Women of a certain age

Recently, as everyone reading this in Britain will already know, the Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace became the latest in a long line of Men On TV (the industry term is “talent”, though in this case it’s never been clear what talent TV producers thought he possessed) to “step back” from his presenting duties following allegations of our old friend “inappropriate behaviour”. Behind that bland euphemism is an all-too familiar story of serial sexual harassment: unwanted touching, insults, bullying, gross sexual comments, and allegedly an incident where Wallace was naked in the studio except for a sock covering his penis. Many women complained, and for years their complaints were ignored. Now they have finally caught up with him, Wallace has responded with his usual humility and grace by dismissing the complainants as “middle-class women of a certain age”.  

When I started to get messages from the media asking me to comment on this phraseology, my first thought was “you don’t need a linguist for that: it’s obvious what he was trying to do”. First, he was playing the class card, presumably in an attempt to present himself as the underdog in this scenario—a sort of male Eliza Doolittle (she sold flowers, he once had a veg stall) tripped up by his failure to meet posh people’s standards of decorum. Which is bullshit, obviously. The complainants weren’t saying he used the wrong fork, they were saying he got his tackle out in the workplace and told contestants their food smelled like his aunt’s vagina. You don’t have to be Lady Muck to think that’s out of order. If Gregg’s working-class grandma was anything like mine, anyone who spoke to her like that (much less tried to sell her potatoes while wearing nothing but a sock) would have been in line for a clip round the ear.  

Second, of course, he was playing the age(ism) card: if there’s anyone more prudish than a middle-class woman, it’s a middle-class woman “of a certain age”. But that was when I paused, and thought: wait, maybe there is something to say about his language after all. Because “a woman of a certain age” is a more interesting expression than might be apparent at first glance.

“A certain age” can be just an ordinary phrase, one whose meaning is basically the sum of its component words, as in “when you get to a certain age employers just put your CV in the bin”. You could swap the words for others with a similar meaning (e.g. “when you get to a particular stage of life…”) and still be saying essentially the same thing. But “a woman of a certain age” is an idiom, a fixed sequence of words which functions as a single unit. If you substituted different words the resulting phrase might still make sense, but it wouldn’t have the same meaning. Which is…well, what is it? Every woman alive is, in the literal sense, “of a certain age”, but only some are, in the idiomatic sense, “women of a certain age”. So what exactly does it mean to be “a woman of a certain age”?  

A quick look at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that “of a certain age” has been used since the 18^th century as a euphemism for “middle aged” (or as the Historical Thesaurus puts it, “of an age which it is not polite or necessary further to define”). And though the dictionary says it is mainly used of women between the ages of 40 and 60, it’s by no means only used in reference to women.

The authors of the Grammarphobia blog report that the earliest example they found in a search of literary databases appeared in a female-authored treatise on midwifery published in 1709, which argued that while men should not normally be permitted to examine women’s genitals,

It may perhaps be granted that men of a certain age, men past the slippery season of youth, may claim the benefit of exemption from impressions of sensuality, by objects to which custom has familiarized them.

The OED’s earliest example comes from a text published nearly fifty years later, and also refers to a man:

I chose my Lord Davenant here, a man of a certain age, a widower, d’ye see; not only fit to husband you, Louisa, but to father you (R. Cumberland, 1753)

If you search the illustrative quotations that appear in every OED entry, you find that men of a certain age are still going strong in the twenty first century. For instance:

The wizards commenced that…table-thumping which is the mark of appreciation amongst men of a certain age (Terry Pratchett, 2009)

Whereas the two 18^th century examples I’ve quoted are neutral or even slightly positive about middle-aged men, in the 21^st century these men tend to be presented as faintly comical or a bit pathetic—out-of-touch old buffers, or in the throes of an embarrassing midlife crisis. Applied to women, by contrast, “of a certain age” seems historically to have had two main meanings, which are not only different from the ones I’ve just described for men, but also quite different from each other—though as usual, what they do have in common is that they conceptualize women primarily in sexual terms.  

The first of these two meanings is the ageist one—that a woman is too old for men to find her desirable (and in many though not all cases a spinster or an “old maid”). What counts as “old” in this context is predictably elastic. “Of a certain age” can mean actually old: in 2006, for instance, the Daily Telegraph announced that

after decades of tireless service to millions of women of a certain age, the era of the blue rinse is over.

As far as I’m aware, blue rinses were for white-haired old ladies, not women in their 40s and 50s. But the idiom can also be used about women who are not yet middle aged, especially if they are still unmarried and no longer considered eligible. One example in the OED, from a novel published in the 1850s, describes a character as

a young lady of a certain age—say liberal thirty—an ardent Bloomer”

Given the date I’m guessing this is a reference to Amelia Bloomer, the US women’s rights advocate and popularizer of “rational dress”, suggesting that the character may be one of those ugly, unnatural and therefore unmarriageable feminists.

But there are also many cases in which the implication of the phrase is more or less the opposite: rather than being disdained as unattractive and undesirable, the “woman of a certain age” is praised for her knowledge, experience and sophistication—qualities which young girls, however beautiful, cannot offer. Honoria Scott’s Amatory Tales (1810), for instance, describes a character as

a woman of a certain age, and handsome person; her understanding intelligent and cultivated; she had moved much in the circles of fashionable life.

By the mid-twentieth century this positive depiction of the middle-aged or older woman has acquired a more openly sexual dimension. Sexually she is in her prime, and her experience is as great as her enthusiasm: consequently she can still provide men with at least one very useful service. As Somerset Maugham explained in a novel published in the 1940s,

there’s no better education for a young man than to become the lover of a woman of a certain age.

Like Mrs Robinson in that 1960s classic The Graduate, she can train him up so he’ll know what he’s doing when he eventually falls for a woman who could be (and in The Graduate literally is) her daughter.

The OED’s examples suggest that recently there’s been more emphasis on women’s own pursuit of pleasure when they reach “a certain age”.  In the mid-1990s a piece in a St Louis newspaper queried the view that only men can be “silver foxes”, maintaining that

Some Silver Foxes are women ‘of a certain age’ who live with zest and elan.

If you Google “woman of a certain age” you’ll find it being used in this sense by various businesses selling fashion, beauty or lifestyle products to women over 50. It’s still a euphemism, but instead of just covering up the negative associations of middle and old age it’s become associated with what’s supposed to be positive for women about ageing—like the increased freedom and self-confidence that enable them to “live with zest and elan” (and of course, to spend money on themselves).

You’ll find even more of these businesses if you also Google the French equivalent of the English phrase, “une femme d’un certain age”, which turns out to be quite popular with businesses owned by English-speakers. It trades on the stereotype of the French as a sophisticated people, especially when it comes to sex, and the belief that older women in France are—so long as they keep themselves in good shape—more appreciated by men than their English counterparts (though once again, “older” is a pretty flexible concept–the illustration at the top of this post is meant to show “a woman of a certain age in Paris”, for instance). It’s often assumed that the English idiom “a woman of a certain age” originated as a calque, a French phrase translated into English. That’s certainly possible—the French version first appeared in the late 1600s, so slightly before the first English examples in the early 1700s, and before about 1800 most upper-class Englishmen were fluent in French—but the evidence is not strong enough to make it certain.

