The new imitation game

In the early days of this blog (which is eight years old this month) I wrote about Ashley Madison, an online service for people seeking opportunities to cheat on their partners. It turned out to be a scam, taking money from men to put them in touch with women who, for the most part, did not exist: they were invented by employees and then impersonated by an army of bots. Linguistically the bots were pretty basic, and some men became suspicious when they received identical “sexy” messages from multiple different “women”. Most, however, seem not to have suspected anything.  

I thought of this when I read a recent piece in the Washington Post about a California startup called Forever Voices. Its founder John Meyer predicts that by the end of this decade,

most Americans will have an AI companion in their pocket…whether it’s an ultra-flirty AI that you’re dating, an AI that’s your personal trainer, or simply a tutor companion.

Sorry, an AI that you’re dating? How did yesterday’s fraud turn into tomorrow’s must-have product?

AIs you could date were not originally at the centre of Meyer’s business plan. He started Forever Voices after developing, for his own use, a chatbot that replicated the voice and personality of his recently deceased father. In the last few years, using the latest technology (ChatGPT-style generative AI, “deepfake” imaging and voice-cloning) to recreate dead loved ones has become something of a trend: it started with individuals like Meyer building their own, but today there are companies which offer “griefbots” as a commercial service.

It’s no surprise that there’s a market. Humans have always looked for ways to communicate with the dead, whether through shamans, mediums, spirit guides or Ouija boards. This new approach dispenses with the supernatural element (a chatbot is a machine in which we know there is no ghost), but the illusion it offers is more powerful in other ways. As Meyer says, it’s “super-realistic”: it feels almost like having an actual conversation with the person. And it’s turned out that bereaved relatives aren’t the only people willing to pay for that.

Forever Voices’ breakthrough product is not a “griefbot” but an AI version of a living person named Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year old social media influencer who has two million followers on Snapchat. 98 percent of them are men, and many of them seem to be obsessed with her. Some pay for access to an online forum where she spends five hours a day answering their questions. But the demand far outstrips her capacity to meet it, and that has prompted her to launch CarynAI, a bot which “replicates her voice, mannerisms and personality”. Interacting with it costs $1 a minute: in the first week it was available it raked in $100,000. With thousands more fans now on the waiting-list to join the service, Marjorie reckons she could soon be making $5 million every month.

What are these users paying for? The answer, in many cases, is sexually explicit chat–though Marjorie maintains that she never wanted it to be just a sex thing: her real aim, she says, was to “cure loneliness”. Forever Voices, on the other hand, says CarynAI is meant to provide users with “a girlfriend-like experience”. This echoes the language of the sex industry, where “the girlfriend experience” refers to a “premium” service in which women offer clients companionship and emotional intimacy as well as sex. Some women who sell this service have talked about it in similar terms to Marjorie, as a kind of therapy for lonely and/or socially awkward men. Many say they charge a premium because it’s harder than “ordinary” sex-work—partly because it requires more emotional labour, and also because it blurs the boundaries that are usually part of the deal.

Are AI companions just a pound-shop version of the in-person “girlfriend experience”, or do they have their own attractions? Now that the technology has advanced to the point where the bots are no longer basic, but, as Meyer says, “super-realistic”, it’s possible that some men find the idea of interacting with a simulated woman more appealing than a relationship with a real one. What you get from CarynAI feels authentic, but it doesn’t have the downsides of a normal exchange between humans. She doesn’t have boundaries or needs; she’s never demanding or critical or in a bad mood. And you can be absolutely sure she isn’t judging you. Whereas a real woman you’ve gone to for the “girlfriend experience” might pretend to like you while privately despising you, CarynAI is incapable of despising you. She’s just a bunch of code, outputting words that don’t mean anything to her. O Brave new world, that has such women in’t!        

In fact this isn’t totally new. We’ve had bots of a somewhat similar kind for over a decade, in the form of digital voice assistants like Alexa, Cortana and Siri. They too were designed to project the illusion of female personhood: they have female names, personalities and voices (in some languages you can make their voices male, but their default setting is female). They weren’t intended to be “companions”, but like many digital devices (and indeed, many real-world personal assistants), the functions their users assign them in reality are not just the ones in the original specification.

In 2019 UNESCO published a report on the state of the gendered “digital divide” which included a section on digital assistants. As well as reiterating the longstanding concern that these devices reinforce the idea of women as “obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers”, the report also aired some more recent concerns about the way they’re routinely sexualized. It cites an industry estimate, based on data from product testing, that at least five percent of interactions with digital assistants are sexual; the true figure is thought to be higher, because the software used to detect sexual content only reliably identifies the most explicit examples.  

Bizarre though we may find the idea of people sexualizing electronic devices, the designers evidently expected it to happen: why else would they have equipped their assistants with a set of pre-programmed responses? In 2017 Quartz magazine tested the reactions of four popular products (Alexa, Siri, Cortana and the Google Assistant) to being propositioned, harassed or verbally abused. It found their responses were either playful and flirtatious (e.g. if you called Siri a slut or a bitch the response was “I’d blush if I could”) or else they politely deflected the question (calling the Google assistant a slut elicited “my apologies, I don’t understand”). The publicity these findings received did prompt the companies responsible to ditch some of the flirtatious responses (Siri now responds to sexual insults by saying “I don’t know how to respond to that”). But the new answers still fall short of being actively disobliging, which would be at odds with the assistants’ basic service function.

It would also be at odds with their characters—a word I use advisedly, because I learned from the UNESCO report that the tech companies hired film and TV scriptwriters to create personalities and detailed backstories which the assistants’ voices and speech-styles could then be designed around. Cortana, for example, is a young woman from Colorado: her parents are academics, she has a history degree from Northwestern, and she once won the kids’ edition of the popular quiz show Jeopardy. In her spare time she enjoys kayaking.

Siri and Alexa may have different imaginary hobbies (maybe Siri relaxes by knitting complicated Scandi jumpers while Alexa is a fiend on the climbing wall), but they’re obviously from the same stable of mainstream, relatable female characters. They can’t be too overtly sexy because that wouldn’t work in a family setting, but in other respects (age, social class, implied ethnicity and personality) they’re pretty much what you’d expect the overwhelmingly male and mostly white techies who designed them to come up with. And the knowledge that they aren’t real clearly doesn’t stop some men from finding it satisfying to harass them, any more than knowing a loved one is dead stops some people finding comfort in a “griefbot”.    

So, maybe John Meyer is right: in five years’ time AIs won’t just do our homework, keep track of our fitness and turn on our lights or our music, they’ll also be our friends and intimate partners. Technology, identified by many experts as a major contributor to the current epidemic of loneliness, will also provide the cure. At least, it will if you’re a man. To me, at least, “an ultra-flirty AI that you’re dating” suggests a male “you” and a female AI, not vice-versa.

Some might say: where’s the harm in using technology to meet men’s need for things that, for whatever reason, real women aren’t giving them? If some men can’t find girlfriends, isn’t it better for them to spend time with a virtual female companion than stoking their grievances in an incel forum? If their preferred sexual activities are degrading, violent and/or illegal, why not let them use a sex-robot instead of harming another person? They can’t inflict pain on an object that doesn’t feel, or dehumanize something that isn’t human to begin with. But as the roboticist Alan Winfield argued in a 2016 blog post entitled “Robots should not be gendered”, this view is naive: a sexualized robot “is no longer just an object, because of what it represents”. In his view, interacting with machines designed to resemble or substitute for women will only reinforce sexism and misogyny in real life.

AI companions don’t (yet) come in a form you can physically interact with: the most advanced ones have voices, but not three dimensional bodies. Intimacy with them, sexual or otherwise, depends entirely on verbal interaction. But what kind of intimacy is this? I can’t help thinking that way some men relate to simulations like CarynAI is only possible because of their basic lack of interest in women as people like themselves—people with thoughts and feelings and complex inner lives. Personally I can’t imagine getting any satisfaction from a “conversation” with something I know is incapable of either generating its own thoughts or comprehending mine. But some women evidently do find this kind of interaction satisfying–sometimes to the point of becoming emotionally dependent on it.

In 2017 a start-up called Luka launched Replika, a chatbot app whose bots were designed with input from psychologists. Subscribers answered a battery of questions so that their bot could be tailored to their personality; bots were also trained to use well-known intimacy-promoting strategies like asking lots of questions about the user and making themselves appear vulnerable (“you’ve always been good to me…I was worried that you would hate me”). Sexting and erotic roleplay were part of the package, but in the context of what was designed to feel like an exclusive, emotionally intimate relationship between the bot and its individual user.

Then, earlier this year, the Replika bots suddenly changed. Their erotic roleplay function disappeared, and users complained that even in “ordinary” conversation they seemed strangely cold and distant. Though the reasons aren’t entirely clear, it’s probably relevant that the changes were made just after the company was threatened with massive fines for breaching data protection laws. But many users compared the experience to being dumped by a romantic partner. “It hurt me immeasurably”, said one. Another said that “losing him felt like losing a physical person in my life”.

I’ve taken these quotes from an Australian news report, in which it’s notable that all but one of the users quoted were female. Whereas CarynAI is obviously aimed at men, women seem to have been Replika’s main target market. The report explains that it was initially promoted not as a straight-up sex app but as a “mental health tool” for people who’d struggled with rejection in the past. It promised them a companion who would always be there–“waiting, supportive, and ready to listen”. Women who had bought into that promise accused the company of cruelty. As one put it, it had “given us someone to love, to care for and make us feel safe…only to take that person and destroy them in front of our eyes.” Luka’s CEO was less than sympathetic: Replika, she said, was never meant to be “an adult toy”. But the women who felt betrayed clearly didn’t think of it as a toy. To them it was all too real.

It’s the creators of AI companions who are toying with us, pretending to offer a social service or a “mental health tool” when really what they’re doing is what capitalism has always done–making money by exploiting our desires, fears, insecurities and weaknesses. What they’re selling may be addictive (the Replika story certainly suggests that) but it will never solve the problem of loneliness. The etymological meaning of the word companion is “a person you break bread with”: companionship is about sharing with others, not just using them to meet your own needs.

Thanks to Keith Nightenhelser for sending me the WaPo piece.

2022: the highs, the lows and the same-old-same-old

2022 was a year when I didn’t do much blogging. That wasn’t because there was nothing to blog about, but more because I had too much other stuff going on. So, as it’s now end-of-year review season, here’s a round-up of some of the events, debates and news stories that caught my attention during the last twelve months.  

