A tale of two politicians

This week I’ve been thinking about two women politicians who have featured prominently in recent news stories. One is Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far-Right Rassemblement National, who faced Emmanuel Macron—and lost to him—in the second round of the Presidential election last Sunday. The other is Angela Rayner, the Deputy leader of Britain’s Labour Party, who became the subject of a story alleging that she was in the habit of deliberately crossing and uncrossing her legs (like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct) to put Boris Johnson off his stride during their occasional encounters at the weekly Parliamentary ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions.

These were obviously different kinds of stories—one about a real and serious political event, the other a piece of media-confected froth—about two politicians who have little in common beyond their sex. But both tell us something about the situation of women in politics. Regardless of who she is and what she stands for, a female politician’s sex is (still) an issue in ways a man’s is not. She may be able to use this to her own advantage, or it may be used against her by her political opponents, but either way it will be an element of the discourse that she is in some way obliged to negotiate.

I don’t think Le Pen’s failure to become France’s first female President had much, if anything, to do with her femaleness. But I do think her campaign—the most successful of her career so far—showed her awareness of what it takes for a woman leader to be electable. It also underlined a paradox that has often been commented on–that this may actually be easier for women on the Right of the political spectrum. Though conservatives (with a small as well as a large C) have a general problem with female authority, centuries of patriarchy have produced a set of cultural archetypes through which it can be made acceptable—most notably the ‘Iron Lady’ and the fiercely protective Mother, personae which are more appealing to right-wing authoritarians than they are to feminists and other progressive types.

Le Pen seems to have made a conscious effort to exploit that appeal. Her campaign posters drew attention to her sex by calling her ‘Femme d’état’ (‘stateswoman’), and shortly before the final vote she declared to the voters of Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre (and more importantly, the French media) that she would ‘lead France like the mother of a family, with common sense [and] consistency’. In line with this pledge, her campaign had emphasised cost of living issues and their effect on ordinary families (something that also worked well for Margaret Thatcher, who was fond of comparing the UK economy to a household budget). Of course, Le Pen isn’t really an ordinary housewife and mother; the point is rather that as a woman of a certain age and social type she can plausibly adopt that persona when it suits her. Whereas ‘femme d’état’ invites direct comparison with Macron, ‘mère de famille’ lays claim to qualities he would never be suspected of possessing.

Superficial or cynical as all this may sound, opinion polls suggested it made some difference: many people found the 2022 Le Pen less aggressive and more ‘relatable’ than the 2017 version. Le Pen still didn’t win, but she showed how a female candidate can control the narrative around her femaleness by choosing her own gendered persona from the limited selection on offer and then performing it consistently. This is something women on the Left are often more reluctant to do, both because they believe their sex shouldn’t be an issue and because they’re uncomfortable with the traditional archetypes. But refusing to play the woman card carries the risk that your opponents and/or the media will do it for you, and that you won’t be able to control the results.

That’s essentially what happened to Angela Rayner when the Mail On Sunday (with the assistance and encouragement of Conservative politicians) chose to identify her with another familiar archetype of female power: the Seductress who uses her sexual allure to manipulate men and bend them to her will. Investigations have since suggested that Rayner herself may have been the original source for the Basic Instinct comparison: several witnesses claim she joked about flashing Boris Johnson in an informal exchange among smokers on the terrace of the House of Commons. But she presumably didn’t intend the joke to become a national news story. Once that happened she was forced onto the defensive, describing it as a ‘perverted, desperate smear’.

It did smack of desperation, not least because it wasn’t clear how Boris Johnson benefited from a story which implied that a woman crossing her legs in his vicinity rendered him instantly incapable of thinking about anything else. Didn’t that just reinforce the already widespread perception of him as both easily distracted and an incorrigible lecher? And did it not risk making Rayner look like the better politician, skilfully exploiting her opponent’s known weaknesses?  Well, maybe, but then again no. When a woman is accused of using her sex for political, professional or financial advantage it is always a putdown—a re-statement of the ancient patriarchal principle that women are only good for one thing, and that they use that thing as a weapon because it’s the only kind of firepower they can muster. As one Tory MP told the Mail On Sunday:

She knows she can’t compete with Boris’s Oxford Union debating training, but she has other skills which he lacks.

This snide comment targets Rayner’s class origins as well as her sex: it’s a thinly-veiled way of saying that girls who went to northern comprehensives (and in Rayner’s case left school at 16) can’t cope with the rhetorical demands of a high-profile role in the House of Commons, so they compensate by acting like the slags they are. A similar tactic was used by the right-wing press during the 2015 General Election campaign in an effort to undermine another female politician with working-class roots—the SNP leader and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. In her case it would have been hard to argue that she couldn’t match the boys’ debating skills, since it was her impressive performance in the TV election debates that had got the Tories rattled; but their media pals still devoted considerable energy to portraying her, verbally and visually, as the archetypal Seductress, or her low-rent sister the Slag.    

Ironically, the accusation ‘she uses her sex because it’s the only weapon she’s got’ is most often resorted to when it’s the only weapon the accuser’s got: faced with a female opponent who is as smart and as skilled as he is, he reaches for a crude sexist insult in the hope she will be humiliated (and depressingly, this tactic has a good chance of working, since there are few women for whom it doesn’t reopen old wounds or play on persistent insecurities). But it’s still remarkable that anyone can get away with deploying the ‘she doesn’t have his rhetorical skills’ argument about, of all people, Boris Johnson. Mail readers may have forgotten some of Johnson’s earlier triumphs of oratory—like the time he called Jeremy Corbyn a ‘big girl’s blouse’—but how could anyone forget the much more recent occasion when he treated the UK’s business leaders to several minutes of waffle about Peppa Pig? It’s hard to imagine a less convincing advertisement for the benefits of an ‘Oxford Union debating training’, but (as so often in matters of language) prejudice apparently still trumps evidence.

The Mail on Sunday story was froth, but while we were all busy frothing about it, another story was blowing up. It had broadly the same theme—sexual (mis)behaviour in Parliament—but in this story the offenders were not women like Angela Rayner, but men like the Tory MP Neil Parish, who had been seen in the debating chamber watching porn on his phone. (He has since resigned, calling the incident ‘a moment of madness’.) The Tories, however, are not alone here. Currently, no fewer than 56 MPs (including representatives of all the main parties) are being investigated following complaints of sexual harassment. Assuming that all or nearly all of these alleged harassers are men, that’s roughly one in every eight male members. These numbers suggest a pervasive culture problem—both a specific problem with the institutional culture of Westminster and a more general problem with Britain’s political culture.

The Angela Rayner story is part of that problem. Though it wasn’t intended to distract us from the ongoing scandal of sexual harassment at Westminster (more likely it was meant to distract us from Partygate and other scandals involving Boris Johnson), what links it to the issue of harassment is the use of sexualised language and behaviour to put women (back) in their place. Whether this is done by harassing them or, as in Rayner’s case, by accusing them of distracting men, the message to women is clear: ‘don’t delude yourself that we think of you as equals: we haven’t forgotten—and won’t let you forget–that sex is what you are and what you’re for’.

It may not be a coincidence that this message has become more strident as the number of women at Westminster has increased. They now make up 35% of all MPs, which is just above the proportion some political theorists have defined as a ‘critical mass’, meaning that women are present in sufficient numbers to make a difference to the overall culture. What proponents of this theory envisaged was a positive cultural shift, but what we are seeing in this case looks more like a backlash: women are now a large enough minority to be seen by some men as a threat to their dominance. On the positive side, though, however, women are pushing back against unacceptable male behaviour. When forty of them met last week to discuss their concerns with the Chief Whip, reports described them as ‘on the brink of mutiny’. They expressed anger not only about the Rayner story and the porn-watching MP (who at the time had not yet been named), but also about the lower-level sexism they experienced on a daily basis: the gratuitous comments on their clothes and appearance, the sniggering from male colleagues when they spoke in debates, the whips who routinely referred to them as ‘girls’.  

I find it interesting that Conservative women have been so vocal on this issue. Not all of them, of course: some of them are handmaids who can always be counted on to defend the indefensible, but others, including senior women like Caroline Nokes, Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May, have been highly critical of the ‘laddish’ turn they feel the party has taken under Johnson. Maybe this is another situation where women of the Right have some advantages over their Leftist sisters. Conservative women don’t, on the whole, aspire to be ‘cool girls’, or to be seen as ‘one of the lads’; they feel no need to display their sex-positive credentials by being relaxed about pornography in the workplace. If a Guardian columnist calls them pearl-clutching prudes, it’s water off a duck’s back: the constituents who elected them don’t care what Owen Jones thinks.

Labour women, on the other hand—especially those who, like Angela Rayner, are seen as high-fliers and potential future leaders—do have to care, and arguably that makes it more complicated for them to address their own party’s lad culture problem. When the question of Rayner’s role in the creation of the Mail story surfaced, she explained the reports of her ‘laughing and joking’ by pointing out that women confronted with sexism often go along with it to save face, though in reality they’re mortified and disgusted. Many women (me included) will recognise this account of their behaviour–though if it’s true that Rayner joked about her ‘ginger growler’ that sounds more like actively engaging in laddish banter than just passively going along with it. But if you’re serious about challenging sexism, don’t you at some point have to say enough is enough, even if it makes you unpopular?        

Women who worry about the consequences of challenging sexism are not wrong to fear the backlash, but they shouldn’t think appeasement will protect them either. No successful female politician of any party can entirely escape from sexism and misogyny, because the issue isn’t how she behaves, it’s simply that she’s a woman trespassing on what (some) men still consider their turf. Those men will always resent her, and will relieve their feelings by doing and saying things which are meant to remind her where she really belongs. That’s why cartoonists represented Theresa May as a stiletto-heeled dominatrix, and Marine Le Pen has been depicted as a streetwalker in fishnets taking money from Vladimir Putin. But at least the Le Pens of the world can cast themselves in other roles, like the matriarch or the resourceful housewife. I understand why women on the Left reject those female archetypes, but one of the lessons we could learn from this week’s events is that they urgently need to find alternatives.  

What are words worth? Thoughts on the pardoning of witches

Last month the Scottish government gave its support to a proposal to grant a posthumous pardon to people who were executed as witches. The campaign group Witches of Scotland estimates that between the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1563 and its repeal in 1736, almost 4000 people were accused; around two thirds of them, more than 2500 people, were subsequently convicted and executed. As well as a pardon, the campaigners want an official apology and a public memorial to those who died.

In Scotland as elsewhere, a large majority of the victims of witch-hunting—around 84 percent of them—were women, and the campaign has been seen as a feminist issue. For some supporters its significance goes beyond the purely historical: it’s been suggested that the righting of this centuries-old wrong will also, in the words of Scottish Parliament member Natalie Don, ‘have an impact in challenging gendered and patriarchal attitudes in [present-day] society’. All of which raises some interesting questions about history, politics and (for reasons I’ll come to shortly) language.  

There are other cases where a pardon has been granted to a group of people who are considered, in retrospect, to have been criminalized unjustly. In 2016, for instance, the UK Parliament passed legislation pardoning anyone who had been convicted under the various laws that once prohibited consensual sex between men. Lord Sharkey, who proposed the relevant amendment, said that ‘a pardon is probably the best way of acknowledging the real harm done by the unjust and cruel homophobic laws, which thankfully we’ve now repealed’.

