Asking for it: language and affirmative consent

A few weeks ago a group called Right To Equality launched a campaign to change the law to require “affirmative” sexual consent—actively saying yes to sex rather than just not saying no—which was immediately derailed by a row about language. The problem was the same one Northwest Cancer Research ran into last November, when it tried to promote cervical cancer screening with a billboard featuring crossed female legs alongside the rape-myth-inspired strapline “Don’t keep ‘em crossed/ get screened instead”. Right to Equality’s ads alluded to another rape cliché: its “provocative” strapline, which appeared on posters over a close-up of a woman’s face (or alternatively on a T-shirt below the wearer’s face), was “I’m asking for it”.

This did not go down well. The Daily Mail‘ summed up the obvious problem in its headline “Sex abuse survivors blast… ‘insulting and triggering’, ‘I’m asking for it’ consent law campaign as they say, ‘This was what my rapist told me’”. And that wasn’t just the view from the Tory tabloids. An opinion piece in the Independent called it “the most offensive sexual assault campaign I’ve ever seen”, while a critical article in the New Statesman (aptly headed “No one asked for it”) judged it “troublingly misguided”.

By now it should surely be clear that women do not, on the whole, appreciate sexualized imagery and verbal innuendo in messaging on subjects like rape and cancer. They might find it innocuous in other contexts (in an ad for Cadbury’s Flake, say), but in this context they find it tasteless and offensive. So why do the adwomen–and they are, almost always, women–keep giving us these “provocative” campaigns?

As I said in my post about “Don’t keep ‘em crossed”, I think a significant part of the problem is that ideas about how language works which are taken for granted in the creative industries often misfire under real-world conditions. To creatives it may seem obvious that provocative slogans are effective (attention-grabbing, memorable, etc.), but in the real world viewers may react to provocation in ways which undermine the advertisers’ aims. For instance, if a young woman goes out wearing the “I’m asking for it” T-shirt, will the people whose attention she grabs think, “oh, cool, she’s subverting a rape myth”, or will they think she’s saying she’s always up for it? Will they want to engage her in a conversation about consent, or will she become a target for catcalling and lewd remarks? The short answer is, it depends: both those reactions are possible. But if you assume you’ll only get the one you wanted, and don’t consider other possibilities, you may find yourself in the embarrassing position of running a feminist campaign about rape whose most vocal critics are rape survivors.

While there’s always potential for a message to be read in different ways by different people, that’s a particular issue with messages which don’t make their meaning immediately obvious, but instead present the viewer with a puzzle-solving task–a long-established tradition in British advertising, which often uses allusion and wordplay to give the viewer the satisfaction of working out what the ad is saying. “I’m asking for it” belongs to that tradition. To work out what its designers intended it to communicate, viewers need to recognize the strapline as an allusion to “she was asking for it”, realize that changing the subject pronoun to “I” implies that the woman in this version actively wants sex, and connect that to the text below the image (“let’s change the law to require a clear yes to sex”) to derive the solution that “it” doesn’t just mean “sex”, it also means “consent”, and that double meaning is the key to the message. Undeniably, this is clever. But is everyone who sees the ad going to get it?

The answer, I think, is “no”. Some viewers will miss the point simply because they haven’t engaged for long enough to work it out (eye-tracking studies have found that the average time spent looking at a poster ad is 1.7 seconds). Others, however, will miss it because they don’t share the background assumptions which are needed to get to the “right” answer. To read “I’m asking for it” in the way the designers intended–as a subversive twist on an old rape-myth–you have to recognize “women ask for it” as a myth. And research suggests that quite large numbers of people, especially people under 25, don’t think it’s a myth, they think it’s a fact.

To be fair, the campaign has taken criticism of “I’m asking for it” on board, and has now produced some new posters with less “provocative” straplines (e.g., “only yes means yes”). But understanding how language works in real-world situations isn’t just important when you’re designing publicity for a campaign about affirmative consent. Similar questions about how language works are also raised by the actual aim of the campaign, making affirmative consent a legal requirement.  

