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.

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.

‘You have no authority here’

We’re not even a week into February, but the shortest month has already produced two news stories on one of this blog’s perennial themes: the Divine Right of men to talk at, about and over women.

One of these stories garnered international attention. In Japan, Yoshiro Mori, head of the organising committee for the delayed Tokyo Olympics, pushed back against proposals to increase the representation of women by saying that women talk too much at meetings. ‘Women’, he explained, ‘have a strong sense of rivalry. If one raises her hand to speak, all the others feel the need to speak too’. The ensuing outcry prompted what was described as ‘a grovelling apology’, though not—as yet—Mr Mori’s resignation. I won’t comment further, because I said what I had to say in this post about (ex-) Uber director David Bonderman, who made a near-identical gaffe in 2017. Different country, different man, same story. [Update: a few days after this post was first published, Mori did resign.]

The other news item concerned a meeting of the Handforth Parish Council held remotely last December, which became a viral sensation in Britain last week after a recording was posted online. It featured a woman named Jackie Weaver, Chief Executive of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils, who had been parachuted in to act as Clerk after concerns were raised about the conduct of some council members. What you see in the viral clip is a series of male councillors bellowing at Ms Weaver (‘STOP TALKING…YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY HERE JACKIE WEAVER…READ THE STANDING ORDERS’), to which she responds by calmly removing them from the call and parking them in the virtual waiting room. Two female councillors, meanwhile, intervene to urge civility and get on with the business of the meeting. They don’t raise their voices; their interventions (Yoshiro Mori please note) are brief and to the point.

Many of us will, at some time in our lives, have wondered how men like Yoshiro Mori and Brian Tolver, Chair of Handsforth Parish Council, came to be such prize asses. Perhaps there’s a clue in a recent piece of research. Last month a couple of people sent me the link to a brief item in the US academic weekly Inside Higher Ed, headed ‘Study: Men Talk 1.6 Times More Than Women in College Classrooms’. The study in question, titled ‘Who speaks and who listens: revisiting the chilly climate on college campuses’, has just been published in the journal Gender & Society, and it’s worth taking a closer look at.

The phrase ‘chilly climate’ alludes to a report that first appeared in 1982 (‘The classroom climate: a chilly one for women?’), and what the authors, Roberta Hall and Bernice Sandler, meant by it was ‘an environment that dampens women’s self-esteem, confidence, aspirations and their participation’. When I worked in the US in the late 1980s it was used among the feminist academics I knew as shorthand for everything from the endemic problem of sexual harassment to the way women students were ignored or interrupted when they tried to make a point in class.  

It’s that last aspect of the chilly climate which this new article revisits, with the aim of finding out whether the patterns reported in the 1980s have persisted into the 21^st century. The research was conducted by the first author, Jennifer Lee, for her undergraduate thesis at Dartmouth College, where her co-author Janice McCabe is a sociology professor. In the article they refer to the institution as ‘Oakwood College’, but I think we can assume it’s actually Dartmouth.

To answer the question ‘who speaks and who listens’, Lee observed nine different classes—three each in science, social science and humanities—over a period of five weeks; this gave her a sample of 80 class meetings adding up to 95 hours of classroom talk. Five of the nine classes were taught by women and four were taught by men; they all included (though in varying proportions) both male and female students. Lee used a coding frame to record her observations systematically:

each time a student spoke, we noted their observed gender based on their appearances and pronouns, type of student response (comment, question, answer to professor’s question, or response to a previous comment), and the beginning of interactions (raise hand, speak out, called on by professor). As much as possible, we captured students’ and professors’ exact words and body language.

She also kept fieldnotes, supplementing the information captured by coding with observations about ‘the feel of what happened’. When the data were analysed, two main patterns emerged.

First, men took up more ‘sonic space’ than women: on average they spoke 1.6 times as much. They were more likely to speak ‘out of turn’ (that is, without either being called on or raising their hands), and to interrupt someone who was already speaking; they were also more likely to engage in prolonged exchanges with the teacher.

As always, though, averaging flattens out the differences within each group. The researchers’ discussion suggests that the pattern was disproportionately affected by the behaviour of one or two individuals in each class—men like ‘Danny’, of whom Lee wrote in her fieldnotes that ‘he completely dominates the conversation’. Or ‘Tom’, whose behaviour in one session Lee’s notes describe like this:

As the class continues, Tom cannot hold still…[he] has already interrupted the professor multiple times. Before Tom can continue arguing with the professor, the professor calls on Jackie instead. As Jackie is making a comment, Tom interrupts her…

While it’s telling, as the researchers comment, that they didn’t observe a single class in which a woman was the dominant speaker, it’s also important to recognise that only some men behave like Tom and Danny.

The second pattern to which Lee and McCabe draw attention is that men tended to formulate their contributions more assertively than women. 

Men’s comments included strong phrases like: “I’m not kidding.” “It’s impossible.” “That will never happen.” One man commented on a thought experiment initiated by the professor by saying: “Imagining that . . . is preposterous.”

‘In contrast’, the article goes on,

women students’ tones were largely hesitant and apologetic. In one class session, numerous women’s presentations started with hedges such as: “Um, so I couldn’t find a whole lot online, but… ” “I don’t want to repeat the lecture too much, but .. .” “Perhaps this is too specific, but…”    

Later they note that ‘women repeatedly answered professors’ questions with another question, such as “Isn’t it what they are doing?” …Even when they clearly had the correct answer, women often double checked their answers by offering them in question formats’.

These comments might strike us as uncomfortably close to all those finger-wagging pop-advice pieces telling women they’re undermining themselves at work by ‘over-apologising’ and saying ‘just’ too much. The comparison isn’t entirely fair: unlike the pop-advice writers, Lee and McCabe are not in the business of either blaming women or fixing them. Rather, as they say in their conclusion, they want to ‘shift the blame from individual-level to interactional social processes that continue to disadvantage women’. But like a lot of the earlier research their study revisits, I do think they’re still implicitly operating with a deficit model of women’s speech-style.

My evidence for that is in the article’s own language. Men’s comments are described as ‘strong’ whereas women’s are ‘hesitant’; men who engage in prolonged exchanges with the teacher are said to ‘actively pursue answers and claim an education, rather than passively receiving education’. Even if the intention isn’t to blame women, these lexical oppositions—‘active/passive’ and ‘strong/hesitant’—have an obvious evaluative loading. They suggest that the male pattern is preferable. And for feminists I think that should raise questions. Is talking less, or less assertively, inherently disadvantageous for learning, or is that assumption based on unexamined cultural prejudices?

In my 37 years as a university teacher I have often pondered that question, beginning in the late 1980s when, as I mentioned earlier, I moved from the UK to teach in the US. One of the differences I found most striking was how much American students talked. The belief that talking was essential for learning was stronger in the US than (at the time) it was back home, and it was reflected in the practice of giving a ‘participation grade’ (i.e., some of the marks for each class had to be earned by actively contributing to class discussion). The grade was meant to reward the quality rather than just the quantity of students’ contributions, but if you wanted to do well, total silence was not an option.

My next job was in Scotland, where my students were more reserved. I had one class whose members were so reluctant to talk, I eventually asked them directly what their problem was. After a lengthy, awkward silence, a student finally spoke up. ‘What’s the point of talking’, he said, ‘when we know we’d only be talking pish?’

These students didn’t share the belief that talking in class was the key to learning. And since then I’ve taught students from many other parts of the world where that is not the prevailing view. It’s a historically and culturally specific belief, and in my experience students who don’t embrace it, for whatever reason, learn just as much (or as little) as those who do. There are, of course, cases where silence does signal disengagement, but I’ve had plenty of students who spoke rarely in class, but then produced written work which showed they’d been fully engaged. Though personally I prefer a talkative class, I no longer believe that talking in itself is a measure of how much a student is learning.     

So, am I saying it’s not really a problem if women aren’t getting as much airtime as men in college classrooms? No: in an academic culture like Oakwood’s, which directly rewards students for talking, it’s clearly a problem if the dominance of some men denies women (and other men) opportunities to talk. And it’s always a problem when women like ‘Jackie’ are interrupted and talked over so their contributions go unheeded. What I’m questioning, rather, is the tendency to treat stereotypically male behaviour as a model for success in every activity, whether that’s politics, management, or—as in this case—learning.

Often this argument is based on a kind of common-sense logic: men are more successful at X than women, so women who want to succeed at X should model themselves on men. But in the case of higher education this seems perverse, since if their grades are anything to go by, men are not more successful learners than women. Today in the US, on average, women have higher GPAs than men. Of course, I’ve already said that averages don’t tell the whole story. Maybe the point is more that women who already do well would do even better if they were more like Tom and Danny, men who ‘pursue answers and actively claim an education’.

But how do we know that Tom and Danny are learning more, or doing better, than their less vocal classmates? The short answer is, we don’t: the article contains no information on anyone’s grades. It’s surely at least conceivable that these men’s classroom performances of alpha-maleness are actually doing them no favours. Their compulsion to dominate rather than listening to other views might even be harming their education.  

Still, grades aren’t the only thing you go to college for–especially if it’s an elite college like Dartmouth. Even if they’re not helping themselves academically, the Dannys and Toms may be cultivating habits that will help them to be successful later on. Perhaps Danny is fashioning himself into exactly the kind of person who will eventually impress the recruiters for a top law firm; whereas Jackie, who waits to be called on and does not protest when Tom interrupts her, will get fewer and less prestigious job offers, despite having equally good grades.

If you’ve seen this scenario play out enough times, of course you’ll be tempted to conclude that Jackie would have a better chance if she were more like Danny. But as I’ve pointed out many times before, that isn’t how it works in practice. The behaviours we reward in men will often attract disapproval or resistance when they come from women: ‘STOP TALKING…YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY HERE’.  