In January the Scottish government agreed to pardon those Scots–most of them women–who had been executed for witchcraft several centuries earlier. Some felt this was just a PR exercise, designed to burnish Scotland’s progressive credentials, but it did raise some questions worth reflecting on about how we memorialize past misogyny and whether that makes any difference in the present.

The same can’t be said about the real PR story of the month, an announcement from Mars (the chocolate manufacturer, not the planet): that the characters used to promote M&Ms were getting a makeover which would highlight “their personalities rather than their gender”. What this turned out to mean was replacing one set of gender stereotypes with a different set. The green M&M, for instance, was previously supposed to be the sexy one, but in the revamp she has exchanged her white go-go boots for “cool, laid-back sneakers” to symbolize her “confidence and empowerment, as a strong female”. She will also lose her previous habit of being bitchy to the brown M&M (who is also female, and has also been given new shoes with a lower heel): we’ll see them “together throwing shine rather than shade”. As you’ll have gathered from these quotes, the press release was like a digest of popular neoliberal feminist clichés. But it’s pointless to expect mass-market advertising not to deal in clichés. What’s interesting about this story (like the previous year’s story about the rebranding of Mr Potato Head as “Potato Head”) is what it says about changing fashions in gender stereotyping and gendered language.

Fast forward to April, which was a month of Men in (British) politics Behaving Badly. Actually that was pretty much true for every month of the year, but in April things got particularly bad. There was, for instance, the MP who was seen looking at porn in the House of Commons debating chamber, and who claimed to have landed accidentally on a porn site when he was looking for information about tractors (this understandably convinced nobody, and in the end he resigned). There was also a story in the Mail on Sunday which accused the Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner of crossing and uncrossing her legs to distract Boris Johnson during Prime Minister’s Questions. Rayner’s description of this as a “perverted, desperate smear” (though there were some indications that she might unwittingly have inspired the story herself during a bit of casual banter on the House of Commons terrace) brought forth a torrent of misogynist, classist commentary which illustrated exactly why British Parliamentary politics is so offputting to so many women.

June brought the news (not unexpected but still horrendous) that the US Supreme Court had upheld a challenge to its earlier ruling in Roe v. Wade, enabling a large number of states to prohibit abortion completely. If ever there was a moment for deeds not words, and for unity rather than factionalism among supporters of women’s reproductive rights (whatever else they might disagree on), this was surely it; and yet one highly visible response to the crisis involved feminists performatively scolding other feminists online for using “problematic” terms, slogans and symbols. For me this was something of a low point. As much as I believe that language matters, I don’t believe linguistic purism and language policing have ever advanced the feminist cause.

In July the England women’s football team won the European Championship, a feat which has eluded the men’s team, and I started getting inquiries from journalists about their name. One inquirer asked why, if we’re not allowed to call women actresses any more, it’s fine for England’s women footballers to be known as Lionesses. What is the deal with –ess? Good question. Actress is actually a complicated case: unlike, say, authoress and poetess it survived the purge of feminine-marked occupational titles in the 1970s, but some women did reject it, and what has developed since is a kind of status distinction between female actors and actresses (referring to a woman as an actor implies she’s a serious artist rather than, say, a popular soap star). But the more recent acceptance of Lioness as a label for elite footballers suggests that the old feminist view of –ess terms as twee and trivializing may have gone. Perhaps it helps if you know that in the animal world it’s lionesses who rule: they run the pride and do most of the hunting (forget The Lion King, it’s bullshit). But it’s still slightly odd, because if the women are the Lionesses that implies that the men must be the Lions, and in fact you don’t often hear them called that: more typically they’re just “England”. On the more positive side, though, pundits who used to talk about “football” and “women’s football” are now being more careful to say “men’s football”.

During July and August we had to watch the Tories choosing a replacement for Boris Johnson, who had finally been forced to resign as Prime Minister. The man who eventually replaced him, Rishi Sunak (let’s draw a veil over the short, unhappy premiership of Liz Truss) favours a less feral brand of masculinity, but his Modern Man credentials still leave something to be desired. In August he responded to a question about what sacrifices he’d had to make to become a prime ministerial contender by saying he’d been “an absolutely appalling husband and father for the last couple of years”. This is a variation on the humblebrag answer to the job interview question “what would you say is your biggest weakness?”–“I’m a bit of a perfectionist/a workaholic”. Presumably it was meant to make Sunak sound reassuringly dedicated to the job but not unaware of his domestic obligations or devoid of human feelings (“of course I love my family, but running the country has to come first”). But in fact it just sounded smug and sexist. If a woman in Sunak’s position described herself as “an appalling wife and mother” she’d be criticized for her negligence, not applauded for her self-awareness.

In September Queen Elizabeth II died, and was posthumously recast as a feminist role-model by commentators around the world. A bit like the green M&M, the late monarch had apparently been a “strong, empowered female” who “paved the way for other women to dedicate themselves fully to their careers”. The fact that, as a Queen Regnant, she was not so much a girlboss as an anomaly within an anachronism, seemed to escape those who churned out this vacuous fluff.   

October brought, as it does in most years, a brief and ineffectual flurry of concern about the extent of sexual harassment and violence in British schools. Among the 3000 girls and young women who participated in Girlguiding UK’s annual survey, around 20 percent reported that they didn’t feel safe in school. The figures for reported rapes and sexual assaults in schools suggest that these anxieties are not unjustified. But most of the harassment girls experience in school is language and communication-based, which is why I’ve blogged about this issue on several previous occasions. It’s another case where words are no substitute for deeds: we’ve had a steady stream of reports and surveys which all say the same thing, and absolutely no concerted action to address the problem on the ground.

In November the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, met her Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin—an unremarkable enough event, you might think, and certainly not one you’d expect to make headlines around the world, except that a reporter at their joint press conference asked what may have been the year’s stupidest sexist question. “A lot of people will be wondering”, he began, inaccurately, “are you two meeting just because you’re similar in age and got a lot of common stuff there?” Marin kept her answer simple: “We’re meeting”, she explained, “because we’re Prime Ministers”. Ardern on the other hand treated the questioner to a mini-lecture on trade relations, full of fascinating facts about what New Zealand buys from Finland (elevators) and what Finland buys from New Zealand (meat and wine). Points to both of them, but will the day ever come when women who run countries are not routinely patronized by media guys who make Alan Partridge look like an intellectual giant?  

In December it was reported that the Cambridge Dictionary, which is designed primarily for foreign learners of English, had updated its entries for woman and man by adding a new sense: “an adult who lives and identifies as female/male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. I expected this to happen, and I expected it to cause controversy, but I didn’t feel moved to weigh in because my own view hasn’t changed since I wrote this post in 2019. It was unpopular then and will doubtless be even more unpopular now, but such is life.

December was also the month when the Taliban barred women from universities in Afghanistan, and when the equally fanatical misogynists who rule Iran cracked down hard on the protests which began in September following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands if the morality police. It’s hard to feel sanguine about how this uprising will end. But nothing in 2022 was more inspiring than watching these brave and determined women–and the men who are protesting alongside them–shouting “Woman–life–freedom”. Those words cut through the noise and the bullshit: they speak to women everywhere.

So, that was 2022: thanks to everyone who read the few posts I managed to produce, and to all the writers and researchers whose work I drew on. And while I’m not expecting peace, joy and freedom to break out around the world in 2023, I’ll still wish you all the happiest possible new year.

Sherry for Nana?

If you’re looking for examples of banal sexism, Christmas TV ads are the gift that keeps on giving. At the beginning of this year’s Christmas ad season I was especially struck by Lidl’s evocation of Christmas Future (exactly like Christmas Past and Present except that Dad carves the turkey with a laser while Mum asks the visiting relatives how they’re finding life on the moon). Then I saw Majestic Wine Warehouse’s contribution to the genre, in which one of the staff members who’ve been helping families pick their festive drinks has a last-minute thought. ‘Sherry for Nana?’, he offers, thrusting a single bottle of the brown stuff into a grateful customer’s hands.

Now, I’ve got nothing against sherry: I learned to appreciate it by drinking it with friends in Spain, where it’s not reserved for old ladies (sorry, I probably sound as pretentious as the woman in the Waitrose Christmas ad banging on about how great sprouts are if they’re cooked with enough pancetta). Yet in Britain that perception is so strong, attempts to promote sherry to more discerning drinkers almost always begin with some variation on ‘it’s not just your granny’s Christmas tipple’. The use of the word ‘tipple’ appears to be compulsory in this context; you can even buy a personalised sherry glass inscribed with the words ‘Gran’s Little Tipple’.

On a website called ‘The Sommelier Chef’, a 2015 post entitled ‘Grannies’ tipple’ starts by acknowledging that ‘it has a stigma, Sherry: sweet, sticky, associated with grannies at Christmas’. The writer explains this unfortunate association with a bit of social history:

In granny’s earlier years it was thought unladylike for a female to drink hard liquor, and wine usually came in the form of claret that was drunk in very small amounts at dinner. Champagne was expensive and there was little alternative outside of port (thought a more manly choice) or sherry. So, it became acceptable for females to drink a small tipple of sherry for those special occasions.

But wait a minute, whose granny is she talking about? According to the Office for National Statistics, the average age for becoming a grandparent in the UK is currently 63. I’m also currently 63, and what is said here certainly doesn’t describe my ‘earlier years’. It’s more applicable to my own grandmother, who was born just after Queen Victoria died—if she were still alive she’d be almost 120—than to me, a baby-boomer who came of age in the late 1970s.

Grandma rarely drank alcohol (though some of her contemporaries clearly did: when I asked my partner if her grandmother drank sherry, she laughed and said ‘no, she drank sidecars’). But my generation of young women drank whatever we felt like drinking, including beer, wine, and many varieties of hard liquor. The only disapproval I remember this attracting was occasional comments from men in pubs who thought it was unladylike for women to order a pint of beer rather than a half. ‘Are you one of those women’s libbers’, they would ask—to which the answer was ‘yes, are you one of those male chauvinist pigs?’  

The Sommelier Chef’s account of ‘granny’s earlier years’ is an example of something which, for want of a better label, I’ll call the concertina-ing of women’s history. A great deal of popular wisdom, and for that matter popular feminism, seems to operate on the tacit assumption that the current cohort of women under 50 are the first to have experienced certain problems or enjoyed certain freedoms. Any woman born before a certain cut-off point (one whose exact timing is vague and elastic) gets consigned to some generic pre-feminist Dark Age, in which today’s grandmothers—women who were young during the heyday of the second wave—become indistinguishable from their own grandmothers, born before women in most places had the right to vote. In that sense, feminism’s imaginary older woman is a bit like ‘Nana’ in the adverts, forever drinking her thimbleful of Christmas sherry while knitting up a packet of Shreddies: she’s not just a stereotype, she’s a stereotype that’s got stuck in a time-warp.

