends to be the more formal “father” (as with the conventional description of certain revered, and often deceased, politicians like Washington, Gandhi and Mandela as “fathers of the nation”). More familiar/ affectionate labels are liable to be seen as disrespectful, and in some cases they are overtly insulting. “Centrist Dad”, for instance, is a derisive label for middle-of-the-road male politicians who are seen as uncool and ineffectual; “magic grandpa” is a dig at elderly male radicals like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders (and indirectly at the younger activists who support them).

“Daddy” also has another set of meanings which are not so directly linked to a male politician’s politics. While writing this post I found an instructive illustration in Buzzfeed Australia, which had declared 2015 “the year of the political Daddy”. Among the men who featured in its list of political daddies were Malcolm Turnbull (at the time the prime minister of Australia) and Justin Trudeau (who had just become prime minister of Canada). Both led broadly centrist parties (centre-right in Turnbull’s case and centre-left in Trudeau’s), but that wasn’t why they qualified for the “Daddy” label. Turnbull was a daddy because, in the words of a young person whose tweet the article quoted, “he’s a silver fox with good teeth who’d take care of you. He has an i-Pad and an Apple Watch so he’s clearly got money to spare and he could buy you things”. He was a sugar-daddy, in other words. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, was the daddy equivalent of the “yummy mummy” or the “MILF”—mature and responsible but also hot (or as Buzzfeed put it, “a fine slice of Canadian bacon”).  

Though this piece was obviously meant to be humorous, I think it still tells us something about the political connotations of “Daddy”. And what it mainly tells us, put simply, is that “Daddy” is a trivializing label. Of course you could say the same about “Mummy”, which trivializes women leaders by likening their political power to the pettier authority that mothers have over children. But “Mummy” also serves a more serious purpose: it is used to counter the still-common perception of female leadership as unnatural and female leaders as sexless viragos. “Daddy” does not have an analogous function. Male power, being the historical and cultural norm, does not need to be defended against the charge that it’s unnatural or that it makes a man less manly. On the contrary, one reason why familial labels can be used to insult or trivialize male politicians is that these terms assign men to a domain which is seen as inferior, apolitical and feminized.

In fact, as any feminist will tell you, the institution of the family is far from apolitical: it is one of the foundations of patriarchy, and historically the paterfamilias was an important archetype of male power. But the later “separation of spheres” made the home a domain in which women had control. Though theoretically they remained subordinate to the male “head of household”, in practice they were allowed and indeed expected to take charge at home so that men could devote their energies to more important tasks outside it.

The personae constructed by modern male political leaders are typically based on these public roles: the archetypes they draw on include the patriotic soldier, the inspirational preacher, the hard-headed businessman and the efficient “scientific” manager. A persona like “Daddy”, which locates a man primarily in the domestic rather than the public sphere, risks implying that a male leader is soft or lightweight, preferring the comforts of home to the challenges of public life.

You might wonder, though, if what I’ve just said is out of date. Aren’t male politicians today—including Conservatives—keen to stress their “modern man” credentials by being photographed in their kitchens, parading their families as electoral assets and taking every opportunity to present themselves as “hands-on” parents? Wasn’t Boris Johnson, the father of numerous children (though the exact number remains unconfirmed), sharply criticized for his admission that he had never changed a nappy?

My answer would be “yes and no”. It’s true that contemporary politicians are expected to demonstrate “authenticity” and “relatability” by opening their personal lives to public scrutiny, and that has made it prudent for male leaders to cultivate the image of the “family man”. David Cameron was a case in point: his wife Samantha featured prominently in his election campaigns, and he presented himself as a fully-involved, caring father (though this was slightly undermined when he accidentally left his daughter in a pub). His excruciatingly dull WebCameron channel even featured a video of him doing the washing up.