Consent, of whatever kind, is obviously about communication, and that’s usually assumed to mean linguistic communication, which is thought to be less ambiguous, and so less open to (mis)interpretation, than other ways of signalling desire (e.g., through gaze, gesture or touch). What, after all, could be clearer and less ambiguous than the simple words “yes” and “no”? But as people who study everyday talk have been pointing out for years, in reality it isn’t that simple. The idea that if you want it you say yes and if you don’t you say no is at odds with what we know about how real speakers actually do things.

In 1999 the researchers Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith challenged what was then a ubiquitous piece of rape prevention advice–that if women didn’t want to have sex they should “just say no”–by pointing out that in reality it’s extremely rare for English-speakers to decline any kind of invitation or proposition by just saying no: most real-life refusals don’t even contain the word “no”. What people typically do is use a formula for refusal that involves some combination of hesitating, hedging, expressing polite regret and giving an acceptable, though not necessarily truthful, reason. For instance, if you don’t want to go for coffee with a co-worker you might say “um, I wish I could, but I really need to finish this report”.

Kitzinger and Frith presented evidence from focus groups that sexual propositions are not an exception to this rule: their female informants reported using the same refusal formula in sexual situations as in others (e.g., “[pause], I’m really tired and I’ve got an early start tomorrow, so I think I should probably just go home”). In their experience this was usually effective, and where it wasn’t, that was not because the man hadn’t understood it as a refusal, but because he wasn’t willing to accept a refusal. In those cases they said they’d be wary of using the word “no” because of its potential to make him angry and more aggressive. “Just say no”, Kitzinger and Frith concluded, is bad advice: it’s linguistically unnatural, unnecessarily blunt (since everyone understands the conventional formula), and in a tricky situation it may increase the risk of violence.

Saying yes isn’t as risky as saying no (since it will usually be what the other person wants to hear), but it raises the same question about how natural it is. Is it true that “only yes means yes”? Is continually asking for/giving permission to do things (kiss, touch, undress someone, penetrate them) a kind of verbal interaction people either do have, or could be persuaded to have, in reality—or is it an unrealistic and misguided thing to expect of them?  

I can’t claim to have a definitive, evidence-based answer, because for obvious ethical reasons there isn’t much data to base one on. We really don’t know much about how people “naturally” talk during physical sexual encounters. There has been some research on chatrooms where people who can’t see or touch each other use language to construct erotic narratives, and there are some studies of the fictional dialogue which appears in representations of sex (e.g., pornography and romance fiction). But it’s not clear how much this research tells us about the kind of “ordinary” sex-talk that isn’t scripted or performed for an audience.

It’s possible that it tells us something, though, since in the absence of more direct instruction (watching other people have sex, or practising it under the guidance of an experienced tutor) many people use fictional representations as templates for their real-life sexual encounters. Recently, for instance, there’s been concern about the extent to which young people are getting their templates from porn, a genre in which “consent talk” (i.e., explicit, ongoing verbal negotiation of what the parties do or don’t want) is not typically part of the script. Consent talk is also largely absent in representations where sex occurs in the context of romantic love. In romantic sex scenes what’s usually depicted is a quasi-mystical connection between two lovers which ensures that their desires are perfectly in sync: they don’t need to talk, their bodies just know. But if it isn’t modelled in the representations people use as sources of information and inspiration, how do they learn to do consent talk in real life? Is talking about it simple and straightforward, or is it something a lot of people struggle with?

In 1990 this became a real and consequential question for students at Antioch College, a small and “progressive” liberal arts college in Ohio, when the college introduced a new sexual consent policy as part of its disciplinary code (meaning that any student found in violation would face sanctions that included expulsion). The policy stated that consent had to be both affirmative and ongoing–explicitly sought and received for each discrete sexual act (so, no assuming that one thing “naturally” leads to another). As a spokeswoman for the college explained this to the media,

If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask. If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask. If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask.