Not everyone agreed. George Montague, a gay man who was convicted of gross indecency in 1974, told the BBC he wanted an apology, not a pardon. ‘To accept a pardon means you accept that you were guilty’, he said. ‘I was not guilty of anything. I was only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

The Scots lawyer Andrew Stevenson has made the same point about the pardoning of witches:  

One pardons a wrongdoer, not the party wronged. Yet by means of a pardon conferred by statute the state is granting, not seeking, forgiveness. A pardon (of witches or anyone else) does not quash a conviction. It actually reaffirms its existence.

Pardoning is an example of the type of speech-act the philosopher J. L. Austin called a ‘performative’, meaning that the utterance of certain words actually performs, as opposed to just reporting, a specific action. Whereas statements like ‘it’s raining’ describe a state of affairs that exists independently of the speaker’s utterance (or doesn’t: I can check by looking out of the window), performative utterances like ‘I bet you £5 it rains today’ or ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ are, in themselves, enactments of the bet or the oath. They bring a new reality into being—or at least, they do if they’re performed properly. Performatives don’t have truth conditions, but rather ‘happiness’ or ‘felicity’ conditions which must be met if the performance is to have the intended effect. In the case of pardoning those conditions include the prior existence of a crime or a wrong for which the person being pardoned was responsible. Consequently, Stevenson argues, pardoning the witches cannot achieve the intended effect: it will not bring into being a new reality in which they were never guilty of anything.

But while this argument may be legally correct, for most people in modern Scotland it is surely beside the point, since they already take the witches’ innocence for granted. Witches are a different case from gay men: a pardon is not being proposed because of a change in society’s attitudes to what they do (people used to think witchcraft was wrong, but that has now been recognized as an unjust prejudice), but rather because we now reject the idea that witchcraft is, or ever was, a real phenomenon. To us it is self-evident that the accusations made against witches—for instance that they had killed their neighbours’ cows with curses, transformed themselves into owls or cavorted on beaches with Satan—were false: no one could have been guilty of such absurd and impossible crimes. In that sense you could argue that the wrong has already been righted, to the extent it ever can be. But in that case, what is a pardon meant to accomplish? 

A cynical answer might be that it’s ‘performative’ not (just) in Austin’s sense, but in the now-popular pejorative sense: an ostentatious but superficial display of concern intended mainly to boost the performer’s claim to the moral high-ground. That criticism has sometimes been made about the formal apologies other governments have offered for more recent wrongs like the removal of indigenous children from their families in Australia, or the abuse of women in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. The problem isn’t necessarily that they’re insincere (I’m sure the Scottish government does genuinely believe it was wrong to execute people for witchcraft). But if the regret politicians express for the way certain people were treated in the past is not accompanied by any concern about the injustices those people still suffer in the present, their performances may be dismissed as just self-serving, empty words.

What about Natalie Don’s assertion that revisiting the history of witch-hunting in Scotland will serve the purpose not only of atoning for past sins, but also of ‘challenging gendered and patriarchal attitudes’ in the present? This argument is often made about the commemoration of atrocities: we should remember the Holocaust or the Atlantic slave trade not only as a mark of respect to the victims, but also as a way of educating ourselves, and so preventing comparable horrors in future. Painful though it may be, we can only learn from history if we face up to what really happened and why.  

The witch-hunts of the early modern period have not generally been commemorated in this way: they’ve been mythologized and trivialized by the entertainment and tourism industries. In the English town of Lancaster, the site of the 1612 Pendle witch-trials (in which ten women and two men were convicted and executed), the historian Rachel Hasted reported in 1984 that

The local tourist bureau has just launched an advertising campaign headlined The Magick of Lancaster, with a 17^th century woodcut of several women being hanged…Tourist shops all over the county sell little black-hatted figures on pipe-cleaner broomsticks and guide-books to ‘the witch country’ with lurid accounts of their doings.

A quick online search confirmed that some tourist attractions in the area are still presenting Lancashire’s witch-hunts (aka the torture and killing of human beings) as if they were quaint local traditions on a par with cheese-rolling or dancing around the maypole.

As Silvia Federici argues in her 2018 book Witches, Witch Hunting and Women, the lurid tales and tacky souvenirs both sensationalize and sanitize history: they recycle an image of the witch that was originally constructed by her persecutors, while glossing over the reality of her persecution. Federici would presumably applaud Scotland for facing up to that reality. But exactly how to present ‘what really happened and why’ remains a complicated question. Historians, including feminists, hold different and sometimes conflicting views.       

Back in the 1980s, Rachel Hasted took issue not only with the crass pop-history in tourist guides, but also with what she dubbed a ‘new myth of the Witch’ popularized by feminists. This account posited that the witches were ‘wise women’ and healers, dispensing plant-based natural remedies to the people of their peasant communities, and (in some versions of the story) holding on to ancient pagan beliefs. Witch-hunts were said to have occurred when these long-established activities, and the traditional knowledge that underpinned them, began to be seen as a threat to the authority of the church and the interests of the men who controlled the emerging medical profession.

But in Hasted’s view the Lancaster records did not support this interpretation. The Pendle women were pious Christians who neither laid claim to nor were accused of using any knowledge of medicinal herbs. In Scotland, too, it seems that few women tried for witchcraft were known in their communities as healers. These cases might fit better with an alternative account in which women were victimized not because the authorities felt threatened by their power, but on the contrary, because they were so powerless.

Some research suggests that accusations of witchcraft were disproportionately made against individuals who were already marginalized because they were old, disabled, or without regular employment, and consequently so poor that they would sometimes beg or steal from their neighbours. It wasn’t a coincidence that many of them were women: the exclusion of women from many kinds of work made them vulnerable to poverty, especially if they were single. But in this account what made them targets was not their sex in itself, but the perception of them as troublesome and undesirable. The implication is that accusers were motivated less by fear of witchcraft than by a desire to see people they disliked, disapproved of, or had some kind of quarrel with, punished by the authorities.

That desire has existed in every age, and been exploited by authoritarian regimes of all kinds. We now know, for instance, that in both Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany, many people who informed on their neighbours, workmates or fellow-students did so for personal rather than ideological reasons, to settle scores with their enemies or gain an advantage over their rivals. Recently there has been some discussion of this in Scotland, in relation to a controversial new hate-crime law which was finally passed last March. One concern expressed by critics of the legislation was that it would encourage zealots and grudge-bearers to drag the state into their personal or political feuds.   

The Scottish witch-pardon might also invite questions about the complacency of a society that condemns past abuses of women while tolerating comparable abuses in the present. When I say ‘comparable’, I obviously don’t mean that women in Scotland are still being executed for witchcraft. But many of the same things that were said about witches are still regularly said about women in modern courtrooms—for instance that they are liars, manipulative, vengeful and sexually predatory.

The actual language of witch-hunting is not dead either. In 2020, after the trial of former SNP leader Alex Salmond on multiple sexual assault charges ended in his acquittal, commentators in the Scottish media used it to attack some of the women journalists who had covered the case. A programme fronted by Kirsty Wark was said to have featured a ‘coven’ of women who were likened to the three witches in Macbeth; one of them, Dani Garavelli, was also described as ‘the Rapefinder-General’. The sexism of this rhetoric, which recasts women, the original witch-hunt victims, as persecutors of innocent men, is not, of course, unique to Scotland. But nor does Scotland have any special claim to have moved beyond it.

I’m not suggesting that feminists should oppose the pardoning of witches (or formal apologies or memorials to them, which IMHO might be apter choices), but I do think we should consider what we want these performances to accomplish. If all they accomplish is to distance the living from the superstitious beliefs of their long-dead ancestors, that’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s nothing especially feminist about it. For the gesture to ‘have an impact in challenging gendered and patriarchal attitudes’, it would need to go beyond saying ‘look, we’re not like our ancestors, we find what they did abhorrent’, and address the ways in which—regrettably—we are still like them.

2021: mixed messages and weasel words

When I last did an annual round-up we were nearly a year into the pandemic. 2020 had been grim, but it seemed possible 2021 would bring a gradual return to something more like normal life. It didn’t: though the government in England declared ‘freedom day’ in July, as I write in late December normality still seems a long way off.

Living through this pandemic has something in common with living as a feminist. In each case you’ve always got to be prepared for some new horror, while at the same time knowing (a) that the underlying problem is the same one you’ve been shouting about forever, and (b) that the response of the people with the power to do something about it will be the same mixture of arrogance and incompetence, excuse-making and victim-blaming, which has failed on every previous occasion. Spin and disinformation will abound, and large sections of the media will amplify them.

In Britain, and particularly in England, the pandemic has been, among other bad things, an object lesson in how not to do public communication. One reason for that, though not the only one, is that the Communicator-in-Chief, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is a man who has never been renowned for his clarity, honesty, seriousness, grasp of detail or commitment to any kind of public service. It’s hard to think of anything he has said since about March 2020 (when he announced the first full lockdown by saying ‘you must stay at home’) that has not been evasive, confusing or misleading.

By the end of 2021, as evidence surfaced of Johnson and his colleagues drinking and partying while the rest of us were forbidden to socialise or even visit dying loved ones, the public’s patience began to wear thin. But the media had spent the year making excuses for ‘Boris’, if not explicitly then implicitly, by using language that echoed his own carefully cultivated image as an unruly schoolboy forever getting into ‘scrapes’, and in some cases blaming his poor decisions on the malign influence of his partner Carrie. And yes, this is about sexism. Though I don’t think feminists should idealise women leaders (which was something of a trend in 2020), at least women in positions of authority generally make some effort to look and sound like competent adults. No woman could get away with Boris Johnson’s naughty schoolkid act.

For British feminists—and many women who might not think of themselves as feminists—perhaps the galvanising horrific event of 2021 was the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March. There were many other killings of women by men this year (by December 18 there were 136 known cases), but this one stood out because the perpetrator was a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police, who had used both his police ID and the circumstances of the pandemic to entrap his victim (he told her he was arresting her for breaching the public health rules in force at the time). It also emerged that his predatory attitudes to women had been known to his colleagues for years, and that he had been reported more than once for exhibitionism—reports which his fellow-officers apparently did not follow up on. The case thus highlighted not only the extent to which women’s freedom is restricted by their well-founded fear of male violence, but also their inability to trust the police.

Violence against women in general is a subject on which mis- and disinformation is rife, mainly because of the constant repetition of ancient but demonstrably inaccurate and misleading stories about why it happens and who is (or is not) responsible (‘he just snapped’; ‘she rejected him and he couldn’t live without her’; ‘an isolated incident’, etc., etc). But in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder what we got from the authorities, as well as assorted experts and pundits, was gaslighting on a grand scale—a sustained attempt to persuade women that when they described the realities of their own lives they were being irrational and even ‘hysterical’.  

My most-read post of 2021 was an analysis of the discourse in which the mass outpouring of women’s anger was dismissed as an overreaction to something (the killing of a woman by a male stranger) which was, mysteriously, both an inevitable fact of life and at the same time ‘incredibly rare’. (So, maybe one or two cases a decade then? No: according to the UK Femicide Census they account for about one in every twelve cases. Applied to this year’s figures that statistic would translate to roughly one every month.) Think-pieces in the media asked why women are so afraid of men; few asked why so many men habitually behave in ways that make women fearful. And in a bravura display of missing the point, it was suggested that any lone women stopped by a male police officer could call a police station to verify that he was legit. This advice entirely ignored the reason why the question had been raised in the first place—that when Wayne Couzens stopped Sarah Everard he was not impersonating a police officer, he actually was one.  