But these are still largely superficial, token gestures–as we saw during the most recent Tory leadership election, when Rishi Sunak answered a question about the greatest sacrifice he had made by saying that since becoming Chancellor he had been, he was sorry to say, “an appalling husband and father”. This was calculated to tick not only the “modern man” box, but also and more importantly the “you can count on me to focus on the job 24/7/365” box. I’m pretty sure a comparable female politician would not have underlined her dedication to public service by describing herself as “an appalling wife and mother”. “Mummy” is expected to juggle her public and domestic responsibilities: nowadays she’s allowed to talk about how difficult she finds it, but not to admit she has failed or given up. An imperfect mother may be relatable, but one who chooses to neglect her children is just cold and heartless. “Daddy”, by contrast, can be candid about his negligence so long as he presents it as a sacrifice he has had to make (and not, like Boris Johnson, as a badge of alpha-male pride).  

Another problem with the “Daddy” persona has less to do with gender per se than with the way gender intersects with age. Though a literal father can be a (post-pubescent) male of any age, metaphorically paternal labels are ageing. The “centrist Dad” is (attitudinally if not literally) middle-aged—he’s staid rather than adventurous, reliable but dull—while the sugar-daddy is middle-aged-to-old.

These associations sit uncomfortably with the increasing tendency, at least in western democracies, to favour younger men as political leaders. There’s currently an obvious exception in the USA, where it seems likely that both candidates in the next presidential election will be almost 80; but by recent standards that’s unusual. Presidents Clinton and Obama in the US, President Macron in France and Prime Ministers Blair, Cameron and Sunak in the UK were all in their early-to-mid 40s when they took office. For men this appears to be the new sweet spot, the point at which a leader is old enough to have the gravitas his role demands, but also young enough to be perceived as energetic, dynamic and “modern”. For women, on the other hand, it is difficult to appear both youthful and authoritative: if anything political “mummies” are advantaged by being older.

“Daddy’s home” as a reaction to the return of David Cameron was presumably intended to evoke the more positive associations of ageing (experience, wisdom, stability, etc); but there are obvious reasons why so many people found this ludicrous. When Cameron entered Downing Street at the age of 43 he was the youngest British prime minister for almost 200 years; when he resigned he was not quite 50, and as he returns to frontline politics after a comparatively brief absence he is still a few years shy of 60. It’s absurd to cast him as a father figure, an elder statesman returning to the fray to give a new generation the benefit of his wisdom. He isn’t much older than his Cabinet colleagues, and in the short time he’s been away he’s done nothing that would make him any wiser. Where the Blairs and Obamas of the world set up foundations and get involved in international diplomacy, he has devoted his post-prime ministerial years to writing his memoirs and shilling for dodgy financiers.

That it’s possible even to attempt to rebrand Cameron as a wise counsellor or a stabilizing influence speaks volumes about the awfulness of the last seven years. The fact that the Tories have gone through four prime ministers since 2016 makes the Cameron era seem not only more distant in time than it really is, but also, by comparison with the Johnson era or the Truss moment, less politically disastrous than it really was. It was, after all, Cameron’s misjudged referendum gamble that paved the way for the chaos that followed. Now the fire his carelessness started has run completely out of control. The idea that he’s the man to put it out and save his party from electoral oblivion is a delusion born of desperation. (What do his supporters think he’s going to put it out with, the trusty watering-can of blandness? Cringe, indeed.)  

But pondering Cameron’s less than statesmanlike record does bring to mind another aspect of “Daddy” as a cultural archetype. In cartoons and sitcoms he is often a hapless figure, well-meaning but ineffectual; he’s the bumbling fool who doesn’t realize he’s a fool because his family pretends that he’s in charge. So, perhaps Daddy really is home after all. Though not, we may devoutly hope, for long.         

You cannot be serious

Last week the Covid inquiry heard evidence from Dominic Cummings, the self-proclaimed genius behind the Vote Leave campaign who became a powerful figure in Boris Johnson’s administration, and from Helen McNamara, the deputy chief civil servant (and highest-ranking woman) in the Cabinet Office. They had worked together during the early phase of the pandemic, but to say they did not get on would be an understatement. In one of the WhatsApp messages which were apparently the government’s preferred mode of internal communication, Cummings ranted:

…if I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit…I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building. I don’t care how it’s done but that woman must be out of our hair—we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt.

At the inquiry McNamara hit back with a comprehensive critique of the macho, misogynist culture Cummings and others had presided over. In addition to making the Cabinet Office a toxic workplace for female employees, this had affected, she said, the government’s handling of the crisis in ways that were directly damaging to millions of women.