I am not a fan of the ‘Mars and Venus’ approach to language and gender which portrays women collectively as co-operative and caring while men are competitive status-seekers. There’s a lot of variation in both groups, and to the extent the Mars and Venus generalisation holds at all, I would say it does so largely because of sexism, which leads us to reward (or punish) different behaviours in male and female speakers. But when I look at something like Lee’s fieldnotes about Tom, or the recording of the Handforth Parish Council meeting, I do wonder why we keep on rewarding a style of hyper-masculine performance which in many situations is so patently dysfunctional.

In the classroom we reward it when we allow students like Tom free rein; in other settings we reward it by elevating men like Brian Tolver to positions of responsibility. I’ve never been a parish councillor, but in my long experience of other nonfeminist bodies – juries, local voluntary groups, workplace committees – it’s absolutely typical for self-important blowhards like Tolver to be chosen by their peers as leaders and spokespeople. We favour these men because they match our cultural template for what ‘authority’ looks and sounds like. Maybe it’s our template that we really need to change.

A short history of lads in (British) English

Back when universities were still teaching face-to-face, the Times Higher reported on a research project which found that on some courses lecturing had been abandoned because of the ‘laddish’ behaviour of certain students, who disrupted the proceedings by heckling and interrupting. I found I had some questions about this. One was why universities were dealing with this problem by changing their teaching methods, rather than warning the offenders that if they persisted they’d be kicked out. Another, however, was about the language we use to discuss this kind of behaviour.

The Higher called it ‘laddish’, as did the researchers whose work was being reported. In Britain, the word ‘lad’ and its derivatives (e.g. ‘laddish’, ‘laddism’ and ‘lad culture’) are now well-established labels for what a 2012 report on sexual violence in universities described as ‘a group or “pack” mentality’ among young men, expressed in practices like heavy alcohol consumption and our old friend ‘banter’ (much of it, according to the report, sexist, misogynist and homophobic). But are these ‘lad’ terms helpful from a feminist point of view? Where do they come from and what do they imply?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the English noun ‘lad’ has been in use since the 14th century. Originally it had two main senses: the first, now obsolete, was ‘serving man or attendant, man of low birth’, while the second was ‘boy, youth, young man’. In some regional varieties of English (and Scots) ‘lad’ is still a straightforward synonym for ‘boy/young man’. But in the standard language it’s now more commonly used in another way: ‘familiarly’, to or about a male of any age, as either a term of endearment or a marker of solidarity among men who share ‘common working, recreational, or other interests’.

This non-age-specific usage is something ‘lad’ has in common with ‘girl’. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the argument that calling an adult woman a girl automatically demeans her by reducing her to the status of a child doesn’t work for all cases and contexts. ‘Girl’ can certainly be demeaning when it’s used by a person of higher status (e.g. by a boss about his secretary or a mistress about her servant), but among equals what it expresses is solidarity or camaraderie. It can also be a way of metaphorically attributing the positive qualities we associate with youth–like being carefree, fun-loving and sexually attractive–to someone who isn’t literally young. No doubt that reflects our culture’s ageism, but it isn’t necessarily an insult.

‘Lad’ works in a similar way. The plural form ‘lads’ most often appears in contexts where the emphasis is on solidarity and male bonding: ‘the lads’ may refer to the male friends a man goes out drinking with, the teammates he plays sport with, or—as the OED’s 20th century examples reminded me—his brothers in a union where the trade is working-class and male (‘I’ll have to take this offer back to the lads’). Like ‘girls’, ‘lads’ also turns up in expressions like ‘a night out with the ___’, where the implication is that those involved are temporarily putting adult cares aside and recapturing the pleasures of youth.

But there are also some differences between ‘lad’ and ‘girl’, reflecting the differing norms of masculinity and femininity. One of the senses listed for ‘lad’ in the OED is ‘a man of spirit and vigour’, as in ‘Jack the lad’ and ‘a bit of a lad’. These idioms suggest a general propensity for mischief or bad behaviour, but they can also take on a more specifically sexual meaning. One of the OED’s examples, from a text published in 1960, is ‘A bit of a lad, Mr Alan Clark, going around fancy-free for years’.

If you’re thinking, ‘but don’t girls also misbehave, sexually and otherwise?’, the short answer is yes, of course–but that isn’t part of the meaning of the word ‘girl’, nor indeed of ‘lass’, the female-specific term that directly parallels ‘lad’: we wouldn’t refer to a woman as ‘Jill the lass’ or ‘a bit of a lass’. So what do we call women who behave like ‘Jack’? Historically, they have also been ‘lads’: the OED notes that in the past ‘lad’ was sometimes used to mean ‘a spirited girl’ (the example it offers is dated 1935). More recently, young women who engage in ‘laddish’ behaviour–being loud and disruptive, getting drunk and having sex–have been referred to, belittlingly, as ‘ladettes’. This language suggests that female lad(ette)s are seen as gender-deviant: they’re assumed to be aping the boys rather than expressing their own authentic ‘spirit’.

The ‘lad’ of ‘lad culture’ is clearly a descendant of the ‘man of spirit and vigour’, and in 2001 the OED acknowledged this development by adding a new draft section to the ‘lad’ entry. In contemporary British usage, it explains, a ‘lad’ is

a young man characterized by his enjoyment of social drinking, sport, and other activities considered to be male-oriented, his engagement in casual sexual relationships, and often by attitudes or behaviour regarded as irresponsible, sexist, or boorish; (usually) one belonging to a close-knit social group’.

The first illustrative example for this sense comes from a 1986 article in The Face by Julie Burchill:

Remarried after more than a decade on the rampage, at 47 in true Lad style to a girl of 22.

The capitalization of ‘Lad’ here suggests that Burchill is referencing what she regards as a recognisable social type. It’s that type which the section is concerned with–though the  reference to ‘a young man’ does not acknowledge what the example clearly implies, that the Lad is defined less by his age in and of itself than by his attitudes and behaviour. In Burchill’s terms 55-year old Boris Johnson, with his long string of well-publicised affairs and his famously indeterminate number of children, would surely count as a Lad.

Johnson was also what we might now describe as a lad when he was young: at university in the early 1980s he belonged to the hard-drinking, restaurant-trashing Bullingdon Club. But as boorish and irresponsible as their behaviour undoubtedly was, it was not yet described as ‘laddish’. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the ‘lad’—or as he was sometimes called at the time, the ‘New Lad’–became a familiar cultural figure, his laddish enthusiasms both codified and celebrated in a clutch of popular ‘lad mags’ like Loaded and FHM.

What, you might wonder, was ‘new’ about the New Lad? In many ways he wasn’t new at all: he was an amalgam of all the earlier ‘lads’, simultaneously engaged in male homosocial bonding, disruptive mischief-making and aggressive heterosexuality. Some high-profile New Lads were middle-class men adopting a working-class style of masculinity (their sport was football, their drink was beer), but that wasn’t unprecedented either. The real point of the ‘new’ label was to contrast the emerging ‘New Lad’ with the already-established ‘New Man’, who was ‘sensitive, charming, considerate…he’d do the housework and not be afraid to shed a tear’. After a decade when pop culture had been dominated by foppish New Romantics and androgynous synthpop types, the ‘New Lad’ represented the return of the repressed: he gave men permission to be men again.

‘New lads’ were uninterested in feminism, but to begin with, at least, they were keen not to come across as unreconstructed misogynists. The message of Loaded, according to one of its founders, was

Don’t take us too seriously, we’re blokes and we’re useless. . .We like football, but that doesn’t mean we’re hooligans. . .We like looking at pictures of fancy ladies sometimes but that doesn’t mean we want to rape them.

Feminists were not impressed, however, and there was also concern in other quarters. The examples illustrating ‘lad culture’ in the OED show that by the end of the 1990s it was widely regarded as a problem. This quote, for instance, is taken from the Glasgow Herald:

Boys seem to have an extreme amount of pressure on them and it’s very hard for them to resist the lad culture.

What prompted this anxiety wasn’t the sexism of lad culture, but rather the contribution it was thought to be making to the much-discussed problem of boys’ academic underachievement. Research confirmed that one of the hallmarks of laddism among school-age boys was the belief that studying was uncool. No one wanted to be what Boris Johnson once called his slightly less laddish contemporary David Cameron–a ‘girly swot’. The worry was that lad culture was leading boys—especially the middle-class white boys who had embraced it so enthusiastically—to neglect their schoolwork and undermine their future prospects.

In hindsight this anxiety seems misplaced: far from ending up unemployed, the lads of the 1980s and 1990s have become the new Establishment. Whether they’re posh Tory boys like Boris Johnson and Toby Young, or leftists like Owen Jones (and yes, I know he’s gay, but he’s also a classic lad), they are well-represented among Britain’s most powerful and influential people. And it’s not just at the top that laddism rules. The lad mags are long gone, but the culture they promoted lives on. The current pandemic has given us countless examples of irresponsible, boorish and sexist male behaviour, whether it’s students ‘zoombombing’ online classes with offensive messages and/or pornography (which is generally having, as the Economist put it, ‘a good pandemic’), ‘covidiots’ flouting lockdown rules (in Britain 80% of those fined for this have been men, the majority young), or middle-aged professional men expressing outrage because they’ve been told to wear a mask or expected to look after their own children.

Of course this has not gone uncriticised. Nor has the sexual harassment and sexual violence associated with lad culture in educational settings. The effect of ‘lad’ masculinity on women students gets far more attention today than it did in the 1990s. But I do sometimes wonder if the vocabulary of ‘laddism’ does feminists any favours.

As this blog has pointed out before, words carry baggage from their history of being used. ‘Lad’ is arguably a case where that historical baggage is largely positive, and thus in tension with the feminist analysis of ‘laddism’ as a serious problem. The ‘lad’ has long been associated with youthful exuberance, vigour, rebelliousness, hedonism and humour–qualities which many people find attractive, and whose less appealing manifestations they are willing to shrug off as ‘only natural’. Familiar excuses for irresponsible, boorish and sexist behaviour—‘boys will be boys’, ‘it’s just banter’, ‘we’re blokes and we’re useless’—are more or less baked into the discourse. (See also: ‘classic Dom’, and ‘it’s just Boris being Boris’.)