The reason the college was making statements to the media was that the policy had caused nationwide controversy. It had been seized on by critics of campus “political correctness” (a major talking-point in the early 1990s) who decried it as an authoritarian attempt to limit adolescents’ sexual freedom– though at the same time they said the attempt was bound to fail, because no normal adolescent would take any notice. In 1993 I went to Antioch to investigate what was happening. I interviewed a number of people about the policy (mostly students, but also the Dean who oversaw its operation) to find out how they felt about it, what difference they thought it had made and what following it (if they did follow it) involved in practice.  

The students told me that while a lot of people they knew were not complying with the policy (and some were vocally opposed to it), there were also many who had embraced it positively. The main benefit everyone mentioned was making it easier to refuse unwanted sex without getting the pushback that had been common in the past. However, some students also said that being compelled to think so specifically about what they did or didn’t want, and then to verbalize those thoughts, had resulted in them having more pleasurable sex.

The Dean believed that the policy’s main value was educational. She was exasperated by the argument that college students didn’t need “sex lessons”: Americans, she told me, were in denial about the extent of young people’s ignorance. The workshops students had to attend when they arrived invariably revealed how little many of them knew, not just about consent but about sex itself. But the policy had not, she said, solved the problem of rape on campus, which in her view was still prevalent, and still significantly under-reported.

One student who had served as a “peer advocate” agreed with that assessment. The policy, she explained, was at odds with mainstream peer-group norms which put pressure on women to acquiesce to men’s demands, and to keep quiet about it if things went wrong. It was also a fairly common view that talking explicitly about sex-acts was embarrassing, unromantic and potentially damaging to a woman’s reputation (if she talks about it so freely, doesn’t that suggest she’s a bit of a slut?) The students who were most enthusiastic about the policy were feminists and other social justice types who had consciously rejected the mainstream heterosexual culture. At progressive Antioch those people were fairly numerous, but even there they were not a majority; on many campuses they would be a tiny minority.          

What Antioch’s experiment shows, IMO, is that it takes more than a written policy, even one backed up by serious disciplinary sanctions, to shift the linguistic and behavioural norms which are deeply embedded in a community’s everyday life. Redefining consent on paper is the easy part: the hard part is bringing what happens on the ground into alignment with that redefinition. The same point applies even more strongly to a campaign which wants to shift a whole society’s norms by rewriting the relevant legislation. Even if Right to Equality succeeds in changing the legal definition of consent, on its own that’s unlikely to be the game-changer they seem to think.

Part of Antioch’s problem was that the very explicit consent talk the policy prescribed evidently didn’t come naturally to most students. Even if we bracket the ones who opposed the policy for political reasons, many others perceived it as embarrassing or weird (even the peer advocate quoted above said that when she first arrived she thought it was “stupid”), while for some it was a turn-off, in conflict with what they thought sex should ideally be like. To become embedded in everyday practice, this kind of talk may need to be not just recommended, or mandated, in the abstract, but concretely modelled–and not (or not only) in sex education lessons, which also tend to be perceived as embarrassing and unsexy, but in the kinds of sexual representations people seek out voluntarily.     

But you might think that’s only marginally relevant to a discussion of Right to Equality’s campaign. Though their website suggests they do see championing affirmative consent as, in part, a cultural intervention, an attempt to promote “healthy and respectful relationships” by “highlight[ing] the importance of communication”, their primary aim is to change what happens when someone reports that they were raped. If affirmative consent becomes the legal standard, they argue, a man who, for whatever reason, didn’t explicitly request and receive a woman’s consent will have no excuse: he will no longer be able to argue in court that the complainant’s behaviour (she didn’t say no, she acted like she wanted it) gave him a “reasonable belief” that she consented. Will that not be a game-changer?

Unfortunately, I doubt it. However consent is defined in theory, in practice (as I said earlier in relation to advertising messages) people will still tend to interpret the evidence they’re presented with in a way that fits their own beliefs. If jurors in rape cases are still operating with the same beliefs as before, just changing the question they have to decide on from “did she say no?” to “did he ask and get a yes?” will not necessarily change the outcome. The facts will still often be disputed—the complainant will claim he didn’t ask, the defendant will swear he did—and there’s no reason to think it won’t still be the man whose account jurors prefer, thanks to the combined power of “himpathy” (the desire to give men the benefit of the doubt) and the still-pervasive belief that women “cry rape”.