The lawyer for the inquiry raised the issue of Cummings’s language, asking him if he felt he had expressed himself too “trenchantly”. He replied that while he accepted some of his language had been “deplorable”, the direness of the situation had justified strong words. As for misogyny, he pointed out that he was an equal-opportunity cunt-user—he had called Matt Hancock a cunt, for example—and had been, if anything, even ruder about the male colleagues he referred to as “fuckpigs” and “morons”.

It did not surprise me that this defence attracted no support from feminists. But I was more surprised to see quite a few feminists criticizing the language used by Helen McNamara. Not for being aggressive or obscene, but for the opposite sin of being too “girly”.  

Exhibit A was an email she had sent to Simon Stevens, the boss of NHS England, about one of the issues affecting women which she felt was being ignored. Here it is in full: 

Hi Simon and Mary.

Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me… Has the PPE conversation picked up the fact that most PPE isn’t designed for female bodies and the overwhelming majority of people who need PPE are female? (77% of NHS staff are female, 89% of nurses and 84% of careworkers.) There has been quite a bit of commentary on this. To state the bleeding obvious women’s bodies are different and particularly face shape with masks. If you need more on this let me know! But would reassuring [sic] to know that it is being taken into account in this new supply.

I don’t know who to annoy with this so chose you. But by all means tell me where to direct my questioning.

👊 (that’s a fist bump not a punch)

H

This was held up as a classic example of our old friend the “female email”—in one commenter’s words, “full of apologies…full of deference…full of self-deprecation and emojis”. Caitlin Moran reposted this comment, adding that “the first advice I gave my daughter, when she started working, was to delete the first and last lines of her emails. Why? Because the first and last lines are where you apologize for sending the email. No emails I get from men start or end like that”.

In fairness to these commenters I should say that their intention clearly wasn’t to attack McNamara personally: rather they were using her email as an illustration of the more general argument that women’s experiences of sexism lead even high-status professionals in senior positions to speak and write in ways which are unnecessarily apologetic and deferential. These so-called “female verbal tics”, like starting every email with an apology for bothering the recipient, undermine women’s authority and cause others to perceive them as lightweights. As regular readers will know, however, this popular view is not one I share. And in this case I think the criticism of McNamara is based on a somewhat superficial analysis of the email itself.

Is her email, in fact, “full of apologies…deference…self-deprecation and emojis”? The most obvious evidence for that reading is the fact that McNamara, demonstrating Caitlin Moran’s point, both opens and closes her message by describing it, and/or herself, as “annoying”. She also follows the emoji [note: singular, not plural—the email isn’t “full of emoji”] with a parenthetical “that’s a fist-bump not a punch”, an unnecessary explanation which suggests she feels the need to reassure her correspondents that her message isn’t meant to be hostile. It’s not entirely unreasonable to read this as apologetic and self-deprecating (“sorry to be annoying, please be assured that I’m not attacking you”), but in fact I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.

First of all, it’s simplistic to analyse this message in isolation, because it clearly has a back-story. We can infer from the first line (“just when you thought you were out of the woods…”) that this is not the first time McNamara has emailed Simon Stevens to voice her concerns. The reference to “annoying messages [plural] from me” suggests she has done so on at least two, and possibly several, previous occasions. By doing it again, she’s making clear (a) that she doesn’t feel she has had a satisfactory response, and (b) that she is not prepared to let the matter drop. In that context, her acknowledgment that Stevens may find her persistence annoying looks less like kneejerk girly self-effacement and more like a realistic assessment of the situation. She is telling him she knows her message may be unwelcome, but since she’s chosen to send it anyway, this comes across less as a sincere apology for bothering him than as a diplomatic figleaf—arguably the effect is more “sorry not sorry” than “pardon me for taking up your time”.

Second, it’s not true that the email is “full of” the female-email features mentioned in the comments I quoted earlier. I’ve already noted that there’s only one emoji in it, but more to the point, the central part of the message is not at all deferential or self-deprecating. McNamara outlines her concern directly and confidently: far from expressing self-doubt, she puts on an overt display—you might even say, an ostentatious one—of her knowledge about the subject she is raising. Since Stevens is presumably equally familiar with some of the facts she draws to his attention (like the percentage of women in his own workforce), this might appear more patronizing than deferential. If she were a man and he a woman, we might even be tempted to accuse her of mansplaining.