What words could we use instead? For some forms of ‘laddish’ behaviour (like disrupting lectures, or partying in large groups in the middle of a pandemic) I’d be happier with a term like ‘anti-social’; for ‘lad culture’ I’m tempted to suggest substituting ‘toxic masculinity’. (For the Boris Johnson/Toby Young variant there’s also ‘posh boy misogyny’, but not all misogynists are posh.) It’s not that I think this language would have a deterrent effect (a true ‘lad’ would presumably delight in the disapproval of feminist killjoys); but it would send the message that no, we don’t think this is harmless, or funny, or something we must put up with because that’s just the way men are.

Of course it could be argued that changing culture is more important than changing labels, and that efforts to change culture have to start from where people are. That’s the view of the Good Lad Initiative, which works with men and boys to rethink ideas about manhood. They want to reclaim the ‘lad’, not demonise him. But while ‘lad’—like ‘girl’–has some uses which I agree are innocuous, there might still be a case for calling ‘lad culture’ or ‘laddism’ by a name that doesn’t trivialise it or make excuses for it.

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Take me to your leader

Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently about what lessons we might learn from the great pandemics of the past, the historian Amanda Foreman concluded:

History shows that public leadership is the most powerful weapon in keeping them from becoming full-blown tragedies.

Leadership has been a prominent theme in media coverage of Covid-19. Journalists focus day in and day out on the performance of presidents and prime ministers, and there’s a whole subgenre of commentary on which countries have the best and worst leaders. Opinions on that point differ, but one quite widely-held view (one which could not have been expressed during the Black Death, or even the 1918 flu pandemic) is summed up in this meme, which I saw numerous times last week:

 

The point was taken up enthusiastically in an article for the business magazine Forbes:

Looking for examples of true leadership in a crisis? From Iceland to Taiwan and from Germany to New Zealand, women are stepping up to show the world how to manage a messy patch for our human family.

Female political leaders may be a minority in the world as a whole, but in this crisis, it’s being suggested, they’re doing a better job than men.

Should feminists be cheering? In my (possibly unpopular) opinion, it’s complicated. I’m certainly not going to argue with anyone who finds Angela Merkel or Jacinda Ardern more impressive than Boris Johnson or (if you want to set a really low bar) Donald Trump. But in the last couple of weeks I’ve been struck by how gendered a lot of our pandemic leadership talk is, and how heavily it leans on very familiar gender stereotypes. Even when it’s deployed to big up women, I think feminists should approach this discourse with caution.

One thing that makes me uneasy about it is the way it mythologises leadership itself, as if the fate of each nation will ultimately depend on the abilities and the character of a single individual, the Great (or not so Great) Leader. The problem with this from a feminist point of view isn’t just that the prototypical Great Leader is male: it’s that the basic idea is patriarchal, authoritarian and infantilising. In reality, both good and bad outcomes result from the actions taken, or not taken, by many people, not just one; those actions also have a wider context, which would shape the outcome whoever was in charge. Donald Trump, for instance, has clearly made a bad situation worse, but it isn’t obvious that any US president could have prevented a ‘full-blown tragedy’ given the deep-rooted structural problems—like the absence of universal healthcare—that he or she would have had to negotiate.

Dependence on the One Great Leader can be paralysing, as we saw in Britain recently when the prime minister Boris Johnson was hospitalised with severe Covid-19 symptoms. His ‘war cabinet’ apparently thought it was crucial for the nation’s morale to believe that he was still in command. First they prevaricated, suggesting he had been hospitalised only as ‘a precautionary measure’ and remained ‘in charge of the government’; after his admission to intensive care, his deputy Dominic Raab told reporters the cabinet would be implementing plans the prime minister had ‘instructed them to deliver’. There followed a stream of reports, tweets and other comments telling us the patient was ‘in good spirits’ and that he would ultimately pull through because he was a ‘fighter’. We were even exhorted to ‘Clap for Boris’, as if he could be restored, like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, by a collective demonstration of our belief in him.

This is what I mean by ‘authoritarian and infantilising’: it felt a bit like living in the kind of dictatorship where apparatchiks lie about the Leader’s health to avoid causing panic in the streets. If I’d believed it, which I didn’t, I’d have been more alarmed than reassured to think that important decisions were being made by someone who was ill enough to be in the ICU. My worry (which seems to have been justified), was more that Johnson’s absence had left a vacuum in which no one else felt able to decide anything. But it soon became clear that this nonsense was what a certain section of the public wanted to hear. Believing that only Boris could save us, they wanted him to be both irreplaceable and invincible.

A particularly transparent expression of this belief appeared in a Telegraph column written by Allison Pearson, headed ‘We need you Boris—your health is the health of the nation’:

How is Boris? For millions of people, that was our first thought upon waking yesterday. And our last thought before we fell asleep the night before….It’s rare for a politician to inspire such emotion, but Boris is loved – really loved – in a way that the metropolitan media class has never begun to understand. Hearing reporters and doctors on TV talking about the PM’s admission to the ICU at St Thomas’s Hospital, discussing the likely effect on his lungs and “other vital organs”, was horrible; the picture of naked vulnerability it painted so entirely at odds with our rambunctious hero barrelling into a room with a quizzical rub of that blond mop and a booming: “Hi, folks!”

This is the language of hero-worship, and we can tell from the vocabulary—not only the word ‘hero’ itself, but also words like ‘rambunctious’, ‘barrelling’ and ‘booming’—that its object is both male and hyper-masculine. What Pearson finds ‘horrible’ to contemplate isn’t just the knowledge that someone she admires is seriously ill, it’s the contrast between his normal masculine potency and the ‘naked vulnerability’ induced by illness.

Johnson’s own language has often suggested a similar preoccupation with masculine potency: he has baited opponents with insults like ‘big girls’ blouse’, and likened what he saw as wasteful spending to ‘spaffing money up a wall’. More recently, like several other ‘strong man’ leaders—Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte—he has adopted a macho, tough-talking stance in relation to the pandemic, musing publicly on the possibility that we would just have to ‘take it on the chin’. Some found his insouciance callous, but for many it seems to have confirmed their view of him as the larger-than-life, ‘rambunctious hero’ who is uniquely equipped to lead us through this. Toby Young, for instance, proclaimed his ‘mystical belief in Britain’s greatness and her ability to occasionally bring forth remarkable individuals …’, adding, ‘I’ve always thought of Boris as one of those people’.

Of course, not everyone agrees. This week a columnist for the Irish Post tore into Johnson, saying that ‘of all the European leaders he has looked the most out of his depth, the most shallow, and vacuous’. The writer compares him to the arrogant generals who sent their troops to be slaughtered in the First World War. It’s a totally negative assessment, but it has something in common with the positive ones, in that it imagines the male leader as a quasi-military commander. Whether he is praised for his indomitable spirit and the loyalty he inspires in the ranks, or blamed for his incompetence and indecision, the thinking is hierarchical and the imagery martial. Female leaders are not generally talked about in this way. The archetypal figure we want them to personify is not the heroic warrior but the caring, empathetic mother.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the extraordinary emphasis commentators have placed on women leaders’ interactions with children. The Forbes article I mentioned earlier praises Norway’s Erna Solberg for holding a press conference specifically to answer questions from children; Angela Merkel has been commended for addressing the children of Germany; and Jacinda Ardern garnered vast amounts of approving media coverage (the TV clip has become iconic, embedded in almost every report I’ve read about her) for her answer to a question about what lockdown would mean for the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy (she explained that they’d been classified as essential workers, but might not be able to get to everyone as easily as they would in normal circumstances).

To the writer of the Forbes article, this shows what’s different and special about women leaders. ‘How many other simple, humane innovations’, she wonders, ‘would more female leadership unleash?’ And it’s not just that women are good with children: their relationship with their adult citizens is also figured as maternal.

The empathy and care which all of these female leaders have communicated seems to come from an alternate universe…It’s like their arms are coming out of their videos to hold you close in a heart-felt and loving embrace.

I find this almost as embarrassing as Allison Pearson’s gushing over Boris Johnson. That’s not because I don’t think leaders should display ’empathy and care’: I agree those are important qualities, especially in a situation where people are anxious, fearful and grieving. But even if we put aside the loving embrace stuff (which will never be my top priority when judging the performance of any prime minister), it’s a serious problem for women in politics, and a barrier to the normalisation of female authority, that good leadership in women is always equated with–or reduced to–empathy and nurturance. It’s also a problem that women, for whom nurturance is supposed to be natural and instinctive, are expected to adopt a quasi-maternal leadership style (and often harshly criticised if they don’t), whereas with men we are more open to a range of styles and personae.

In the English-speaking media the most widely praised of the women leading their nations’ responses to the pandemic has been New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. Her conduct has been described as ‘a masterclass in leadership’, and particular admiration has been expressed for her empathetic communication style. Alistair Campbell, writing in the Independent, commented that ‘natural [sic] empathy has always been a strong point for Ardern’, and went on to ask, rhetorically,

could any other leader have stood at a government lectern as she did recently and talked directly to children about how yes, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny were key workers, but they might not be able to get everywhere because they were so busy in these challenging times?

Actually, yes: at least one male leader, Ontario’s Doug Ford, also reassured children about the Easter Bunny’s ‘essential worker’ status. But Ford, a conservative whose ‘crass, populist politics’ have been compared to Donald Trump’s, attracted more media attention when he angrily criticised the US President for blocking shipments of  medical equipment to Canada. Commentary on Jacinda Ardern, conversely, has given far more play to her remarks about the Easter Bunny than to her demotion and public upbraiding of a health minister who broke the country’s strict lockdown rules. ‘I expect better’, she said, bluntly, ‘and so does New Zealand’.

Ardern is tough as well as caring: it takes more than ‘a heart-felt and loving embrace’ to formulate and execute a strategy as hardline as hers. And men’s leadership isn’t all about Trumpian tough-talking. A number of male leaders, including Ireland’s Leo Varadkar and Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have been praised for their emotionally literate communications. It’s not only possible but arguably necessary for effective leaders of both sexes to combine so-called ‘male’ and ‘female’ qualities. But we view their behaviour through a gendered lens, and emphasise different aspects of it in each case.