But there’s another reason why I don’t see redefining consent as a game-changer. In the last few years the way the justice system deals with sexual violence has been the subject of quite intensive investigation (we’ve had a major Parliamentary inquiry and several expert reports), and what’s emerged is a consensus that the main obstacle to justice is not the way the law is written, but the failure of the system, which is both under-resourced and pervaded by misogyny, to enforce it. The scale of that problem would be difficult to overstate: as the Victims’ Commissioner Vera Baird said in 2020, what’s supposed to be one of the most serious offences in the book has instead been “effectively decriminalized”. When she made that observation only 1.5% of recorded rapes were resulting in a criminal charge; that figure has since risen, but only to a still-paltry 2.4%. And even the five in two hundred accused rapists who do get charged won’t all end up standing trial. Cases are now taking so long to get to court that large numbers of complainants are dropping out, and without their testimony the case collapses. In these circumstances it seems pointless to debate whether changing the legal definition of consent will increase the number of convictions. You can’t get a conviction without a trial, and you can’t have a trial without a charge.

What the present situation calls for is deeds, not words. Rather than campaigning to change what the law says, we should demand action to change what it does.

2023: forward to the past?

It’s that time again: the time when commentators of all kinds look back at the last 12 months, and pick out what they see as the most significant trends or the most memorable moments of the year. This blog’s annual round-ups have tended to be variations on a few well-worn themes; the details are different every year, but the overall trends are much the same. In that respect, as what follows will make clear, 2023 was fairly typical; but one thing several of the issues I’ve picked out have in common (something the title of this post alludes to) is an oddly “retro” vibe: they’re cases where an old form of sexism has been reinvented or repackaged for new times.             

1. Tech troubles

This year’s lists of WOTYs (words of the year) were dominated by a single theme: most major English dictionaries agreed that 2023 was the year of artificial intelligence. Though Oxford (which put its shortlist to a public vote) ended up crowning rizz, a slang term derived from charisma, Collins went with AI and Cambridge chose hallucinate (in the AI-related sense of “make stuff up”). Merriam-Webster’s choice, authentic, reflected concerns about AI’s capacity to deceive by mimicking or producing believable simulacra of real people: deepfake was also on its shortlist.

Feminists have their own concerns about recent developments in AI, ranging from the way large language models amplify sexist biases in the massive datasets used to train them to the implications of AI “companions”, whose increasing popularity I wrote about in May. But this year’s events reminded us that some of women’s most pressing technology-related problems are not new—and are still not getting the kind of serious attention, either from the tech companies or from policymakers, which we’ve seen being given to AI.  

In January, when the New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern unexpectedly resigned, there was speculation that the misogynist abuse and threats she’d been subjected to had played a significant part in her decision. Another female leader who resigned in 2023, the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (though she clearly had other reasons for stepping down) spoke publicly both about her personal experiences of online abuse and her fear that it was driving women out of politics, or deterring them from entering in the first place.

We’ve known about this problem for some time. In 2016 a cross-party campaign (fronted by Yvette Cooper MP) was launched under the slogan “Reclaim the Internet”: it aimed, among other things, to pressure the tech companies to do more. But this initiative evidently did not achieve much. In 2017 a survey of women MPs found that one in three had seriously considered quitting because of the volume of abuse they received, and in 2019 a significant number chose not to seek re-election, citing abuse as a reason for their decision to stand down. Like tech’s other big misogyny problems–one being the ease with which violent and/or supposedly illegal pornography can be accessed online, by children as well as adults, and another being the proliferation of extreme misogynist content which is then promoted to young men on mainstream platforms like YouTube and TikTok—this one seems to be getting worse.          

2. Women beware women: the political rise of the female anti-feminist

But there’s one type of female politician who had a good year in 2023: the right-wing woman whose rhetoric is even more extreme, reactionary and authoritarian than that of the men around her. Though in most cases her main selling point is nationalism/racism, she will often position herself explicitly as a female anti-feminist, extolling women’s traditional domestic roles while making her own status as an exception, a woman in a position of public leadership, more acceptable by adopting one or more of the archetypal personae through which female power has historically been understood (mother, iron lady/warrior queen, seductress or “pet”). As a type she is far from new, but she has managed to reinvent herself: her politics may be backward-looking, but she presents herself as a thoroughly modern woman.