There’s a sign she may have recognized this as a problem in her use of the jocular phrase “to state the bleeding obvious” (or in other words, “I know I’m telling you things you already know”). When you say something that on the face of things doesn’t need saying because the person you’re addressing already knows it, that will often suggest to them that you’re trying to communicate something else which you don’t want to say explicitly: in this case, perhaps, something like “since you already know all this, you should surely be doing something about it”. That may, indeed, be McNamara’s intention, but the jocularity of “to state the bleeding obvious” softens that rather accusatory message. By switching to a more informal, conversational register she can counter the impression that she’s lecturing him, and put the exchange on a more equal, collegial footing.   

To me, in fact, the most striking thing about this email is its informal and not infrequently jokey tone. The jokiness is intermittent rather than sustained throughout, but it’s still striking because of what’s being discussed and in what circumstances. At a moment when the government and the NHS were in crisis mode, making decisions that were literally matters of life and death, you might expect more gravity and less levity. Granted, there is such a thing as “gallows humour”, deployed to help people get through stressful and upsetting experiences, and humour also functions in most workplaces as a bonding device. But perhaps there’s another reason why McNamara seems to have been striving for a certain lightness of tone. The evidence considered by the inquiry last week suggests that interactions among the people who were managing the crisis were characterized by a remarkable lack of seriousness. At the weekend the columnist Catherine Bennett compared Downing Street during the Johnson/Cummings era to a “frat house”, but arguably its culture owed more to the values of a specifically British institution: the elite boys’ public school.

I have written before about Boris Johnson’s use of a “naughty schoolboy” persona, constructed in part by his use of puerile playground insults like “big girl’s blouse” and “girly swot”, and how that was persona was taken up, or pandered to, by the media in a way that worked to his advantage. Each new display of his incompetence, laziness or dishonesty became just another “scrape” that “Boris” had got himself into, something to laugh about in the same way you’d laugh at the madcap exploits of a fictional fourth-former.

We already knew before the inquiry started that his early response to Covid had been determinedly unserious—first dismissing the threat as exaggerated (not least by those always over-excitable Italian chappies), then hyperbolically declaring he didn’t care if the bodies piled up in their thousands. Amid concern that the NHS had too few ventilators to treat everyone who was going to need one, he reportedly suggested that an initiative to get more British companies involved in manufacturing them could be called “Operation Last Gasp”.  Even when a joke was as tasteless as that one, he apparently saw no reason not to make it.

But the inquiry has revealed that this puerility extended far beyond Johnson. It shows up even in such minor details as the nicknames the men used for each other in their endless WhatsApp messages. Names like “Caino” (Lee Cain) and “Frosty” (David Frost) may be inoffensive by comparison with “fuckpig” and “moron”, but they smack just as much of the playground, or the sports pavilion. Sport was a popular reference point: the war against Covid, like the Battle of Waterloo, would apparently be won on the playing fields of Eton. According to McNamara, the health secretary Matt Hancock once batted away her suggestion that he might need additional assistance with the many urgent problems on his to-do list by playing an imaginary cricket stroke, while saying: “they bowl them at me, I knock them away”.

His boast had no basis in reality. Dominic Cummings told the inquiry that Hancock had lied habitually and continuously, giving endless assurances that he had things under control when it would later transpire that he had made no plans at all. But this insouciance was not unique to Hancock. The whole operation appears to have been conducted in an atmosphere of complacency and over-confidence. Of course the men running it had things under control, and of course they would triumph in the end: they were, after all, the government of a country that had conquered half the world, and defeated Hitler, with ingenuity, “character” and “pluck”.

Though they hadn’t all been educated at public schools, the men were evidently following the male ruling-class code which is inculcated by those institutions: never doubt yourself; never admit weakness; use joking and banter to disguise your real emotions (especially fear and sadness, though anger is less of a problem) and to show you don’t take yourself too seriously. Put your faith in the virtues of the gentleman amateur, who succeeds without needing to work at it, and disdain the conscientiousness of the “girly swot”. 