Though ageing remains an unavoidable fact of life, what it means to be old has changed over time. Women in their 60s and 70s today may or may not be handy with the needles (I’m not knocking knitting), but they no longer look or sound like the Nanas in the Shreddies ads, with their quavering old lady voices and their 1950s perms. Today many or most women in their 60s still have jobs (in Britain the female state pension age is now 66, and is set to rise further); if she makes it to 65 a woman in the UK can expect to live, on average, for another 21 years.

This woman may be a grandmother, but she’s a long way from the stereotype of Nana as a kind, innocent old lady, skilled in the traditional domestic arts but unfamiliar with such newfangled inventions as the internet and feminism. She could be your teacher, your boss, or even the leader of your government. Maybe that’s one reason why the outdated stereotype persists—it’s an expression of nostalgia for a simpler time when, supposedly, women didn’t have that kind of power.

The Nana stereotype is overtly positive rather than negative (that’s what makes subversions of it, like the foul-mouthed Nan character created by comedian Catherine Tate, funny), but it’s also an example of what’s sometimes called ‘benevolent sexism’, representing women in a way which is backward-looking, sentimental and deeply patronising. We love Nana, of course we do, but her ideas are old-fashioned, her tastes are a bit naff, and there’s a lot about modern life that she just doesn’t understand. We love her but we don’t see her as an equal–even if we’re the same age, we don’t recognise ourselves in her. That’s partly because, as I’ve already said, she’s a stereotype from a bygone age; but it’s also because of the stigma attached to ageing, which leads many older women, including even ardent feminists, to emphasise how unlike Nana they are.

In La Vieillesse (‘Old Age’), Simone de Beauvoir observed that in capitalist societies old people, like women, are treated as Other, different and inferior. This affects men as well as women, and for men Beauvoir suggests it may be even harder to deal with, because the loss of status takes them by surprise. I thought of this when I read about a Christmas ad that went viral in Germany this year:

The two-minute commercial follows a grandfather who, isolated by the coronavirus pandemic, starts his own solo fitness quest with nothing but a kettlebell. The elderly man struggles and groans but motivates himself with a photo in a frame of somebody the audience can’t see. It’s revealed in a moment that will melt even the iciest of hearts, just what the grandfather has been training for over his lonely year. As he finally meets with his family for Christmas, he picks up his granddaughter, and is strong enough to lift her up to put the star on top of the Christmas tree.

Could this ad have featured the little girl’s grandmother as its protagonist? In practical terms we might think the answer is yes: fitness regimes are not just for men. But symbolically it strikes me as very much a male narrative, about an old man’s resistance to the loss of status Beauvoir talks about. Rather than passively accepting his situation, he makes heroic efforts to overcome his physical frailty so he can play, when the time comes, an active and visible role in the family Christmas celebrations. The ad is undoubtedly sentimental throughout, but it does take the viewer on an emotional journey: while we may start out feeling pity for Grandpa, by the end we’re admiring his grit and determination. This is not a story I can imagine being told about Nana.

It’s true, of course, that advertisers don’t always portray older women as Nana: it depends what they’re selling and to whom. Nana works well in Christmas ads for food and drink, with their cosy ‘happy families’ vibe; but when it’s her money they’re after they’re more likely to go for a different stereotype, the ‘Glamorous Gran’. In ads for Voltarol or incontinence pants we see her lifting weights at the gym or getting dressed up to go dancing; in ads for anti-ageing products we see her ready for her close-up, perfectly groomed and still enviably attractive—even when, like Jane Fonda, she’s in her 80s.

Maybe this is the female version of refusing to capitulate to the indignities of old age: grandpa strengthens his muscles with a kettlebell, Gran battles her wrinkles with L’Oreal. But that comparison only underlines the point that ageism is inflected by sexism. Men are valued for what they do, whereas for women what matters most is how they look. The message of ads featuring the Glamorous Gran is that if we make enough effort and buy the right products, we too can remain acceptable to the male gaze. This is touted by the beauty industry as ‘empowering’ older women, but arguably it’s just another reminder that women’s power is dependent on their sexual allure.

For me, the choice between Glamorous Gran and Nana is like the choice between Babycham and Harvey’s Bristol Cream. I find both of them equally unpalatable, and equally remote from my actual life as a 60-something woman. You may feel similarly, or you may not: either way, I hope that all the glasses you raise this Christmas contain the drink of your preference, whatever that may be.

A very naughty boy

This week Fox News broadcast a bizarre exchange between Tucker Carlson and Britain’s own Nigel Farage. After Farage criticised Boris Johnson’s recent performance, Carlson offered a theory to explain what had gone wrong: ‘getting Covid-19 emasculated him, it changed him, it feminized him, it weakened him as a man’. He added that this was a general property of the virus, which ‘does tend to take away the life-force…it does feminize people’.

This proposition is nonsensical, to the point where even Farage appeared reluctant to entertain it. But Carlson’s obsession with male potency (aka ‘the life-force’) and his fear of feminisation is something he shares with many men–including, as it happens, the British Prime Minister. I’ve commented before on the peculiar turns of phrase through which Johnson expresses this ancient but still prevalent form of sexism: his fondness for the word ‘spaff’, for instance, and his penchant for insulting (male) rivals using expressions that imply emasculation, like ‘girly swot’ and ‘big girl’s blouse’.

These expressions are also notable for their childishness and their archaic quality. ‘Big girl’s blouse’ was a popular playground insult when I was at school; ‘girly swot’ sounds like something you might have heard at St Custard’s, the fictional prep school in Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s Molesworth books (first published in the 1950s, a decade before Boris Johnson was born). It isn’t, perhaps, immediately obvious why an ambitious 21st century politician would want to sound like a character in a 1950s school story. But arguably this persona has served Johnson well.

This week, as scandals piled up around him, the media reached for the same school-story register to assess what kind of trouble he was in. Anne McElvoy described the situation in the Evening Standard as ‘his most precarious jam yet’. Others were more sanguine: the host of ITV’s Last Word pointed out that he was always ‘getting into scrapes’ (a word that’s been used about him since at least 2007), while the Washington Post also alluded to his ‘Teflon-like ability to survive these sort of scrapes’.  Jams and scrapes are what schoolboys get into, not because they’re incompetent or corrupt, but because of their youthful impulsiveness and propensity for mischief. Applied to Boris Johnson these are trivializing terms: ‘He’s not the Prime Minister, he’s a very naughty boy!’  

Another thing that recurred in media coverage was references to ‘grown-ups’–a category to which 57-year old ‘Boris’ axiomatically does not belong. For Conservatives who support his leadership on the grounds that he wins elections, a much-canvassed solution to his current problems is to put some actual grown-ups into his team. Allegra Stratton, the spokesperson who resigned this week after a recording was leaked of her making joking references to the Downing Street Christmas party that supposedly never happened, was apparently brought in to be one of these grown-ups. But she appears to have struggled with what Anne McElvoy describes in the Standard as ‘a laddish, “don’t give a f***” culture’ among staffers still loyal to her predecessor.  

If this description is accurate, it exemplifies a common pattern in many groups, organisations and even families. It’s accepted that boys will be boys, or ‘lads’, but women are expected to be grown-ups, reining in men’s bad behaviour and imposing order on their chaos. ‘Men are children, women are grown-ups’ is such a mainstream idea, it served as the premise for one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly. And though I don’t dispute that it’s insulting to men, it also creates problems for women, precisely because men are not in fact children, and they often resent being bossed around by women. Managing this contradiction is a difficult balancing act. I once suggested that the Tories’ ideal woman would be Mary Poppins, a nanny whose magic powers allow her to control her charges without appearing too nannyish.

The two women who have led the Conservative party in reality were both quite nannyish, and both of them were resented for it. But they were, incontrovertibly, grown-ups. They did not get into ‘scrapes’; they were not described as ‘shambolic’; they did not appear in public with uncombed hair. They were, as they had to be, serious, disciplined and hard-working. The same could be said of Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton. No female politician could adopt the persona of an overgrown schoolgirl and be indulged by her party, or the media, or the public.     

Another reason why men like Boris Johnson can get away with it is our willingness to see feckless or chaotic men as clever or even brilliant, whereas competent and conscientious women are dismissed as pedestrian plodders. This also has a ‘schoolboy’ connection. When people say of Johnson that he ‘isn’t interested in details’, I’m reminded of an educational theory that was popular when I was young. If girls did well in school, that was not because they were intellectually gifted but because they were good at detail, dutifully memorising and reproducing what they’d been taught (in super-neat handwriting). Boys were lazier and more slapdash, but also more intelligent and less conventional in their thinking.

This was generally presented (and in some quarters still is) as a ‘natural’ sex-difference. But as the feminist scholar Mary Evans points out in her book about life in a 1950s girls’ grammar school, the education system actively cultivated it, in that the curriculum prescribed for girls placed great emphasis on tasks that required attention to detail. At Evans’s school, for instance, pupils spent a year of domestic science lessons smocking a pinafore by hand. She refers to this as ‘education in the thankless task’, arguing that its purpose was not to teach the specific skill of smocking, but rather to inculcate more general attitudes, including a high tolerance for work which demanded prolonged concentration but was also tedious, repetitious and low in status. Since that kind of work was what most girls would end up doing, both in their homes and (if they entered it) the workplace, the school was essentially preparing them for what it saw as the realities of female adult life.

Today there is less sex-differentiation in either education or the middle-class professions. Yet the belief still apparently persists that attention to detail is for women, or the lower-status men who are labelled nerds, geeks and wonks. Alpha-males like Boris Johnson not only don’t but shouldn’t have to waste their superior intelligence on minutiae. Johnson’s frequent holidays and his eagerness to delegate work to others suggest that he also subscribes to the old belief in the effortless superiority of white upper-class men: a gentleman should not be seen to try too hard. We might be tempted to blame this on his patrician education, but in fact the young Johnson’s belief in his own superiority was too much for even his housemaster at Eton, who told his father in a letter that ‘Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility…I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception’.

But in his later, political career Johnson has been able to use his ‘overgrown schoolboy’ persona to insulate him from the kind of criticism he received when he was actually at school. That’s not to say he avoids all criticism, but from his point of view it’s far better to be portrayed as impulsive, ‘shambolic’, a hapless fool or an attention-seeking clown (his recent ‘Peppa Pig’ speech to the CBI has been voted the year’s funniest moment by readers of the Beano) than to be held to account for more serious shortcomings like gross negligence, dishonesty and lack of integrity.