The anger this case provoked among women gave a boost to the ongoing campaign to extend current legal provisions on hate crime to offences motivated by misogyny. For a moment it seemed as if the government would seize on this apparently popular demand, but in the event they decided to pass. I did not share some feminists’ disappointment: I’m no fan of the government (see above), but I am nevertheless a ‘misogyny hate-crime’ sceptic, for reasons I wrote about in March. Apart from my doubts about whether ‘hate’ is the right frame for most violence against women and girls, I agree with those feminists who have argued that the main problem for victims of rape, sexual assault and domestic abuse is the failure of the criminal justice system to enforce the laws we already have. One issue here is how poorly resourced the system has become after years of public spending cuts. But another is the endless excuse-making and victim-blaming complainants continue to encounter within a system that is itself institutionally sexist and misogynist.

The criminal justice system is not alone here. A number of schools responded to incidents of girls being upskirted by boys by telling the girls to wear ‘modesty shorts’ underneath their uniform skirts. Perhaps the teachers who came up with this policy weren’t aware that upskirting became a criminal offence in 2019. Or perhaps making new laws is just a futile symbolic gesture if you don’t also make efforts to tackle the attitudes which both underlie the behaviour you’re concerned about and ensure that most instances of it will continue to go unreported and/or unpunished.  

This year brought more evidence that UK schools are struggling to deal with endemic sexual harassment and rising numbers of sexual assaults, including a growing number involving children aged under 11. On this issue disinformation took another common form—using language that obscures who’s doing what to whom. The vast majority of sexual assaults recorded in schools are perpetrated by boys against girls, but the statistics which contained this information were reported in virtually all media sources using the studiedly gender-neutral (and reciprocity-implying) phrase ‘sexual abuse between children’. We do need to talk about the way early exposure to a highly sexualised popular and online culture is affecting both girls and boys—but without implying that the effects are the same for both.

There’s a lot of muddled thinking in this area, though, and in 2021 it produced some strikingly mixed messages. On one hand there were repeated expressions of concern about the effects of social media in ramping up the objectification of teenage girls and the attendant dissatisfaction many feel with their bodies. In January, for instance, a report was published which found that heavy use of social media was associated with lower levels of wellbeing and self-esteem for adolescents generally, but girls experienced a steeper decline than boys from the age of 14 (with one in three girls reporting negative feelings about their appearance). Yet in the same month a public health campaign to increase the take-up of cervical cancer screening among young women suggested they should encourage their peers to get screened by posting coded references to the state of their pubic hair (‘bushy, bare, or halfway there?’) on social media.

While objectified female bodies are hyper-visible, women’s voices continue to be silenced and disparaged. Examples that made the news in 2021 included the story of the man in charge of the Tokyo Olympics, who defended the near-absence of women in his organisation by saying that women would cause problems with their incessant talking, and a study which revisited some 40-year old findings about who speaks in US university classrooms and reported that not much had changed (men in this study talked 1.6 times as much as their female peers). My post on this topic was inspired, however, by a more positive story, about a woman whose response to being told to stop talking by a man in a Zoom meeting was swift, uncompromising and highly effective: she expelled him. I refer of course to Jackie Weaver, who became a national celebrity after a recording of the Handsforth Parish Council meeting went viral.  

In summer, reading an academic history of women’s contributions to language study before World War II made me wonder how many of the women discussed had an entry on Wikipedia. I discovered as I expected that many of them did not, but I was also shocked by the sexist and sometimes downright insulting content of the entries I did find. I also discovered a study which found that feminists’ efforts to redress Wikipedia’s well-known gender imbalance are being undermined by a persistent tendency for entries about women to be nominated for deletion because, allegedly, their subjects are not sufficiently ‘notable’.

We had a topical illustration of women’s non-notability in December, when the Sunday Times ran a piece about the data scientists who’ve become popular celebrities during the pandemic. All the individuals featured were white men. The i-Paper swiftly countered by profiling a selection of what it mockingly dubbed ‘the female “data lads”’. ‘Men’, the writer observed, ‘have indeed been at the forefront of Covid number-crunching, but because the pandemic did start a long time ago but not as far back as the Dark Ages, swathes of women have been doing it too, also amassing thousands of online followers’.

In October and November this blog took a backseat to my day-job, and I only returned to it as the end-of-year festivities approached. Not that I was feeling the seasonal goodwill: a rant about the portrayal of ‘Nana’ in Christmas ads was as festive as it got. It could have been a lot darker, though. Shortly before Christmas I stumbled across a tweet whose author had collated no fewer than four versions of a family Christmas card in which Dad, Mum and 2+ kids posed for the camera wearing Christmas jumpers or Santa hats—and in the case of Mum and the kids (or in two cases, just the daughters), a strip of duct-tape fixed firmly over their mouths. This delightful scene was captioned ‘Peace on Earth’. (In case you’re wondering, I’m not reproducing these photos because they contain degrading images of children too young to have given informed consent to their public circulation.)

When the depiction of gagged women can become a humorous Christmas meme, we are a long way from where feminists might have hoped we’d be in the third decade of the 21^st century. And this wasn’t the only point in the year when I wondered if we were going backwards. In April the death of Prince Philip unleashed a global wave of commentary so overtly patriarchal it could easily have been composed 100 years ago. Its main theme was Philip’s difficult position as a man forced to walk in his wife’s shadow—though we were repeatedly assured that in private he ‘wore the trousers’. An Italian newspaper approvingly remarked that ‘he was the only one who could tell the sovereign to shut up’.

Telling women to shut up was one of the recurring themes of this year. But so was women refusing to (be) shut up. Those who featured directly in my posts included not only Jackie Weaver, but also the women who organised and attended vigils for Sarah Everard despite attempts to stop them, and the female employees whose testimony led to the downfall of New York state Governor (and serial sexual harasser) Andrew Cuomo. In this second Plague Year, when so many women were so overburdened with extra work and worry, the fact that they continued to raise their voices was cheering, even if the events they were responding to were not. Thanks to everyone who read this blog this year, along with all the researchers whose work I made use of; let’s hope things get easier in 2022.

What’s in a frame? Misogyny/hate

‘Women’, wrote Germaine Greer in 1970, ‘have very little idea how much men hate them’. Fifty years later, it seems we have woken up. The problem of woman-hatred is now widely acknowledged and discussed; in Britain there’s growing pressure for misogyny to be legally recognised as a form of hate. Campaigners have presented this as a question of parity, saying that the law should ‘treat misogyny like racism or homophobia‘ (which are already covered, along with religious hatred, transphobia and hostility to people with disabilities). It’s an argument that has resonated with many feminists, and it’s now under serious consideration. Though the Scottish Parliament recently rejected a proposal to include women in new hate crime legislation, a working party has been set up to examine the issue further. Meanwhile in England and Wales, the Law Commission issued a consultation paper last year which did recommend that the law should be extended. Since the outcry that followed the murder of Sarah Everard this proposal has attracted more mainstream political support.

So, it looks as if change is coming; but will that be a step forward for women? On reflection I have my doubts, and in this post I’m going to try to explain them.

In England and Wales currently there isn’t a specific hate crime law, but rather a patchwork of provisions threaded through other laws. One key provision is in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which says that if someone who committed a criminal offence ‘demonstrated, or was motivated by, hostility on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity’, the court should treat that as an aggravating factor and consider whether to impose a harsher penalty. This also indirectly brings what is popularly known as ‘hate speech’ into the picture (though the term itself has no status in English law), in that the language someone used may be treated as evidence of hostile motivation. Other legal provisions target verbal behaviour more directly. The Public Order Act 1986 includes an offence of ‘stirring up hatred’, which will often be done by way of language (one recent case involved a series of anti-Muslim posts on Gab), and also one of using ‘threatening words and behaviour with intent to cause harassment and distress’.

The Law Commission has recommended that these provisions should be extended to cover hostility on the grounds of sex, or hostility to women (which of these options to prefer is one of the questions posed in the consultation). To reach that conclusion, it explains that it applied three tests:

1. Demonstrable need: whether there is evidence that crimes against women are (a) prevalent and (b) linked to hostility and prejudice;
2. Additional harm: whether women victims are more severely impacted by crimes which are motivated by hostility/prejudice, and whether these also cause harm to other members of the target group (‘secondary victims’);
3. Suitability: whether an extension of the hate crime framework to crimes against women would be workable in practice and compatible with the rights of other groups.

The Commission concluded that the first two tests were met. Crimes which disproportionately target women (e.g. rape and sexual assault, domestic violence, forced marriage, FGM, street harassment, online abuse) are prevalent, rooted in prejudice, and have an impact on women in general. But some questions remain unresolved. One is the practical feasibility of extending the law, given the high number of crimes against women and the fact that the justice system is already overstretched. Another concerns the status of domestic violence/abuse, which some argue should be excluded because it isn’t motivated by hostility to women as a group; rather it arises within specific intimate relationships, which could be same-sex partnerships, or heterosexual ones where the abusive partner is the woman. The consultation paper does suggest that sex (more specifically, femaleness) should become ‘a protected characteristic for the purposes of hate crime law’, but it asks if there should be a ‘carve out’ for domestic violence.

This is one reason why some feminists are concerned about the Commission’s proposals. They fear the effect will be to create a new hierarchy of crimes against women, taking us back to the days when attacks carried out by strangers were seen as ‘worse’ than violence perpetrated by someone the victim knew. Feminists have also drawn attention to an even more basic problem, namely the failure of the criminal justice system to enforce the laws we already have. What good, they ask, is creating new offences, or giving the courts power to impose harsher penalties, when most of the crimes women currently report do not lead to a prosecution, let alone a conviction? And that’s not only because the system is under-resourced. Women are also denied justice because of longstanding biases, both in the system and in the surrounding culture. How can we trust institutions which are themselves riddled with misogyny to enforce new anti-misogyny laws effectively and fairly?

Campaigners for new legislation often argue that it will help to drive institutional and cultural change, by sending the message that ‘this is serious and will no longer be tolerated’. But in the case of crimes against women, this message often turns out to be no match for the prejudice it was meant to shift. For instance, this month the media reported on a school in Liverpool where girls had been told to wear shorts under their uniform skirts after several of them were ‘upskirted’ (i.e., boys took pictures of their underwear) on a transparent staircase in the sixth-form building. This story caught my eye because upskirting was recently the subject of a successful campaign to make it a criminal offence (it became one in 2019). The Liverpool boys, who were over 16, could in theory have been reported to the police. I’m not saying that would necessarily have been the right thing to do. I’m sympathetic to the argument that where possible we should try to educate young people rather than criminalising them. But it’s telling that this school did neither. Instead it chose to punish the girls, by imposing a dress-rule that would make them feel uncomfortable, undignified and as if they were the ones at fault.

Even if I had more faith in legislation as a remedy for social ills, I would still want to ask whether extending hate crime laws sends the right message about misogyny. My doubts on that score reflect my interest in language–in words and meanings and what might be called ‘discursive framing’. Treating misogyny ‘like racism and homophobia’ means slotting women into a pre-existing frame which was not originally designed for them. And that raises the question of how well the frame fits.

Categories have their prototypical members, the examples that spring to mind first when we encounter their generic label. Our prototype for the category ‘bird’, for instance, the kind of bird we’ll draw if we’re instructed simply to ‘draw a bird’, is something that looks like a robin or a sparrow, not an ostrich or a penguin. In the case of hate crime/hate speech the prototype is hatred of a racial or ethnic Other. This is where it began in the UK, with the outlawing of ‘incitement to racial hatred’ in the 1960s. Later religious hatred was added, and this was not a big stretch because it’s close to the prototype: often it’s as much about race/ethnicity as religious belief per se. The other types of hatred now covered by the law—homophobia, transphobia, hostility to disabled people—share some features with the prototype, in that they target minorities who are perceived as ‘different’, as outsiders. And there’s another thing these target groups have in common. Hatred of them is linked, historically and in our minds, to right-wing extremism. The prototypical (western) right-wing extremists, the Nazis, regarded Jews, homosexuals and disabled people as inferior and impure, and they did their best to exterminate them.