Both Helen McNamara and Dominic Cummings were more “girly swots” than gentleman amateurs, though Cummings’s swottishness was of a different, more stereotypically masculine kind (roughly, the policy wonk-slash-tech bro kind), and the fact that he was not a woman gave him a very different status within the culture (though it did eventually turn against him). McNamara was sidelined along with the other, less senior women, and vilified when she resisted being silenced. What I see in her behaviour is not primarily a woman performing kneejerk deference to men in the hope that they will like her better, but an outsider accommodating to the insiders’ culture and language in the hope (vain though it proved to be) that this would enable her to wield some influence rather than none.

Of course, it’s undeniable that McNamara’s outsider status was connected to her sex. But it was also connected to the fact that she was serious in a way many of the men around her were not, and could not tolerate being told they should be. Especially by a woman. The alpha-male if geeky “Dom” could get away with bullying rants, but any woman who tells the boys to stop messing about and be serious reminds them too much of all the female authority figures, like mummy and nanny and matron, whose power they resented when they were actually children—and for that she will be ridiculed and punished.

I’m sure the final report of the Covid inquiry will run to hundreds if not thousands of judiciously-worded pages (the Chair, after all, is a bit of a girly swot), but what we’ve heard so far about the government’s response could be distilled into a much shorter conclusion. We have been ruled for far too long by these entitled puerile fuckpigs, and if we don’t want their incompetence and indifference to kill us all, we need to stop falling for their bullshit and escort them from the building.             

Zombie fact-checking

On Twitter/X not long ago I saw a thread about a training session which someone had just run for a group of professional women. They’d discussed, among other things, the problem of women constantly saying “sorry”. So far, so familiar: the Over-Apologizing Woman is a staple of this kind of training, and I’ve written about her on this blog before (if you missed it, see here, here and here). But what caught my eye on this occasion was a statistic the trainer had presented: in the course of her life, the average woman will apologize 295,650 times.

This number piqued my curiosity because it’s so precise: not “around 300,000” or “over a quarter of a million”, but exactly 295,650. Purveyors of linguistic zombie facts (so-called because they refuse to die no matter how often they’re debunked) most often choose round numbers, like “men utter 7000 words a day whereas women utter 20,000”. Their simplicity makes them easy to remember, but it also raises the (justified) suspicion that they’re invented rather than real. 295,650 seems more believable–it looks less like a made up number and more like the result of some kind of calculation. Where, I wondered, did it come from?

The trainer’s presentation suggested that it came from research done by someone named Serenta Flowers. I’d never come across her work, so I asked the trainer for the reference. She helpfully supplied me with a link—but when I followed it I discovered that “Serenta Flowers” was not a researcher, or indeed a person, but a typo. The actual source of the number was a survey conducted a few years ago for Serenata Flowers, a company which describes itself as “the UK’s leading online florist”. 

According to HR News, one of many websites I found that had carried reports on this survey, Serenata’s researchers had asked just over a thousand British workers a series of questions about apologizing–how many times a day they apologized, what kinds of things they apologized for, how they felt about apologies. Analysis of the responses revealed that the average number of apologies per day was eight for men and ten for women. The lifetime figures (236,520 for men and the aforementioned 295,650 for women) seem to have been extrapolated from these daily averages. I couldn’t reconstruct the calculation exactly, but if you assume a life-expectancy of 80 years, convert that into a number of days and then multiply by the male daily average of eight, you get a total of c234,000, which is reasonably close to the lifetime figure of 236,520.

There are many things I could say about the dodginess of these numbers. For instance, the lifetime figures seem to have been calculated on the assumption that people produce the same number of apologies every day of every year from birth to death, which is clearly not the case (do young children apologize eight or ten times a day?). What is meant by the word “average” is not explained, and no details are given about the composition of the sample (how representative was it of the British working population? Would the numbers be equally valid for British workers of all ages, races, regions, classes and occupations?)

