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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender, talking and The Traitors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many thanks to everyone who commented on my Twitter thread    

You cannot be serious

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Simon and Mary.

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

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

👊 (that’s a fist bump not a punch)

H

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.  

Body language

At the girls’ grammar school I attended in the early 1970s, most of my peers’ most hated subject was Latin, which was generally considered to be super-hard, super-boring, and of no practical use whatsoever. I too found it pretty tedious, but there were several subjects I hated more, including geography, PE and, above all, domestic science. So I was content, if not exactly ecstatic, to plod on with Latin until O Level, the ancient equivalent of today’s GCSE. The school encouraged us to do this if there was a chance we might go on to university, and especially if we aspired to study medicine. Whenever we complained about the uselessness of Latin, we’d be told that ‘Latin trains the mind’, followed by ‘and you’ll need it if you want to be a doctor’.

Today’s medical students are not expected to have studied Latin, but they still need to learn a technical vocabulary which is heavily reliant on it. In anatomy, for instance, much of the standard terminology dates back to the Renaissance, when Latin was the language of learning across Europe. And sometimes, decoding medical Latin reveals that it isn’t just the language that’s ancient.

Last year the New York Times reported on the experience of Allison Draper, who as a first-year medical student came across a reference to the ‘pudendal nerve’. Not knowing the word ‘pudendal’, she consulted a dictionary of anatomy. She was shocked to learn that it derived from the Latin verb ‘pudere’, meaning ‘to be or make ashamed’, and that ‘pudendum’, a gerundive form meaning, roughly, ‘thing to be ashamed of’, was the standard anatomical term for the outer female genitalia. She decided to write a paper arguing that such terms had no place in modern medicine. Her (male) anatomy professor supported her, though he admitted that before she raised it he had never given the matter any thought.  

Another male anatomist, Bernard Moxham, had already concluded that ‘pudendum’ was a problem. To his mind it was not only sexist but also unscientific, putting moral judgment in place of description. Moxham had previously served as president of the international organisation that oversees the standard reference work on anatomical terms, Terminologia Anatomica, and he proposed that organisation’s terminology group should consider replacing ‘pudendum’ and ‘pudendal’ with more objective, descriptive alternatives.

He was surprised when this proposal met with resistance. Some members of the group maintained that the terms weren’t really sexist: they could be interpreted as referring not to the negative concept of shame but to the ‘positive’ concepts of modesty and virtue (though it’s hard to see what’s positive about locating women’s virtue in their genitals). Others warned darkly of a slippery slope: if ‘pudendum’ went, how many other traditional terms might also have to go because they were scientifically uninformative or out of tune with modern sensibilities?  Eventually the group agreed that ‘pudendum’ should be removed from Terminologia Anatomica, but ‘pudendal’, as in ‘pudendal nerve’, should stay; they were concerned that its removal might cause difficulty for colleagues in other branches of medicine. However, a pain-management specialist who regularly performs the procedure known as a ‘pudendal block’ told the Times she found its survival ‘incredible’. ‘What’, she asked, ‘does that say about the medical establishment and their attitudes to women?’ 

The story of ‘pudendum’ does say something about the sexism of medicine as an institution, but arguably it says at least as much about the culture in which medicine exists. In the 21^st century it may seem crassly offensive to label women’s genitals ‘the thing to be ashamed of’, but historically that label served the same purpose which is more often served today by using vague expressions like ‘undercarriage’ or ‘bits’. These are forms of polite avoidance, ways of not directly naming the offensive thing itself. And what’s behind that is not a specifically medical prejudice, but a far more general and culturally pervasive view of female sexuality, and the associated body-parts, as a source of shame and disgust. That view remains widespread among women themselves: surveys have found that many or most of those questioned regard terms like ‘vulva’ and ‘vagina’ as embarrassing and offensive.

But while medical terminology reflects the prejudices of the surrounding culture, the authority and prestige of medicine give its language a particular power to define the realities it speaks of—including the female body and the processes which affect it. Challenging that power, and medical authority more generally, has been an important feminist project more or less throughout the history of the movement. But as the case of ‘pudendum’ shows, it isn’t easy (even for insiders) to shift the norms of a linguistic register whose traditions are so revered and so jealously guarded. How changes happen, when they do, is a complicated question–as we see if we consider an earlier challenge to the language used by doctors about women’s bodies.    

In 1985 the UK medical journal The Lancet published a letter from a group of senior obstetricians calling on the profession to stop using the term ‘abortion’ to refer to both induced terminations of pregnancy and ‘spontaneous’ or involuntary pregnancy loss. The letter stated that in the writers’ experience, women who had experienced pregnancy loss found the use of ‘abortion’ distressing and offensive. It proposed, on ‘humanitarian grounds’, that non-induced cases should instead be called by women’s own preferred term, ‘miscarriage’.