Sometimes gendered expectations can lead us to see what isn’t there. In our research on the 2015 UK General Election, Sylvia Shaw and I found that perceptions of the way female party leaders communicated were at odds with the evidence of their actual speech, and that the same stereotypical qualities were attributed to women whose styles, according to our analysis, were totally different. That’s another thing that irritates me about the meme: it treats the women pictured as interchangeable representatives of their sex rather than individuals with their own distinctive qualities.

Talking about leadership in the stereotypically gendered terms I’ve been discussing is a habit I think we need to break. I’m not suggesting a leader’s gender is irrelevant to the way they do things—it’s part of their identity and of the life-experience they bring to the role—but it isn’t the only thing that matters, and it certainly doesn’t determine their style of communication, decision-making or crisis management.

We can surely recognise that certain women leaders are doing an excellent job in this pandemic without putting them in a special, separate ‘female leadership’ box tied up with a pink ribbon. (Would Theresa May have belonged in that box? Margaret Thatcher? Sarah Palin?) And we can surely acknowledge the importance of leadership in a crisis without buying into the fantasy of the Great Leader—whether invincible warrior or nurturing mother—whose words and actions will determine our fate.

Mandemic

Whatever else the current pandemic may be, here in the UK it’s been a communications car crash. We’ve been bombarded with confusing official messages, some containing technical terms which are used variably even by experts, and are incomprehensible to much of the public (‘herd immunity’, anyone?) And some politicians’ ‘backstage’ language (though in the age of social media what’s uttered behind the scenes tends to find itself under the spotlight sooner rather than later) has been remarkably ill-judged. Boris Johnson reportedly suggested to business leaders he had approached for help manufacturing ventilators that they could call the initiative ‘Operation Last Gasp’. In the US, someone complained on Twitter that a member of the Trump administration had referred to COVID-19 as ‘Kung flu’, and Trump himself has publicly called it ‘the Chinese virus’. Sexism, which is this blog’s territory, has not been such an overt problem in public health messaging. But I do think it is there more covertly, both in what’s not being said and in the way some things are being said.

Feminists have already called attention to certain absences or silences—most obviously of women’s voices at the highest level. There are exceptions, such as Germany and Scotland, but globally it is mainly men who are the public voices of  both political and scientific authority. As someone commented when the media published a photo of Mike Pence and his then all-male Coronavirus Taskforce praying, ‘it must be a mandemic’. (Pence has since appointed one woman expert, Deborah Birx.) Boris Johnson too has set up a high-level committee (‘C19’) that consists entirely of men.

When not making racist remarks or tasteless jokes, both Johnson and Donald Trump have adopted a martial rhetoric in which we are now ‘at war’ with the novel coronavirus. In Britain the tone is evidently intended to be Churchillian: rousing, patriotic, appealing to the legendary ‘Blitz spirit’ of plucky little England. At one press conference this week Rishi Sunak, the 39-year old who has very recently become Chancellor of the Exchequer,  uttered a series of platitudes about doing ‘whatever it takes’ to defeat ‘the enemy’:

Yes, this enemy can be deadly, but it is also beatable – and we know how to beat it and we know that if as a country we follow the scientific advice that is now being given we know that we will beat it.  And however tough the months ahead we have the resolve and the resources to win the fight.

But though wars are traditionally men’s business, they also make demands on women. The government’s recently-published list of key workers, for instance, includes a number of predominantly female occupational groups, like nurses, care workers and supermarket staff, who will all be at heightened risk because of the personal contact their jobs involve (these are also, and will doubtless remain, among the lowest-paid jobs on the key worker list). The absence of women from pandemic ‘war cabinets’ isn’t just a symbolic issue, it’s a ‘nothing about us without us’ issue. It raises concerns that the men in charge will give little or no thought to the way their decisions affect women–differently, not always equally, and potentially in very damaging ways.

Apart from the Churchillian posturing, one way I see ‘mandemic’ thinking being subtly reflected in language is in the way politicians and official spokespeople talk about ‘home’. ‘Stay at home’ is one of the UK government’s key public health messages, along with ‘wash your hands’ (it’s said that Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings particularly favours these three-word slogans—see also ‘Take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’). But it was long ago pointed out by feminists that ‘home’ doesn’t have quite the same meaning for most women as it does for most men.

In Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler’s Feminist Dictionary the entry for ‘home’ defines it as ‘most women’s place of work’. In current conditions it’s temporarily become a place of work for large numbers of men as well as women whose jobs do not require their physical presence in the workplace, and also the place where 5-18 year-olds will now be doing their schoolwork. All this only adds to the unpaid care-work—domestic labour, childcare, the ‘mental load’ of planning and strategising that keeps the show on the road—which makes ‘home’ a permanent workplace for women with families (whether or not they also have a paid job). The idea of ‘home’ as a safe haven, a shelter from the dangers of the outside world, may be less than soothing when you’re the one who will be expected to do even more caring than usual, in conditions of household isolation (i.e., without a break, or any of the usual social supports), and possibly with drastically reduced economic resources.

There’s also the point that for some women ‘home’ is a place of danger rather than safety. Reported incidents of domestic violence increase significantly even during relatively brief holiday periods; it’s horrifying to think about what could happen during a lockdown lasting weeks or months. We know this was a serious problem in Wuhan, but the British government has pledged no additional funding for the organisations that provide services to women. (There’s some general advice and contact numbers here.)

In the UK people over 70 have been told they should isolate themselves completely for several months, a policy which has been referred to both in Britain and Ireland as ‘cocooning’ the ‘elderly’. Both those words set my teeth on edge. ‘Elderly’ is a euphemism which people use to avoid the plain but apparently taboo word ‘old’, and it has strong connotations of frailty and helplessness—hence the need for ‘cocooning’, wrapping the frail and helpless in cotton wool. I’m sure the term ‘cocooning’ was chosen to sound warm and caring, but for those who remain fit and active (as many people do in their 70s and even beyond), the policy might well sound more like house arrest, removing all personal freedom at a stroke. It’s true that social distancing restricts everyone’s freedom, but the degree of restriction envisaged for the over-70s is extreme—no leaving the house or seeing anyone in person for months—and I don’t think it helps to dress that up in warm and fuzzy words. (Especially if you’re leaving it to volunteers to make sure that ‘cocooned’ people who don’t have family nearby, or at all, can still access food and other necessities.)

As someone who’s not far from being ‘elderly’ myself, I’m not surprised that some people over 70 are resisting the official advice (which is not (yet) being stringently enforced). I doubt that’s because they’re unaware that rates of serious illness and death from COVID-19 rise steeply after the age of 60, but they might think there are other factors to consider (like the effects of such prolonged isolation/immobility on mental health) when deciding if extreme measures are necessary or desirable for them personally. What the world seems to think, however, is that any ‘elderly’ person who resists being ‘cocooned’ is simply proving that old people in general are muddle-headed and irresponsible, in denial about the risks they face and incapable of making rational decisions. They must be nagged, patronised and held up as Bad Examples on social media by people who know better, not uncommonly their own children.

A lot of this discourse is covertly sexist as well as ageist. Because ‘elderly’ (does anyone, of any age, actually ‘identify as’ ‘elderly’?) connotes ‘frail and helpless, in need of protection’, we tend to imagine the prototypical ‘elderly’ person as a woman. I’ve noticed it’s most often the behaviour of their mothers that prompts people in their 30s and 40s to take to Facebook or Twitter to recount examples of ‘reckless’ behaviour and solicit advice on how to stop it. Of course this anxiety is fuelled by love, and the fear that comes with love; and of course there are old people (of both sexes) who really are extremely frail and at very high risk. But where people are still healthy and independent, neither the government nor their younger family members will get through to them by patronising and infantilising them.

Meanwhile, the populist (and in some cases, ‘elderly’) male political leaders who have cast themselves as latter-day Churchills make a public spectacle of their recklessness. They’re no longer suggesting, as Donald Trump initially did, that the pandemic is either a hoax or ‘just the flu’, but they go on ostentatiously shaking hands: not long ago Boris Johnson boasted that he had shaken hands with people who had COVID-19, while Trump said he would continue to shake hands with anyone who might ‘want to say hello’, adding that if they ‘want to hug you and kiss you, I don’t care’. When he and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro were found to have had close contact with someone who later tested positive for the virus, both said initially that they saw no need to get tested themselves. (Trump later announced he had tested negative.)

These are performances of masculinity (of which the firm handshake, in particular, has long been a powerful symbol), and of imagined alpha-male invincibility. They say ‘I’m not afraid, I’m not a wimp, I’m hard enough to take the risks I’m telling others to avoid’. Which is bullshit at the best of times, and even more so when the risks they’re taking are potentially harmful to others too. And it isn’t just ageing politicians who think there’s something emasculating about following advice to act responsibly. According to one report on the introduction of stricter social distancing measures in Britain, ‘millennial men have been the worst offenders at failing to reduce their contact with other people, continuing to visit pubs, travel widely and take part in other social events’.

Finally in this round-up of ‘mandemic’ rhetoric, let’s not overlook the early signs that anti-feminism may be replicating alongside the novel coronavirus. National crises tend to turn people’s minds to what kind of world they’d like to build when it’s all over, and these visions of a better future are often marked by nostalgia for the past—especially when it comes to the roles of men and women. During World War II, comparisons with which have already become a cliché of pandemic-talk, women like the iconic ‘Rosie the Riveter’ were drafted in to help the war effort by filling the roles male combatants had vacated; but afterwards they faced intense pressure to become the dependent housewives whose profound dissatisfactions Betty Friedan would later write about in The Feminine Mystique.

If you’re thinking, ‘OK, but we’ve moved on since 1945’, consider the fact that the closure of schools across Britain yesterday prompted this ruminative tweet from a man whose profile identifies him as a trades unionist and ‘Blue Labour’ supporter (i.e. economically on the left but socially conservative):

One of the downsides of the shift towards an economic structure & culture in which both parents are expected to work is that domestic chaos ensues when a crisis hits. We need to build an economy which allows families to enjoy a good standard of living on the wages of one earner.