But I won’t delve into these technicalities, because there’s a much more basic reason why I don’t believe Serenata’s numbers. The survey relied on self-reporting (that is, people describing their own behaviour, as opposed to someone else observing it). There are some things this approach works well for, but linguistic behaviour isn’t one of them. Most answers to a question like “how many times a day do you apologize” will be no more than guesses; even if people are making a genuine effort to reconstruct the details, their recollections are unlikely to be accurate, because so much of our informal spontaneous speech is essentially produced on autopilot. We don’t pay much conscious attention to what we’re doing, and we certainly don’t keep track of how many times we’ve done it in the last eight hours. If I spent a day following you around with a clipboard and making a note each time you apologized, I’d expect the figure I ended up with to be quite different from your own best estimate.

Self-reports are also unreliable for another reason–because people’s responses to questions about their behaviour tend to be influenced, more strongly than the behaviour itself, by their beliefs about what’s acceptable or desirable. For instance, it’s well known that patients answering questions about their lifestyle often report drinking or smoking less than they really do–a tendency healthcare professionals adjust for by mentally increasing or even doubling the self-reported numbers. Similar considerations apply to linguistic behaviour. Some people may claim not to use nonstandard (or in lay terms, “incorrect”) pronunciations or grammatical forms, when recordings of their speech show that in reality they use those forms a lot; others may claim to use more nonstandard forms than they really do. What these inaccurate reports reflect is the understanding that certain ways of speaking are considered typical of, or appropriate for, certain kinds of people. The way someone says they talk may tell us less about their actual behaviour than about the kind of person they either think they are or would like to be seen as.

The relevance of this to the Serenata survey is that apologies, in the popular imagination, are very strongly associated with women rather than men. Could the stereotype of saying sorry as a “female verbal tic” be at least partly responsible for the finding that women reported apologizing more frequently than men?

I say “at least partly” because there is some evidence from reputable research which supports the belief that women apologize more than men. But it’s possible the size of the difference was inflated in this survey by a tendency for respondents of both sexes to report what they subconsciously thought of as “gender-appropriate” numbers (that is, higher for women and lower for men). The potential for this kind of bias is another reason to be wary of claims about language-use based on self-reports–especially if numbers are involved.

I used to think that what was behind the problems I’ve been discussing was simply that the people who design surveys like Serenata’s are not very knowledgeable about research methods. But whether or not that’s true, I’ve come to think it’s not the main issue. The real purpose of these surveys is not to produce accurate facts and figures, but to generate publicity and promote the client’s product. And for that purpose, dodgy statistics may be as good as, or even better than, more reliable ones.

Consider, for instance, how the statistics discussed above are presented and interpreted in the HR News report I linked to earlier (which, incidentally, is identical to several other reports I found online, making me suspect that it’s actually a press release written by Serenata’s own marketing department). After giving us the numbers for how often workers apologize, the report goes on:

Due to the overuse of everyday apologies in the UK workplace, a huge 80% of workers feel the word “sorry” carries little value, and as such we need to work harder to communicate a sincere apology when it’s due. 73% of those surveyed said receiving a bouquet of flowers with an apology would help it feel more genuine.

Then it quotes a spokesperson for Serenata, who notes that

gifting flowers is a great way of going the extra mile to show someone you care and want to right a wrong. Apology flowers are so popular that we actually have a section of the website dedicated to them.

It couldn’t be much clearer that the survey was basically a marketing exercise, designed primarily to promote “apology flowers”. And to achieve that goal it needed the supposed facts about how often people apologize to fit with the conclusion that “everyday apologies” are “overused”. This explains why there’s so much emphasis on the lifetime apology count of 295,650;. If you’re trying to convince people that apologies are overused, it helps to present them with a number big enough to make them think “well, yes, that does seem a bit excessive”–a reaction they’d be less likely to have to the daily average of 8-10, though the lifetime figure is merely an extrapolation from the daily average (i.e., it’s just a different way of saying the same thing). In scientific terms the lifetime number is pretty meaningless, but its real function is rhetorical, backing up the assertion that words like “sorry” are too “overused” to seem “genuine”.

But even if we believed the numbers, the conclusion being drawn from them wouldn’t follow. To explain why it’s nonsense to say that “sorry” is overused, we need to take a closer look at what “everyday apologies” actually do.