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the “post-fascist” Brothers [sic] of Italy who is now the Italian prime minister, is a notable case in point. She has described herself as first and foremost a mother, and has emphasized her Christian beliefs, but she has also exploited her relative youth and sexual attractiveness in a way that sometimes makes you wonder if she’s trying to establish the bimbo as a new political archetype. She once posed for the media while holding a pair of melons to her chest (a reference both to her last name and to the slang meaning of “melons”, which is the same in Italian as in English), and at a NATO summit in 2023 she cut short a press conference on the grounds that her high heeled shoes were killing her. Like Marine Le Pen (who improved her performance in the last French presidential election by adopting a softer, more maternal image), Meloni seems to know what she’s doing: polls suggest that her brand of femininity is seen by many women as “relatable”.

The antifeminist female politician has also become a significant figure in the British Tory party, whose internal wars were, regrettably, a major driver of our national politics in 2023. She isn’t a completely new phenomenon (the obvious precedent is Margaret Thatcher), but I can’t remember a time when so many women were talked of on the Tory right as potential leaders. In some cases antifeminism is incidental to their political brand (Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, for instance, are more notable for being the rabidly anti-immigrant children of immigrants), but one of this year’s rising stars, the 41-year-old backbench MP Miriam Cates, brought it squarely into the foreground, underlining her status as a woman to watch with a speech at the NatCon conference which identified falling birthrates (she didn’t say “among white people” but that’s generally assumed to have been her meaning) as an “existential crisis”. Too many young people, she said (this obviously meant “young women”) were going to university and having careers instead of babies. (Footnote: Miriam Cates has a degree from Cambridge University and a career as a politician; she does also have three children, but given the demands of her job as an MP we can assume she delegates most childcare to someone else.)    

But as troubling as it is to hear this kind of rhetoric from an elected British politician, we Brits don’t seem to be in much immediate danger of being led by fanatically right-wing women. Their most senior representative in government, Suella Braverman, got the sack in November (prompting a reshuffle that brought a more traditional figure, “Daddy” David Cameron, back into the Cabinet). Meanwhile, the official inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic underlined the point that real power still belongs largely to the same privileged male public-school-and-Oxbridge types who have ruled us since time immemorial. The language these men used during the crisis (as revealed by the WhatsApp messages they exchanged) gave a good indication of their arrogance, laziness and hostility to any woman who raised concerns. The testimony of Helen MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant in the Cabinet Office at the time, was an incisive, albeit belated, contribution to feminist criticism of Boris Johnson’s monumentally incompetent and self-serving administration.

3. Misrepresenting male violence

Another subject which continued to make national headlines in 2023 was the high prevalence of violence against women, and the extent to which the justice system is failing women who suffer it. Since Sarah Everard’s abduction and murder by serving police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021 there has been a steady flow of new revelations about police officers either perpetrating crimes against women or covering up for colleagues who had done so. But while the media have been instrumental in bringing these cases to public attention, an academic book published in April, Alessia Tranchese’s From Fritzl to #MeToo, showed that their reporting of sexual violence is itself part of the problem, contributing significantly to the climate of disbelief, victim-blaming and “himpathy” (making excuses for male perpetrators) which enables so many violent men to evade justice.

Tranchese’s analysis of the language of rape reporting in UK newspapers provides clear evidence that language which implies that women who report rape are lying is not only still the norm, it has actually become even more entrenched in recent years. One of the developments that has helped to entrench it is the “celebrification” of news coverage since the 2010s: stories about male celebrities accused of rape or sexual assault are getting more space in newspapers, and these men are particularly likely to be given the “himpathetic” treatment. While it’s often assumed that #MeToo put a stop to this, Tranchese’s data suggest that its effect was in fact quite limited, and that the backlash that followed (which she documents in detail) may have entrenched the problem further.