None of this really explains, though, what Gregg Wallace meant by “women of a certain age”. Clearly he wasn’t paying tribute to the sexually experienced woman who “lives with zest and elan”, but I also doubt he was saying that the women who complained about him were ugly old boilers who should have been grateful for the attention; almost none of the celebrities he was referring to are even remotely plausible candidates for that kind of insult. TV companies may tolerate bad behaviour from their male “talent”, but one thing we know they don’t tolerate (ask the former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly) is more than the slightest hint of visible ageing in women who appear on camera. Nor do they tolerate actual unattractiveness in female talent of any age: as the former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross once sagely observed, “There are not many mingers who make it on to TV in their 20s and 30s”. (In case you’re wondering what occasioned that pearl of wisdom, he was arguing that yes, older women get pushed out sooner than men, but younger women, if they’re attractive, get hired sooner than men, so it all cancels out in the end.)

The female Celebrity Masterchef contestants who’ve said publicly that they complained about Gregg Wallace—in some cases not on their own behalf, but because they had witnessed him harassing (often much younger) production staff who were not in a position to complain—are mostly in their 50s (they include Ulrika Jonsson, Kirsty Wark, Kirstie Allsopp and Emma Kennedy). My guess is that what really ticks Wallace off about these women (women of a certain age that happens to be more or less his own age—he’s 60) is simply that they weren’t afraid to speak up. They didn’t just assume they couldn’t complain or that no one would take them seriously (though at the time, of course, no one did). How dare these uppity, over-privileged women act like a bunch of bossy Karens, reporting the host of a programme they were guests on to the manager?

That’s really the question to which the answer is “they’re middle-class women of a certain age”. And in publicly airing his views on that demographic, perhaps Gregg Wallace has done us a favour. He’s pointed the way to a (re)definition of “a woman of a certain age” which is not about her sexlessness or, conversely, sexiness, but rather her lack of respect for the rules men have historically expected women to play by (“don’t bother to challenge our bad behaviour, darling, we’re more important than you so you’ll only be hurting yourself”). Experience—professional as well as personal—has given women like the ones who complained about Wallace the confidence and the clout to say “to hell with that”.

Though I’m no longer young enough to be “of a certain age” myself, this is one sense of the old idiom I can definitely get behind. So, thanks for that, Gregg—and please close the door quietly on your way out.   

Talking about the Taliban: culture versus politics

Last week the Taliban in Afghanistan published a 114-page document setting out the latest official version of its laws on “vice and virtue”. Western news coverage focused particularly on Article 13, which according to press reports states that

if it is necessary for women to leave their homes, they must cover their faces and voices from men.

“A woman’s voice”, the reports explained, “is deemed intimate”: like the sight of her face, the sound of her voice is a “temptation” from which men must be protected. To that end, the new code requires women not only to be silent outside their homes (even praying or reciting scripture is forbidden), but also to speak quietly inside, to make sure they can’t be overheard by passing unrelated men. Singing and reading aloud are forbidden everywhere.    

Most of the reactions I saw were horrified, but some people took a different tack. On one hand, we had right-wing anti-feminist trolls accusing western feminists of being insufficiently outraged (allegedly because they fear they’ll be accused of racism if they criticize Muslims); on the other, I saw a few comments from progressive types (most of the ones I saw came from women, though I don’t know if they’d call themselves feminists) that actually did accuse the Taliban’s critics of cultural imperialism: “the west”, as one put it, “has no right to impose its values on other cultures”.  

I’m always taken aback when I see this argument presented as progressive, because actually it’s as reactionary AF. Not only does it treat “culture” as a monolith, uncontested and unchanging, in this case it also treats it as belonging to men. “Afghan culture” is assumed to be whatever the men of the Taliban say it is; what women think apparently doesn’t count. And it’s not as if we have no idea what women think. After the new vice law was announced, numerous women inside Afghanistan (as well as activists living in exile elsewhere) took to the internet to urge the world to condemn it. These women have made it abundantly clear that they reject the definition of Afghan culture which has been imposed on them–not by western colonialists but by the Taliban, and not just without women’s consent, but in defiance of their actual cultural traditions.

There is, for instance, a long tradition of Afghan women singing and reciting poetry. Those who are now protesting against the new law by uploading videos of themselves singing to X and TikTok and YouTube are not just defying the Taliban’s latest edict, but continuing a much older tradition of women using poetry and song to criticise the abuse of male authority (one example, collected in 2012 by Eliza Griswold, translates as You sold me to an old goat, father. May God destroy your home; I was your daughter). Listening to what these women are telling us, in their own words and by their own choice (despite the potential risks) is the opposite of “imposing our values” on them.

There are other reasons for feminists to criticize this kind of “culture talk”. As human rights activists long ago pointed out, governments and transnational organizations have frequently avoided taking action against states that deny basic rights to women by putting that issue in the box marked “culture”, as opposed to the box marked “politics”. We might not think much of the way other human rights abuses have been handled in practice, but at least they are seen as meriting a political response; the status of women, by contrast, is often treated as a “cultural matter” on which it would not be appropriate for outsiders to take a view. CEDAW, the 1979 UN Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, allows member-states which ratify it to enter culture-specific “reservations”—that is, specify they will not be bound by particular clauses which they say are incompatible with their culture. This has allowed various countries to sign up to a non-discrimination treaty while continuing to discriminate in the very areas of law that affect women’s status most (e.g. marriage and divorce, inheritance, taxation and the passing on of nationality to children).

Culture talk is also used by antifeminist men like the trolls mentioned earlier to argue that women in the west have nothing to complain about: they should shut up and be grateful they live in a culture whose values in no way resemble the Taliban’s. But in fact those values are part of the western cultural tradition too, and their influence lingers on even now.   

The suppression of women’s speech is a case in point. It’s hard to think of any civilisation in recorded history which has not placed restrictions on when, where and to whom women may speak. Prohibitions on women speaking outside the home and/or to men other than close relatives have been common everywhere, and often they’ve been based on the same argument the Taliban uses: that the female voice is “intimate” (a euphemism for “sexual”), and like other intimate parts must be concealed to preserve its owner’s modesty.

The Greek philosopher Plutarch, for instance, maintained that a virtuous woman “should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes”. According to the poet and classicist Anne Carson, the idea that women had two mouths (the actual mouth and the vagina) was a commonplace of both Greek and Roman discourse: both orifices, she explains, “provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed”.  

But this isn’t just ancient history. The same connection between verbal and sexual (in)continence was made by western authorities for most of the modern era. In Europe and North America from the 16^th century to the 20^th, advice to women on how they should behave continued to link silence with modesty (which also meant chastity), and there was still particular anxiety about women speaking to male strangers outside their homes.

In the early 19^th century that anxiety intensified as more women became active in social reform movements such as the campaign to abolish slavery: some of them, like their male counterparts, travelled around making speeches at political meetings. Even when their audiences were exclusively female these women’s presence on public platforms attracted criticism; but when they spoke to audiences that included men the disapproval was stronger, and had a clear sexual dimension. In Massachusetts in 1837, Congregationalist ministers issued a pastoral letter declaring that a woman who addressed a mixed-sex audience in public was not merely presumptuous but unchaste: like a prostitute or an adulteress she would “fall in shame and dishonor into the dust”.