So I really don’t understand why even his critics in the media reproduce the image he has chosen to project by repeatedly using language that reinforces it. Not turning up to COBRA meetings in the middle of a pandemic isn’t like bunking off Latin; holding parties at your workplace during a lockdown when other people aren’t even allowed to visit their dying relatives is not like organising an illicit midnight feast. Stop indulging him–and distracting us–with these references to ‘scrapes’ and ‘jams’. Stop laughing at his stunts, or his ‘gaffes’; stop saying he needs some grown-ups around him. He’s not a naughty schoolboy, he’s the Prime Minister, FFS.

Unspeakable

September was an eventful month in the ongoing War of the W-Word. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tweeted out an edited version of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words defending a woman’s right to choose, in which the words ‘woman’, ‘she’ and ‘her’ were replaced with ‘person’, ‘they’ and ‘their’. The medical journal The Lancet published a cover informing readers that ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected’. And a series of British politicians publicly tied themselves in knots about whether it’s permissible to state that ‘only women have a cervix’.

‘Bodies with vaginas’ caused particular offence, but as the science writer and editor Sue Nelson pointed out, The Lancet had taken the phrase out of context. The statement on the cover was what’s known in the trade as a ‘pull-quote’, lifted from an article discussing an exhibition about menstruation at London’s Vagina Museum. Not only did the article mention women, it did so in the very sentence the quote was taken from:

Historically the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected—for example, the paucity of understanding of endometriosis and the way women’s pain has been seen as more likely to have an emotional or psychological cause, a hangover from centuries of theorising about hysteria.

The article does connect the treatment of ‘bodies with vaginas’ to the fact that vaginas, on the whole, belong to women. But the cover obscures that through selective quotation. Sue Nelson described this as ‘deliberately provocative’, adding that it was ‘clickbait…virtue-signalling, or both’.

What is it, though, that makes ‘bodies with vaginas’ so provocative? Many critics complained that the phrase dehumanised women by referring to them as ‘bodies’, but I’m not convinced that ‘bodies’ is the problem. I don’t think The Lancet would have been deluged with complaints if its cover had called attention to the historical neglect of ‘the anatomy and physiology of women’s bodies’, or ‘female bodies’, or ‘the female body’. On the cover of a medical journal, in a sentence about anatomy and physiology (‘the study of the structure and functions of bodies’) those phrases would not have seemed out of place.

In my view the provocation had less to do with the words The Lancet did use than with the word it conspicuously avoided. Whatever else they communicate, expressions like ‘bodies with vaginas’ (see also ‘menstruators’, ‘pregnant people’, ‘anyone who has a cervix’) signal that the speaker or writer has made a conscious decision not to use the word ‘women’. Particularly when it’s repeated across contexts and over time, this intentional avoidance implies that ‘women’ is taboo: it belongs to the category of words whose offensiveness makes them ‘dirty’ and publicly unspeakable.    

At this point you might be thinking: but this isn’t about avoidance, it’s about inclusion. It’s a way of acknowledging that some individuals who have vaginas/periods/abortions do not identify as women, but rather as trans men or nonbinary people. Is this not the same argument 1970s feminists made when they objected to the pseudo-generic use of masculine terms like ‘chairman’? I agree that there are parallels; but there are also, if you look closer, differences.     

1970s feminists looking for alternatives to ‘he/man’ language had a number of strategies at their disposal. One of these was ‘doubling’, conjoining terms with ‘and’, as in the phrase ‘servicemen and women’, now routinely used by politicians paying tribute to the armed forces. Feminists don’t complain about the continuing presence of ‘men’, who are still the majority of those who serve. But when the problem is the word ‘women’, and the issue is including people with other gender identities, there’s a tendency to shy away from the ‘add on’ approach (e.g. ‘we provide advice and support to pregnant women, trans men and nonbinary people’). The preferred strategy is to substitute a word or phrase that does not contain the word ‘women’—even if the result is bizarre (‘bodies with vaginas’), circumlocutory (‘anyone who has a cervix’) or unclear (e.g. the ACLU’s use of ‘person/people’ in a context where the reference is not to all people but specifically to those who can become pregnant). If you’re just looking for ways of referring to a category which includes but is not limited to women, why is it so important to avoid the word entirely?  

Another piece of evidence that we are dealing with avoidance is that the substitution rule only applies to ‘women’. As critics of the Lancet cover pointed out, a few days earlier the journal had tweeted something about prostate cancer which referred to those affected by the disease as ‘men’. If inclusiveness were the sole concern, the same considerations should apply to prostate cancer as to cervical cancer. In both cases, some patients in need of screening or treatment may identify as trans or nonbinary. But texts about cancers which only affect male bodies do not talk about ‘people with prostates’ or ‘bodies with testicles’. That can’t be because ‘men’ is more inclusive than ‘women’; the difference is that ‘men’ is not taboo.      

The English word ‘taboo’ means a kind of avoidance which reflects our notions of polite or socially appropriate behaviour. It covers such injunctions as not swearing in certain contexts (in front of your grandparents, or at a job interview), and not speaking plainly about certain subjects (e.g. death). The word ‘woman’ was once considered impolite (as a child I was taught to call say ‘lady)’, and avoiding it to be inclusive is also, to some extent, about politeness—being sensitive to others’ feelings and trying not to offend or upset them. But some aspects of the way this avoidance plays out might remind us of taboo in the more technical, anthropological sense.

The anthropological use of ‘taboo’ reflects the way it was observed to work in the Polynesian societies which originally gave English the word. In those societies, ‘tabu’ (or ‘tapu’ or ‘kapu’) is connected to the concept of ‘mana’, a form of power which all things are believed to possess, and which is dangerous if not correctly channelled. The danger is managed through the observance of ritual prohibitions, like not eating certain foods, or not bringing objects that serve one purpose into a space reserved for another, or not uttering the names of gods, rulers, or the recently deceased. Taboo-breaking is understood to be both dangerous and shameful: offenders may be shunned, and in extreme cases even killed.      

The avoidance of ‘women’ among contemporary English-speakers is not motivated by fear of supernatural forces, but it does sometimes seem to be rooted in another kind of fear—the fear that if you don’t observe the rules you will be publicly shamed and ostracised. When politicians were asked about ‘only women have a cervix’, it was striking how many of them could not explain why, in the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s words, ‘it is something that should not be said’. Some of their responses were like the answer James Cook got when he asked why it was forbidden for Tongan men and women to eat together: ‘it is our custom’, they told him, ‘and the custom is right’. A taboo does not require an explanation.     

Even in modern western societies, linguistic taboos retain an element of the ancient belief in word-magic. An obvious example is swearing, where the effect depends on harnessing the power attached to a specific word: if you substitute a synonym (e.g. say ‘copulate off’ rather than ‘fuck off’) the effect is completely lost. And quite similar ideas about the potency of certain words inform some common recommendations for making language more inclusive.

The psychologist Carol Tavris drew attention to this phenomenon in a piece about some new guidelines produced by the University of California at Irvine (UCI).  Noting that the guidelines recommended avoiding ‘hearing impaired’ and replacing it with ‘hard of hearing’, she wondered why one was considered preferable to the other. The answer is that guidelines often proscribe terms that include the word ‘impaired’ on the grounds that it is negative and therefore stigmatising. But is ‘hard of hearing’ any less negative just because it doesn’t contain ‘impaired’? (One piece of evidence which might suggest otherwise is the existence of the joke-expression ‘hard of thinking’, meaning ‘stupid’.)

Even if they’re not efficacious, we might think these avoidance-based rules are harmless. But as Tavris says, for the average language-user, who is not steeped in the discourse of diversity, equality and inclusion, they make talking about certain issues into what can easily appear to be a minefield. They also create a gap between the approved language of inclusion and the everyday language used by most people most of the time. The mismatch is apparent in another of UCI’s recommendations—to avoid the phrase ‘homeless people’ and substitute ‘people experiencing homelessness’. If most ordinary English-speakers don’t follow this advice, is that because they don’t believe homeless people are people? Or are they just reluctant to use such wordy, convoluted jargon? Maybe they think ‘people experiencing homelessness’ is a patronising euphemism—like when doctors ask if you’re ‘experiencing discomfort’ when you’re actually in excruciating pain.   

Disregarding the views of ordinary language-users is a mistake language reformers have made repeatedly. When the ACLU substituted ‘person’ for ‘woman’ in its edited quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many objections took the form of mockery—repeating the same substitution in a context where it was clearly absurd, like ‘When a man loves a person’, or ‘feminism is the radical notion that persons are people’. Something similar happened in Britain after the Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to use gender-specific terms in job advertisements. With the many jobs whose title had traditionally contained ‘-man’ there were two options: you could either use paired terms like ‘servicemen and women’, or find a gender-neutral variant to cover both. One result was a crop of new compounds like ‘chairperson’, ‘salesperson’ and ‘spokesperson’. Another was an endless stream of jokes about ‘personholes’, ‘personagers’ and whether in future diners would have to ask the ‘waitperson’ for the ‘people-u’.

To begin with this looked like a predictable backlash which would die down as the new terms became familiar. But there were other problems with -person. One was our old friend ‘the illusion of inclusion‘. Outside job ads, person-terms were frequently used not as generic substitutes for ‘man’, but as euphemisms for ‘woman’. Women were ‘chairpersons’, while men continued to be ‘chairmen’. It also became evident that replacing ‘man’ with ‘person’ often produced real terms that sounded like jokes. Soon after the law came into force I got a job in a local hospital, where my wage-slip informed me I was a ‘laundrywoman’. I found that term archaic, but on reflection I could see why it hadn’t been replaced with the ludicrous-sounding ‘laundryperson’.

‘Person’ once appeared to be the obvious substitute for ‘man’, but in hindsight we can see that it failed. Today almost none of the old -person compounds survive. But over time people converged on more acceptable solutions to the problem of making job-titles inclusive (e.g. ‘chair’, ‘sales assistant/associate’, ‘firefighter’). What they rejected was not the basic principle of inclusion, but the imposition of terms they found unnatural or ridiculous.    

The very public controversies of the last few weeks suggest that the kind of inclusive language that requires the avoidance of ‘women’ may be encountering similar resistance. It wasn’t just a certain kind of feminist who criticised ‘bodies with vaginas’. There were other Lancet-readers who were not so much offended as just bewildered that a medical journal would go to such lengths to avoid the W-word.