Her point was demonstrated in September of this year, when a documentary that aired allegations about Russell Brand prompted a flurry of complaints that Brand was being unfairly subjected to “trial by media”. This view was expressed by commentators across the political spectrum, and none appeared to have noticed what Tranchese had pointed out: that women who report being raped or sexually harassed by a popular celebrity like Brand (or even one as lacking in “rizz” as Prince Andrew) are routinely put on trial by the media, in reports which implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—represent them as sluts, gold-diggers, vengeful obsessives and liars. Yet this form of “trial by media” does not raise the same concern that it might interfere with the pursuit of justice through the proper channels: it’s familiar, unremarkable and taken for granted. From Fritzl to #MeToo was not the most enjoyable feminist book about language I read this year (that accolade goes to Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue), but in political terms it was probably the most important.   

4. Back to bullshit

One issue this blog has returned to regularly since 2015 is the never-ending flow of bullshit about women’s language masquerading as wisdom or science. There was something of a slowdown during the pandemic, but by the beginning of this year normal service had been resumed.

In January I spotted what looked like a new riff on the familiar theme of How Women’s Language Holds Them Back, in a Harvard Business Review article headed “Research: men speak more abstractly than women”. Which is a problem, apparently, because “our studies have shown that people tend to associate abstract language with power and leadership”. So, if you want to be seen as a leader, try waffling vaguely about “intangible concepts”. And if you’re wondering how that fits with another common piece of advice for women—namely, “cut out the fluff and be direct”—let me remind you that this kind of logical thinking will get you nowhere. On Planet Bullshit the only rule which applies consistently is that anything women do–or are said to do–with language can and will be used against them.

Later in the year I revisited the more familiar bullshit claim that women are incapable of forming a sentence without using the word “sorry” after stumbling across some training materials which set out to cure trainees of their addiction to the S-word by confronting them with the shocking fact that in the course of her life the average woman will apologize no fewer than 295,650 times. And where did this statistic come from? Why, from a survey conducted by an online florist! Whose purpose, needless to say, was not scientific but commercial: it was designed to persuade us that, since verbal apologies have been rendered meaningless by overuse, we should consider buying “apology flowers” instead.  

In July one of the world’s leading newspapers, the New York Times, took the unusual step of publishing an op-ed in which the writer Adam Grant (a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton Business School) defended women’s use of so-called “weak language” as a rational choice, given the evidence that women who follow advice to speak directly and assertively are liable to be judged “abrasive”, “strident” and unlikable. It’s an argument that feminist linguists have been making for decades; but perhaps now that a man has made it, people might actually start taking it seriously.

5. (M)adwomen: reinventing sexism in advertising

As annoyed as I get about bullshit advice (especially when it makes use of garbage “research” like the online florist’s survey while resolutely ignoring the existence of actual research on language and gender), my most rage-fuelled post of 2023 (and also the one that got most page-views) was about another old chestnut, sexism in advertising: more specifically, the way the use of verbal innuendo and sexualized visual imagery has spread from its original home in ads for products like women’s underwear to charity-led campaigns about women’s health.

Once again, this was not the first time I’d broached the subject. In 2021 I criticized a campaign which claimed to be raising awareness about cervical cancer screening by urging women to post a cat picture online, choosing a longhaired, shorthaired or hairless cat to show whether their pubic hair was “bushy, bare or halfway there” (cat = pussy, geddit?). Could efforts to encourage women to have smear tests get any more tasteless? The answer, it turns out, is yes: in Manchester in November, North West Cancer Research unveiled its latest campaign, featuring 3D images of disembodied female legs alongside a slogan its creators described as “playful and a bit cheeky” (though I’d call it “demeaning and a bit rapey”): “don’t keep ‘em crossed, get screened instead”.