Research has shown that ‘miscarriage’ did subsequently become more common in medical usage. But there has been some debate on the role played by the Lancet letter. Was it the letter that changed doctors’ attitudes, and thus their linguistic choices, or was a gradual shift from ‘abortion’ to ‘miscarriage’ already happening in response to external pressure? Patient-led groups and women’s health activists had established a clear preference for ‘miscarriage’ before 1985: in 1982, when a charity was set up to support affected women, its founders named it the Miscarriage Association. Might these ongoing developments, led by women outside the profession, have played a more important role than the letter in shifting the professional consensus over time?      

That question has recently been revisited in an article by the corpus linguist Beth Malory, who investigated the use of ‘abortion’ and ‘miscarriage’ in the titles of articles published in three UK medical journals (The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology) between 1975 and 1995. Using a statistical modelling technique called ‘change point analysis’, which is designed to identify sudden (rather than gradual) changes in an established pattern, she found that in this case there had been a moment when the pattern abruptly changed, and there was an 85% probability that this occurred in 1986—within months of the publication of the Lancet letter. In Malory’s view this is strong evidence that the letter played a pivotal role in the shift towards ‘miscarriage’.

That doesn’t mean external pressure played no role: the letter was, by its authors’ own account, a response to the concerns expressed by patients and organisations representing them (the letter cites a survey conducted by the Miscarriage Association in which 85% of respondents opposed the then-current medical use of ‘abortion’). But it does seem likely that the effect of the letter reflected the authors’ status as eminent members of the medical profession, which enabled them to make the case for ‘miscarriage’ more authoritatively than the women they spoke for could have done. So, in this case as in the case of ‘pudendum’, the moral of the story seems to be that changing the language of medicine is not something sisters can do for themselves: they may be instrumental in preparing the ground, but ultimately they need the support of high-ranking insiders. (Who will often, as in these cases, be men.)    

Nearly 40 years have passed since the Lancet letter, but the issue it addressed hasn’t gone away. ‘Miscarriage’, once recommended as a compassionate and respectful choice, is increasingly under fire itself. And this time women are voicing their objections from a platform that didn’t exist in the 1980s.

In 2020, after the model and media personality Chrissy Teigen shared the news of her recent pregnancy loss on Instagram, the response quickly spread across social media, and then to mainstream publications like Glamour magazine, which ran an article headed ‘Women are calling for the word “miscarriage” to be banished for good’. The article reproduced a Twitter exchange in which a woman expressed her appreciation for Teigen’s use of the term ‘pregnancy loss’, observing that ‘“Miscarried” is such an awful description…it’s like you did something wrong’. Other women agreed: ‘miscarry = mishandle’, tweeted one, while another added, ‘you’re so right…it’s no wonder so many women carry feelings of shame and guilt after their loss’. Many women commented that the term ‘pregnancy loss’ was new to them, and said they planned to start using it instead of ‘miscarriage’.

This change already had some professional support. In 2011 the US journal Obstetrics and Gynecology published a paper entitled ‘Nomenclature for pregnancy outcomes: time for a change’ (note: no question-mark), which argued that new terms were needed to reflect both advances in scientific knowledge and what it called ’emotional considerations’. The authors’ own list of suggested terms contained several that included the word ‘loss’ (e.g. ‘embryonic loss’ and ‘early pregnancy loss’). ‘Pregnancy loss’ also appeared in some of the article titles in the paper’s bibliography, showing that some specialists had already adopted it.

Though it hasn’t happened yet, it wouldn’t surprise me if ‘pregnancy loss’ became the dominant term in the not-too-distant future. Personally I think it’s a good term: it’s straightforward, transparent and acknowledges what the experience means to those affected by it. But it’s still striking, as Beth Malory also comments, how fast and how far ‘miscarriage’ has fallen. The responses to Chrissy Teigen suggested that it is now widely seen as a woman-blaming term (in the words of the tweet quoted earlier, ‘miscarry = mishandle’). That isn’t just a lay view, either: in 2015 a doctor writing in the Toronto Globe & Mail argued that ‘miscarriage’ was a harmful term because the ‘mis-’ prefix leads women to believe their pregnancies have ‘gone wrong’ (when in reality it’s more likely they were never viable) and that this must be because of something they did wrong.