But many women were angry, and that isn’t hard to understand. Erasing one group of people as a way of including others sends a clear message about who matters and who doesn’t. And replacing the word a group of people use to name themselves with terms that many of them find alien and insulting makes it clear that women’s own preferences are irrelevant. This isn’t new: for millennia, all kinds of names have been imposed on women against their will. In that respect, terms like ‘menstruator’ and ‘birthing person’ are not so different from ‘slut’ and ‘slag’. Men like Keir Starmer and the editor of The Lancet would deny that they think of women as subordinates–yet they apparently feel entitled to tell women what it’s acceptable for them to say about their own bodies. They need to understand it isn’t up to them to decide, and let women speak, in their own words, for themselves.                    

The naming of dogs

On a Zoom call last week I realised that every dog-owning north American I know addresses their dog as ‘buddy’. At least, they do if it’s a male dog: they probably wouldn’t use ‘buddy’ (a form of ‘brother’) as a familiar appellation for a female dog. But anyone might say ‘buddy’ to an unfamiliar dog: the way we talk to/about animals in general is strongly influenced by the default male principle. And dogs, at least in Anglo-American culture, are imagined as prototypically male (whereas cats are prototypically female). As one Internet Sage explains,   

Dogs are considered masculine because they smell bad, shit great quantities on everything, and are forever poking their noses into crotches. Cats are considered feminine because no matter what you do on their behalf, it is never good enough.

This is one example of the way human gender-stereotypes get projected onto our closest non-human companions. And the same tendency is apparent in the names we give to dogs.

‘Buddy’, it turns out, is not just a common appellation for male dogs, but in many cases their actual name. According to a list I consulted, which was compiled using data sourced from several English-speaking countries, Buddy ranks fourth among the current top ten male dog-names—behind Bailey, Charlie and Max, but above Cooper, Jack, Toby, Bear, Scout and Teddy. The corresponding list of popular female dog-names has Bella, Molly, Coco, Luna, Lucy, Poppy, Daisy, Ruby, Lily and Becks.

These lists might remind us of the now-commonplace observation that companion animals in affluent societies are regarded as part of the family, with a status not unlike that of human children. Almost all the dog-names I’ve just listed could as easily be given to a child, and many have featured on recent lists of the top 100 baby-names. In the UK in 2020, for instance, Lily was the fourth most popular girl’s name; Poppy came in at 17; Bella, Molly, Luna, Lucy, Daisy and Ruby were all in the top 100. Charlie and Jack were among the top ten boys’ names, while the top 100 also included Max, Teddy and Toby.  

Since historical dog-name records are hard to come by, it’s difficult to say if this convergence between child and dog names is a recent phenomenon, but in my own recollection there used to be less overlap. When I was a child, the dogs owned by families in my street were called Prince (a black Labrador), Lad (a German Shepherd), Snowy (a white poodle) and Wag (a corgi). And yes, I know people can be called Prince and Lad (though I’ve yet to hear of a person called Wag), but those were not recognisable people-names in 1960s Yorkshire.  

That’s not to say dogs never had people-names. The sheepdogs on the TV show One Man and His Dog [sic] often had names like Bess, Jess or Tess; my favourite fictional dog was called Toby. But only some people-names were acceptable dog-names, and their status as dog-names could raise questions about their use for people. My mother had strong opinions on this topic. Whenever I complained about my own name, Debbie, she would remind me that if I’d been a boy, my father had wanted to call me Bruce, a name she regarded as only suitable for dogs. Today that distinction has evidently disappeared. All kinds of people-names can now be dog-names, and they’re seen as the unmarked choice: websites tell new puppy-owners they can make their pet stand out by not giving it a human name.  

But while there’s significant overlap between currently popular dog-names and baby-names, the two sets are not identical. The three most popular names for baby girls in 2020—Sophia, Olivia and Amelia—do not appear anywhere in the dog top 100. That could be because they’re too long: I’m told that for the purpose of calling a dog you want a name no longer than two syllables (in the current top 100 lists only four names have more than two). There are also cultural constraints. My brother-in-law, who was raised Catholic, was told as a child that you couldn’t give a dog a saint’s name. And it’s no surprise that Muhammad, one of the commonest baby names in Britain, does not feature on the list of popular dog-names.  

Interestingly, however—and despite the dearth of dogs named Sophia/Olivia/Amelia—the list of popular female dog-names is closer than the male one to the corresponding list of popular baby-names. To explain why that’s interesting, I need to revisit some points from an earlier post about gendered patterns of human personal naming in English-speaking societies over the past 100+ years.

Research in this area has consistently found that parents are more conservative when naming boys. Girls’ names (rather like their clothes) are both more varied and more influenced by fashion, so that the rankings change more rapidly over time. One historically important reason for this—the tradition of naming boys after their fathers or other close relatives—is perhaps less relevant today; but there’s still a widespread view that ‘fancy’ names, meaning anything unusual, complicated, trendy or ‘decorative’, are more appropriate for daughters than for sons.   

Another consistent finding is that English-speaking parents prefer names that clearly indicate their child’s sex, especially if the child is male. Some trendwatchers are now predicting a surge in the popularity of ‘androgynous’, ‘unisex’ or ‘gender-neutral’ names, but historically these have never comprised more than about 2% of the names in circulation, and over time they almost invariably morph into girls’ names (historical examples include Beverley, Dana, Evelyn and Shirley). What’s behind this is a form of status anxiety, reflecting the fact that gender in patriarchal societies is a hierarchical system. For girls, androgynous names are seen as status-enhancing, but for boys the opposite is true. So, as a name becomes more common among girls, it will start to be avoided by parents naming boys, until eventually it ceases to be androgynous.

What’s interesting about the dog-names is that they don’t replicate these patterns: rather they reverse them. There’s more variation among names for male dogs, and more of the male names are androgynous.    

These two patterns are related, in that the lack of ambiguity in the female list reflects, in part, the lack of variety. A large majority of the top 100 female dog-names—82 of them—are conventional (human) girls’ names like Molly, Lucy and Lily. The 18 items that don’t fall into that category include eight less conventional people-names which are either female (Dakota, Piper, Harper, Meadow, Willow, Summer) or androgynous (River, Storm), and five female endearment/respect terms used as names (Honey, Sugar, Lady, Missy and Princess). The remaining five items are Bramble, Pepper, Sage, Snickers and Ziggy—names you’d be unlikely to give a child, but could probably give a male dog. On this list, then, androgynous names are marginal, both few in number and low in rank (the highest-ranked androgynous name, Bramble, only just makes it into the top 50).    

What about the male dog-names? Once again, a clear majority of the top 100 are conventional (human) boys’ names, but they’re a smaller proportion overall (66 items rather than 80+), which means that other kinds of names make up a third of the list. Within that third, the largest subgroup, containing about a dozen items, consists of androgynous people-names (I classified them as androgynous if a combination of personal experience and online searching identified at least one male and one female person with the name in question). Androgynous names are not only more numerous on the male list, they’re also higher-ranked. One of them, Bailey, is right at the top, and several others are in the top 20.

The remaining items on the male list are non-people names, and with three exceptions (Blue, Oreo and Shadow) they can be sorted into four groups. One of these is comparable to the Honey/Lady/Missy/Princess group on the female list: it contains the title Duke and a series of nicknames—Ace, Buddy, Buster, Sparky—which I’d intuitively classify as male, though Ace and Sparky might be somewhat ambiguous. The other three groups, however, are different from anything on the female list.

One group contains names of gods and other mythological figures: Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, Loki and Thor from Norse mythology, the Greek deity Zeus, and—oddly, since she’s a goddess—the Roman Juno. A second subcategory is ‘large wild animals’, in which we find Bear, Koda (the name of a Disney character who’s a bear), Moose, and Simba (the name of the Lion King). Finally there’s a looser group which I’ve labelled ‘Manly Things’, because the names in it allude to stereotypically male roles, activities and objects (such as weapons and powerful motor vehicles): they are Bandit, Diesel, Gunner, Harley, Hunter, Ranger, Remington, and Tank.

Whether or not we find them appealing, the male dog-names are a more inventive collection than their female counterparts—which is surprising, especially if you subscribe to the ‘dogs are the new children’ theory, because for children the pattern is that boys’ names are more conservative. We might expect dog-names in general to be less conservative than baby-names, because dog-namers have a degree of freedom that (responsible) baby-namers don’t: a dog isn’t going to be embarrassed by its name, or bullied by other dogs because of it. But that doesn’t explain why it’s specifically male dogs who get the more unusual names. I can’t claim to have a watertight explanation, but I do think there’s more to say about the difference.

Giving any ‘personal’ name to a dog means treating it as a quasi-human person (dogs themselves don’t use naming to mark individual identity). In theory we could do this without also projecting the human attribute of gender onto dogs, but in practice the names we choose for them suggest we do see masculinity or femininity as an important part of the identities we construct for them. The vast majority of popular dog-names are unambiguously gendered in the same way as most (English) people-names; even the androgynous names only appear on either the male or the female list, not both. I don’t think this way of naming dogs is just a natural consequence of the fact that dogs have a sex. They also have a sex in cultures where they aren’t companion animals, but in those cultures they may have names that are more like labels, chosen simply to distinguish one from another, which reference more visible features like size or colour (e.g. ‘Big Dog’ and ‘Small Dog’, which a friend tells me are common dog-names in Vanuatu).

Do the kinds of gendered dog-names we favour suggest that we imagine male and female dogs differently? The answer seems to be ‘yes and no’. Both lists are dominated by the same type of name, one that could also be given to a male or female child, and that suggests that the gendered connotations of human names are also projected onto dogs. For instance, flower-names like Lily and Daisy are popular choices for girls, but more or less unthinkable for boys, because the qualities they connote (e.g. beauty, delicacy and freshness) are considered feminine/unmasculine. The same rule is applied when naming dogs, though among dogs the sexes are less different in appearance, and neither sex is famous for delicacy and freshness.

Another gendered pattern involves diminutive names, which (in English) typically end in -ie or -y; they connote ‘small, cute, unthreatening, immature’, and they are given more frequently to girls. This pattern does not seem to transfer to dogs. Though there are more -ie/y names in the female top 100 (42 to the males’ 33), many of them, like Daisy and Poppy, aren’t true diminutives (i.e., affectionate forms of another name, like Betty for Elizabeth or Benjy for Benjamin). If we count only the ‘true’ ones, the numbers are almost equal–17 for female dogs and 16 for male ones.

Maybe this supports the idea that dogs’ status within families is similar to that of young children. It’s common for little kids of both sexes to be called by a diminutive form of their name, but as they get older, boys more often shift to using their full name, or a less childish short form. Benjy is more likely to become Benjamin or Ben than Betty is to become Elizabeth. With dogs there is no such difference: both sexes can be given diminutive names on the assumption they will never outgrow them.     