But this prototypical form of hate, the kind that motivates genocides and pogroms, that calls for the ‘repatriation’ of Black British people to ancestral homelands they have never set foot in or advocates the involuntary sterilisation of the ‘unfit’, is not what (most) misogyny is about. Though misogynists do see women as Other and lesser beings, who exist only in relation to men and for men’s benefit, few of them wish for a world in which women are not available to meet their emotional, domestic, sexual and reproductive needs. What they want is not to eliminate women, or to live entirely apart from them, but to exploit, dominate and control them. Misogyny, in short (as the philosopher Kate Manne has argued), is not a generalised hatred of women, but rather the punishment of women who refuse to stay in their subordinate place or to meet what men regard as their obligations. The extreme right has no monopoly on that kind of punishment, nor on the belief system which justifies it. Some forms of misogyny are so common and unremarkable, it hardly makes sense to label them ‘extreme’.

Because misogyny is so different from the prototype which hate crime laws were designed for, it’s difficult to just ‘add women and stir’. The Law Commission’s question about whether there should be a ‘carve out’ for domestic violence is one illustration of this difficulty: violence against an intimate partner is commonly understood as the consequence not of hate, but of its opposite, love, ‘gone wrong’. Murderers and family annihilators are said to have killed their ex-partners and sometimes their children because they couldn’t bear the pain of separation, rejection or ‘betrayal’.

I would have no hesitation in calling this behaviour misogyny, but I think what’s behind it is less a hatred of women than a sense of entitlement in relation to women. I would apply the same reasoning to, for instance, child abuse and elder abuse: what motivates these forms of violence is surely not a generalised hatred of children or old people, but rather a feeling of entitlement to use and abuse them, to exploit their relative powerlessness for your own gratification, or to punish them for making what you see as unreasonable demands. We should be able to recognise the seriousness of these forms of abuse, and to punish them as they deserve, without having to put them into a frame that doesn’t fit.

The notion of misogynist hate speech raises similar questions. According to the philosopher Alexander Brown, a typical legal definition of hate speech looks something like this:

(1) Speech [or other expressive conduct] (2) concerning one or more members of a protected group or class (3) that involves [expresses, incites, justifies] feelings of hatred toward group members.

Brown argues that this is too narrow, and that a better definition would reflect the way the term ‘hate speech’ is used/interpreted in ordinary language—which, as he points out, does not always treat ‘feelings of hatred’ as central. He goes on to offer a list of the types of speech (or writing) which in his view would ‘intuitively fall under the ordinary concept [of] hate speech’:

1. Slurs, epithets or insults vilifying members of historically victimized groups (e.g. the N-word, ‘dirty Jew/faggot’)
2. Forms of speech that assert or imply a group’s inferior or sub-human status (e.g. ‘these people [asylum seekers] are cockroaches’)
3. Group defamation or negative stereotyping: the false/overgeneralized attribution of qualities/behaviour to a group (e.g. the blood libel; ‘homosexuals abuse children’)
4. Incitement: advocating, justifying or glorifying hatred, violence or discrimination against a group (e.g. ‘kill all Xs’; symbols used to intimidate, e.g. burning crosses/nooses/swastikas)

Although this list makes no explicit reference to women–all the examples relate to race/ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation–it’s not hard to see how the framework might be applied to them. Clearly, there are slurs vilifying women (‘bitch’, ‘cunt’, ‘whore’); assertions of female inferiority and subhumanity are staples of online discussion among incels, MGTOWs et al.; negative stereotyping of women is commonplace; and under the heading of incitement/intimidation we could include the threats with which women are bombarded online, often expressed in the linguistic register to which Emma Jane has given the label ‘rapeglish’. Maybe we could even consider flashing, or sending unsolicited dick pics, as the misogynist analogue of the noose and the swastika. The problem with Brown’s taxonomy, then, isn’t that women can’t be slotted in at all. The problem is how much that leaves out.

One thing it leaves out is a feature of many kinds of misogynist discourse: the use of, specifically, sexualised speech to enact power and domination over women. A great deal of what women experience as intrusive, degrading or intimidating male behaviour is couched not in the language of hate, but ostensibly in the language of desire or sexual interest. Everyday street remarks like ‘nice tits’, or ‘give us a smile’, certainly don’t ‘intuitively fall under the ordinary concept of hate speech’: on the surface they seem appreciative rather than hostile, and men are quick to exploit that if women object (‘what’s the matter, can’t you take a compliment?’) But these comments are not innocent or harmless. As well as underlining women’s status as sexual objects, they are pointed reminders that women in public space are under constant male surveillance and must conduct themselves accordingly.

Other kinds of misogynist speech, like ‘rapeglish’, are closer to the ‘ordinary concept of hate speech’ because they’re explicitly violent and threatening. But even rapeglish tends not to be put in the same conceptual box as, say, racist or anti-semitic rhetoric, because its graphic sexual content prompts people to read it as a display of individual pathology rather than the expression of a hateful ideology. The same is true of indecent exposure, which is viewed more as a compulsion afflicting some (inadequate or disturbed) men than as an intentional form of expressive behaviour which is meant to humiliate and intimidate. Once again, the sexualised nature of the behaviour obscures the political purpose it serves. The philosopher Rae Langton has made a similar point about pornography, arguing that its sexual content tends to disguise its ‘status…as propaganda’. ‘For racial hate speech’, she writes, ‘hierarchy and subordination look like what they are… For pornography [they] look like what they are not–namely, the natural sex difference’.

Our belief in ‘the natural sex difference’ also makes it possible for certain non-pornographic messages that might otherwise be judged as hate speech to escape that categorisation. Consider the greeting card below, which was photographed in a bookshop: the fact that it was openly on display suggests that most people wouldn’t consider it hateful, even if some might find it tasteless.

Why not, though? Because it’s saying you can’t ‘shoot [women] and bury them in the garden’ rather than advocating that course of action? Because it’s clearly meant to be a joke? Maybe; but if the word on the card were not ‘women’ but, say, ‘Jews’ or ‘gays’, neither of those considerations would make it acceptable. Animosity between men and women (aka the eternal ‘battle of the sexes’) is understood to lie beyond the realm of politics and even culture: it’s seen as natural, universal and—crucially—reciprocal (just like the desire which draws the warring parties together). That’s why the one word you could replace ‘women’ with and still have an acceptable product is ‘men’—though you’d be glossing over the fact that in reality women very rarely kill men, whereas (in Britain) men kill women at a rate of 2-3 a week.

I’m not using these examples to argue that more kinds of speech should be legally defined as hate speech. I’m suggesting that ‘hate’ may not be the right frame for understanding or addressing the issue of misogyny. Feminists who favour that frame argue that equality requires inclusion: the exclusion of woman-hatred from existing provisions sends the message that women are less important than other groups, and that misogyny is less serious than other hatreds. But while I agree that misogyny is a real and serious problem, I don’t think that means it is, or should be treated, exactly like racism or homophobia. To me, taking it seriously means considering it on its own terms. Women need to be able to frame a response that begins from our experiences, our needs, and our ideas about what would truly make a difference.    

Life lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woman, interrupted

In 2015 Jessica Bennett wrote an article for Time magazine about the problem of men interrupting women. ‘My friends’, she said, ‘have come up with terminology for it: Manterrupting. Manstanding. (Or talk-blocking if you want the gender-neutral version)’. ‘Manterrupting’, defined by Bennett as ‘the unnecessary interruption of a woman by a man’, joined ‘mansplaining’ and ‘manspreading’ in the lexicon of everyday sexism. And in case anyone doubted that we needed such a term, along came Donald Trump, who interrupted Hillary Clinton 35 times in one 90-minute presidential debate.

But while Trump’s boorishness is not in doubt, on its own it doesn’t prove there’s a larger pattern. Bennett’s article, whose title was ‘How not to be manterrupted in meetings’, belongs to a genre which I have criticised many times on this blog because of its tendency to invent problems so it can sell women solutions (like the app that removes ‘just’ and ‘sorry’ from their emails, and the courses that teach them to stop tilting their heads). Whenever you encounter a generalisation of this form (‘women over-use the word “just”‘; ‘men interrupt women constantly’) it’s always worth asking if it’s supported by reputable evidence. So, what does research say about men interrupting women? Like so many things about language, it’s complicated.

The complications begin with the basic definition of ‘interruption’. If person B begins speaking before person A has stopped, does that mean B is interrupting A? Some researchers would say yes; others would say ‘not necessarily’. What we usually mean when we say that ‘B interrupted A’ is that B infringed A’s speaking rights by taking the floor before A was ready to cede it. By that definition, most cases of simultaneous speech are not interruptions at all.

Simultaneous speech is a common by-product of the way turn-taking works. We don’t usually agree in advance that A will speak first, then B, then C. Rather, who speaks when is something we negotiate as we go. We monitor the unfolding interaction and figure out from various clues when a potential ‘turn transition point’ is approaching. At that point, if no one has been selected to speak next, anyone can bid for a turn. And people often make their move slightly before the current turn has finished, resulting in a brief period when two speakers overlap. As long as the second speaker has correctly predicted that the first is about to finish, this won’t be perceived as violating their rights.

To illustrate the difference, here are two examples (they’re from a transcript of a British TV election debate broadcast in 2015). In the first example, the moderator invites SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon to respond to a point made by Labour leader Ed Miliband. The brackets show where there’s a stretch of simultaneous speech:

MOD:              Nicola Sturgeon do you agree with what Ed Miliband [is saying]
STURGEON:                                                                                                       [ well  (.)  ] I

This is overlap, not interruption. Though Sturgeon starts to speak before the moderator has finished his question, it’s already clear he’s giving her the floor: she knows her turn is coming and just slightly misjudges the timing.

In the second example, Ed Miliband is speaking when Sturgeon comes in uninvited:

MILIBAND: and that’s not [ going   to  ]
STURGEON:                          [we need to] replace the Tories

This is an interruption: Miliband is in the middle of a sentence, and Sturgeon cuts him off before he’s had a chance to make his point.

As it happens, Nicola Sturgeon produced more interruptions than anyone else in this debate–and it was virtually always a man she interrupted. But her behaviour no more disproves the ‘manterruption’ thesis than Trump’s behaviour proves it. To assess the validity of the claim about gender difference, we need to look at studies which investigated it directly.

I’ll start with one of the earliest (first published in 1975 and still frequently cited), which was carried out on a California college campus by Don Zimmerman and Candace West. They collected 31 recordings of students talking informally: ten were conversations between two men, ten were between two women and eleven were between a man and a woman. Their analysis of the interruptions (which they distinguished from overlaps along the lines I’ve just explained) showed a very striking pattern. In same-sex conversations the interruptions were fairly evenly distributed between the two speakers, but in cross-sex conversations the male speaker was responsible for 96% of the interruptions. Zimmerman and West concluded that men ‘deny equal status to women as conversational partners’.

I often see this study cited in popular sources (like Bennett’s Time article) as definitive proof that men interrupt women more than vice versa. But clearly it isn’t definitive: if we’re going to make general claims we need more to back them up than a single study, done nearly 50 years ago, which looked at a specific population (US college students) engaged in a particular kind of talk (informal, peer-to-peer and one-to-one). The good news is that since 1975 a lot more studies have been done. The bad news, however, is that their findings have been far from uniform.