This does illustrate one way in which we have, perhaps, moved on: it is written in impeccably gender-neutral or ‘inclusive’ language. But as I’ve pointed out before, that formal inclusiveness often masks a clearly gendered meaning. I’m willing to bet that when you read the tweet you drew a non-random conclusion about which parent he was imagining as the ‘earner’, and which would be assigned responsibility for staving off ‘domestic chaos’. (And don’t bother asking about single parents: though they’ve always existed, nostalgia generally renders them invisible.)

Watch out for the bullshit, and whenever you come into contact with it, wash your hands.

Gentlemanly sexism

Writing in the Law Society Gazette this week, Joshua Rozenberg asked why Lady (Brenda) Hale, who was president of the Supreme Court of the UK from 2017 until her retirement last month, did not get the job in 2012 when she first put herself forward. He draws on the account given by an insider, Lord Hope, who retired in 2013 and has since published his diaries. What he says is revealing, not just about the workings of the Supreme Court, but about a particular kind of sexism and the language that goes with it.

Below are some of the statements Rozenberg quotes from the parts of Lord Hope’s  diaries where he talks about Lady Hale. Most date from 2012, the year when she put herself forward for the presidency of the court but was not selected, and 2013, when she succeeded Lord Hope as deputy president.

1. [She is] a formidable, vigorous person with a strong agenda of her own.
2. Another colleague said that, if she is so touchy, it must be doubtful whether she would be a suitable president.
3. The picture that she presents of the relationship between men and women is not one which most women share. This is a pity, as she is such an excellent lawyer and does so much that is good for the court.
4. Her time will no doubt come, but not now.
5. The in-house vote was strongly in favour of Jonathan, probably because Brenda is not easy to deal with, frightens some people and is so relentless in her pursuit of her agenda about women.
6. There are some tense moments with Brenda, of course, but she is not at all untrustworthy or unreliable. She is just confrontational and sharp when she senses an inefficiency or a gender issue which the rest of us do not understand. Those brief moments take nothing away from the immense contribution which she makes to the work of the court.

Is this what it looks like at first glance–a balanced assessment of a colleague’s strengths and weaknesses, offered by someone with no axe to grind–or is it something else? There are clues in the language: three things, in particular, are worth taking a closer look at.

First, let’s look at the adjectives Lord Hope uses to describe Lady Hale. Only one of these–‘excellent’ in ‘such an excellent lawyer’–is strongly and unequivocally positive: the rest cover a spectrum from weakly or equivocally positive to clearly negative. Under ‘weakly or equivocally positive’ I’d put ‘a formidable, vigorous person’, because ‘formidable’ belongs to a set of code-words I’ve talked about before, which are used to suggest that a woman is capable but intimidating. An even more equivocal assessment is ‘not at all untrustworthy or unreliable’. At best it’s the faintest of faint praise (‘trustworthy and reliable’ seems like a pretty low bar for a Supreme Court justice); at worst it implies that Lady Hale might be suspected of untrustworthiness/unreliability (why defend her against an accusation no one would dream of making?) Then we have ‘touchy’, ‘not easy to deal with’, ‘relentless’, ‘confrontational’ and ‘sharp’. All of these are clearly–and with the exception of ‘not easy to deal with’, quite strongly–negative.

Most of the negative adjectives (e.g. ‘touchy’, ‘confrontational’, ‘sharp’) relate to what the HR department would call ‘interpersonal skills’: we’re being told that Lady Hale, though ‘an excellent lawyer’, is difficult to work with. That criticism is amplified in a series of statements about the effect she has on others–though Lord Hope does not specify who those others are, leaving us to infer that what he’s describing is not just his own reaction, but everyone’s. For instance: ‘Brenda is not easy to deal with’ (not easy for who to deal with?), ‘she frightens some people’ (which people?) and ‘there are some tense moments with Brenda, of course’ (who gets tense at these moments? Why ‘of course’?) Since ‘Brenda’ is the only person mentioned specifically, she is effectively being portrayed in these statements as the sole source or cause of any conflict.

The third thing that’s interesting about Lord Hope’s comments is their rhetorical structure. In many of the examples I’ve quoted he constructs himself as impartial and even-handed using sentences with a two-part structure, where one part makes a negative assessment and the other qualifies it with something more positive:

This is a pity / as she is such an excellent lawyer and does so much that is good for the court

There are some tense moments with Brenda, of course / but she is not at all untrustworthy or unreliable

She is just confrontational and sharp when she senses an inefficiency or a gender issue which the rest of us do not understand. / But those brief moments take nothing away from the immense contribution she makes to the work of the court

Sometimes the order is the opposite, apparent approval followed by something that undercuts it:

[She is] a formidable, vigorous person / with a strong agenda of her own

This rhetorical structure, in which every negative is juxtaposed with a positive, is what produces the impression of balance or even-handedness. But if we look beyond the structure, we might think that the balance is not even. Whereas the negative points are clear and specific (‘frightens some people’; ‘confrontational and sharp’), the positive ones are either equivocal (‘not at all untrustworthy or unreliable’) or else they are fulsome but vague generalities like ‘does so much that is good for the court’, or ‘the immense contribution she makes’. This is the kind of phraseology you might use in a recommendation letter for someone you either don’t know very well or don’t think very much of–it’s bland, formulaic and lacking any genuine enthusiasm.

The other thing that tips the balance towards the negative side is the repeated references to Lady Hale’s ‘agenda about women’. In this judicial context, the word ‘agenda’ itself has negative connotations of partiality and bias; to make matters worse, Lady Hale’s agenda is ‘strong’ and her pursuit of it ‘relentless’. Her concerns are also by implication obscure (involving issues ‘which the rest of us do not understand’), and unrepresentative of the constituency she claims to speak for (‘the picture she presents….is not one which most women share’). Lord Hope does not explain how he knows what most women think, or why he considers himself better qualified to speak for them than Lady Hale. Perhaps he thinks it’s because he doesn’t have an ‘agenda’.

Lord Hope’s comments on Lady Hale exemplify something I’m going to call ‘gentlemanly sexism’, meaning a form of sexism which is prevalent in institutions dominated by ‘gentlemen’, members of what might be called the ‘establishment’. These men, often though not always from a privileged social class, are highly educated, self-confident and accustomed to getting what they want, but their style is understated: they value courtesy, civility, fairness and emotional control. Their sexism isn’t aggressive or vulgar, but it is sexism nevertheless; and since it’s the sexism of men who wield a fair amount of power, it’s by no means inconsequential.

Lord Hope’s comments on Lady Hale have two characteristics which I think of as hallmarks of gentlemanly sexism. First, there’s the effortless superiority–the way he unselfconsciously, or perhaps unconsciously, positions himself ‘above’ Lady Hale. Though she is a peer rather than a subordinate, he takes it for granted he is both qualified and entitled to make authoritative pronouncements on her strengths and weaknesses, her prospects, and the legitimacy or otherwise of her concerns. His assessments, both positive and negative (‘an excellent lawyer…her time will no doubt come…not easy to deal with…not at all untrustworthy or unreliable’), are presented less as personal opinions, of the kind everyone is proverbially entitled to, and more as definitive judgments delivered from on high. The language may be measured, but the gesture itself is presumptuous.

Second, there’s his mastery of the gentlemanly art of undermining people while appearing to be scrupulously fair or even generous (‘such an excellent lawyer…does so much that is good for the court’). The weapons gentlemen prefer are subtle: it’s all about what they don’t say, the faintness or blandness of their praise, the cautionary ‘but’ clause–‘she’s clearly very able, but she’s not easy to deal with’, or ‘a formidable person, but she has her own agenda’.

I don’t want to suggest these tactics are only used against women. Essentially they’re used to exclude or limit the influence of people who are seen as potentially disruptive, and not all of those people are women. Conversely, not all women are seen as disruptive. But Lady Hale evidently was seen in that way, particularly after she put herself forward for the presidency. According to Joshua Rozenberg her colleagues on that occasion wanted ‘anyone but Brenda’; a year later she wasn’t their first choice for deputy president either. Even when her time did come, her ‘agenda’ remained contentious. As recently as last summer, Rozenberg tells us, she felt impelled to address the issue in a speech:

What is this “Brenda agenda” and why should voicing it arouse such feelings? It is, quite simply, the belief that women are equal to men and should enjoy the same rights and freedoms that they do; but that women’s lives are necessarily sometimes different from men’s and the experience of leading those lives is just as valid and important in shaping the law as is the experience of men’s lives.

To a feminist this is not particularly controversial. But it’s not surprising if it ‘arouses feelings’ among men like Lady Hale’s colleagues, who may well have spent large parts of their lives in predominantly or exclusively male institutions, and who have undoubtedly benefited from the worldview she is challenging, according to which men are the default humans and their perspective is simply neutral, the proverbial ‘view from nowhere’. For some men that challenge causes deep discomfort, and they react by casting the challenger as an obsessive, a nag and a bully–or in more gentlemanly language, ‘relentless in her pursuit of her agenda’. It reminds me of the way some men complain that women talk ‘incessantly’, when in reality they talk less than men: this only makes sense if we assume the men are measuring women’s volubility not against their own, but against the belief that women should be silent. Similarly, the charge that Lady Hale harped ‘relentlessly’ on women might only mean that she broached the subject occasionally rather than never.

Now she has retired, perhaps Lady Hale will also publish her diaries, and give us her perspective on those ‘tense moments with Brenda’. But I suspect she probably won’t– either because she’s got more important things to do, or because she’s more of a gentleman than the gentlemen.

The battle of the big girl’s blouse

During Prime Minister’s Questions this week, Boris Johnson accused the Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn of being scared to fight an early General Election (the government would like to call one, but they have so far failed to get the votes they need to do it). As Corbyn charged the prime minister with being ‘desperate’, Johnson was heard to shout, ‘Call an election, you great big girl’s blouse!’