Even as late as the 1980s—150 years after the Congregationalist ministers’ letter—conservative Christian men were still worrying that women’s voices would lead men into sin. At the height of the campaign for women to be ordained as priests in the Anglican church, Graham Leonard, the Anglican bishop of London, explained his opposition by saying that if he encountered a woman in the sanctuary (the space where priests conduct sacred verbal rituals like the consecration of the bread and wine at Mass) he would be “unbearably tempted to embrace her”.  

This wasn’t just a religious thing. In the 1970s, when the BBC made the momentous decision to let a woman (Angela Rippon) present the TV news, it did so in defiance of two arguments that had been around for decades. One was our old friend “women’s voices lack authority”, but the other was the idea that a female voice would “distract” men from the serious contemplation of current events. No prizes for guessing what “distract” meant in this context: when women’s voices are deemed “intimate”, “private”, “distracting” or “tempting”, these are euphemisms for male sexual arousal. (Angela Rippon would later reveal that one of her colleagues flashed her while she was on the air.) And since men apparently cannot control themselves, they must instead control the women they hold responsible.    

It’s true, of course, that at the level of institutional policy things have changed since the 1980s. Today female newsreaders are unremarkable, and the Church of England has not only women priests but women bishops (albeit some Anglicans still refuse to recognize them). Today there are very few platforms, religious or secular, from which women in western democracies cannot, in theory, speak. But in practice women’s speaking rights are still not equal to men’s: a lot of policing still goes on, and some of it is highly sexualized—like the graphic rape threats which are now routinely sent to women who participate actively in public debates (for politicians and journalists particularly this has become a predictable occupational hazard). Nor is it rare for women’s speech, both inside and (more especially) outside the home, to be policed by their male partners or family members. Restricting how and with whom a woman may communicate, and surveilling her to make sure she doesn’t interact with anyone “unapproved”, are classic coercive control tactics which thousands of men use every day.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women on the receiving end of these tactics are in the same position as the women of Afghanistan: clearly they are not. They are not totally excluded from public life; they are not at risk of being thrown in jail if their voices are heard outside their homes; the law does not leave them with no protection at all from abusive men. The situation of women under the Taliban is dire, and no one should have any qualms about saying so.

But I still find it frustrating when the Taliban are presented as exceptional, not just in the lengths they’re prepared to go to in reducing women to faceless, voiceless non-persons (in that respect I agree they’re in a league of their own), but in the beliefs about women, men and sex that underlie their project. In some form or other those beliefs have existed, and still do exist, in cultures around the world. They are not confined to Islamic societies or non-western societies. And one reason I think it’s important to recognize that is because some of the westerners who have most to say about the misogyny of Other Cultures are not, in reality, feminist allies: control over women is part of their political agenda too.  

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m talking about the white nationalists of the far right in North America and Europe, who maintain that western culture is threatened by the presence of non-white and Muslim immigrants. One argument they’re fond of using is a quasi-feminist one—that immigration harms women’s rights by bringing in large numbers of men from cultures whose sexual attitudes are unenlightened and predatory. But if you look at the language they use it quickly becomes clear that what they’re really defending isn’t the supposed “western value” of sex equality, it’s the ownership rights of white men over white women.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean, which I saw on X last week:

You are witnessing the biggest act of cuckoldry in history. An entire civilization giving away its land and women because the alternative is to be mean.

When you see women being discussed in the possessive—my woman, his woman, our women, their women, or in this case its (“an entire civilization’s”) women—you can be pretty sure you are dealing not with someone who subscribes to “the radical notion that women are people”, but with someone who thinks women are property. For white nationalists this goes beyond the commonplace idea that individual women belong to individual men; collectively women are the property of the nation or the race, an entity composed of men who share a common ancestry. Their big fear (expressed most dramatically in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory) is that white women will either be taken by, or will give themselves to, men who don’t share that ancestry, and the result will be the destruction of the white race. That’s what this is about, and no one should confuse it with caring about women’s—or even just white women’s—rights.   

Nor should anyone think that the misogyny is incidental, just a means to a more important (racist) end. You can tell how fundamental it is by looking at the way the writer frames his complaint, using the metaphor of cuckoldry. White civilization is being compared to a husband whose wife cheats on him, leaving him emasculated and humiliated. The threat these men perceive isn’t just to their culture, or their racial privilege, but to their manhood.  

Cuckold is, or used to be, an archaic term. As an English student in the late 1970s I learned what it meant by reading texts that had been written several centuries earlier (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration drama). If you’d asked me then what I thought the chances were of it ever returning to everyday use I’d have put them on a par with the chances that prithee or Zounds would be revived. Yet 40 years later it did return: by the mid-2010s the abbreviated form cuck had become the alt-right’s insult of choice for a beta-male, a weak and unmanly man. Often it was used as a political insult, meaning that the target was not sufficiently hardline to satisfy far-right extremists. But sexual inadequacy was also implied: for the kind of man who calls other men cucks, power and sexual prowess go together.  

But although cuck is a male-on-male insult, it’s also intimately connected to the misogynist belief that women have power over men by virtue of their ability to provoke desire, and that they use this sexual power to entrap, exploit and dominate men. One of the great truisms of the manosphere is that women are users and liars: they can’t be trusted not to cheat on you and saddle you with raising some other man’s child. Without cheating women there could be no cuckolded men. If white men don’t want to be cucks, they must take back control not only of their borders but also of the women inside them. In far right circles it’s not unusual to see the argument that this reassertion of male control will necessitate the removal of women’s civil rights. One X-user’s reply to the complaint quoted above observed that the rot had set in when “we gave women the vote”.  I don’t think he was joking.

If you spend time lurking in the manosphere you will also find men proposing, or fantasizing about, social policies which are even more reminiscent of the Taliban. MGTOWs (“Men Going Their Own Way”), whose aim is to free themselves from the weakening effects of women’s sexual allure, complain about women dressing “provocatively” and suggest that they should be prohibited from dressing in public in ways that arouse men against their will. Some incels (“involuntarily celibate” men) have argued that women should not be allowed to choose their own partners, but should be (re)distributed by the state, like tax credits, so that self-identified beta-males like themselves are not unjustly denied access to female sexual services.

And let’s not forget the form of religious fundamentalism which has most political influence in the west. Conservative Christians are also big on women dressing modestly, speaking softly, and submitting to the authority of their husbands. And in some places they haven’t just fantasized about curtailing women’s rights. In the US, for instance, they’ve recently been able to realize their long-held ambition of getting the Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 judgment in Roe v Wade which gave women the right to legal abortion. In half of the 50 states that right no longer exists. And the measures some states have proposed to stop women getting around the ban are not unlike the Taliban’s approach to enforcement—for instance, making it a crime to assist a woman who plans to terminate a pregnancy by driving her across state lines. (In Afghanistan drivers can be punished for transporting a woman who is not accompanied by a suitable male guardian.) Or forbidding hospitals to treat women unless and until they are at imminent risk of death. Again, I’m not saying all these things are exactly the same. But they are surely similar enough to give us pause when someone says that “our” culture, unlike “theirs”, respects the rights of women.