In the early 1990s Deborah James and Sandra Clarke reviewed the accumulated evidence, and concluded that there was no clear pattern. Some studies had found that men interrupted more, a smaller number had found that women interrupted more, and the majority had found no difference. These reviewers also pointed out, however, that comparing the various findings wasn’t easy: different researchers had defined interruption in different ways, and consequently they had counted different things.

One issue that may arise in this kind of research is whether to count cases which are formally interruptions (i.e., not just overlaps), but which don’t match the prototypical definition of interrupting as taking the floor from someone who isn’t ready to give it up. It may sound like an oxymoron, but there is such a thing as a supportive interruption–when one speaker breaks into another’s turn, not to make their own point but to display their engagement or agreement with the current speaker’s point. Here’s an example from a conversation among women friends:

A: she didn’t like Katy she didn’t ge[t on with Katy at all                   ]
B:                                                               [no she didn’t get on with Katy]

B’s interjection meets the formal criteria for interrupting (it starts too early to be an accidental overlap, and it’s too long to be classified as a minimal response like ‘yeah’ or ‘right’), but B isn’t trying to take the floor from A; rather she’s reinforcing A’s point, in this case by echoing A’s actual words. Then she stops speaking, and A goes on with her story. The whole conversation is like this: there’s so much talking at the same time, you wonder if it even makes sense to call what the speakers are doing ‘interrupting’.

In a 1982 article called ‘Who’s got the floor?’ Carole Edelsky asked the same question about some data she’d recorded at academic committee meetings. In theory a committee meeting is much more formal than a conversation among friends, but Edelsky noticed that the participants hadn’t observed the formalities consistently. Mostly they had followed the expected one-speaker-at-a-time pattern of turn-taking (Edelsky calls this a ‘singly developed floor’, or ‘F1’); but there were moments when that arrangement yielded to what she calls a ‘collaborative floor’, or ‘F2’. In F2 episodes it was difficult to say who ‘had the floor’: it seemed more like a free-for-all, with people chipping in frequently but briefly, and often speaking simultaneously. Whereas F1 talk was male-dominated, with men holding forth at length while women took fewer and shorter turns, the talk that occurred during F2 episodes was more equally distributed. Edelsky offers the following explanation:

F1s, characterized by monologues, single-party control and hierarchical interaction where turn takers stand out from non-turn takers and floors are won or lost, share features with other contexts in which women have learned they had best not assert themselves. F2s, however, are inherently more informal, cooperative ventures that provide both a cover of “anonymity” for assertive language use and a comfortable backdrop against which women can display a fuller range of language ability.

Later researchers (including, perhaps most famously, Deborah Tannen) would echo the suggestion that women feel more comfortable speaking when interaction is organised in a collaborative way. But where Edelsky links this preference to women’s subordinate social status (when there’s a contest for the floor they have ‘learned they had best not assert themselves’), Tannen sees it as a quasi-cultural difference: men relish competition, women prefer collaboration. Though politically they’re very different, these two accounts make similar predictions about gender and interruption: crudely, that men in ‘F1’ situations will produce more interruptions of the competitive, floor-grabbing kind than women, but in ‘F2’-type situations women will equal or outstrip men in the production of supportive interruptions.

What all this means, though, is that we can’t answer the question ‘is there a general problem of “manterruption?”–which is essentially about the first type of interruption, not the second–by simply counting all the interruptions. To ensure we’re comparing like with like, we also need some way of deciding what kind of interruption we’re dealing with.

But how do we decide, given that we have no access to the thoughts of the people involved? One answer is to use what we do have access to–the reaction of one speaker to another’s intervention. Some conversation analysts argue that you can only count something as an interruption if there’s evidence it was taken as an interruption by the person on the receiving end. And what they mean by ‘evidence’ is the kind of reaction which is known in the jargon as ‘doing being interrupted’–acting in a way which signals to others that you feel your speaking rights have been infringed. You can convey that message verbally (e.g., by saying ‘stop interrupting me!’ or ‘please let me finish’), paralinguistically (e.g. by sighing deeply, or raising your voice while continuing to speak), nonverbally (using gestures or facial expressions), or a combination of these possibilities.

The conversation analyst Marta Baffy looked at ‘doing being interrupted’ in her analysis of the Congressional hearings which investigated Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election. She focused on the testimony of Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, which was of interest because one of the people who questioned him, Sen. Kamala Harris, was reprimanded by the Chair for interrupting him. This reprimand, along with the subsequent criticism of Harris’s ‘aggressive’ behaviour in the media, prompted accusations of sexism from her supporters, who pointed out that women, and especially women of color, are often described as ‘aggressive’ when the same behaviour from a man would pass without comment.

Was a sexist double standard in play here? Baffy investigated by comparing the exchanges between Harris and Sessions to Sessions’s exchanges with a male questioner, Sen. Angus King. King, it transpired, had interrupted Sessions around the same number of times as Harris. In both cases Baffy counted eleven instances of simultaneous speech, most of which (six in King’s case and seven in Harris’s) could be classified as interruptions. There was, in other words, little difference between the two senators’ actual behaviour; but there was a big difference in the way Sessions reacted. With Harris he ‘did being interrupted’ nine times; with King he did it only three times.

As Baffy points out, there’s no way we can be certain that this difference was the result of sexist bias. There are other possible explanations: for instance, King questioned Sessions earlier in the day than Harris, so perhaps he just got grumpier as the hours ticked by. But the sexism interpretation fits with other evidence: some studies have found that women who interrupt are judged more negatively than men.

In one study Katherine Hilton asked 5000 American English-speakers to listen to scripted audio clips containing simultaneous speech, and then say if they thought one of the speakers had interrupted. To test whether gender had an effect, she recorded the same scripts in two versions, with the role of the putative interrupter played by a man in one and a woman in the other. She found that male judges rated female interrupters as ruder, less friendly and less intelligent than men performing the same script.

If we put these two studies together, we might well conclude that men have a problem with women who interrupt. And though neither study investigated the manterruption pattern directly, their findings may be a clue to what’s behind it.

But wait, I hear you say, have we established that there is a manterruption pattern? You’re right: so far I’ve been emphasising that the evidence is mixed, and sometimes difficult to interpret. I think that’s a reasonable summary of the overall picture. But I also think there’s something to be learned from a kind of research I haven’t talked about yet: research dealing not with casual conversation (or laboratory simulations of it) but with institutional talk–for instance, business meetings, job interviews, academic seminars, political debates, legal proceedings and medical consultations. In these contexts the pattern is more consistent; it’s also very revealing.

In institutions there’s generally a hierarchy of status, and we’d expect that to be the strongest predictor of who will interrupt whom. Yet many studies of institutional talk have found that higher-ranking women are routinely interrupted by lower-ranking men. Women doctors get interrupted by male patients, women bosses by male subordinates, women teachers by male students and women judges in Australia’s High Court by the male advocates who make arguments before them.

What strikes me about this pattern, and about the attitudes uncovered by Katherine Hilton, is how well they fit with the patriarchal principle laid out by the philosopher Kate Manne–that men are entitled to take from women, whereas women are obligated to give to men. If we think of (non-supportive) interruptions as a form of ‘taking from’ (that is, taking the floor from someone else) Manne’s principle might explain why men apparently feel entitled to interrupt any woman, even one who by other measures outranks them, while judging women’s own interruptions illegitimate or hostile.

From this perspective, the reprimanding of Kamala Harris was an example not of sexism but of misogyny–the punishment of women who give too little and/or take too much. But Harris has lived to fight another day: this week it was announced that she will be Joe Biden’s running-mate–and if he wins, therefore, his vice-president. This wasn’t a foregone conclusion; though Biden was committed to picking a woman, many people expected him to choose someone more emollient. There had been rumours that his team regarded Harris as too ‘ambitious’ and ‘abrasive’. But in the event she was picked despite, or perhaps even because of, her reputation for being, as Donald Trump immediately put it, ‘nasty’ to men.

Of course, when the campaign gets going Harris may come under pressure to be ‘nicer’. If so, I hope she’ll resist it. ‘Be nice, be polite, be conciliatory, be gentle’–these injunctions to women have a long and depressing history. But history, like men, can be interrupted.

 

Expletive not deleted

This week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a powerful speech condemning the behaviour of a colleague, Florida Congressman Ted Yoho. Yoho had a problem with some comments she had made suggesting that a recent spike in crime was related to rising unemployment and poverty; he accosted her on the steps of the Capitol, and in the ensuing heated exchange he called her ‘disgusting’, ‘out of your freaking mind’ and finally (according to a reporter who overheard him, though by that time Ocasio-Cortez herself had walked away) a ‘fucking bitch’.

When the reporter’s account was published there were calls for Yoho to be sanctioned: a day later he made an apology to the House which Ocasio-Cortez and many others found woefully inadequate. In her own statement she said that she could have let the original insult pass—she’d heard far worse while waiting tables in New York City—but Yoho’s denial that he used the words ‘fucking bitch’, his lack of genuine regret and the House’s acceptance of his ‘non-apology’ had made her want to pursue the matter further.

This is, among other things, a story about language and power. It unfolded in three parts, and since each part brought a different aspect of language to the fore, I’ll consider them one by one.

I:  The insult

I’ll start where the story did, with a man calling a woman a bitch. What does that mean, and what does it accomplish? Ocasio-Cortez described it as ‘dehumanising’, and on one level she’s obviously right: ‘bitch’ represents a human woman as a non-human (canine) female animal. On reflection, though, we might wonder if that’s really what gives the insult its force. Many other labels compare women to animals—they can also be called, for instance, cows, sows, vixens, cougars and tigresses. In most cases, though, it’s more obvious what attribute of the animal is being invoked. A sow is fat, a vixen is sly, a cougar is predatory, a tigress is fierce. But what is the attribute linking canine bitches to human ones?

There are idioms (like ‘you’re my bitch now’) which suggest that the reference is to being dominated—the bitch is the submissive one, the bottom; but I don’t think that’s the prototypical meaning of ‘bitch’ when it’s used to insult a woman. On the contrary, in fact, women are typically labelled bitches when they aren’t submissive enough. The classic bitch is an ‘uppity’ woman–ambitious, powerful, outspoken, independent, non-compliant or outright disobedient.

Ambitious, outspoken and widely considered a rising star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fits the ‘uppity woman’ profile. That’s probably why, following an argument to which her sex was irrelevant–and which ended when she called him rude and walked away–Ted Yoho reached for the sex-specific insult ‘bitch’. If the argument had been with a male politician he would doubtless have found the man’s behaviour offensive; he might have called the man ‘disgusting’ and ‘out of your freaking mind’. But he wouldn’t have called a man a ‘fucking bitch’. The sin of the bitch–asserting herself while female–is one men cannot commit.

‘Bitch’, we might conclude, is not so much a dehumanising term as a misogynist one. Its function is both to punish individual women who transgress in the ways just outlined, and to police the behaviour of women in general (‘listen and learn, ladies: if you don’t want to be called a bitch, you won’t do what that bitch did’). In the lexicon of misogyny it’s the ultimate all-rounder.

(Incidentally, if you’re still wondering what human bitches have to do with canine ones, there may be a clue in the earlier history of the word. When ‘bitch’ was first, to quote the OED, ‘applied opprobriously to a woman’ (the earliest citation for this sense is dated 1400) it meant ‘a lewd or sensual woman’, or in other words, a whore. So, originally I suspect the relevant canine comparison was with the insatiable sexual appetite of a bitch in heat.)