‘Big girl’s blouse’ is an expression of contempt for weak and wimpy men. The OED’s first citation for it (i.e., the first written record they could find—I can testify from personal experience that it was used in everyday speech in Britain before 1969) comes from a TV sitcom called Nearest and Dearest, where it was used by the main female character Nellie (a middle-aged working class northerner played by Lancashire actress Hylda Baker) to berate her useless brother Eli, with whom she ran the family pickle factory.

An entry for the phrase on Wordhistories.net suggests that its meaning derives from an analogy between a ‘feeble, cowardly man “in a flap”…and an oversized garment hanging loose’. I don’t find that entirely convincing, though, because it doesn’t explain the gendered nature of the insult. Its target is always male, and the point is to deride him as unmanly. You see this very clearly in one of the examples the entry reproduces, from a 1986 sports report in the Guardian:

The last time Liverpool lost in a home league match against Chelsea was in 1935. The following year scientists isolated the principal female hormone and there are those at Anfield who will tell you that Chelsea have been playing like big girls’ blouses ever since.

The reference to female hormones suggests to me that what the writer wants to conjure up isn’t a mental picture of an outsize garment flapping around. Something is being made here of what’s inside a ‘big girl’s blouse’ when its owner wears it. A ‘big girl’s blouse’ is a man who’s soft when he should be hard: metaphorically he has breasts instead of balls.

As Declan Kavanagh observed on Twitter, this is a classic example of an ‘effeminophobic’ insult, and Boris Johnson’s use of it prompted some debate about whether he was guilty of sexism or homophobia. The answer is surely that any insult whose core meaning is ‘effeminate/emasculated man’ is both homophobic (insofar as popular homophobia conflates being gay with being effeminate) and sexist. Its sexism is slightly less straightforward than the sexism of, say, ‘bitch’, or ‘slut’, because unlike those two epithets it’s used to insult men rather than women. But that should not prevent us from noticing that its force depends on a sexist presupposition. It follows the rule I alluded to in my last post, that one reliable way to insult a man (of any sexuality) is to attribute female or feminine qualities to him.

Why is the attribution of femininity insulting to men? Not only because it implies gender nonconformity (though that’s part of the story), but also because it demotes the target from a dominant to a subordinate position. It exploits, in other words, the tacit understanding that gender isn’t just a difference, it’s a hierarchy. That’s why, although it’s possible to insult a woman by attributing masculine qualities to her (especially if you’re talking about how she looks), it’s also possible for that gesture to be a compliment (‘you think like a man’ is a classic example: we’re supposed to be flattered by this ‘promotion’ to the ranks of the superior thinkers). Attributing femininity to a man, by contrast, pretty much always implies a downgrading of his status.

Feminists were in no doubt that ‘big girl’s blouse’ is a sexist expression, and some quickly set about ‘reclaiming’ it, composing tweets which recontextualised the insult as part of a positive message of resistance to sexism. Sophie Walker, the former leader of the Women’s Equality Party, tweeted:

Today at Young Women’s Trust we are all wearing our #BigGirl’sBlouse to fight the gendered job roles and sex discrimination that’s holding back the brilliant young women we need in all our workplaces and decision-making spaces

Another feminist photographed a pink shirt on a washing line, explaining that

This is the #BigGirlsBlouse I wore yesterday, when I went to talk to an employer about how they can protect their staff from #sexualharassment. They’re especially keen to tackle the everyday, ‘low-level’ sexism that erodes people’s status at work. The gov’t could learn from them!

There were also tweets like this one, thanking Johnson for inspiring the writer to take action:

Well this Big Girls Blouse has just contacted her local Labour CLP and offered to campaign for the first time ever. I’m 52 and a 40 E cup in case it’s of interest to Boris. And me and my assets will now be doing all we can to bury him. Thanks for the inspiration. #BigGirlsBlouse

Whether sexist insults can be ‘reclaimed’ is one of the questions I’m asked most frequently: to my mind it’s a complicated issue, and the reaction to ‘big girl’s blouse’ is quite a good illustration of its complexity.

The way #BigGirl’sBlouse has been taken up on Twitter exemplifies what might be called ‘opportunistic’ reclaiming–intervening in a specific context to get a specific, and usually limited, effect. It’s the same thing feminists did with ‘[such a] nasty woman’ after Donald Trump used the phrase to describe Hillary Clinton. I call it ‘opportunistic’ (which I don’t mean to imply a negative judgment—being able to seize the moment is an important political skill) because you’re essentially exploiting a political opportunity created by your opponent, using his own insulting words to criticise and/or ridicule him. The goal isn’t really to reclaim ‘nasty woman’ or ‘big girl’s blouse’ by turning them into terms of feminist approbation; on the contrary, in fact, it’s to make these expressions less acceptable in future.

Another well-known example of this type is the use of the term ‘slut walk’ to name a protest against rape culture which was organised in response to a police officer’s comment that if women didn’t want to be raped they shouldn’t dress like sluts. Opinions on this one differ: mine is that the original slut walk was a great example of seizing the moment–taking the opportunity to call out an egregious piece of public slut-shaming–but that’s where it should really have stopped. Now that most onlookers can no longer connect the concept of a slut walk to the context in which it originally emerged, the political message has become less clear, and it’s been accused of uncritically celebrating an inherently sexist concept (though in fairness, the founder of the slut walks, Amber Rose, has said herself that she’d like the word ‘slut’ to become obsolete.)

A different type of reclamation involves repurposing a term that was historically an insult as a positive marker of group identity and solidarity, though its use as such is usually restricted to group members and trusted allies. Examples include ‘crip’ (as used by some disability activists) ‘dyke’ and ‘queer’, as well as, some would argue, ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ (which are used by some female speakers as terms of endearment, though that doesn’t mean they’d accept them from non-intimates). ‘Big girl’s blouse’ is not a good candidate for this kind of reclamation, because although it expresses contempt for women, it is not used directly to insult them. It’s not obvious in this case who would want to reclaim it as an identity marker: its targets, allegedly ‘effeminate’ or wimpy men, do not form a coherent political community.

Even where there is such a community, though, the reclamation of insults as positive identity labels tends to generate internal dissent. ‘Queer’ is a case in point: you increasingly see it being used positively, but surveys have found that a lot of LGBT community members, especially gay men, do not find this in-group use acceptable. Some say they will never be willing to call themselves by a word their experience has led them to associate with being verbally abused, threatened and even assaulted. While words continue to be used as slurs, some of the people targeted by them will find proposals to reclaim them insensitive and insulting.

With ‘queer’, the aim of the pro-reclamation camp is not just to make the word positive for in-group members, but also to make it more generally usable as a neutral, descriptive term. The idea is that ‘queer’ should be as widely accepted as ‘gay’ has become in recent decades. Similarly, there have been regular proposals to reclaim ‘cunt’ as simply a non-clinical descriptive term for the female genitals (though as I’ve explained elsewhere, I doubt that will ever happen).

One word that women did succeed in reclaiming as a neutral descriptive term is the word ‘woman’ itself. ‘Woman’ was not a strongly pejorative term like ‘cunt’ or ‘queer’, but it was often felt to be ‘impolite’ and therefore avoided or replaced. Historically the politeness issue had been about class distinctions: it was insulting to call female people of a certain social status ‘women’ rather than ‘ladies’. But even after that distinction had been lost, the idea lingered on that ‘lady’ was polite while ‘woman’ was disrespectful. Feminists were critical of what they saw as the squeamish avoidance of ‘woman’, and they made a concerted effort to establish it as simply the unmarked or default way to refer to an adult female. Broadly speaking that effort was successful (though ‘woman’ has since become contentious for other reasons, and the baggage that made people uncomfortable with it in the past remains visible in, for instance, the dictionary and thesaurus entries that recently inspired a petition complaining about their sexism).

In some cases it’s pointless to try to reclaim a word, because social change has made its use as an insult, and sometimes its use for any purpose, a non-issue. An example is ‘old maid’, a derogatory label for a no-longer young woman who, as people used to say, has been ‘left on the shelf’. In a world where unmarried women are no longer social outcasts or freaks, this term has lost its sting, and much of its currency: in the unlikely event that someone did call you an old maid, you’d probably assume they meant it as a joke.

If you’d asked me before this week, I’d have put ‘big girl’s blouse’ in the same category of archaic joke-insults. I hadn’t heard it in years; to hear it being uttered in the House of Commons, especially by someone who’s younger than I am, was more of a surprise than an affront. Though I don’t dispute that it’s a sexist expression, what it connotes, at least to me (perhaps because I first encountered it in the school playground 50 years ago), is an old-fashioned and particularly puerile kind of sexism. In short, I thought Boris Johnson sounded silly and childish calling Jeremy Corbyn a ‘great big girl’s blouse’.

It has since turned out that this is not the only occasion on which Johnson has resorted to the language of the playground. Last month, as he and his advisers planned to sideline Parliament in the crucial run-up to Brexit, he wrote a note in which he referred to fellow-Old Etonian David Cameron as a ‘girly swot’. Critics have been quick to diagnose arrested development, and to blame it on the British upper-class habit of sending impressionable children to single-sex boarding schools. But in fact this isn’t just a British problem: all over the world (in the US, the Philippines, Brazil) we are seeing the rise of middle-aged, misogynist man-children whose political rhetoric leans heavily on crude and puerile insults. When we criticise Boris Johnson’s language we need to see it in that context–as an outward and visible symptom of a deeper political malaise.

The header image shows a detail from one of Ronald Searle’s illustrations for Willans and Searle’s series of  Molesworth books

Hold my beer

This week we learned that the organisers of the Great British Beer Festival, an annual event sponsored by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, have taken the radical decision to ban alcoholic beverages with sexist names. The products which were said to have fallen foul of this new policy included a cider called ‘Slack Alice’ (whose makers describe it, hilariously, as ‘a little tart’), and beers named ‘Dizzy Blonde’, ‘Village Bike’ and ‘Leg Spreader’. A quick trawl of the internet produced a number of other potential candidates, such as ‘Bristol’s Ale’ (‘I’ll let the image reproduced below speak for itself), ‘Top Totty’, and ‘Voluptuous Vicky’.