The things respondents to the survey said they apologized for most often were minor offences like being late for appointments, missing calls and accidentally bumping into someone. These are not wrongs which need to be righted by sending flowers; they’re exactly the kind of fairly trivial infractions for which a conventional formula (like “sorry I’m late”) is the contextually appropriate choice. These everyday apologies are what we reach for in situations where no apology would be rude, but an elaborate apology would be weird. Such situations are very common–I don’t find it at all implausible that they might crop up eight or ten times in a working day–and so, therefore, are the low-level, formulaic apologies they call for.

The observation that everyday apologies “carry little value” is, in a way, correct—as I’ve just said, they’re for situations where you don’t need to make grand gestures—but in context they carry as much value as they need to. Their function is to maintain harmonious social relationships by reassuring a person you’ve imposed on in some way (for instance, by keeping them waiting or interrupting what they’re doing) that you’re aware of the imposition and you regret it. With minor impositions a brief, conventional expression of regret is sufficient: no one asks, or cares, whether the stranger who apologizes for stepping on their foot on a crowded bus is “genuinely” or “sincerely” sorry.

But that doesn’t mean the expression of regret is unncessary; the fact that it’s formulaic doesn’t make it meaningless or valueless. Saying sorry is a token not only of the speaker’s regard for the person she’s imposed on, but also of her more general willingness to be bound by the social norms which define what counts as an imposition. Those norms vary across cultures, but withholding apologies when they’re culturally expected is liable to be taken as an anti-social act. That’s another reason why we use everyday apologies–to stop people judging us as arrogant, ignorant or socially inept. The stereotype of women who say sorry as grovelling, self-abasing doormats completely misses the point that in many cases we apologize as much for our own benefit as for other people’s.

What all this boils down to is that Serenata’s survey is garbage. But you might ask, does that really matter? It’s not a Ph.D thesis; it doesn’t claim to be adding to the sum of human knowledge. You can’t blame businesses for commissioning “research” designed purely to serve their commercial interests. And anyway, no one takes these surveys seriously…do they?

Well, actually, they sort of do. Serenata’s survey got a lot of media coverage online: when I searched I found (what I take to be) the company’s press release about it reproduced on a range of HR, business and career-themed websites (there was even a specially-tweaked version for Scottish outlets, with statistics specific to Scotland). It was also the peg for several gender-themed features and opinion pieces on websites targeting a female audience: their headlines included “Women apologize 295,650 times in their lives”, “Do women really apologize more than men?” (no prizes for guessing the answer) and “This study explains why women feel the need to apologize so much” (which focused mainly on a different study, but cited Serenata’s survey as evidence that “the numbers are there”).

Not one of these pieces questioned the credibility of Serenata’s numbers. They were presented simply as facts, products of what was invariably described as a “study” or “new research”, as if a market survey commissioned by an online florist were no different from a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal. In that sense people did take the survey seriously; and I do see that as a problem, since if it isn’t actually true that “women apologize 295,650 times in their lives”, a piece which takes the truth of that claim as its starting-point, whatever else it goes on to say, will just end up recycling myths.

And then there’s the context where I first came across the claim myself: a training course for professional women where Serenata’s statistic was again presented as reliable factual information. This way of using garbage research, in materials which are meant to serve an educational purpose, is the one that pisses me off most. And unfortunately it’s all too common: in more than three decades of investigating communication training, I’ve seen very few courses that made use of reputable research evidence. Most are a mishmash of well-worn folk-stereotypes, findings from market surveys like Serenata’s, and made-up pseudoscience culled from bestselling self-help titles and/or the pronouncements of management “gurus”. Which would be one thing if the training were effective, but there is no good evidence that attending these courses either changes trainees’ ways of communicating or improves their career prospects. Yet they continue to be popular with organizations of all kinds—and even, to my eternal regret, with women who think of themselves as feminists.

In these circumstances, the best advice I can offer is caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. I can’t stop you from being exposed to this kind of garbage (particularly in your workplace, where training may be compulsory), but I can try to give you some pointers on how to spot it, so you can put it in the bin where it belongs.