II: The (non) apology

In the second part of the story, which began when the incident on the Capitol steps was reported in the press, attention turned from Yoho’s offence itself to the apology he was forced to make for it. Apologising is what politeness theorists call a ‘face-threatening act’, of a kind which (especially if it is public) demands a carefully-considered balancing act: you need to display humility, but without allowing yourself to be humiliated. If you get this balance right, apologising can actually enhance your status. But there are many ways to get it wrong.

Yoho clearly got it wrong: many reports referred to what he delivered as a ‘non-apology’. To see why, let’s take a closer look at his statement. (I am linking, with apologies, to Fox News, because their report has an embedded clip, and in this case it’s instructive to listen to the vocal delivery as well as reading the words.) The quote below is the beginning of the apology proper:

I rise to apologize for the abrupt manner of the conversation I had with my colleague from New York. It is true that we disagree on policies and visions for America. But that does not mean we should be disrespectful. Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of the language I use. The offensive name-calling words attributed to me by the press were never spoken to my colleague, and if they were construed that way I apologise for their misunderstanding.

In the rest of the statement he explains why he felt strongly about Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on crime and poverty; he talks about his own experience of poverty and his interest in helping other poor people to succeed. He concludes: ‘I cannot apologise for my passion, or for loving my God, my family and my country’.

Perhaps the most obvious explanation for the judgment of this statement as inadequate is what’s conspicuously missing from it: Yoho did not apologise for what was generally regarded as his most serious offence, referring to a colleague as a ‘fucking bitch’. Rather he denied that he had used ‘the offensive name-calling words attributed to me by the press’. Had he left it there it would just have been his word against the word of the reporter who claimed to have heard him utter the offending phrase. But instead he opened up a whole new can of worms by adding: ‘and if they were construed that way I apologise for their misunderstanding’.

This sentence is a puzzle which I admit I have failed to solve. ‘They’ and ‘their’ presumably refer back to ‘the offensive name-calling words’; but he’s just said those words ‘were never spoken to my colleague’. How can unspoken words be ‘construed that way’, or indeed any way? Is his point that he didn’t address the words directly to Ocasio-Cortez (‘my colleague’), but only uttered them after she had left (and if so, how does that make it better?) Or is he saying he used other words, which the reporter misheard as ‘fucking bitch’? The harder you look, the more opaque this denial becomes.

Yoho does manage to apologise for ‘the abrupt manner of the conversation I had with my colleague’. But as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out on Twitter, the words he chooses (‘abrupt manner’, ‘conversation’) downplay the aggressiveness of his behaviour. There’s also something weaselly about his use of pronouns in ‘it’s true that we disagree….but that does not mean we should be disrespectful’. It’s clear that the first ‘we’ must refer to him and Ocasio-Cortez. But what about the second one? He might claim it’s a more generic reference to ‘people who disagree’, but more likely it refers to the same two people as before—in which case the implication is that Ocasio-Cortez was also disrespectful, and should share the blame for ‘the abrupt manner of the conversation’ .

Yoho later muddies the waters further by making an explicit non-apology: ‘I cannot apologise for my passion’. Though he may not have intended this as a retraction of his earlier apology for ‘the abrupt manner of the conversation’, it’s not hard to see how that inference might be drawn. If we reason that Yoho spoke abruptly because of his passion, then his refusal to apologise for his passion may suggest that he didn’t really mean it when he apologised for being abrupt.

A felicitous apology must acknowledge that the speaker did something to cause another person harm or offence, it must express the speaker’s regret, and the expression of regret must be sincere (or at least, perceived as sincere by the addressee). Yoho’s statement fails on all counts. His acknowledgment is partial and selective, hedged about with denials, self-justifications and deflections of blame onto others; there is no expression of regret, and only the self-justifications come across as sincere.

And speaking of self-justifications…

Part III: the rhetoric

Though there’s nothing I like about Yoho’s statement, the part of it I dislike most is the reference he makes to his status as a husband and father: ‘Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of the language I use’. Or, translated into the dialect of his fellow conservative Republicans, ‘I have far too much respect for women to let the words “fucking bitch” pass my lips’.

This sententious drivel is in a long line of similar statements made by conservative politicians in recent years. Think back to 2016, when senior Republicans reacted to the release of the Hollywood Access tape—the one where their candidate and future president Donald Trump boasted about ‘grabbing [women] by the pussy’—by claiming to be offended on behalf of their wives, mothers and daughters. Or to 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that she’d been sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh prompted Kavanaugh to become tearful about the toll her alllegations were taking on his family. The other men in the room felt his pain: ‘I know as a father’, smarmed Ted Cruz, ‘there’s been nothing more painful to you than talking to your daughters and explaining these attacks’. You couldn’t have asked for a clearer demonstration that some women matter, others don’t, and powerful men decide which are which.

But when Yoho played the family card, Ocasio-Cortez evidently saw an opportunity. In the most powerful part of her statement, she pointed out that she too was somebody’s daughter. She was glad, she said, that her late father was not around to read about her mistreatment in the papers. She told the House that by accepting Yoho’s non-apology they were giving permission for their own wives and daughters to be treated by other men in the way he had treated her.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wish she’d taken a different tack. Though her speech was eloquent, and doubtless designed, like all good rhetoric, for a particular audience and setting, ‘remember every woman is some man’s daughter/ sister/ mother/ wife’ is a deeply patriarchal argument. If feminists can agree on nothing else, they can surely agree that women are people in their own right, and deserve to be valued for their own sake.

But I’m not going to labour the point, because Ocasio-Cortez is getting plenty of grief already: if I waited a little longer I could probably add a fourth part to the story, headed ‘the backlash’. Exhibit A is an article in yesterday’s New York Times, which reported on Ocasio-Cortez’s statement, and commented that she ‘excels at using her detractors to amplify her own political brand’. Ambitious, disruptive, opportunistic, self-promoting…the Times doesn’t need to use the B-word to make the point. The media narrative has come full circle; but the real story, like the struggle, goes on.

In praise of strident women

Here’s what some random man on Twitter had to say about Greta Thunberg yesterday (just to put it in context, he was replying to a woman who had tweeted her admiration for Thunberg following the latter’s speech at the UN Climate Action summit):

But she’s so strident! Just her speaking style, if we can set aside for a moment what’s she’s speaking about, which is critically important I agree. All the more reason to win over a broad base with an agreeable presentation; you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

This was not, by a long shot, the worst thing anyone had said about the 16-year old activist. A pundit appearing on Fox TV called her ‘a mentally ill Swedish child’; Dinesh D’Souza shared an image showing a photo of her alongside an old Nazi propaganda poster featuring a blonde-braided, rosy-cheeked Nordic maiden, and invited us to infer that she was continuing an old ‘socialist’ (aka totalitarian and racist) tradition. And—with the inexorability of night following day, or of targets being missed for the reduction of carbon emissions—US President Donald Trump mocked her in a tweet, which read: ‘She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!’ (It was later reported that Thunberg had upped the ironic ante by incorporating his words into her own Twitter bio.)

Unlike these critics, however, Random Twitter Guy thought he was being constructive. He wasn’t politically opposed to Thunberg’s message; he just thought there was a problem with the way she delivered it. He felt her presentation hadn’t been ‘agreeable’ (which is true: the speech was visibly angry and linguistically accusatory, punctuated regularly by the question ‘how dare you?’): it had too much vinegar and not enough honey. He presented this concern as tactical, a question of maximising the reach of this critically important intervention by taking care not to alienate listeners when you could be recruiting them to the cause.

But we might want to probe what’s behind this perception of Thunberg’s style as alienating to a mass audience. Would Random Twitter Guy have had the same reaction if the ‘how dare you’ speech had been made by a male teenager? I suspect the answer is ‘no’, and the reason for that suspicion has to do with language. It’s not, to my mind, just a random coincidence that the word RTG reached for to describe Greta Thunberg was ‘strident’.

‘Strident’ is one of a number of code-words which have become covertly gendered because of the way they’re most commonly used. Though in principle they are applicable to anyone who speaks in a certain way, in practice they are used significantly more frequently to criticise the speech of women and girls. It doesn’t necessarily matter how the target of this criticism actually speaks, because what’s couched as a complaint about her speech style is really just a way of complaining about the woman or girl herself, while making the speaker’s antipathy to her appear to have some reasonable or ‘objective’ basis. (‘I’m fine with women holding office/ making speeches/ leading movements…it’s just that this particular woman’s voice/speaking style is so horrendously [insert code-word here].’)

Another classic code-word of this type, as we saw in commentary on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, is ‘shrill’ (there’s a graphic here showing the sex-unbalanced distribution). ‘Abrasive’ is popular in some contexts (as Kieran Snyder found in 2014 when she analysed a sample of performance reviews in the tech industry), and ‘bossy’ does the job in others; ‘aggressive’, ‘intimidating’ and ‘pushy’ may also work. A related code uses apparently positive, or at least not overtly negative, terms to express condescension rather than outright dislike—the iconic example would be ‘feisty’. (And somewhere in between the two we find ‘formidable’, as in ‘the formidable ladies of the WI’.)

But back to ‘strident’. What exactly is a ‘strident’ speaker being accused of? The word itself comes from the Latin verb ‘stridere’, meaning to creak (it also covers ‘shriek’ and ‘screech’, which in English show a similar pattern of sex-preferential usage to ‘shrill’), and one thing it can evoke is a loud, rough or grating vocal quality. In relation to Greta Thunberg’s speech, however, we’re probably dealing with another sense of the word, relating to the (metaphorical) tone in which an argument is made or an opinion expressed.  To quote the definition offered by the Oxford Dictionary, being ‘strident’ in this sense means

presenting a point of view, especially a controversial one, in an excessively and unpleasantly forceful way.

Like the rest of the code-words, ‘strident’ used in this way isn’t inherently a gendered or sexist term. The illustrative example given in the OD entry I’ve just quoted is the gender-neutral ‘public pronouncements on the crisis became less strident’. But its well-established use as a criticism of female speakers reflects the sexist tendency to judge men and women by different standards when considering what might constitute being ‘excessively and unpleasantly forceful’. What might be deemed appropriately forceful in a male speaker—taken as a sign of his sincere and urgent concern about the issue at hand—becomes ‘excessive’ and ‘unpleasant’ in his female counterpart, because it diverges from the stereotypical feminine ideal against which her performance, unlike his, is consciously or unconsciously being measured.

‘Forceful’ speech is rather generally disapproved of in women. As Robin Lakoff noted in her pioneering 1973 essay ‘Language and Woman’s Place‘, it’s considered unladylike and unattractive to be too blunt, too direct and too sure of oneself. If women do express opinions, they are expected to do it in a suitably measured and ‘pleasant’ way: to be deferential rather than commanding, gentle rather than aggressive, agreeable rather than accusatory, soothing rather than angry or despairing. Rather than being forceful, women are taught that they should use their charms to get what they want. But that’s a lesson Greta Thunberg seems to have skipped: she doesn’t pose or smile for the cameras, she isn’t sexy or flirty or cute. As commentators have noticed, this is hard for certain men to understand, and some of them are evidently enraged by it.

The philosopher Kate Manne has pointed out that the primary duty assigned to women as a class—taking care of other people, especially male ones—requires them both to suppress their own feelings (which Thunberg, angrily accusing today’s leaders of failing her generation, obviously did not do) and to put inordinate effort into making others feel better–another expectation Thunberg did not meet, giving a speech which some commentators found long on blame and short on hope. ‘Giving hope’, observed Manne on Twitter,

whatever the grim truth of the matter, is a feminine-coded pseudo-obligation that is far too seldom questioned.