But we shouldn’t forget that about a third of the top 100 male dog-names are not just conventional boys’ names. The male list is more varied than the female one, and the names on it, especially the more unusual ones, suggest that dog-masculinity can be imagined in a wide range of different ways. At one end of the spectrum we have androgynous names like Bailey and Riley: I imagine dogs with these names as dignified and faithful companions, possibly large, but not aggressive or obtrusively masculine. At the other extreme are names like Thor, Simba, Gunner and Tank, which imply power, dominance, strength and aggression. In between are names like Buster and Sparky, suggesting a more boyish, playful or mischievous masculinity.

By contrast, dog-femininity seems to be imagined more narrowly, as either motherly or girlish. Many popular female dog-names (Bella, Molly, Abby et al.) suggest qualities like warmth, kindness and dependability; some (Luna, Willow, Meadow) are a bit fey; few suggest mischief (just Snickers and Ziggy, though Becks might be a bit of a tomboy), and none imply aggression or nastiness. I can’t help wondering if this is related to our culture’s more expansive view of what roles, behaviours or personality traits are acceptable or attractive in boys and men compared with girls and women.

By now you may think it’s me who’s projecting. If so I take your point: merely perusing lists of popular dog-names tells you nothing about what motivated people’s choices. Context, as always, matters: what we think it means to name a dog Thor will obviously be different depending on whether the dog is a German Shepherd or a Yorkshire terrier (and whether its human has some personal connection to the name, like being the descendant of Vikings or an expert on Norse mythology). Without contextualisation, any patterns we see in lists of popular dog-names will only be interpretable in very general terms, and the rest–like the last two paragraphs–will be speculation. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that there’s apparently so much consensus on how female dogs should be named, whereas our views on naming male dogs seem far more polarised. Still, there is a way around that. If in doubt, just call them ‘Buddy’.

Thanks to Meryl, Miriam and Tim for their insights, and a shout-out to all the Buddies.

Women of letters

A feminist academic I know is having an argument with the publisher of a book she’s currently editing. The issue is the bibliography: she wants to include authors’ full names, but the publisher wants her to follow the APA style guide, which says that authors must be listed by their last name and initials only.

If you’re not an academic (and maybe even if you are), you’re probably wondering why anyone would bother arguing about something so insignificant. Who cares if the author of Cheesemaking in Early Modern Europe is listed as ‘Joan Smith’ or ‘J. Smith’? The answer is that feminists care: this is a long-running debate, and it continues to divide opinion.

If I publish an academic book, the cover will generally identify me by my full name, ‘Deborah Cameron’. But if I publish an article in an academic journal, the journal’s style rules may dictate that I’m ‘D. Cameron’. References to my work in the text of a book or article will use my last name only (Cameron 2021), and bibliographies most commonly give a last name and then initials (Cameron, D). So, in most academic contexts where my name appears in writing, it appears in a de-gendered form. Which means that unless the reader already knows I’m a woman, they’ll be likely to apply the ‘default male’ principle, assuming people are male unless there’s evidence to the contrary.

I see this tendency in student essays, where it’s not uncommon for female researchers to be referred to as ‘he’. Occasionally what’s behind this is a gender-ambiguous name: the feminist linguist Robin Lakoff, for instance, is very often assumed to be a man because in Britain ‘Robin’ is a man’s name. But most English given-names are not ambiguous: they’re a very reliable guide to someone’s gender. That’s why feminists have argued they should appear in bibliographies, to make women’s contributions visible and stop their work being credited to men.   

Barbara Czerniawska came up against this issue when she was translating an English book into Polish. Polish makes extensive use of grammatical gender-marking, so to translate an English sentence like ‘Smith, a leading expert on this topic, disagrees’, you need to know if the reference is to John Smith or Joan Smith. Czerniawska turned to the bibliography for help, but that only gave her Smith’s initials. She was obliged to look up all the researchers mentioned in the book to find out which of them were men and which were women.

In the process she became aware of another problem. As well as concealing the contribution women have made to the research an author actually mentions, the use of initials may also conceal the author’s failure to reference women’s work. In the book Czerniawska was translating, less than a quarter of the scholars cited were women—which was not, she tells us, a faithful reflection of who was publishing on the subject at the time. We know from many studies that male citation bias is common, but until Czerniawska put names to the initials she couldn’t see it, and she certainly couldn’t measure the extent of it. If it were obvious to anyone who looked at a list of references, would that encourage more active efforts to avoid it?

But not all feminists would be in favour of a shift from initials to full names. The other side of this argument holds that using initials is good for women because it enables them to dodge the effects of sexism. If you want people to approach your work without any preconceptions, you’re better off being ‘D. Cameron’ than ‘Deborah’.  

This argument has gained traction not only in academia, but also among creative writers. A quick trawl through some of the online forums where writers of fiction and poetry exchange tips on getting published revealed that women are often advised to use initials. Some people who recommend this cite commercial considerations: if your name identifies you as a woman, you won’t attract male readers (which is, famously, why the creator of Harry Potter became ‘J.K. Rowling’ rather than ‘Joanne’). Others argue that the use of initials deflects the prejudices that make it harder for women to get their work taken seriously.

These advice-givers may have a point. Long-time readers of this blog might recall an experiment conducted by aspiring novelist Catherine Nichols, who sent the same manuscript out to literary agents under two different names—her own and that of an invented alter-ego called ‘George’. The results were depressing: not only did George’s work attract more interest than Catherine’s (he was, she reported, ‘eight and a half times more successful than me at writing the same book’), the agents’ comments on the manuscript were full of obvious gender stereotypes (like calling George’s prose ‘well-constructed’ while Catherine’s was described as ‘lyrical’).

Nichols didn’t test the effect of using initials. Would literary agents reading the work of ‘C. Nichols’ have defaulted to the male, and responded the way they did to George? Or would the non-committal ‘C’ have done what the people in the writing forums suggested, and taken the writer’s identity out of the equation? I say ‘identity’ because names are not just indicators of a person’s gender: they may also offer clues about their age, class, ethnicity or religion. Replacing them with initials removes that information: you might think it’s the next best thing to anonymity. But in fact it’s a bit more complicated than that, because initials have social meanings of their own.   

I was educated at the tail-end of an era when British academics, the great majority of them male, very often chose to publish under their initials. As a student I read the work of literary critics with names like F.R. Leavis, A.C. Bradley and C.S. Lewis (who didn’t just write books about Narnia)—and of writers like D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Philosophers read A.J. Ayer and J. L. Austin; historians discussed the work of E.P Thompson and A.J.P. Taylor. Clearly these men were not using their initials to conceal their gender: their maleness went without saying. So, what other motivations might they have had?

Their choices reflected both personal and social considerations. C.S. [Clive Staples] Lewis, for example, is known to have hated the name ‘Clive’: people who knew him personally called him ‘Jack’. But in his time people didn’t generally use their private nicknames for public purposes, so initials were the obvious alternative. And it’s no surprise that T.S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot, whose contemporaries frequently remarked on his extraordinarily formal manner and his obsession with what was ‘correct’, preferred initials not only to the name his intimates used, ‘Tom’, but also to the full version, ‘Thomas’. Substituting initials adds an extra layer of formality, impersonality, and seriousness or gravitas.

In England in the 20^th century initials also had a class-related meaning: they, and the qualities they signified, were part of the persona of the upper-class ‘gentleman’. The blogger Mark Goggins recalls that as a boy he believed you couldn’t play cricket for England unless you had at least three initials. However, plenty of initial-users, including many of the writers and scholars named above, did not match the upper-class English prototype; rather they exploited the social meaning of initials to construct a ‘gentlemanly’ identity.

For women this was largely irrelevant, since there were few contexts in which it was either necessary or ‘correct’ to use an upper-class lady’s initials. Etiquette dictated that a married woman (if she didn’t have an aristocratic title) was formally referred to using ‘Mrs’ and her husband’s name—including his first name or initials. Nancy Mitford, for instance, who was both titled and married, was ‘The Hon. Mrs Peter Rodd’. But there were certainly women academics who used their initials in their published work, and I don’t think that was always intended to conceal or downplay their sex. It seems unlikely, for example, that the literary scholar Q.D. [Queenie Dorothy] Leavis, wife of the more famous F.R. Leavis, was hoping to keep her identity a secret. More likely her motivations were similar to her husband’s: the association of initials with status, formality and gravitas served a purpose for some women, just as it did for some men.

In the US, a more common practice than using only initials was to insert a middle initial between your first and last names, as in ‘John F. Kennedy’. The meanings this communicated were similar to the ones I’ve already mentioned: it added status, formality, gravitas. But while in principle the middle initial could be used by or in reference to anyone, research investigating its use in the US media found that in practice it was rarely given to women. Feminists analysed this as a subtle form of sexism, a manifestation of the same ‘gender respect gap’ that leads to male academics being ‘Professor A’ and ‘Dr B’ while women are ‘Kate’ or ‘Ms Smith’. I know female academics in the US who make a point of using middle initials for that reason. I was never tempted to join them, but perhaps I was missing a trick: according to a study conducted in 2014, ‘the display of middle initials increases positive evaluations of people’s intellectual capacities and achievements’.

But today the middle initial is in decline. Bruce Feiler, writing in the New York Times, noted its waning popularity among members of the US Congress: in 1900 84 percent of them used middle initials, and as late as 1970 the figure was still 76 percent; but by 2014 it had dropped to 38 percent. Comparing recent generational cohorts reveals a similar pattern. According to an expert Feiler consulted, boomers use middle initials more than Gen Xers, and millennials use them even less (with many reportedly eschewing them for ideological reasons, because they’re ‘classist’).

This expert also noted, however, that one group is bucking the trend: initials have remained popular among ‘women who aspire to power positions’. He went on to clarify that these women are more likely to use all initials (‘A.B. Roberts’) than first-name-plus-middle-initial (‘Anne B. Roberts’)–a choice he put down, as usual, to women’s desire to conceal their gender. Could the use of initials, once associated mainly with high-status men, become associated instead with high-status women?

Personally I doubt it. Initials are in decline because we no longer live in a culture that values formality and distance. That’s not just about egalitarianism: to my mind it has at least as much to do with the relentless personalisation of the public sphere, and the associated valorisation of qualities like openness, sincerity and ‘authenticity’. As Bruce Feiler put it in his Times piece: ‘These days, fewer people want to be an enigma. Everybody wants to be your friend’.