In my last post, about the sexism of dictionary and thesaurus entries for the word ‘woman’, I pointed out that the vocabulary of English is rich in terms that represent women as men’s inferiors, dependents, servants and sexual objects. The beer and cider names just mentioned cover most of these bases—as with ‘humorous’ greeting cards and ‘saucy’ seaside postcards, there seems to be a particular obsession with double-entendres featuring breasts—but the thing I find most striking is how many of them are drawn from a very specific part of the lexicon of sexism: the extensive and elaborate set of terms which mean ‘an unchaste or promiscuous woman’. One who spreads her legs for any man, or has been ‘ridden’ by every man in the village. Who is ‘slack’, a ‘little tart’, a strumpet, a slut, a whore.

As feminists have been pointing out for at least the last 45 years, there is no analogous set of slur-terms denoting men. Men who have a lot of sex are ‘studs’ rather than ‘whores’. ‘Gigolo’ can be an insult, but that’s about it. As Amanda Montell summarises the rule in her recent book Wordslut: (incidentally, I’m not going to get into the debate on reclaiming ‘slut’, but there’s a good concise discussion of the word’s past and present uses in this blog post by Nancy Friedman):

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

Even then, as Montell observes, there are far more insults based on the first principle than the second. Where do they all come from?

Quite a few are the result of a process which the linguist Muriel Schulz named ‘the semantic derogation of women’. As she explained:

Again and again in the history of the language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or a woman may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications, at first perhaps only slightly disparaging, but after a period of time becoming abusive and ending as a sexual slur.

‘Tart’, for instance, started out as a term of endearment, like ‘sweetie’ or ‘cupcake’. ‘Hussy’ is a variant of ‘housewife’, a neutral occupational label. ‘Slut’ was always negative, but in its earlier meaning of ‘untidy or slovenly person’ it wasn’t a sexual slur. ‘Slack’, as in ‘Slack Alice’, can be applied to people of either sex, but it only means ‘unchaste, promiscuous’ when it’s used about a woman. If I criticised a man for being ‘slack’ I’d be implying that he was lazy or careless, not sexually incontinent or undiscriminating in his choice of partners. (Similarly, we can talk about ‘loose women’, but not ‘loose men’.)

Female promiscuity and prostitution belong to the set of socially taboo subjects which tend to generate a lot of slang words. The variety and inventiveness of this vocabulary has often been celebrated by lovers of language. There’s a famous literary example in John Barth’s novel The Sot-Weed Factor, a 1960s pastiche of 18th century picaresque novels like Tom Jones, where two characters identified as prostitutes engage in a prolonged verbal duel (it goes on for several pages) consisting entirely of English and French epithets meaning ‘prostitute’.

“The truth is,” said the dealer, “Grace here’s a hooker.”
“A what?” asked the poet.
“A hooker,” the woman repeated with a wink. “A quail, don’t ye know.”
“A quail!” the woman named Grace shrieked. “You call me a quail, you, you gaullefretière!”
“Whore!” shouted the first.
“Bas-cul!” retorted the other.
“Frisker!”
“Consoeur!”
“Trull!”
“Friquenelle!”
“Sow!”
“Usagère!”
“Bawd!”

Amanda Montell also notes that some promiscuous woman-terms are ‘fun to say’. Archaic-sounding words like ‘strumpet’ and ‘harlot’, or newer coinages like ‘skankly hobag’, are colourful, exotic, over the top; other terms are ‘fun’ because, like ‘village bike’, they involve some kind of play on words. In all this celebration of linguistic creativity, it’s easy to forget that what we’re looking at is a long list of sexual, and sexist, slurs.

But why, you may be wondering, would sexual slur-terms be considered good names for alcoholic beverages? What are you trying to say when you call your product ‘Leg Spreader’ or ‘Village Bike’? Is it, ‘hey, lads, this one’s as good as Rohypnol if you’re looking to get your end away’? Or ‘this beer is convenient and undemanding–good for a quickie in the car-park, but you wouldn’t take it home to meet your parents’? Or is the point just to associate a product that targets a certain (male) demographic with something else that demographic is believed to be keen on?

Actually, I don’t think what’s behind these names is the old adage that ‘sex sells’ (there’s surely nothing sexy or aspirational about the Village Bike): what they’re selling has more to do with masculinity and male camaraderie. Beer, after all, is the classic male homosocial beverage, the one men consume while engaged in stereotypically male homosocial activities like watching the football on TV or having a night in the pub with the lads. Arguably, what’s being referenced in names like ‘Leg Spreader’ and ‘Village Bike’ is the stereotypical language of male homosocial bonding—our old friend ‘banter’, which, just like the crude beer names, is transgressive, politically incorrect and resolutely non-serious (hence the common coupling of the term ‘banter’ with words like ‘irreverent’, ‘witty’ and ‘light-hearted’).

In support of this interpretation I will cite what I consider to be—at least for this purpose—an unimpeachable source, namely the comments made on the CAMRA ban by readers of the Daily Mail. There were three points that recurred in this set of comments. The first (though in fairness it did not command universal agreement) was that beer is a man’s drink, and that in attempting to make it less off-putting to women, CAMRA was alienating its core constituency. The second point, which did command more or less universal agreement, was that banning ‘Slack Alice’ et al. was ‘PC nonsense’; and the third was that anyone who found these ‘light hearted’ names offensive must be a miserable git with no sense of humour.

Interestingly, a fair number of commenters felt impelled to add that in their experience, women are not at all offended by expressions like ‘village bike’. ‘All the women I know find this funny’, wrote one. ‘My wife’, affirmed another, ‘thinks [the ban] is PC, puerile condescension’. Yet another recalled that his ‘good lady’, an enthusiastic patron of beer festivals for many years, had only ever been put off a beer by its name on one occasion, when someone offered her a glass of ‘Old Fart’.

It’s always suspicious when a conversation about sexism consists predominantly of men making claims about what their wives, female friends and colleagues think, while the women themselves remain conspicuously silent. (The extract I quoted earlier from The Sot-Weed Factor is another case of a man putting words in women’s mouths and attitudes in their imaginary heads.)  But that’s not to say that the Mail readers’ wives, if asked, would share CAMRA’s attitude to ‘Slack Alice’ and her ilk. Women’s relationship to sexual slur terms is complicated: they have their own reasons for tolerating this kind of sexism, and even on occasion for joining in with it.

For many women who are not feminists, men’s fondness for beer, banter and busty women comes under the heading of ‘boys will be boys’. It’s seen as harmless, and they indulge it. It’s also common for casual sexism to be presented in the way the Mail comments do, as ‘light-hearted’, just a bit of fun. If you object to it, you’ll be that humourless person (and if you’re female, worse still, that humourless feminist killjoy) who doesn’t get, or can’t take, a joke. As I’ve said before, the charge of having no sense of humour is a surprisingly powerful one, and women are especially vulnerable to it (since it’s an old sexist stereotype that women can’t tell or understand jokes).

Another reason women may tolerate, or indeed actively embrace, the language of ‘sluts’ and ‘strumpets’ and ‘village bikes’ is to distinguish themselves from the women those epithets are aimed at. It certainly shouldn’t be thought that only men call women whores: there’s abundant evidence that women have been calling each other whores for centuries. What is known in modern parlance as ‘slut-shaming’ has long been, and continues to be, a way for women in patriarchal societies to exercise power over other women. Because of that, as I noted in an earlier post about sex and swearing, exchanges of sexual slurs between women were not usually light-hearted: accusations of unchastity could not be taken lightly, because a woman whose reputation was damaged by them faced real and serious social consequences. In some communities and situations that’s still the case today.

But surely, you might be thinking, you can’t compare the representation of women in beer names and on pumpclips with the slut-shaming of women in real life. ‘Slack Alice’ and ‘Voluptuous Vicky’ aren’t real people: their names may be sexist, but they’re clearly intended to be humorous, and arguably the humour is more affectionate than contemptuous. If you look at their visual representation, you’ll also notice that these women are presented as figures from a bygone age. They exemplify, in fact, the advertising strategy that the cultural critic Judith Williamson labels ‘retrosexism’, where you use obviously ‘retro’ imagery (in this case it’s most often drawn from the mid-20th century visual language of either the seaside postcard or the pin-up photograph) to locate sexism firmly in the past. The implication is that we all know this isn’t meant to be taken seriously: the past was another country, and we’re enlightened enough now to look back and laugh at the absurdity of it.

As Williamson says, though, in reality the world is still full of entirely unreconstructed and un-ironic sexism. The retro style may be dated, but the substance–objectifying women and judging them by a sexual double standard which is not applied to men–shows no sign of withering away. In her view what retrosexism really expresses is nostalgia: the longing of many men, and some women, for a time when sexism wasn’t just (as it still is) a thing, but an acceptable, taken-for-granted thing. A time when nobody complained that tit jokes were offensive, or lectured cider-makers about slut-shaming, or tried to attract more women to beer festivals.

In Britain in 2019 there’s an awful lot of this nostalgia about—expressed not just in retrosexism but also retronationalism and retroimperialism. In that sense, the popularity of crudely sexist beer-names and 1940s imagery is a depressing sign of the times. I’m glad to see that CAMRA, at least, is not just keeping calm and carrying on.

All the images reproduced in this post are taken from Pumpclip Parade, a blog dedicated to ‘aesthetic atrocities from the world of beer’ 

Deeper and down: verbal hygiene for men

Like every other feminist in recorded history, I sometimes get asked, ‘But what about the men? Why do you only write about the linguistic injustices suffered by women?’

The short answer is that we live in a world that treats men as the default humans, and that is reflected both in our use of language and in our public conversations about it. Of course men’s speech may attract negative judgments if they belong to a group that’s a perennial target for this kind of criticism (like ‘young people’ or ‘foreigners’ or ‘speakers with working-class accents’), but they are rarely targeted specifically because they’re men. We don’t, for instance, see men’s employers sending them on courses to learn to speak more like women. And when did you last read an opinion piece in a newspaper criticizing some irritating male ‘verbal tic’?