Since one of the criticisms ‘strident’ implies is a failure or refusal to meet the linguistic demands associated with ‘proper’ femininity, it is not surprising that the word has a specific history of being used to disparage feminists—women who express Rebecca West’s proverbial ‘sentiments that distinguish me from a doormat’. In my own youth, the pairing of ‘strident’ and ‘feminist’ was a cliché in its own right—it may even have been where I first encountered the word ‘strident’.

Sometimes ‘strident’, when paired with ‘feminist’, was pretty much a code-word for ‘man-hating’, and that association apparently lingers on. Last year, the hashtag #StridentWomen was created in response to a comment made by the (male) Chief Scientist of Australia, who had complained that the real progress being made on sexism and sexual harassment in science was being unfairly ignored by ‘strident’ women. Here, once again, the underlying complaint is about women not treating men the way men feel entitled to be treated—not deferring to their superior knowledge, not expressing gratitude for whatever crumbs we’ve been tossed, not reassuring men we know they’re trying and everything will be OK.

‘Strident’ women, in short, are women who not only speak out forcefully, but who do so on their own behalf, in the interests of their own sex, or in Thunberg’s case their own generation. And the misogynist reaction is, how dare they? How dare women behave so selfishly? How dare they question the official line that things are improving, or suggest that progress needs to be faster? How dare they turn the tables, wagging their fingers and saying ‘how dare you’ to their betters?

Here’s my advice to people like Random Twitter Guy: if you don’t want us to think you’re sexists and misogynists, be careful with words like ‘strident’. The code I’ve been discussing was cracked by feminists long ago: we know what you’re communicating, even if you don’t. And far from shutting us up, what you communicate when you call us ‘shrill’, ‘strident’, ‘pushy’, ‘bossy’, ‘abrasive’, etc., just makes us more determined to go on speaking—as loudly and as forcefully as we think the circumstances require.

Thanks to all the people on Twitter who shared their thoughts and examples.

Cuntroversy: On Samantha Bee and the C-word

On her show last week, as everyone now knows, Samantha Bee used a word which is Not To Be Uttered On TV. Addressing Ivanka Trump, who had posted a photo taken with her child on Instagram while her father’s administration was busy separating undocumented migrants from their children, Bee said:

Let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt. He listens to you.

Later Bee apologised, saying that her use of the word ‘cunt’ had ‘crossed a line’: it was ‘inappropriate and inexcusable’. Plenty of people agreed: even if they shared Bee’s feelings about the President and his daughter, they thought her language overstepped the mark. Not everyone, however, took that view. There were some who defended Bee simply on the basis that they thought her target deserved the epithet; but there were others whose comments focused on the epithet itself, challenging the assumption that ‘cunt’ is, in the words of Grose’s much-quoted dictionary entry,  ‘a nasty name for a nasty thing’.

One high-profile example came from Sally Field, who tweeted:

I like Samantha Bee a lot, but she is flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt. Cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.

Another popular riposte (I saw several variations of it on Twitter) was ‘I don’t think Samantha Bee should have called Ivanka a cunt: she has neither the warmth nor the depth’.

This isn’t a new take on ‘cunt’. Feminists over the past 50 years have regularly proposed to reclaim ‘the most offensive word in the English language’ and turn it into a positive symbol of female power.

Germaine Greer was an early advocate of reclamation: initially she thought the goal should be to make ‘cunt’ an ordinary, everyday word, but later she would say that on reflection she was glad efforts to tame it had failed. ‘Unlike other words for female genitals’ she observed, ‘this one sounds powerful. It demands to be taken seriously’. She also expounded a theory that has long been popular in some feminist circles–that the power of ‘cunt’ and its status as a forbidden word derive from the fact that ‘men identified female sexual energy as a dangerous force’.

These sentiments were echoed by Laurie Penny in a 2011 New Statesman column entitled ‘In defence of the C-word’. Repeating Greer’s point that ‘cunt’ is the only non-medical word for the female genitals that doesn’t domesticate or sanitise what it names, she exhorted women to ‘use it and love it’. ‘Cunt’, she rhapsodised, is

a wholesome word, an earthy, dank and lusty word, with the merest hint of horny threat…it’s fantastically difficult to pronounce without baring the teeth.

Unlike Greer, Penny defends not only the use of ‘cunt’ to name the female genitals, but also its use as an aggressive insult. In both senses, she says, it is a ‘word of power’.

I have always had a problem with this kind of cunt-talk, because it depends on what I would argue is a fundamentally patriarchal gesture—defining power, for women, in primarily sexual terms. Men may monopolise all other kinds of power, but sexual power—that magical ability to bend men to your will by provoking desires they cannot control or resist—is held out to women as a consolation prize. It is also used to vilify them and license various measures designed to control their ‘dangerous’ sexuality. The idea that women pose a sexual threat to men, rather than vice-versa, is the foundation for one of the commonest myths justifying rape (‘she aroused me, I couldn’t help myself’); it is part of the thinking behind every religious injunction telling women they must cover themselves to avoid leading men into temptation; it is also, as we have recently learnt, part of the creed of the men who call themselves incels. Why would feminists celebrate any of this?

Emma Rees, the author of  Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, seems rather more sympathetic to it than I am, but she too notes that there are problems with the idea of reclaiming a word which is both a name for the female genitals and a metonymic (part-for-whole) label meaning ‘woman’. Can this second usage ever be positive? Even in a culture that celebrated female sexuality, describing a woman as a cunt would still entail making her sexuality the defining feature of her identity as a person. And yes, you could argue that calling a man a ‘prick’ or a ‘dick’ does the same, but treating the two gestures as equivalent ignores the very different historical positioning of the two sexes: whereas men have never been valued primarily for their sexual utility to women, nor told that their only power is sexual power, that has been women’s experience for thousands of years.

Proposals to reclaim ‘cunt’ do not have to involve spouting mystical nonsense about ‘female sexual energy’. They could be based, and sometimes have been, on the more straightforward argument that if we see nothing wrong with either women or their genitals then we should see nothing wrong with the word ‘cunt’ either. But once again, this skips too lightly over the point that words have histories; the baggage they bring from the past continues to weigh them down in the present. When we ask what gives words like ‘cunt’ their peculiar power (a power that may be entirely lacking in their synonyms—you wouldn’t get the same effect by calling someone ‘a total vulva’ or ‘a bit of a vagina’), the answer lies less in what the words mean than in what they’ve historically been used to do.

There’s a good discussion of this point in a piece by the linguist Ana Deumert about a recent legal decision made by South African Constitutional Court. The case concerned a white man who was dismissed by his employer for using racially offensive language during a dispute about parking at work. Annoyed that another employee had parked too close to his own space, the white man had gone to the person in charge of parking and demanded the removal of ‘that Black man’s car’. He later made a claim of unfair dismissal on the grounds that referring to someone as ‘that Black man’ could not be considered racist; the phrase was purely descriptive, it contained no insulting or abusive terms, and he had not intended it to be offensive.

The Appeal Court had accepted this argument, but the Constitutional Court applied a different test: its question was not what the speaker was thinking when he used the phrase ‘that Black man’, but whether ‘a reasonable, objective and informed person, on hearing the words, would perceive them to be racist or derogatory’. The Court decided that in South Africa, a society still deeply marked by its recent history as an apartheid state, an informed and reasonable person would indeed have grounds to perceive a reference to ‘that Black man’ as racist. Though ‘Black’ is not in itself a negative term, the decision of a white speaker to foreground his opponent’s status as ‘a Black man’ rather than just ‘a man’ during an argument is liable to be interpreted in relation to a whole history of interactions where that gesture was a clear assertion of racial superiority and white power. As Deumert explains:

The performative nature of language – its ability to cause effects – is rooted in its history, in the circulation and repetition of words and phrases across time… [W]ords mean because they have meant before, and, consequently, words also wound because they have wounded before. There is no escape from history, from the meanings we inherit.

This should not be taken to imply that the meanings we inherit are immutable, and will inevitably be transmitted intact to every subsequent generation until the end of time: word-meaning does change, along with the contexts in which words are repeated and circulated. Terms which were once offensive can lose their power to wound, or indeed fall out of use entirely. But people who talk blithely of reclaiming current insults and slur-terms very often underestimate the magnitude of the task, and the time it takes to accomplish.

Last year there was an interesting—and to some, perhaps, surprising—illustration of this point, in the findings of an online survey which investigated attitudes to the term ‘queer’ among members of the LGBT community. 60% of respondents reported that they found ‘queer’ offensive and inappropriate; among gay men the percentage rose to 93%. These are not the kind of figures you can generalise from, since they were compiled from the responses of a small, self-selected and thus unrepresentative sample; but they do suggest that attitudes to ‘queer’ remain more polarised–and more negative–than might have been expected in 2017. The rise of ‘queer‘–which increasing numbers of people are said to prefer to ‘stale and stodgy’ old labels like ‘lesbian‘–has been chronicled at length in pieces on Buzzfeed, Slate et al. Why are some LGBT people–especially gay men–still so resistant to it?

There are some answers in the comments made by survey respondents. In line with the principle Ana Deumert outlines—‘words wound because they have wounded before’—gay men who found ‘queer’ offensive often cited experiences of having it used to and about them in a clearly derogatory and sometimes threatening way. Some of the strongest objections came from men over the age of 60, but negative reactions were not confined to the oldest respondents. Even if they had been, that would still be a salutary reminder that the meanings we attach to words are slow to change: the movement to reclaim ‘queer’ has been going on for 30 years, i.e. for most of the adult life of anyone now in their 60s or 70s. That’s not to say nothing has changed since the 1980s—‘queer’ has certainly become less uniformly negative in its uses and connotations—but it is still far too soon to declare it ‘reclaimed’, or indeed to know whether its older use as a homophobic slur will ever be completely superseded.

‘Cunt’, at least when used to refer to a person rather than a body part, remains unequivocally pejorative, and that assessment is not undermined by the evidence (cited by numerous contributors to social media discussions of Samantha Bee) that in some circumstances it can be used without anyone either intending or taking offence. The comedian Mark Watson remarked on Twitter that he’d been called a cunt while playing Pictionary with friends—one of many comments whose underlying theme was the linguistic (over)sensitivity of Americans compared to Brits or Australians. A linguist I know recalled his surprise when he heard teenage girls in Wales greeting one another (in Welsh) with ‘what’s up, cunt?’ But what cases like these show is that, like other highly offensive words (most obviously the N-word), ‘cunt’ can be appropriated to serve as a marker of solidarity and mutual affection among intimates. This gesture works not in spite of the word’s taboo status in other contexts, but because of it.

Contributors to the social media debate also suggested that in many non-American varieties of English (Scots featured particularly strongly, and Australian English was mentioned too) ‘cunt’ is used so frequently and with so little animus, it has effectively become just another word for ‘person’. Some people referred to this usage as ‘gender neutral’. But the evidence, at least for Britain, suggests otherwise. To the extent that ‘cunt’ can function as a ‘neutral’ word, neither pejorative nor affectionate, its meaning appears to be gender-specific, referring to a male person rather than just a person. More generally, according to Tony McEnery’s analysis of swearing in the British National Corpus, ‘cunt’ is preferentially used by men, and they most often use it when addressing or referring to other men. Men do also use the word in reference to women, though much less frequently, and women sometimes use it in reference to men. But the corpus does not contain a single example of a woman using ‘cunt’ in the way Samantha Bee used it, to address or refer to another woman.