This argument implies that the negative associations of ‘miscarriage’ are–and always were–an integral part of its meaning. Yet if we look back to the 1980s, there is no reason to think it was perceived as negative. In those days it was championed by feminists, patient groups, charities and eventually doctors; it was presented as the term women themselves preferred. One of the advantages it was said to have over ‘abortion’ was that it didn’t carry a stigma, or make women feel they were being blamed. Evidently that’s changed during the last 40 years; but what has happened to change it?   

The short answer is that changes in word-meaning may reflect changes in the surrounding culture, and in this case I can think of two developments which might be relevant. One is the increasingly aggressive promotion of the idea that individuals are responsible for their own health, and the associated tendency to blame any problems on people’s own unhealthy choices; in the case of pregnant women, whose choices also affect their unborn children, this attitude is particularly punitive (think of all the total strangers who feel entitled to intervene if they see a pregnant woman drinking alcohol). The other is the rise in popular culture of a new ideal of perfect motherhood, embodied by celebrities and social media influencers who plot an exemplary and very public course from conception (which happens exactly as planned) through a radiantly healthy pregnancy to birth (ideally ‘natural’), after which they have no trouble bonding with the baby, and quickly shed any excess weight. For the great majority of women (maybe all of them) this ideal is unattainable, but that doesn’t stop them feeling guilty for falling short.

Of course it’s true that pregnant women in the 1980s—and for that matter the 1880s—were nagged about their health and presented with unrealistic images of motherhood; it’s also true that women who lost a pregnancy were always susceptible to feelings of shame and guilt. But I’m suggesting that the pressure on prospective mothers to be ‘perfect’ has been massively ramped up in recent decades, and that this may at least partly explain why ‘miscarriage’ has taken on more negative, judgmental or accusatory overtones. It’s a projection of our feelings about the thing onto the word that names it. And one question that might raise is whether changing the word will solve the problem.

Critics of this kind of change are fond of pointing to cases where terms which were introduced to replace a stigmatising label rapidly became pejorative themselves, necessitating a further change in the approved terminology (‘handicapped’ replaced ‘crippled’, and was replaced in its turn by ‘disabled’; ‘lunatics’ became ‘insane’ and then ‘mentally ill’). New terms are corrupted by the persistence of old attitudes, turning the project of reforming language into an endless game of whack-a-mole. My response to this is ‘yes, but…’. Changing linguistic labels may not eliminate social stigma, but that’s not an argument for sticking with terms that have become pejorative. You wouldn’t tell someone suffering from chronic headaches that they shouldn’t take a painkiller today because it won’t stop them getting another headache tomorrow. Temporary relief is still relief.

But when feminists get involved in debates about medical terminology, we should be clear about what renaming can and can’t achieve. Terms which were targets of feminist criticism in the past, like ‘hysteria’ and ‘frigidity’, may no longer appear in doctors’ diagnostic manuals, but they live on as everyday sexist insults (also, how enthusiastic are we about replacements like ‘female sexual dysfunction’, which arguably just repackage the old sexist ideas under a new, blander label?) What we’re ultimately fighting is not a war on words, but a battle against oppressive beliefs and practices. Language can play a part in that, but it isn’t the only thing we need to change.

I’m grateful to Beth Malory for sending me her article (which I hope those of you with access will read for yourselves), but she should not be held responsible for the opinions expressed in this post.

Assertiveness: just say no

This month a feminist classic was reissued: Anne Dickson’s A Woman In Your Own Right, first published in 1982. Back in the 1980s virtually every feminist I knew owned a copy; I can still visualise the shiny silver cover. The 40^th anniversary edition looks different, with a sunshine yellow cover and a new subtitle (the original one, ‘Assertiveness and You’, has been replaced by ‘The Art of Assertive, Clear and Honest Communication’). The content has also been updated: it’s not being presented as a historical document, but as still-relevant, practical advice.

Is it still relevant? As Dickson says in her new introduction,

It is tempting to believe that the world has changed to such an extent that women no longer have need of the guidance and support this book originally set out to offer.

She goes on to point out that while some things have changed for some women, many basic inequalities have persisted. Women are still expected to do the lion’s share of the unpaid care-work, and they still contend with high levels of sexual and domestic violence. She also cites some newer problems, like the explosion of online bullying and abuse.

No feminist disputes the argument that we still live in an unequal world. But is assertiveness a solution to the problems Dickson mentions? Personally, I have my doubts: as regular readers will know, I’m critical of the idea that the way women communicate is, if not the root cause of their subordinate position, then at least an important contributory factor. I think the assumptions behind communication training for women are linguistically and politically naïve, and there’s little if any evidence that interventions based on them are effective.