But while men’s language doesn’t attract the same relentless scrutiny as women’s, that doesn’t mean it isn’t policed at all. Masculinity in general is pretty heavily policed, as any man or boy will tell you who’s ever been bullied for his failure to measure up to its exacting standards. But what those standards embody is the same sexist and misogynist belief-system that oppresses women. They police the boundary between the dominant and the dominated, with a view to maintaining the patriarchal status quo. Hence the Prime Directive of masculinity, from which no self-respecting male may deviate: ‘don’t be like a woman’. Don’t throw/run/play like a girl. Don’t like girly things. Don’t cry, or show weakness, or talk about your feelings. Don’t be a sissy, a pussy, or anybody’s bitch.

There are forms of language policing which are clearly related to the Prime Directive. For instance, while researching my last post, about the woman who allegedly faked a ‘deep baritone voice’, I stumbled into a part of the internet where men seek advice, or offer other men advice, on how to make their voices deeper. This quest is based on a simple assumption: the deeper the voice, the more masculine the man. Going lower is desirable, not only because it underscores the all-important difference between men and women, but also because it enables men to claim a higher status among their peers.

As I explored this subgenre of verbal hygiene, I found two things particularly striking. First, it seems to be an all-male affair, a case of men policing other men. Though I can’t claim to have made an exhaustive survey, I didn’t come across a single case where the advice-giver or self-proclaimed expert was a woman. Second, a surprisingly high proportion of it is undisguised quackery, a mixture of old-fashioned snake-oil cures (‘why not buy my patent voice-deepening vitamin supplement?’) and Viz Comic-style top tips, some predictable (‘breathe deeply and speak from the diaphragm’) and others less so (‘use a mentholated chest-rub when you go to bed and your voice will be lower in the morning’).

Of all the top tips I read, I think my favourite was probably this one:

How to Instantly Get a Deeper Voice

Step 1: Tilt your head back as far as you can.
Step 2: Recite the sentence “Bing, Bong. Ding, Dong. King Kong.” slowly, stretching/elongating the “ng” sound for each.
Step 3: Repeat step 2 but at a deeper pitch
Step 4: Repeat again, this time at your deepest possible pitch.

Congratulations, you now have a deeper, manlier and sexier voice. At least for the next day or so. Enjoy.

Reader, I laughed: it’s difficult not to laugh at the picture this conjures up, of men around the world throwing their heads back and intoning ‘Bing bong, ding dong, king kong’. But while the activity itself may seem harmless (if absurd), what’s behind it is arguably not so funny. What I haven’t told you yet is where I found this top tip: it was posted on a forum for followers of the pick-up artist Roosh V. Like other denizens of the manosphere—incels, MGTOWs, crusading men’s rights activists—PUAs buy into a toxic ideology of masculinity and male power, and their obsession with deep voices is clearly part of that. As the giver of the ‘bing-bong’ advice explains,

A deep voice is an inherently masculine strait [sic], being a symptom of both size and testosterone levels. Deep voices elicit attraction from women and respect from men.

Other sources clarify that these two benefits are linked: what really commands the respect of your peers is the ability to attract the ‘right’ women, the ones men regard as trophies (which is also to say, not as people. In this video, for instance, the presenter promises men who follow his voice-deepening instructions that ‘you’ll have your pick of the litter to sleep with’.) What PUAs call ‘game’, meaning ‘manipulating women for sex’, is a contest that pits men against both women and each other: the gratification it provides is at least as much about power and status as it is about sex per se.

But though the game by definition produces winners and losers, a recurring theme in all the advice I looked at is that everyone can be a winner: alpha-male status is not reserved for a few men who’ve won the genetic lottery, but can be achieved by any man who’s willing to make the effort. This classic self-improvement message makes a lot of voice-deepening advice seem very old-school, reminiscent of those 1950s ads where some former teenage wimp who’d had sand kicked in his face once too often explains how, with the help of Charles Atlas, he turned himself into the Incredible Hulk. Along those lines, the PUA prefaces his ‘bing bong’ advice with some personal testimony:

I was born…with a typical, merely average pitched voice. I was also born with a perfectionist streak which when met with discovering game and self-improvement meant maximizing all my attributes as best I possibly could, so having a merely average pitch voice was no longer good enough.

Mr Bing Bong represents the amateur end of the spectrum; at the other end is the slicker, more professional approach adopted by entrepreneurs like Dr Sam Robbins, the purveyor of a formula designed to deepen men’s voices permanently by increasing their testosterone levels ‘naturally’. As he explains in this promotional video, what he’s offering is a more expensive option than chanting or breathing deeply, but it’s also far more effective. And if you do buy the product, you won’t just be rewarded with the respect of your peers and the attentions of attractive women. Your investment will be repaid in actual money. Like the actor James Earl Jones, who was once paid a million dollars just for uttering the words ‘This is CNN’, you will benefit from the scientifically-proven fact that deeper-voiced men earn more than their higher-pitched peers.

This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered the claim that lower-voiced men earn more, and I was starting to wonder where it came from. So I did a bit of digging, and eventually concluded that in this case the source was probably an article published in 2013 under the title ‘Voice Pitch Predicts Labor Market Success among Male Chief Executive Officers’. This article reports on a study that examined the relationship between the pitch of a male CEO’s voice and the size of the company he worked for. Analysis revealed, as the researchers had predicted, that larger companies typically had lower-pitched CEOs. These deep-voiced men did earn more than their higher-voiced counterparts, but the income differential was not directly linked to voice-pitch. Rather it was a by-product of the link to company size, reflecting the fact that big companies generally pay their executives more.

There are a number of problems with this study which I won’t dwell on, because for the purposes of this discussion they’re a side-issue; but even if we took the findings at face value, they still wouldn’t license the conclusion implied by Sam Robbins’s sales-pitch–that men can increase their earnings by lowering their voice-pitch. Apart from anything else, the study only makes claims about one particular group of men, namely CEOs of public companies. Why would we expect a deep voice to confer the same financial benefits on Joe the Plumber or Jon the IT guy? Yet I’d guess it’s mostly the Joes and the Jons who are keeping Sam the Snake-Oil Seller in business.

Clearly, Sam’s business model works because so many men share his enthusiasm for the deep male voice. In America it would be fair to say that this enthusiasm is the cultural norm. But there are a few dissenters, one notable example being Dr Morton Cooper, a practising speech pathologist who is also the author of a best-selling self-help book called Change Your Voice, Change Your Life. Cooper is a controversial figure in his profession, not only because of his celebrity clients and his popular writing, but also because he is seen as a crank. One reason for this is his forcefully-expressed belief that a cultural bias towards deep voices is leading millions of Americans to damage their vocal apparatus by speaking at an unnaturally low pitch.

Not being a speech pathologist, I can’t say whether the preference for lower-pitched voices is having the harmful effects Cooper suggests, but I don’t think he’s wrong to say this preference exists. Apart from the ideological evidence provided by verbal hygiene advice (in both its male and female-directed forms), empirical investigations in a number of countries suggest that the average pitch of the female voice has fallen over time, to a degree which can’t be explained in purely physiological terms (e.g. as a side-effect of better nutrition or increased use of oral contraceptives). If, as some researchers think, it’s a response to social changes which have brought women into more direct competition with men, that could also be a factor driving the popularity of voice-deepening advice among men themselves.

But to judge from the items I reviewed while writing this post, the main reason voice-deepening advice is popular is not that it promises men increased earnings or higher social status; in most cases its central message is that going lower will improve your sex-life. The proposition that deeper-voiced men are more attractive to women is generally presented as a truism: why else, after all, would this form of sexual dimorphism have evolved? As it turns out, though, this is one of the many mysteries of human evolution about which scientists do not agree. There are competing theories, and the evidence is not clear-cut.

One frequently-cited piece of research on this subject is a 2007 study conducted with the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania, which found that deeper-voiced male members of the group (where according to the researchers no one used any kind of contraception) fathered more children than those with average voice-pitch. This is compatible with the theory that women prefer lower-voiced men as mates, but as one of the researchers pointed out, it could also be explained in other ways—it’s possible, for instance, that men with lower voices (which implies higher testosterone levels) begin having children earlier.

The same researcher, Coren Apicella, went on to investigate Hadza women’s preferences directly, by playing them recordings of male voices and asking them whether they thought each speaker (a) was a good hunter, and (b) would make a good husband. Low-voiced speakers were generally judged to be better hunters, but there was no clear preference for them as husbands. In fact, when Apicella divided the women into two subgroups, those who were currently nursing infants and those who were not, she found that the nursing mothers actually preferred men with less deep voices. This was puzzling, because women do less foraging while they’re breastfeeding, and are consequently more dependent on the food provided by men. Why wouldn’t women in this position prefer the low-pitched good hunters? Apicella speculates that less deep male voices might be associated with ‘pro-social behaviour’—there’s no advantage in marrying a good hunter if he’s not committed to sharing.

Some scientists believe that the low-pitched male voice did not evolve to make men more attractive to women, but rather to make them more intimidating to other men; a super-low voice suggests high levels of testosterone, which are potentially associated with high levels of aggression. Evolutionary scientists often assume that women are attracted to aggressive men, but feminists might think there are reasons to question that assumption.

Clearly the evolution question has not yet been definitively answered; but whatever the answer turns out to be, it’s unlikely to change my belief that voice-deepening advice for modern men is bullshit. Not only because the advice itself is bullshit (though I’m certainly sceptical about herbal formulas and mentholated rubs), but also because, like verbal hygiene for women, it exploits and magnifies insecurities which are themselves a product of sexism. The response I recommend to men is the same one I’ve spent three decades recommending to women: don’t buy it, either literally or metaphorically. Don’t let a bunch of quacks, conmen and PUAs tell you what’s ‘manly’. Their ideas on that subject belong in a museum, and their advice belongs in the bin.