As a political movement which seeks to end the oppression of women—wherever it exists and whatever form it takes—feminism needs to start from the assumption that cultures are not monolithic or static, and that one way they can be changed (both for the better and for the worse) is through organized political action. Sex equality is not a “value” which some cultures have and others don’t: it is a political goal that has had to be fought for everywhere. In all societies there are political currents which pose a threat to women’s rights, and in all societies there are currents of resistance with the potential to make women’s lives better. The business of feminism is to oppose the former and support the latter.

So, don’t tell me that as a white western feminist it’s not my place to condemn the Taliban; but also don’t tell me that as a white western feminist I can only condemn the Taliban, and not the male supremacists in my own backyard. It’s perfectly possible—and in the current state of the world, I would say, necessary—to do both.

A modest proposal

After a knife attack in Southport left two dead and nine injured—six of them critically (one of whom has since died)—the police announced that a person described only as a 17-year old male had been charged with murder and attempted murder. Beyond that, they warned the public, speculation about what happened and why should be avoided. But of course people did speculate, not least on why one very obvious question had been so carefully left unanswered in public statements.

In everything from the Home Secretary’s official response to the reports in newspapers and on TV, we were told that the Southport attacker targeted “children”, along with a smaller number of “adults”, at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance class. None of these sources acknowledged that most or perhaps even all of the victims were girls and women: that was only deducible from the accounts given by eye-witnesses, who spoke, as most people naturally do, in the more personal language of “girls”, “daughters” and “mums”.  

This was, of course, no surprise. Girls are exactly who you’d expect to have been participating in an exercise class for 6-11 year-olds featuring the music of Taylor Swift, and mothers or other female carers are who you’d mostly expect to have been supervising them or picking them up. But hey, we shouldn’t be speculating when there’s an ongoing police investigation. Heaven forbid that anyone should name this atrocity as male violence against women and girls (MVAWG).  

Apart from being an insult to the public’s intelligence, what’s galling about this obfuscation is that it’s literally only a few days since MVWG was being described as a national emergency in need of urgent, coordinated action. A report issued by the National Police Chiefs’ Council presented a grim picture: reported offences have risen by nearly 40 percent in five years, to a staggering 3000 a day. In Britain it’s estimated that some 4 million men pose a significant threat to women and girls.

Obviously there is no quick fix for such a vast and multifaceted problem, though it’s good news that the new Labour government has promised to make tackling it a high priority. But in the meantime I have one modest proposal that would take no time and cost no money to implement: officialdom and the media could stop obscuring the nature of the problem by persistently using gender-neutral language to talk about male people victimizing female ones.   

This is not a generalized broadside against gender-neutral language, which is appropriate, and often preferable to sex-specific terms, in contexts where a person’s sex is either unknown or irrelevant, and where specifying it reinforces male bias. When obituarists described the late Zaha Hadid as a “great woman architect”, for instance, that implied not only that “normal” architects are male, but also that Hadid’s achievements, while remarkable for a woman, were not in the same league as men’s (though in fact she was generally regarded as one of the most significant architects of her time). If women do the same thing as men, it’s generally a good idea to use the same label for both. But it doesn’t follow that neutral language is optimal in every context. In some contexts it’s not specifying sex that can make a story biased and misleading.

There could be no more sobering demonstration of that point than the reporting of violent crime, especially though not only MVAWG. That isn’t a new observation, but this year has produced some particularly terrible examples.

Consider, for example, a news story which was widely covered in March, about the findings of a survey investigating the experiences of NHS staff. The survey is carried out every year, and its headline findings are usually reported in the media, but this year they were a bigger story than usual because of the responses to a new question about “unwanted sexual behaviour”. Here’s how the Guardian summarized the survey’s findings: 

Of the 675,140 NHS staff who responded, more than 84,000 reported sexual assaults and harassment by the public and other staff last year.

About one in 12 (58,534) said they had experienced at least one incident of unwanted sexual behaviour from patients, patients’ relatives and other members of the public in 2023.

Almost 26,000 staff (3.8%) also reported unwanted sexual behaviour from colleagues.

This Guardian report is typical in using gender-neutral labels for both the perpetrators of “unwanted sexual behaviour” (patients, relatives, [members of] the public, colleagues) and the NHS employees they targeted (staff), and in giving no other information about the proportions of men and women in either group. It’s possible that this information was not available: perhaps the survey didn’t ask respondents to specify either their own sex or the sex of their abuser(s). If so that’s not the media’s fault, it’s a problem with the design of the survey. But for whatever reason, the language of the news reports did not specify who had been assaulting or harassing whom, leaving readers free to infer that the roles of perpetrator and victim were equally likely to be filled by people of either sex.

If they did infer that, would they be wrong? IMO, almost certainly. While I wouldn’t suggest there are no cases of female patients/relatives sexually harassing male NHS workers, I’d be surprised if that scenario were anything like as common as male patients or relatives harassing female staff (who are an overall majority of all NHS workers). And it would be very surprising if either female patients or female staff were responsible for more than a tiny fraction, if that, of the more serious sexual assaults reported by some respondents: we have plenty of data from other contexts which shows that such assaults are virtually always committed by males. Of course it’s theoretically possible the NHS is different, but there’s no obvious reason to think so. And if you do have information on the sex of perpetrators and victims of sexual abuse, there’s surely no argument that it isn’t relevant for a news story on the subject to include it.     

Yet that information often isn’t included even when we can be sure the media had access to it. In January, for instance, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) issued a report analysing cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation recorded by 42 police forces in 2022. The press release announcing the report included a statistic which then became the main focus of most news reports: in 2022 the majority (52%) of recorded sexual offences against children had been committed by people who were themselves under 18. Below I’ve reproduced the first few paragraphs of the story that appeared on Sky News’s website:

More than half of child sexual abuse offences recorded in 2022 were committed by other children, new figures reveal.

Police say the rise of child-on-child abuse is fuelled by access to violent pornography and smart phones.

Data from 42 police forces in England and Wales shows that a total of 106,984 child sexual offences were reported in 2022, up 7.6% on the previous year and more than five times the just-over 20,000 reported in 2013.

The landmark report found 52% involved a child aged 10 to 17 as a suspect or perpetrator, up from a third in 2013.

Once again, Sky was typical in using the neutral terms child and children for both abusers and their victims. Some reports did include a quote from the NPCC’s Ian Critchley in which he clarified that these offences were committed predominantly by boys against girls. But that information, when it was given, appeared a long way into the story. A reader who just scrolled through the headlines would see only neutral formulations like Sky’s “Children committing half of reported child sexual abuse offences”. Even one who read the whole report would find no details of what Critchley meant by “predominantly”.

In this case that’s definitely not because no statistics were available. They were included not only in the NPCC’s report, but also in its press release, which stated that 82 percent of those who committed sexual offences against children in 2022 were male, and 79 percent of victims were girls. It’s true that the 82 percent figure included adult offenders as well as minors, but there’s other evidence showing that if you narrow the focus to “child-on-child abuse” the numbers are much the same. When the BBC’s Panorama programme investigated sexual abuse perpetrated by and against schoolchildren it found that boys were responsible for 90 percent of reported incidents, while girls made up 80 percent of victims.