In that case, you might ask, why have those interventions been so popular for so long? A cynical answer might be that, like the equally ineffective products of the diet industry, they are lucrative. Training is a profitable business, and AFAIK it’s unregulated: anyone can market their services as a trainer, coach or ‘communication consultant’. Anne Dickson, to be fair, does have expert credentials: she’s not in the same category as the hacks and grifters I’ve criticised in the past. Her model of assertiveness is internally coherent, and there’s more to her advice than the usual finger-wagging bullshit. But that’s exactly why the 40^th anniversary of her best-known work seems like a good moment to revisit the reasons why—even at its best—I find this approach misguided.

Assertiveness training (AT) is now quite strongly associated with feminism, but it wasn’t invented by feminists. It originated in the late 1940s as a form of behaviour therapy for people whose dysfunctional behaviour was linked, in the opinion of those treating them, to ‘poor communication skills’. In some cases the problem it was meant to address was the extreme passivity caused by severe depression or long-term institutionalisation; it was also used with drug addicts, teen mothers and homosexuals, whose ‘deviant’ lifestyles were thought to result from low self-esteem and/or inability to resist peer pressure. In other cases the presenting problem was not passivity but its opposite, aggression. AT was used to teach people (including sex offenders and domestic abusers) to verbalise feelings of anger rather than resorting to physical violence.

Trainees were taught a set of guiding principles which emphasised that (a) everyone has the right to their needs and feelings, while at the same time (b) everyone has the obligation to respect the right of others to their needs and feelings. These principles were said to require the adoption of a style of speech which was clear, direct and honest rather than passive, aggressive or manipulative. The strategies taught in AT included using ‘I’ statements, making requests directly without hinting or hedging, and refusing unwanted invitations or unreasonable requests by ‘just saying no’.  

In the early 1970s, American second wave feminists took AT out of the clinic and into the small, self-organised women’s groups which formed the backbone of the Women’s Liberation Movement. These were women who’d grown up in the 1950s, the era of what Betty Friedan called ‘the feminine mystique’; they turned to AT to help them unlearn their ingrained habits of passivity and subservience. In Britain, similarly, Anne Dickson recalls that the women she worked with early on in her career ‘could immediately identify with passive and indirect behaviours, and could readily understand how this put them at a disadvantage’.

Today Dickson thinks women have less of a problem with passivity, but it troubles her that assertiveness has been popularly conflated with aggression. She complains that the phrase ‘an assertive woman’ conjures up a picture of someone ‘authoritarian, domineering and overbearing’, who ‘gets what she wants by any means available to her’ and uses feminism as an excuse for expressing ‘hostility and intolerance, to men especially’. This is not, Dickson insists, what assertiveness means. It ‘teaches us how to maintain directness and clarity and remain authoritative while at the same time avoiding aggression’ (her emphasis).

These remarks underline Dickson’s continued allegiance to the original model of assertiveness, in which aggression was as much of a problem as passivity, but they also illustrate the limitations of the philosophy behind that model (which, to the extent it has any political content, might be described as ‘wishy-washy liberal’). From a feminist perspective the equation of female assertiveness with aggression is a predictable consequence of sexism and misogyny. Any attempt by a woman to assert her rights or her authority directly, and any refusal on her part to defer to others’ wishes, is liable to be construed as illegitimate and hostile—in short, as an aggressive act, which may then provoke a backlash.  

This is implicitly acknowledged in some of the academic literature on assertiveness. Back in the 1990s, when I was researching AT for my book Verbal Hygiene, one of the texts I read included a discussion of a course developed for women in Puerto Rico, where the designers had decided not to include the topic of saying no to your male partner. In Puerto Rico, they explained, the submission of wives to husbands was ‘a relatively intransigent cultural norm’: encouraging women to say no to their husbands would be neither effective nor ‘socially valid’, and it could put the women at risk of violence. This surely underlines the point that AT is not politically radical. It’s not about challenging the prevailing social order, it’s about helping individuals function more effectively within it.

The main tool AT employs for that purpose is a set of rules for using language, which are meant to help trainees achieve the ideal of ‘clear, direct and honest communication’. In the abstract this seems unobjectionable: no one is in favour of obscure, confusing and dishonest communication. But if you delve into the details of what AT means by ‘clear, direct and honest’, you soon discover that the recommended speech-style is linguistically unnatural and socially unrealistic–and as such, unlikely to make communication more effective.