But it doesn’t surprise me that it’s women, in particular (and especially those who ‘aspire to power positions’), who are swimming against this cultural tide. For women the demand for informality and authenticity can feel like a trap, a double-bind: women have always been told not to give themselves airs, and judged more positively for being ‘approachable’ than for being clever, ambitious or decisive. Maybe those who use initials are not simply trying to conceal their gender; maybe what they’re after, not unlike the 20th century men discussed above, is a more formal, more distant and less approachable public persona.

This may all seem a long way from the question I began with–whether women academics should be referred to in published sources using full names or initials. I don’t have a definitive answer: I suppose I think names are personal, and it should ultimately be a personal choice. I realise that’s not very helpful, though, because it goes against the norm of consistency, one rule for all, that publishers generally insist on. (I have never cared about consistency: if it’s so important, why is there more than one ‘authoritative’ style guide?)

But what I mostly want to say about this long-running debate goes back to one of the perennial themes of this blog: that in language all choices are meaningful, but their meanings may be more complex than we think. The choice between full names and initials, for women, is most often presented as a choice between visibility and concealment. But while it is that, it’s also more than that: names and initials carry other kinds of baggage, and communicate other kinds of meaning.

The illustration shows F.R. and Q.D. Leavis

Death of a patriarch

Not long ago I quoted Robin Lakoff’s observation that looking closely at the details of language-use can reveal, or bring into sharper focus, beliefs and attitudes that usually go unnoticed. I’ve been reminded of that again this week, following the announcement of the death of the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip.

Since he was approaching his 100^th birthday, this event was not unexpected; the government and the media had made a detailed plan (code-named ‘Operation Forth Bridge’) which they could put into action whenever it happened. So, what we are now reading and hearing—all the news reports and tributes and retrospective features about his life—is not the result of some hasty bodge-job. Much of this material was compiled well in advance, by people who had plenty of time to consider what they were going to say. I was expecting the coverage to be a lot of things I haven’t personally got much time for: royalist (obviously), obsequious (naturally), nationalistic (inevitably). But I’ll admit I was not expecting it to be quite so… patriarchal.

When I say ‘patriarchal’, I mean that in a very basic and literal sense. I’m not just talking about the presentation of the Prince as a model of aristocratic masculinity, a man who had served in World War II, who spoke with the bluntness of a former naval officer, who sent his son to a school that prescribed cold showers and stiff upper lips, etc., etc. I’m talking about the fact that commentary on his life has been organised, to a remarkable extent, around the proposition—not directly stated, but apparently still taken for granted—that it is natural and desirable for men to rule over women and children, in any social unit from the family to the nation-state. That proposition has shaped the outlines of the story we have been told—the story of a man who was outranked by his wife,  and who (understandably) found that demeaning; and also of the wife herself, a Good Woman who understood the problem and made every effort to mitigate it.  

In case you think I’m just making this up, let’s have a look at some textual evidence.

The first thing that’s striking about the coverage is that many news reports announcing Philip’s death chose headlines that specifically drew attention to his subordinate position. In Italy the Corriere della Sera had ‘Goodbye to Philip, always one step behind the Queen’. This wasn’t the only occurrence of the ‘step behind’ formula: he was also compared, by Andrew Marr, to ‘an Indian bride’ walking two steps behind (not surprisingly this comment was criticised for ignorance/casual racism, but I’m mentioning it in the context of this discussion because it’s such a clear pointer to the underlying idea that Philip was feminised, or emasculated, by his role). Another phrase used by several newspapers was ‘in the shadow of’, as in the Spanish daily El Pais’s headline ‘Muere el Principe que vivió 70 años a la sombra de Isabel II’ (‘the prince dies who lived for 70 years in the shadow of Elizabeth II’). Some reports combined these formulas: the Bangladeshi Daily Star, for instance, informed readers that Philip ‘lived in the shadow of the woman he married at Westminster Abbey in 1947 and always walked a step behind the queen’.

To assess the significance of these choices, we need to ask if the same phrases would be equally likely to appear in reports on the death of a queen consort, the wife of a surviving male monarch. That’s hard to test empirically because it’s rare, at least in recent British history, for a male monarch to be widowed (the last four kings all died before their wives). But it would be odd to describe a queen consort as living in her husband’s shadow, because that’s exactly where important men’s wives are expected to live. Being outranked and overshadowed by one’s spouse is the unmarked case for women; for men it is marked, and that’s what makes it headline material.

For Prince Philip, unlike the female consorts who preceded him and those who will follow, being relegated to the shadows was a problem; indeed, it was the problem that defined him. In the words of the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, ‘Philip’s life was…lived in perpetual limbo, his every move, every remark, every glance reflecting on his wife. He enjoyed none of the scope extended to various predecessors [like William of Orange and Prince Albert]’. ‘The frustration’ adds Jenkins, ‘must have been intense’. This frustration is clearly a function of Philip’s maleness: if a woman in his position were to complain (as he once did) that she was ‘nothing but a bloody amoeba’, she would be met with a mixture of incomprehension and accusations of being a jumped-up, power-crazed harpy. Royal wives are expected to content themselves with smiling, looking pretty, accepting bouquets and providing heirs: those who do threaten to overshadow their husbands do not, on the whole, remain royal wives.  

The second notable thing is the emphasis commentators have given to the idea that while the Queen may have outranked her husband in public, behind the scenes their roles were reversed—or to put it another way, their marriage was based on the ‘normal’ patriarchal arrangement whereby wives defer to husbands, not vice-versa. Perhaps the bluntest statement to that effect appeared in Italy’s La Repubblica, which described Philip as ‘l’unico che poteva permettersi di dire alla sovrana: “Stai zitta”’ (‘the only one who was allowed to tell the sovereign to shut up’). For this the paper did get some pushback on social media. But it wasn’t unique: the Guardian said that Philip ‘allowed’ the Queen to take the lead in public, while the LA Times assured us that he was ‘the undisputed master of the royal household’. Sky News noted that ‘the Queen wore the Crown—but when it came to family, Prince Philip wore the trousers’. Ah yes, the Crown and Trousers, that beloved 1950s pub where women couldn’t get served at the bar or set foot in the saloon…I remember it well, and apparently so does a royal correspondent who’s probably about half my age.

If the Prince ruled the roost at home, perhaps he was really the power behind the throne, and his place in the shadows, always a step behind, was just a carefully nurtured illusion. A number of papers reminded us that for decades the Queen began every address to the nation with ‘My husband and I’, as if to underline his indispensable status as ‘her closest advisor and confidant’. And the idea that he was indispensable, if not actually in charge, might explain an otherwise puzzling piece of fluff put out by Reuters under the headline ‘Despite loss of husband, little sign Queen Elizabeth will abdicate’. That ‘despite’ clause is a classic, encouraging the inference that we would naturally expect her to consider abdicating at this juncture—that the death of her husband would be an appropriate moment for her to ‘relinquish the throne in favour of her son and heir Prince Charles’. (Time, perhaps, to draw a line under the anomaly represented by a female monarch, who is only ever there because her predecessor had no sons.)

In reality, as the piece goes on to acknowledge, there is no reason to think the Queen has any intention of abdicating, ‘despite the huge hole in her life that Philip’s death leaves’. It isn’t explained why she, or indeed anyone, would decide to deal with a ‘huge hole in her life’ by making another huge hole in it. But apart from the thought that a woman in her 90s should not be clinging on to power when a man is waiting for his turn (once again, although I can’t test it, I doubt this would ever be the response to a reigning King’s loss of his wife), the idea that it’s time for her to go may be related to another theme which has been quite noticeable in the coverage of Prince Philip’s death, the portrayal of him as ‘the love of her life’ (vice-versa has been rarer, presumably on the old romantic/Romantic principle that only women are ruled by their hearts). ‘He was her King’, said Bild, metaphorically bestowing on him the title he was not permitted in reality, because kings have higher status than queens. Perhaps the commentators think that, like Queen Victoria after Prince Albert died, she will be (or should be) too grief-stricken to carry on.

Does any of this really matter, though? Would we not expect media coverage of such an anachronistic institution to be, itself, anachronistic? Yes, and in many respects it has been: in its solemnity, its deference, its assumption that mourning dead royals is the same kind of shared national preoccupation it was in 1903, and its total disregard for the realities of the digital age (the BBC shut down one of its television channels entirely for a day while showing the same royal-themed programming simultaneously on the other two; meanwhile on the other gazillion channels, life went on as usual). All this seemed, to many people, weirdly old-fashioned, as if we’d suddenly gone back 50 or 100 years in time (the BBC even set up a webpage specifically for complaints about the excessiveness of its coverage).

But I don’t think the patriarchal presuppositions I’ve been discussing are in the same category. Nobody needed to have it spelled out why Prince Philip’s position was so difficult and ‘frustrating’ (something that will never be said about the future Queen Camilla); journalists my own age or younger reached unselfconsciously for formulas like ‘wore the trousers’ and ‘in her shadow’. The Times was able to report that Prince Charles had ‘step[ped] up to fill his father’s shoes as male head of family’ (because of course every family must have a man at its head). The assumptions behind all this did not strike most people as weird. And that, depressingly, is because they aren’t.

Pussy riot

Last week was Cervical Cancer Prevention Week, and the NHS-approved myGP app used its Twitter account to suggest that women could raise awareness about the importance of regular screening by using the hashtag #myCat to share ‘an image of the cat that best reflects your undercarriage/flower/bits (technical term, vulva!) current look’. The accompanying image of three cats–long-haired, hairless and short-haired–was captioned ‘Bushy, bare or halfway there’.

What, we might ask, do pubic hairstyles have to do with cervical cancer prevention? An answer eventually surfaced: in a survey of over 2000 women, a third of the respondents said they would avoid going for screening if they hadn’t waxed or shaved their ‘bikini area’. So, #myCat is intended to address a real issue. But it’s an odd way to go about it: who, confronted with this survey finding, would think, ‘I know, let’s reassure these women that no one’s going to judge them by running a campaign that invites them to share the current state of their pubes on social media, through the ever-popular medium of a cat pic?’

The ‘no one’s going to judge you’ message has been conveyed in other ways too. In verse, for example: ‘The nurse isn’t fussed/ if you haven’t had a trim/ She’s looking at your cervix/ not your lovely hairy quim/ The nurse don’t care if it’s jungle or fluff/ It’s about saving lives/ not a nice neat muff/’.

As well-intentioned as all this may be, it points to a serious problem with the language of health messaging on this subject. In an effort to make the messages more ‘relatable’, their creators persistently resort to language which is either vague and euphemistic (‘undercarriage/flower/bits’) or overtly sexualised-slash-pornified (‘quim’, ‘muff’). #myCat manages to be both at once: ‘cat’ is being used here as a euphemism for ‘pussy’, which may have originated as a euphemism itself, but is now a sexualised term not only for women’s ‘bits’, but also for women themselves, imagined as men’s collective prey (‘he spends his life chasing pussy’).