Evidently the media made an editorial choice to report the NPCC’s findings in gender-neutral language (“other children”, “child-on-child abuse”), and to make no reference to the figures in the press release. It’s hard to see a justification for that choice when the pattern was so stark. Sex-specific language (e.g., “Around half of reported child sexual abuse offences now committed by boys aged 10-17, new figures show”) would not have been inaccurate or misleading: arguably it would have given readers a clearer understanding of the facts.

So why have formulas like “child-on-child abuse” and “abuse between children” (the BBC’s preferred phrase) become the norm in reporting on this subject?  One possible answer is, because it’s assumed readers already know the vast majority of abusers are male, and can apply that knowledge when they interpret the words on the page. If a proposition is already “given” information then it doesn’t need to be spelled out explicitly. But in this case I suspect that something else might be going on. Two things, actually. One reflects the view which has become orthodox in much of the media, that the gender diversity of contemporary societies demands a shift to more inclusive (which means neutral rather than sex-specific) language. The other, though, comes from a totally different place.

There is ample evidence that “gender-based” violence of all kinds—rape and sexual assault, child abuse, domestic violence, “intimate partner homicide” and cases where an individual with a grudge against women kills or attempts to kill multiple victims (the best-known such cases have involved self-proclaimed incels; in the US they are classed by the FBI as “misogynist terrorism”)—is  overwhelmingly committed by males. But for the last three decades, and especially in the last few years, men’s rights activists have made a concerted effort to cast doubt on that well-established fact by continually repeating two other propositions: first, that many or most accusations of violence made by women against men are false; and second, that there is a huge, hidden problem of violence perpetrated by women against men and children. In both cases, MRAs say, the truth has been suppressed because of anti-male/pro-feminist bias in the justice system.    

We may associate this story primarily with extreme misogynists—incels, MGTOWs, Andrew Tate—but in my experience a less extreme version has gradually gained some traction among more moderate people. Today I quite often find myself arguing with someone who, though not a fanatical woman-hater, thinks that there are “two sides to every story”, and that female violence against men and boys is a larger problem than the official figures show. I’ve even heard that belief expressed by feminists, who suggest that the problem has been underestimated because of gender stereotyping. As a feminist myself, they ask me, don’t I think that women and girls can be “just as bad” as men and boys?

If that’s a general claim about moral conduct, then the answer is yes: for me “the radical notion that women are people” entails the belief that women are no more virtuous than men. But if it’s specifically a claim about sexual and domestic violence, then the answer is no, because it simply isn’t true. People who think it is or could be true, however, are unlikely to be reading reports about “child-on-child abuse” and mentally translating that as “boys abusing girls”. For those people the media’s use of non-sex-specific terms is more likely to be reinforcing the MRAs’ message—or put another way, amplifying disinformation put out by extremists.

Am I saying that the news media are in league with the men’s rights lobby? No: I’m asking if the media’s understanding of what it means to report impartially (which in criminal cases they have a legal duty to do) has been influenced—possibly unconsciously–by the idea MRAs have worked so hard to embed in popular thinking, that the way certain subjects are dealt with and discussed in public exhibits an unfair bias against men. If that’s a concern, neutral language is the “safe” choice. You can’t be accused of being anti-male, and if someone objects that it’s misleading you can point out that there’s nothing factually inaccurate about referring to people under 18 as children, or to employees of the NHS as staff. Which is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the point that you can mislead, distort or obfuscate by omission: bias isn’t just about what you do say, it’s also about what you choose to leave unsaid.  

It’s true, of course, that anxiety about being unfair to men can’t explain the reporting of the Southport case, where there was never any attempt to suggest that the perpetrator might not be male. If you scrolled through what was being posted on X/Twitter, however, it quickly became clear some people suspected the authorities of trying to cover up something else about him (it has since emerged that he was born in Wales to Rwandan immigrant parents). If it’s true that the victims’ sex was deemed “sensitive” information because of the way racists have exploited offences committed by nonwhite men against white girls, my own view would be that trying to address one serious social problem by denying or misrepresenting another is neither morally justified nor likely to be effective (if you don’t want to stoke racist conspiracy theories, don’t withhold information: you’ll only reinforce the message that ordinary Brits are being lied to by the powerful).

In any case, the explanation might be far simpler—that most people don’t see anything problematic about the pattern I’ve been describing. What’s wrong, they might ask, with calling a child a child? The horror and sadness we feel about what happened in Southport surely has far more to do with the victims being children than with the fact that they were female. And of course I agree with that; but if what happened was related to the fact that they were girls (and while we don’t yet know if that was the issue in this case, it has undoubtedly been the issue in some cases) then we need to resist language which obfuscates that. No problem can be addressed effectively without a clear understanding of what it is; and when girls and women are attacked by violent men, neutral language is the enemy of clarity.

Election special: things can’t only get better

The last few weeks have been All About The Men—and I’m not talking about the football, I’m talking about the election. According to Loughborough University’s Centre for Research on Communication and Culture (CRCC), which produces a weekly report on the media’s election coverage,

Mansplaining has dominated the Media Election… While male voices have dominated in terms of political party representation, this pattern has also been replicated in the reporting of other voices… Men appear far more frequently than women as representatives of businesses, academia, trade unions, think tanks, opinion poll companies, show business, government, and public professions. Crucially women only achieve parity when being featured as ‘citizens’ or as representatives of media organisations and voluntary organisations.

Yet only a few years ago we were told that the future of politics was female: instead of shouty men talking over each other we’d have kinder, gentler politicians like the three women party leaders who featured in the 2015 campaign (Natalie Bennett for the Greens, Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood). Their distinctively female virtues became a prominent theme in election coverage: after the first TV debate the Guardian declared “it was the women wot won it”. Even the Tory Telegraph said they had “brought a certain dignity to an occasion which could have descended into chaos and rancour”.  

Though I was (and still am) critical of this essentialist waffle about women’s leadership styles, I thought the gushing enthusiasm would eventually morph into a simple acceptance of female leaders as ordinary and unremarkable. For a while that seemed to be happening: between 2016 and 2019 all the mainland British parties except Labour chose at least one woman to serve as their leader. But it’s amazing how quickly that moment seems to have passed: as if we’ve been there and done that, and now it’s back to business as usual. In this election only 31 percent of all candidates are women, and only one party has a female leader (Carla Denyer of the Greens, who shares the position with a man): consequently the debates and other set-piece events that form the backbone of the “media election”—generating the largest audiences and the most commentary—have featured all or nearly all-male line ups. There’s been plenty of shouting, not to mention “chaos and rancour”.

The media obviously can’t control who political parties elect to lead them, but in other respects the maleness of their coverage reflects their own editorial decisions. If men still vastly outnumber women as expert commentators on policy issues, that’s not, in 2024, because there aren’t enough women who’d be qualified to comment. And yes, it does matter: if the voices of knowledge and authority are male, and the only women we hear from are ordinary voters giving opinions in a five-second clip, the message that sends is that politics, or at least Politics-with-a-capital-P, is men’s business rather than women’s.  