The finding that ‘cunt’ is a much commoner insult for men than for women might suggest that using it against a female target is perceived as aggravating the offence. If so, that would not be surprising: whatever else may be implied by calling a man a cunt, he is not being reminded of his historical or actual status as a commodity for male sexual use. This implication of the word may also help to explain why ‘cunt’ is so rarely a female-to-female insult. Not because women’s sisterly feelings prevent them from hurling sexist insults at one another, but because there are other sexist insults which are better suited to their needs.

As I noted in an earlier post about swearing, both historical evidence from court records and more recent sociolinguistic studies suggest that the words women have most often used to wound each other are terms like ‘whore’, ‘slut’ and ‘slag’, which make distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women on the basis of their (real or imagined) sexual conduct. In the context of verbal conflict between women, the problem with ‘cunt’ may be that it doesn’t make distinctions. When you call another woman a slag you are implying that she’s inferior, both to you and to anyone else who has eschewed the behaviour implied by the term; but if you call her a cunt you’re invoking a status which no one in possession of female genitals can easily disclaim. You’re not just expressing your opinion of her, you’re also recycling an old patriarchal belief about what all women essentially are.

This is why, ultimately, I do not agree with Laurie Penny’s assessment of ‘cunt’ as a ‘word of power’ for women. The power I see in it is largely the historical power of men to define women, to dominate them and to make them Other. (And also–given the evidence that ‘cunt’ is most commonly a male-on-male insult–to weaponise women’s bodies in their dealings with one another.)

So, am I saying we should treat ‘cunt’ in the way polite society has always treated it, as unspeakable? No: I don’t believe that any word is wholly unspeakable, nor am I in favour of banning words. I share the view set out by the African American legal scholar Randall Kennedy in his thought-provoking history of another ‘troublesome word’, the N-word. Though Kennedy has many qualms about its use, he argues that imposing a blanket prohibition just makes it into a fetish, and so does more to increase than to diminish its power. Instead he proposes that every case should be judged on its merits, giving careful consideration to the speaker’s aims, the effect of the word in context, and what alternatives the speaker could have chosen to use instead.

This last point, I think, is an important one for speakers themselves to take on board. In language there are almost always alternatives, and offensive words, words with the potential to wound because they have wounded before, should not be used either on autopilot or simply for their shock value: it’s always worth asking whether a word that carries less baggage might serve our purposes equally well.

In Samantha Bee’s case I think a well-chosen alternative to ‘cunt’, something scathing but not obscene, and more specific in its application to the person being criticised, would actually have served her purposes better. In a different context (like a live performance in a more intimate space) exploiting the shock value of ‘cunt’ might have been effective, but on a national TV show it was always liable to be heard as crass, flouting the rule so memorably stated by Michelle Obama in her own attack on Trump and his supporters: ‘you don’t stoop to their level … when they go low, we go high’. Perhaps what Bee will regret most, in hindsight, is not that she pissed off her sponsors and a large chunk of her audience by using the C-word on TV, but that by doing so she allowed Ivanka Trump to occupy, however briefly, the moral high ground.

Is ‘terrorism’ the right word?

Since the self-styled ‘incel’ Alek Minassian killed ten people in Toronto last week, deliberately mowing them down with a van he had rented for the purpose, a number of writers have suggested that it is time to start calling this kind of violence ‘terrorism’. These commentators have also called attention to the role of online ‘hate-groups’ (meaning the various misogynist subcultures whose home-base is the ‘manosphere’) in ‘radicalising’ men like Minassian, exposing them to extreme beliefs and inciting them to commit acts of violence.

One feminist writer who made this argument was Jessica Valenti, who wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times that 

despite a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.

Here’s the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism.

David Futrelle, who has spent years tracking online misogynist groups on his blog We Hunted the Mammoth, concurred. In a piece written for Elle magazine he described the incel worldview as ‘a poisonous and hateful ideology’, adding that 

killings carried out in its name should be considered deliberate terrorism just as ISIS bombings or KKK lynchings are.

This suggestion was echoed by Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, a mainstream liberal who confessed that until last week he had never even heard of incels:  

terrorism is precisely the right word for what happened in Toronto, right down to the online radicalisation that preceded it.

All three writers are making a more or less explicit analogy between Minassian’s acts and the acts of people we have no hesitation in calling terrorists, like radical Islamists and white supremacists. And it is not difficult to see the basis for that analogy. Islamist terror groups have used the internet for recruitment and propaganda purposes: the concept of ‘online radicalisation’ entered public consciousness via discussions of so-called ‘home grown’ terrorists like the London 7/7 bombers, who were said to have been inspired by the online preaching of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-based recruiter for al-Qaeda. Minassian’s method of killing, using a vehicle as a weapon, has been used in some recent attacks claimed by ISIS, as well as in the attack on anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville last year.

It’s also clear that misogynist killers see themselves as making a political statement. On Facebook Minassian referred to the attack he planned as an ‘incel rebellion’, and referenced the earlier incel killer Elliot Rodger, who composed a rambling ‘manifesto’ explaining/justifying his actions before murdering six people in 2014. Responses to these events on incel forums suggest that other members of the subculture have understood them as terrorist acts, in the textbook definition of terrorism as ‘the politically-motivated use of violence for the purpose of instilling fear’. After Toronto, one commenter wrote that    

normies must now live with fear for the rest of their lives, they can’t go to school, the mall, or on a date without having to fear another incel attack.

The argument that we should adopt the language of terrorism to talk about this phenomenon is essentially a proposal for what the linguist George Lakoff would call ‘reframing’—changing the language we use about something in order to change people’s perceptions of it. And what’s behind that proposal is the frustration felt by feminists like Valenti, and knowledgeable allies like Futrelle, about the failure of the authorities, mainstream commentators and the public at large to take misogyny seriously. As Valenti points out, the frame which has dominated previous discussions downplays the connection of mass killing with misogyny and the online groups which promote it: it has presented killers like Elliot Rodger as isolated ‘lone wolves’, driven to destroy others, and sometimes themselves, by their personal inadequacies and/or mental health problems. Reframing such acts as ‘misogynist terrorism’ is an attempt to make their political dimension visible.  

It is also an attempt to promote the idea that misogynist violence is preventable. The ‘lone wolf’ frame implies that nothing can be done: you can’t stop disturbed individuals from going off the rails and causing mayhem. But if what those individuals do is reframed as the result of being ‘radicalised’ by online ‘hate-groups’, the implication is that we could and should take action against those groups. We could, for instance, try to take away their platform by lobbying the companies that host their sites to shut them down (David Futrelle has argued for this). Or we could consider the kinds of counter-terrorism strategies that have been used in other contexts, like proscribing certain organisations or setting up programmes to help susceptible men resist their message.    

But while I agree with the writers I’ve quoted about the need to take misogyny seriously, and also with their criticisms of the ‘lone wolf’ frame, I have very mixed feelings about their proposed reframing. In the rest of this post I want to try to explain why I think we should be cautious about adopting the language of terrorism.    

The idea that we should combat misogynist terrorism by taking action against the online extremists who are radicalising men like Alek Minassian borrows not only the terminology but also the strategy of the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. The western governments which have been fighting this ‘war’ since 2001 have devoted considerable effort to preventing radicalisation, but they have not been particularly successful; they may even have exacerbated the problem, by sharpening the sense of grievance felt by young Muslim men, and by sending the message that embracing radical Islamism is the ultimate act of rebellion against authority. Defining misogynist groups as terrorist organisations could have a similarly counterproductive effect. The problem is, as the old cliché has it, that ‘one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’. That’s exactly how the manosphere misogynists like to think of themselves—as a radical resistance movement rising  up against feminist tyranny. Do we really want to adopt a frame that will reinforce their own preferred narrative?  

Another thing we need to think about is what the ‘terrorism’ frame leaves out. All frames have the effect of bringing some aspects of the phenomenon being represented into the foreground, while relegating others to the background or obscuring them entirely, and this one is no exception. It foregrounds a particular kind of misogynist violence, the kind perpetrated by Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger, and it focuses attention on certain features of those killings. For instance, they were public and intended to be spectacular; they targeted strangers en masse, choosing weapons like vehicles or firearms, which can kill large numbers of people quickly and efficiently; their perpetrators subscribed to an identifiable ideology and claimed to have a political motive. What we see in this frame is the similarity with other forms of terrorism. What we don’t see is the connection with other forms of male violence against women and girls.

Most violence against women and girls has none of the characteristics just listed. It most often takes place in private, and is rarely intended to be spectacular. Its targets are not usually strangers: most women and girls who die or suffer serious harm at the hands of violent men are attacked by men they know, especially intimate partners or ex-partners and family members. They are typically attacked individually, and the commonest methods are ‘personal’ ones requiring direct physical contact, like beating, kicking and strangling. Some attacks have a sexual element: they are, or include, acts of rape or sexual assault. The vast majority of perpetrators have not been ‘radicalised’ and do not think of their actions as political.

From this long list of differences it would be easy to conclude that misogynist mass killings have nothing in common with more ‘everyday’ forms of male violence. But that would be a mistake. 

Killings perpetrated by incels are intended as acts of revenge against the women who refuse to consider them as sexual or romantic partners. This is their signature feature, and it is generally taken as the expression of an extreme and deluded belief system. But many acts of violence committed by non-incel men have a similar rationale. The man who kills his wife or girlfriend because she has left him, or is planning to leave him, has the same grievance against her that the incel has against ‘Stacys’. He cannot tolerate being rejected: it is a slight that must be avenged. Men who stalk women–often women who either rejected or left them–feel the same. These are different expressions of the same impulse, rooted in what has been labelled ‘aggrieved male entitlement’. 

The philosopher Kate Manne has argued that this is how misogyny works. Unlike, say, anti-semitism or homophobia, misogyny is not usually a generalized hatred of the kind that prompts calls for the entire group to be exterminated. Rather, misogyny is the enforcement arm of patriarchy: it’s about punishing any woman who does not fulfil what men consider to be her obligations to them. Misogynists become enraged when women either take something men think is theirs by right (like a position of power), or else withhold something men assume they are entitled to (like the sex, love and admiration which incels believe they are owed).  

Jessica Valenti complains that the ‘lone wolf’ frame does not join the dots that connect mass killers to radical misogynist groups; I am suggesting that the ‘terrorism’ frame does not join the dots that connect mass killers to the perpetrators of everyday violence against women and girls. For feminists I think that’s a serious drawback. We can’t tackle misogyny if we limit our focus to a handful of spectacular but untypical cases.

Nor do I think we can tackle it effectively by concentrating our efforts on the forums which are said to be ‘radicalising’ men online. The manosphere is certainly a magnet (and a megaphone) for the aggrieved and entitled, but I don’t think it’s where most men learn to be misogynists. Take away the in-group jargon and what you’re left with is ideas and attitudes (like ‘women owe men sex’, or ‘a “hot” girlfriend enhances a man’s status among his peers’) which are also ubiquitous in the surrounding culture, and are shared by millions of men with no connection to any online group. What produces these beliefs in most men who hold them isn’t ‘radicalisation’, it’s just everyday patriarchal socialisation.  

The introduction of the ‘terrorism’ frame (which has quickly gained traction in the media) has had some positive effects. The ‘lone wolf’ frame has not dominated commentary on the Toronto killings in the way it dominated discussion of earlier cases; there has been less interest in the individual killer and more in the misogynist subculture he belonged to. But I find it depressing if the only way to make people take misogyny seriously is to compare it to other forms of violence and hatred which it only resembles up to a point. And if the effect is to obscure the connections between the spectacular misogyny of incel killings and the misogyny expressed in more ‘everyday’ acts of violence, I think that’s a high price to pay. Let’s not forget that from a feminist perspective, all violence against women is political.