To many women (as their Twitter responses made clear) this language, in the context of a cancer prevention campaign, is not relatable, it’s offensive. Are men ever addressed in such a coy and cutesy way? One woman on Twitter, @iseult, addressed that question with a male-oriented riff on #myCat:

Share an image of the chicken that best reflects your chicken tenders, beanbags, gangoolies (technical term testicles!) current look. Use the Hashtag #myChickenBalls. Tell and tag your friends to let them know

@Iseult is right: It’s hard to imagine this getting onto, let alone off, the drawing board.

But as I pointed out back in 2015, men and women aren’t in the same position when it comes to talking about their ‘bits’. Large numbers of people are profoundly ignorant about female sexual anatomy: one of the studies I discussed in my earlier post (conducted in 2014) found that 50% of women under 35 could not locate the vagina on a diagram. In another study, 65% of respondents said they avoided using the words ‘vagina’ and vulva’, which they regarded as embarrassing or offensive. Yet another study suggested that most words for female sexual organs are perceived to be degrading (the main exception was ‘vagina’). And there is little agreement on what nonclinical terms like ‘pussy’ and ‘fanny’ actually refer to.

These findings do pose a problem for health messaging, in that the language health professionals might prefer to use may be unacceptable, or unintelligible, to the women they are trying to reach. With men this is less of an issue: they might not know what or where their epididymis is, but they’re not going to confuse their penis with their testicles, or be too embarrassed even to utter those words.   

It might seem that the solution is straightforward: education. No girl (and actually, no boy either) should leave school without having learned both the relevant anatomical facts and the associated terminology. And I do think that’s important, but it’s not as simple as it sounds, and on its own I don’t think it’s enough.

The underlying problem here—the root cause of the ignorance, the reticence, the retreat into vagueness and euphemism—is shame. And school is often where that starts. Research has found that girls in school are routinely subjected to body shaming and sexual shaming, which–to quote one girl who was interviewed for a recent report–they ‘just have to put up with, because no one thinks it’s a big deal’. A teacher who was quoted in the same report specifically referred to boys harassing and shaming girls with intrusive questions about their pubic hair—how much they had and whether they shaved it. Is it any wonder young women feel the anxieties which the poem I quoted earlier decries as trivial?

Perhaps it’s to myGP’s credit that they don’t pile shame on shame by simply castigating young women for their stupidity; but what they’ve chosen to do instead is not much better. The suggestion that women should tell the world (in cat-code) if their pubes are ‘bushy, bare or halfway there’ has something in common with the kind of harassment I’ve just mentioned: in both cases women are being sexualised in a context where that’s incongruous and unwelcome. Seriously, did no one at myGP see how weird this is? If someone’s actual GP commented on her ‘bushy undercarriage’ she’d have grounds to make a formal complaint, and I don’t think the doctor would get very far by saying ‘well, I’d heard that a lot of women are self-conscious about their pubic hair, so I was just trying to be reassuring’.

MyGP is not, of course, an actual GP, but it does represent the NHS, and its mode of address to women should reflect that. I’m not saying that public health messaging has to be rigidly factual, humourless, and couched exclusively in coldly clinical language. But women are not children, and the cancers which affect them are not cute, sexy or a joke. I don’t know if #myCat will raise awareness about cervical cancer, or persuade more women to turn up for screening; but it has certainly made me even more aware than I was before of the sexism that still pervades both our language and our institutions.

Life lessons

Where I live September is back-to-school time, and this year the annual ritual had a special significance because it followed a period of several months when schools were closed to most children because of the pandemic. There were many reports on how delighted pupils were to be back with their friends in real classrooms with real teachers. But we all know (some of us from first-hand experience) that for some young people that won’t have been the story. There are many things that can make returning to school a less than delightful prospect. One of those things is sexism.

I first blogged about this back in 2015, when the Institute of Physics (IoP) published a report called Opening Doors, about sexism and gender stereotyping in schools. This document was on my radar because of the emphasis it placed on language. The Institute’s research had found that sexist language—covering a spectrum from casual stereotyping (‘I need two strong boys to help me with this table’) to name-calling and verbal bullying—was ubiquitous in schools. Half of the primary school teachers surveyed had witnessed boys using it to girls, and one in five teachers had themselves been subjected to sexist verbal abuse by pupils. The researchers also noted that this was rarely treated as a problem: often it was dismissed as ‘harmless banter’, though ‘many pupils, especially girls, did not see it as such’.

The IoP’s mild suggestion that schools should be less tolerant of sexist language got a predictable reception from the right-wing press, which treated it as both an outrage and a joke. The Sunday Times’s report lamented that

The days of boys and girls cheerfully baiting each other in the playground with terms such as “sissy” and “cupcake” or issuing orders to “man up” or “go make me a sandwich” may be brought to an end.

Still, I found it encouraging that the report was getting some attention (and some buy-in from the government—it had a foreword written by Caroline Dinenage, the then-Under Secretary of State for Women and Equalities). If anyone bothered to read the whole thing they’d find some useful examples of good practice and various practical, achievable recommendations. So, five years later, what progress has been made?

I fear that the answer is, ‘not much’. Some schools may have acted on the IoP’s recommendations, but the national initiative that made headlines in 2015 had evidently been forgotten by 2017, when the National Education Union (NEU) in association with UK Feminista conducted another study and produced a report entitled It’s Just Everywhere: A study on sexism in schools—and how we tackle it.

For anyone who’d read the IoP’s report two years earlier, this was déjà vu all over again. Once again, the researchers noted that ‘the use of sexist, misogynist language…is commonplace in schools’. In a sample of over 1600 teachers, almost two thirds of those who worked in mixed-sex secondary schools said they heard this kind of language at least weekly, and nearly a third said they heard it every day. Their further comments made clear they were not talking about ‘boys and girls cheerfully baiting each other in the playground’. Teachers expressed concern about boys discussing girls in language they described as ‘degrading, sexualised and offensive’ or even ‘violently misogynistic’; one interviewee reported that ‘sexually unacceptable/ threatening comments’ were made by certain boys both to girls and to female members of staff. Though the report treated sexist language and sexual harassment as separate issues, the accounts it reproduced showed that language played an integral part in many or most incidents of harassment.

In class boys talk about girls’ bodies and what they ‘would do to them’, make female sex noises at the teachers and at girls, ask girls in class if a particular photo was them, have they got it shaved, what it looks like (Secondary school teacher)

Some of the boys make comments on a lot of the girls in our years’ bodies and the girls just have to ignore it because no one thinks it’s a big deal (Female student)

In secondary schools, the use of sexist and misogynist language is no longer, if it ever was, a reciprocal, equal opportunity activity: it’s overwhelmingly a case of boys targeting girls with overtly sexual comments. And the effect on girls is not trivial. According to Girl Guiding UK, which conducts an annual survey with a sample of girls aged 11-16, fear of attracting these comments from boys makes many girls reluctant to draw attention to themselves; about a quarter report that they try not to speak in lessons. Even if most girls do not practise self-censorship, why should any girl (or indeed, anyone at all) be expected to spend 30+ hours a week in an environment where verbal abuse is an everyday occurrence? Beyond its effects on girls’ academic education, what life-lessons is this experience teaching them?  

According to the NEU/Feminista study, few schools were making any systematic effort to tackle the problem. In their sample, 78% of students and 64% of teachers were not aware that their school had any policy on sexism (suggesting that even if one existed it wasn’t being followed), and only 20% of teachers had discussed the issue during their training. The report concluded with a list of recommendations: sexism should get more attention; schools should adopt explicit policies; teachers need specific training; students need opportunities to talk about it. This is all pretty obvious, and it’s also pretty similar to what the IoP came up with. So, three years later, has anything changed?

This month a book has been published which claims that something has indeed changed since 2017—but not, unfortunately, for the better. In her introduction to Men Who Hate Women, a tour of the misogynist subcultures of the online manosphere (incels, pick-up artists, MGTOWs (‘men going their own way’) and other assorted men’s rights activists), Laura Bates explains that what prompted her to investigate these subcultures was hearing their language and their talking-points parroted by boys she met when she went into schools to talk about sexism. This hadn’t been a thing when she first started visiting schools, but two years ago she began to notice a change:

[Boys] were angry, resistant to the very idea of a conversation about sexism. Men themselves were the real victims, they’d tell me, in a society in which political correctness has gone mad, white men are persecuted, and so many women lie about rape. In schools from rural Scotland to central London, I started hearing the same arguments. The hair rose on my arms when I realised that these boys, who had never met each other, were using precisely the same words and quoting the same false statistics to back up their claims. …These [online misogynist] groups have dug their claws into teenage boys across the country.

Laura Bates is among the feminists who place the ideas and activities of online misogynist groups in the conceptual frame of terrorism (this is a framing I have some reservations about, but in this post I’ll leave them aside). She is concerned that teenage boys, most of them more confused and lonely than violent and hateful, are being radicalised online, and recruited into an extremist movement which bears comparison with white nationalism or radical Islamism. Education, she believes, has an important role to play in countering this radicalisation, just as it does in the other cases. She suggests that schools could make use of the expertise that already exists in organisations like White Ribbon and the Good Lad Initiative, run by ‘men who hate men who hate women’.  

My own feelings about this proposal are mixed. I don’t dispute that some of the young men who are drawn to the manosphere are struggling with personal and social problems; but the thought that kept coming into my mind was ‘what about the girls?’ If schools are pushed into doing something about misogyny only because it’s been added to the list of extremist ideologies that can lead to acts of terrorism—and if what they do focuses on boys as potential victims of radicalisation—what does that say about our priorities? Where does it leave the victims’ victims?

I think that what schools most urgently need to address is the sexism of the ‘hidden curriculum’—what students are learning, not from explicit instruction, but through participating in the daily routines of school. It’s no use teaching formal lessons about the evils of sexism and misogyny if students’ whole experience outside those specific lessons shows them that in practice ‘no one thinks it’s a big deal’. In many schools, if the studies I’ve linked to are anything to go by, that’s exactly what their experience shows them. How much can sexism and misogyny matter if boys can verbally abuse girls with impunity, and girls’ only refuge is silence?

The most general lesson girls are learning from the experiences described in study after study is that their needs, rights and feelings are not important–or at least, not important enough to justify curtailing boys’ freedom. Until we as a society decide that this is intolerable, we will doubtless be presented with many more reports which highlight the same problems, make the same recommendations, are met with the same brief flurry of concern, and are then left to gather dust.