In 2015 the feminist campaign group Fawcett ran a campaign called #ViewsNotShoes which criticised the way the media trivialized female candidates by paying more attention to their footwear than their political ideas. This year that problem hasn’t arisen, because women are hardly being talked about at all. The CRCC’s weekly report includes a list of the individuals who’ve been referenced most frequently in election coverage: halfway through the campaign it included just two women politicians, the shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves in fourth place and the Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner in tenth place. Carla Denyer, though a party (co-)leader, did not even make the top twenty.

But these rankings on their own do not capture the extent to which women’s voices are marginalized. Even the highest-ranked woman, Rachel Reeves, got only 5 percent of the week’s coverage, whereas the three men above her got a combined total of 70 percent. Across the CRCC’s sample (which includes both the main TV channels and the national press) women got less than 20 percent of the time or space allotted to politicians’ speech.   

Another female absence was pointed out last week by the Telegraph, which criticized Keir Starmer’s refusal to use his “vivacious and glamorous” wife Victoria as a prop. Why was he failing to capitalize on her potential to “humanise him in the same way Samantha Cameron humanised David, or Michelle Obama boosted the popularity of Barack”?

In Telegraph-world it’s obvious that this is what Important Men’s wives are for, but if Victoria Starmer thinks otherwise, good for her. The importation of the whole “First Lady” thing has always annoyed me, reaching a peak in 2015 when David Cameron’s wife Samantha was mentioned more often in election coverage than any female politician apart from Nicola Sturgeon. That wasn’t repeated in 2017, when there was no prime ministerial wife to play the SamCam role—though Theresa May did do a buttock-clenchingly awful interview on the One Show with her husband Philip—nor in 2019, when Boris Johnson was between marriages. But this year wives could have made a comeback and they didn’t. For this relief, much thanks.

It isn’t just the Telegraph that thinks Starmer is in need of being “humanised”: both he and Rishi Sunak are generally regarded as lacking in charisma. Sunak is seen as aloof and out of touch; Starmer is seen as competent but boring. During their head-to-head debate last Wednesday (where they were both, IMO, offputtingly shouty, ill-tempered and defensive) an audience-member was applauded when he rudely asked if they really believed they were the best leaders the country had to offer.

The answer to that will obviously depend on how we imagine the ideal leader. The traditional preference for male over female leaders reflects the ingrained cultural belief that men are more naturally suited to the role: they’re tougher, more self-confident and more decisive. But as well as doing women an injustice, this stereotype places a heavy burden on men who don’t conform to it. I’d put both Starmer and Sunak in that category. Neither seems comfortable with power in the way that, say, Barack Obama was—or the (arrogant and narcissistic) way Donald Trump is. Their attempts to personify the alpha-male leader are strained and unconvincing—and when they miss the mark the results can be excruciating.

An illustration of this was Starmer’s statement, repeated on more than one occasion, that he agreed with Tony Blair that women had vaginas and men had penises. What made this excruciating wasn’t just the banality of the observation, it was the fact that Starmer was ventriloquising Blair. As bitterly as feminists may disagree about sex and gender, we can surely all agree that there is no reason whatsoever to treat Tony Blair’s pronouncements as definitive. Citing Blair as his authority made Starmer sound not only sexist (“for years I’ve ignored or rebuked any woman who said this, but when Tony said it I suddenly saw the light”) but also overly dependent on his alpha-male predecessor to tell him what to think.

There’s one leader in this campaign who has been more successful at projecting alpha-maleness, and it’s not a coincidence that he is also a far-Right populist.  I speak, of course, of Nigel Farage, who made (what he presented as) a last-minute decision to reclaim the leadership of his party, Reform UK, and to stand for election as the MP for Clacton—a contest the polls predict he will win.

Like Trump in the US, Farage is more popular among men than women. He appeals to the “aggrieved male entitlement” of Right-wing white men by serving as a mouthpiece for their anger, and like all populists he makes a virtue of plain-spokenness, meaning he does not shy away from overtly rude and bigoted comments. Anger and rudeness tend to play less well with women, even if they share the speaker’s politics. That’s probably one reason why men make up two thirds of the former Conservative voters who say they’ll be switching to Reform; women who’ve become disillusioned with the Tories are more likely to say they won’t be voting for anyone.

In the past Farage has not presented himself as particularly anti-women (so long as they were white and British): though his persona has always been blokey, in his political rhetoric he has tended to stick to the racism and ultra-nationalism his brand was built on. That’s been true of British far-Right politics more generally: compared with the US or European versions it’s put less emphasis on antifeminism and misogyny as such (though if you looked, they were always there in the background). Recently, however, Farage has been leaning into a more self-conscious, ideological misogyny—not the “kinder, küche, kirche” variety embraced by Viktor Orban and Giorgia Meloni, but the more aggressive variety associated with the online “manosphere” and its cheerleaders on the US far Right. He’s been photographed with Andrew Tate, the popular misogynist influencer who’s currently awaiting trial in Romania on rape and sex trafficking charges, and in February he did a podcast interview in which he praised Tate for defending “male culture” and being a voice for “the emasculated”.  

This parroting of manosphere talking points seems to me to be a sign of the times. Misogyny was always part of the far-Right package, but in the last two decades its importance has arguably increased, in part because it seems to act as a “gateway drug”, drawing disaffected young men into the larger alt-Right world of white nationalist and neo-Nazi extremism. Perhaps Farage’s embrace of Tate is a bid to increase Reform’s support among young British men, who recent surveys suggest are becoming more and more antifeminist. If so, that makes it even more alarming that he may soon be an MP, with the platform and privileges of a mainstream elected politician.

Not that he has ever lacked a platform: the media love Farage, for many of the same reasons they loved “Boris”. Unlike Sunak or Starmer he’s a Character, a maverick, a maker of gaffes and a generator of clickbait outrage. The CRCC found that in the week he took back control, his party received more media coverage than all the other small parties combined; he himself shot up to third place in their list of the most-mentioned individuals.

I find this irresponsible. Getting media exposure has always been Farage’s superpower: it’s what’s given him such extraordinary influence (together with zero accountability, since he was never the person actually making the decisions). It’s obvious why some media outlets are continuing to indulge him (because they like his brand of far-Right populism), but those that purport to find his politics repellent should consider paying him a bit less attention. It’s true that his coverage hasn’t been uncritical, but I don’t think that’s the point: even negative attention contributes to the perception of him as a significant political figure, and it also plays into his Trump-like persona as a voice “the elite” will go to any lengths to discredit.  

It’s clear that, barring catastrophe, by this time next week we’ll have a Labour government—most likely one with a large majority. I’m not disputing that will be a positive change: I’m as keen as anyone to see the back of the Conservatives who have (mis)governed us for nearly 15 years. But beyond that I don’t think women will have much to celebrate. They will remain seriously underrepresented among our lawmakers; as a majority of the nation’s poor and of its carers (both paid and unpaid) they will suffer disproportionately from Labour’s reluctance to commit to spending what would need to be spent to rebuild our public services and reverse the other dire effects of austerity; and if Reform gains the kind of foothold the polls are predicting they’ll have reason to worry about the longer-term implications for women’s reproductive and employment rights.   