One problem with AT’s advice is its assumption that every speaker in every situation has the same freedom to choose to be ‘direct and honest’, and that what stops many women from making that choice is simply their own lack of confidence or self-belief. In reality, of course, there are other constraints which have more to do with the social context than with individual psychology. Many of the contexts in which women are told they should assert themselves involve power inequalities: standing up to a bullying boss, or a violent husband, may have consequences they are (understandably) unwilling to risk. It’s not a good idea to ‘just say no’ to someone who may take that as a provocation and respond with physical violence.

In fact, empirical research has shown that even in non-threatening situations English-speakers very rarely perform refusals by ‘just saying no’ without apology or explanation. A bald ‘no’ may be clear and direct, but it will also be heard as rude and hostile. But AT handbooks have a tendency to dismiss linguistic markers of politeness as mere ‘padding’, detracting from the clarity of the message without adding any extra information. The point this misses is that communicating isn’t just about exchanging information, it’s also about negotiating the relationship between participants. Politeness plays a crucial role in establishing the necessary level of co-operation and mutual respect. Eliminating it will undoubtedly influence the way your interlocutors perceive you—but not usually in a positive way.    

There’s a good illustration of this in the original AWIYOR: if you’re in a café and you find your cup hasn’t been washed properly you should say to the server, ‘I’d like you to change this for a clean cup’. This is textbook assertiveness: a clear, direct, first-person statement of what the speaker wants, with no superfluous ‘padding’ (like, say, ‘sorry, but could you change this for a clean cup please?’). It’s also brusque to the point of rudeness, making the speaker sound overbearing and self-absorbed.

That’s not just my opinion. Psychologists have done experiments where subjects watched videotapes of people communicating in ‘assertive’ and ‘unassertive’ ways and then rated each speaker for qualities like competence, likeability and aggression. ‘Assertive’ speakers are often judged to be aggressive, rude and unlikeable. And while that’s true for speakers of both sexes, you won’t be surprised to hear that the effect is stronger for women. Because women are expected to be kind and self-effacing, any female behaviour that deviates from that norm attracts more disapproval than the same behaviour in men.  

For me this is the core of the problem with communication training for women. Even when the advice itself isn’t stupid, it doesn’t acknowledge what both research and experience consistently show—that women are judged by a double standard and caught in a double bind. If they conform to gendered expectations they’ll be criticised as weak and ineffectual, while if they flout those expectations they’ll be damned as ‘abrasive’, ‘shrill’ and ‘strident‘.

This casts doubt on the assumption the whole enterprise is based on: that women are held back in life by the way they communicate, and the remedy is for them to change their behaviour. But if the new, ‘improved’ behaviour is not acceptable either–it just attracts a different set of criticisms–that might suggest that women’s speech was never the real problem. What really holds women back is systemic sexism: the negative judgments made on their speech are just expressions of that deeper prejudice.

So where does that leave A Woman In Your Own Right? I’ve read a lot of self-help books and training manuals in my time, and as I said earlier, I regard AWIYOR as one of the better ones. Even if I think some of the advice is linguistically misguided, it would be hard to argue that it’s actively harmful.

Considered as an institution, however, I do think assertiveness training—and communication training more generally—has done more harm than good over the last 40 years. Some examples are worse than others, but they all recycle and reinforce the belief that women as a group have a communication problem, and that this is an important reason why they are (still) not equal to men. They’re underpaid because they don’t feel comfortable asking directly for more money. They’re overworked because they can’t say no. They’re overlooked because they don’t speak up, or else they hedge and waffle and don’t protest when they’re interrupted.

This argument is not supported by good evidence, and our continuing receptiveness to it distracts attention from the deeper causes of inequality. It also obscures the nature of the problems women do have with language and communication, which have more to do with a combination of men’s behaviour and widely-held sexist attitudes than with women lacking the confidence to speak or using language that stops people taking them seriously.

So, with all due respect to Anne Dickson, I am not inclined to celebrate the anniversary of A Woman In Your Own Right. To be honest (not forgetting clear and direct), I find its longevity depressing. There was a time when I thought this whole genre was on its way out, but it managed to hang on, and in the last decade it’s produced a new crop of popular texts with titles like The Confidence Code and Girl, Stop Apologizing.

These recent books are part of the rise of what the feminist media scholars Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill call ‘confidence culture’, a depoliticised form of feminism which, in their words, ‘exculpate[s] social structures and institutions from responsibility for gender injustice, laying it squarely at women’s door’. Rather than exhorting women to demand their rights and improve their material conditions through collective political struggle, it calls on them to empower themselves by improving themselves. As A Woman In Your Own Right demonstrates, this is not a new idea. It wasn’t the solution to our problems forty years ago, and it isn’t the solution to them now.

Cartoon by Angela Martin, 1994

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.

Sherry for Nana?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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