But it’s also the smaller things that rankle. Things like the persistence among male politicians of the belief that you can communicate alpha-maleness by shouting and interrupting constantly (extra points to Rishi Sunak for repeatedly talking over the debate moderator Mishal Hussein). Or like the ubiquity of the “two blokes having a blokey chat about politics” format for commentary, as epitomized by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart: they’ve had hours of airtime on the BBC, and on election night they’ll be joining the Channel 4 line-up, while copycats Ed Balls and George Osborne, another podcasting duo comprising two middle-aged white blokes from opposing parties, will be on ITV. Both these channels’ results programmes will feature the familiar combination of a senior male presenter with a woman sidekick (if you want to see a results show fronted by a single presenter who is not a man, your only option so far as I can tell will be Sky News).

The fact that all this is still seen as just the natural order of things makes me want to scream. So does the absence (AFAIK) of any discussion of the statistic I cited earlier, that more than two thirds of the candidates in this election are men: if the results reflect that, the percentage of women MPs will be lower in the next Parliament than in the last one (where it was 35 percent). Comparing this campaign with 2015, or 2017, is a reminder that progress is not inevitable. What women need is not just a change of government, but a change in our whole political culture.    

Trivial pursuits?

I’ve always associated crossword puzzles with men. When I was a child my father did the Telegraph crossword religiously every day; in the age of pen and paper, when only one person in a household could fill in the empty squares, that was understood to be his prerogative. Later on, as an avid reader of detective fiction, I discovered characters like Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Morse, men whose puzzle-solving prowess demonstrated the same erudition and mental agility they brought to the unravelling of murder mysteries. To the extent I thought at all about the creators of crosswords, I assumed that they too must be male. I vaguely imagined them as scholars or “boffins”, working at desks piled high with reference books which their wives were not allowed to dust.    

But in fact, as I learned from Anna Shechtman’s book The Riddles of the Sphinx, the earliest crossword enthusiasts, and the most influential figures in the development of the crossword puzzle as we know it (or at least, as they know it in the US*), were women. Though a man, Arthur Wynne, came up with the basic idea (his diamond-shaped “word-cross” made its debut in 1913), the rules that would come to define the standard crossword, governing everything from the proportion of black squares to the ordering of clues, were put in place by women like Ruth Hale, the founding president of the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, Helen Haven, who organized the first competitive crossword-solving contest in 1924, and Margaret Farrar, who became the first editor of the New York Times crossword in 1942. It wasn’t until the 1970s that crossword-constructing started to become a job for male “boffins”. But it didn’t take long for them to displace women almost entirely, and their dominance has continued into the 21st century: today around 80 percent of crossword constructors are men.

Anna Shechtman is one of the other 20 percent. As a student she was the second youngest woman ever to have a puzzle accepted by the New York Times, and when she graduated in 2013 she spent two years as an assistant to the Times’s long-serving crossword editor Will Shortz. Though she eventually went back into academia, she still contributes crosswords to the New Yorker, and is actively involved in current efforts to modernize and diversify the “CrossWorld”. Her inside knowledge is one of her book’s strengths: there’s a lot of fascinating detail about both the technical and the political aspects of contemporary crossword construction. The main focus of the book, however, is history—both Shechtman’s personal history as a former/recovering anorexic (which she sees as inextricably linked to her precocious passion for making crosswords–both were expressions of her need for control) and the longer history of the crossword itself. In this post I’ll be concentrating on the second of these strands, since it’s the one that speaks most directly to my interest in women and language.   

Just as I didn’t know the crossword was a largely female creation, I didn’t know until I read Shechtman’s book that in the 1920s, when crosswords first became popular in the US, solving them was a largely female pastime, and was disaparaged for that reason. Disapproval of the mid-1920s crossword craze ran the gamut from sexist condescension (“look at these silly women with their trivial word-games”) to full-blown moral panic (“these women are so addicted to crosswords they’re neglecting their duties as wives and mothers!”) Cartoons depicted women hunched over their puzzles while their husbands tended to their neglected infants (“what is home without a mother?” asked one caption), while columnists warned that women’s “crossword puzzleitis” was causing an epidemic of divorce. This panic was linked to wider anxieties about the changing role of women (who in the US had gained the right to vote in 1920). The selfish and irresponsible crossword addict was often portrayed specifically as a New Woman or a Flapper–a woman who rejected traditional femininity and demanded the same freedoms as men.    

One woman who fit this stereotype was Ruth Hale, who in addition to codifying many of the rules for crossword construction was a journalist, a member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City, and a feminist in the tradition of the 19^th century radical Lucy Stone. Like Stone, Hale kept her birth-name when she married fellow-journalist Heywood Broun, but their marriage still damaged her professionally; though her husband acknowledged her as “the better newspaperman [sic]”, it was he who got the high-profile assignments (some of which he delegated to her, though they still appeared under his byline). Eventually she divorced him, not because their relationship had broken down, but in an attempt to assert her independence. Sadly, this effort came too late: Hale died not long after. But her involvement with crosswords had given her one sphere of influence where she was not overshadowed by her husband.

Shechtman thinks crosswords may also have answered a psychological need for structure and rules that could not be met in other areas of Hale’s life because of her commitment to feminism. Her political principles led her to do many things that were highly unconventional by the standards of the day (like divorcing her husband while continuing to live with him), but in her crossword-related activities she was free, paradoxically, to be a stickler for convention. Shechtman sees her as one of many women in the story of the crossword who “wrestled with the norms of gender by rigidly attaching themselves to the norms of language”.  

Not all of them were feminists like Hale. Some were college-educated women who had chosen not to pursue careers, but who struggled to reconcile their ideological commitment to traditional domestic roles with their experience of domesticity as monotonous and stultifying. Crossword-constructing, Shechtman suggests, offered women in this position “an intellectual outlet” and gave them a break from “the relentless routines of childcare and the doldrums of an empty nest”. In most cases it did not take them out of the home or provide them with an independent income: it was more like a hobby they pursued in their spare time. But for a few women it did become a career.

One such woman was Margaret Farrar, the first crossword editor at the New York Times. Farrar’s attitude to women’s role was conservative: she always maintained that her family came first, and even used her earnings to fund her husband’s publishing house. Her conventional views were also reflected in her approach to the crossword itself, which Shechtman describes her as “domesticating”. She instructed Times contributors to make their puzzles “bright and entertaining”, and instituted what came to be called the “breakfast test”, requiring the removal of any word or clue that might put a solver off their breakfast. This ruled out not only gross and indecorous topics, but also anything politically controversial. When the US entered World War II she extolled its virtues as a morale-booster: “you can’t”, she observed, “think of your troubles while solving a crossword”.    

Later on, some crossword constructors would produce puzzles which were designed not to distract solvers from the grim realities of life, but to raise their awareness of social problems and teach them the ideas and terminology of radical social movements. Unlike more conventional forms of political education, which generally required a high tolerance for boredom, the crossword could deliver its message through an activity people actually enjoyed. Among those who used it in this way were second-wave feminists: Shechtman devotes a chapter to Julia Penelope, a radical lesbian feminist and linguist who turned to crossword-constructing in the 1990s. Her academic specialism—the history and significance of sexism in the English language—was also a theme that featured prominently in her puzzles: they contained clues like “never the governor’s equal (9)” (answer: GOVERNESS), and “independent woman (8)” (answer: SPINSTER).

Penelope was clearly a much less influential figure in crossword history than Hale or Farrar, and it’s unclear if her puzzles found a significant audience even among feminists. In the 1970s and 1980s she had published in periodicals with a large (by radical feminist standards) circulation, but by the time she started making crosswords (the mid-1990s) those outlets had cut their ties with her. One of them, the journal Sinister Wisdom, had publicly denounced her on the grounds that her brand of lesbian separatism was transphobic, white-centric and insufficiently sex-positive, and told its readers not to buy an anthology she had edited (a reminder that cancel culture existed long before we called it that). Her response was to circulate a letter in which she repudiated the entire lesbian feminist community. Since she appears to have lost much of her previous following as a result of these events, it seems unlikely that her later crosswords had much impact.    

Shechtman evidently finds Penelope a distasteful figure, noting that while she was very insistent on the power of words to wound, her own words did significant harm to others. Though a lot of her writing wasn’t my cup of tea either, I did find myself wondering why she’s singled out for this very damning assessment, when the other women discussed in the book (who were hardly paragons of virtue by contemporary feminist standards) are criticized, if at all, in much more muted terms. Not only did I find this jarring (because it’s at odds with the book’s prevailing tone), it also bothered me for another reason.

Whereas the other women Shechtman discusses, feminist or not, benefited from their status as respectable married ladies, Penelope was a far more marginal figure. Shechtman’s own account makes clear how badly she was treated throughout her life (she died in 2013) for being, in her own words, “a lesbian who couldn’t pass”. Coming of age at a time when lesbians and gay men faced vicious persecution, as a student she was expelled from two different universities in Florida by order of a state committee tasked with rooting out homosexuals. Though she went on to study elsewhere, eventually earning a Ph.D and  holding a series of academic positions, she was repeatedly passed over for tenure and promotion. In her later years she depended on casual editing work to pay her bills. It’s surely not hard to understand why someone who’d had those experiences might have become, over time, increasingly angry, combative and uncompromising.

I couldn’t help feeling that the reason Penelope gets a chapter is less because of her contribution to the history of the crossword and more because it’s important to Shechtman to explicitly condemn the kind of feminism she represented. Yet in fact there are some striking similarities between Penelope and the current generation of progressive crossword constructors. They may deplore her political views, but they share her theoretical understanding of language as an ideological instrument shaped by patriarchal, racist and heteronormative values. They also share her belief that those values can be resisted by making organized efforts to change the way words are used—even in seemingly peripheral linguistic products like crossword puzzles.  

In crosswords the influence of patriarchal, racist and heteronormative values is most apparent in judgments on the “puzzleworthiness” of words. To be puzzleworthy a word must be in “common usage”, or refer to something which is “common knowledge”: there’s no point in making puzzles whose obscurity will defeat most solvers. But in practice what counts as “common” reflects the vocabulary and the cultural preoccupations of the straight white middle-aged men who edit most crosswords. That means, for instance, that arcane baseball terms are deemed puzzleworthy, but words referencing the interests of women, minority ethnic groups or LGBTQ people are not. Shechtman lists a number of words which Will Shortz took out of her puzzles on the basis that readers wouldn’t know them: they include not only MALE GAZE (which might be a bit obscure outside feminist circles), but also MATCHA (white men, it seems, don’t drink green tea) and SULA (the title of a novel by Toni Morrison, whose status as a Nobel laureate apparently doesn’t change the assessment of a Black woman writer’s work as “niche”).

Shechtman and her contemporaries want the criteria for puzzleworthiness to be de-biased and updated. They want words that demean or offend minority groups to be banned; they want editors to consult, and test draft puzzles on, a more diverse group of solvers; in a field heavily dominated by white men, they want more opportunities for crossword constructors who do not belong to that demographic. Some of them, more radically, want crosswords to stop just rewarding solvers for what they already know, and start giving them opportunities to learn new things by including a wider range of terms in puzzles.

Though these demands will doubtless prompt some people to complain that “wokeness” is turning their beloved puzzle into an ideological purity test, change is already happening, as much for commercial as political reasons. As Shechtman points out, puzzles these days sell a lot of newspaper subscriptions, so there’s an economic incentive to ensure they don’t just appeal to middle-aged white men. If you want to broaden the audience for them it makes sense to expand their linguistic and cultural range, which in turn makes it logical to diversify your pool of constructors.      

While the dominance of white constructors has been a constant throughout the US crossword’s history (the first New York Times crossword constructed by a Black man appeared in 1996, and the first one to carry a Black woman’s byline was published as recently as 2021), the current dominance of men reflects a major shift since the early days. According to Shechtman things began to change in the 1970s, when large numbers of educated women entered the paid workforce and the supply of housewife-constructors began to dwindle. But the shift became decisive with the advent of new technology. As computers became capable of doing some tasks (e.g., searching for words that contain a particular sequence of letters) more quickly and efficiently than humans, crossword construction started to look less like an occupation for people with advanced linguistic skills, and more like a job for scientists and engineers. Today, many parts of the process have been more or less automated: rather than spending hours selecting words and fitting them together in a grid (the graph-paper-and-pencil method Shechtman taught herself as a teenager), constructors now use downloadable wordlists and dedicated software (though they still need to be creative in writing clues and coming up with themes for their puzzles, and successful constructors usually customize the standard wordlists to reflect their individual preferences).

This particular story may be unfamiliar to most feminists (it was certainly new to me), but its basic outline is depressingly familiar. When a task is performed by women it is seen as low-level and undemanding, and the women get no credit for the skill it in fact requires; but when men get involved, and eventually displace the women, the task mysteriously comes to be seen as so highly skilled that only men (indeed, only the most intelligent men) are qualified to do it. The re-gendering of the crossword during the 20^th century is a paradigm case of that progression. In the space of a few decades the housewife constructing puzzles at her kitchen table (using graph paper, pencils and perhaps her old college dictionary) morphed into the “boffin” and then the computer nerd; crossword solving, originally disparaged as a frivolous pastime that was rotting young women’s already unimpressive brains, came to be understood as a form of mental calisthenics for cerebral fictional detectives and men like my father.

I’d guess there are similar stories to be told about other language-based pastimes (Scrabble, for instance, whose evolution from a purely recreational and mainly domestic pastime into a tournament sport has both marginalized women (the top-ranked competitive players are 86% male) and sparked heated debates about sexism). It occurred to me that this is potentially fertile ground for language and gender researchers: while there’s been a lot of work on “reclaiming” women’s contributions as lexicographers, grammarians or style-guide and etiquette manual writers, AFAIK there’s been little investigation of their role in the development and popularization of word-games.

Perhaps games have been neglected because we think of them as a distraction from reality rather than a source of insight into it. But Shechtman shows that this is a false dichotomy: the things we use to distract us are also real, and may have as much to tell us as more “serious” pursuits about ourselves and the social world we live in.      

* I should clarify that The Riddles of the Sphinx deals exclusively with American crossword history, which means it doesn’t touch on the British tradition of the “cryptic” crossword (invented for the Observer in 1926). This was actually Morse’s and my father’s puzzle of choice: my father left the non-cryptic “quick” crossword in the Sunday paper for my mother, which suggests that in Britain it was specifically the cryptic puzzle that became the key symbol of male intellect.  

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.