A lot of people who objected to this campaign assumed it must have been designed by men, but in fact it was produced by a female-led creative team at an agency whose website stresses its feminist credentials. Unfortunately it is part of an industry whose feminism leans heavily on half-baked ideas about “empowerment” and sexual “agency”: hence the assumption that using sexualized words and images in the context of cancer prevention is witty and “edgy” rather than offensive (except of course to dried-up old prudes who haven’t caught up with the latest thinking). For this agency’s next awayday I’d recommend a daytrip to Tate Britain, whose current exhibition of late 20^th century British feminist art, Women in Revolt! might help them understand why those of us who remember the 1970s (that golden age of sexist advertising) aren’t impressed. The issue isn’t that we’re old: we’re just puzzled and disappointed to see younger women reinventing a wheel we spent our own youth trying to put a spoke in–partly [irony klaxon] so that future generations would be spared the relentless sexism we grew up with.

6. Books, old and new

Speaking of late 20^th century feminism, November brought the sad news that Dale Spender had died. Though her contributions to the women’s movement were many and varied, particularly in her native Australia, in Britain she was probably best known as the author of the 1980 feminist classic Man Made Language, in which she argued that using a language made by men forces women to internalize and reproduce a male-centred view of the world. My post about Spender explained why I didn’t (and still don’t) agree; but it also explored the reasons why her book spoke so powerfully to many feminists, and reflected on the way it challenged me to formulate my own ideas coherently (a process whose end result was my own first book). It isn’t always the writers you agree with who inspire you, and you don’t have to agree with other feminists about everything to admire and respect their contributions.

Though I can’t compete with Spender’s lifetime output of over 30 books, I’ve written a few more since the 1980s, and the most recent of them, Language, Sexism and Misogyny, was published just before Christmas. It’s my attempt to assess what’s changed—and what hasn’t—in the 50 years since language became a serious subject of feminist study; it covers many of the subjects I’ve written about on this blog, and it’s aimed at a similar kind of audience (i.e., it’s not just for specialists in linguistics). If anyone who’s reading this post would also like to read the book, you can find the details here.

As ever, I’ll end by thanking everyone who’s visited Language: a feminist guide in 2023, and all the other feminist researchers and writers who’ve contributed to this year’s posts through their published work or their suggestions and recommendations. And whatever may happen in 2024, I hope it will bring you at least some of what you wish for.    

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    

Same old stories

In her book From Fritzl to #me too, which was published last month, the linguist Alessia Tranchese confronts the myths and stereotypes that the UK press continues to peddle in its reporting of rape and sexual assault. It’s great that someone has done this very thorough investigation of the coverage that appeared in UK newspapers between 2008 and 2019, but it’s hard to imagine a more depressing and enraging project. Tranchese’s analysis shows that the state of rape reporting is as dire as the state of everything else to do with rape—for instance, the decline in rates of prosecution and the low rate of convictions even though most cases never get to court. As she points out, those things may not be unconnected to the way rape is reported: for many people (including those who serve on juries), what they read, hear or see in the media plays a major role in shaping their understanding of the issue.

Tranchese is a corpus linguist: she uses methods which enable analysts to look for statistical patterns in very large samples of data, and to track the way those patterns change (or don’t) over time. This means that her book contains a certain amount of technical discussion which non-specialist readers might find hard going. But this kind of evidence, based on thousands of examples spanning a significant period of time, is a much-needed corrective to the kind of media commentary we’re most likely to see, which offers the writer’s instant hot-take on the latest high-profile case. When the news broke about this week’s ruling by a civil court in New York that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, for instance, one popular take was that this showed how things had changed in the years since #metoo: women no longer have to be “perfect victims” to be believed. But even if we bracket the fact that this was not a criminal trial and the jury didn’t accept the most serious charge (of rape), that conclusion almost certainly wouldn’t survive a detailed examination of a larger sample of data. Though Tranchese’s research focused on the UK, I’d be willing to bet that a similar study of US news coverage would come to the same general conclusion she does—that most negative attitudes to women who report rape haven’t changed much since the noughties, and some have got measurably worse.    

The most significant thing that has got worse is directly connected to the issue of (dis)belief. The idea that women “cry rape” (i.e., make false accusations) is ancient, but since about 2012, language which implies that women are lying has become more frequent in news reports. One indication of that is the frequency and distribution of the word alleged.  In the early part of the period Tranchese studied, alleged most commonly occurred with words denoting non-sexual crimes, such as bribery or fraud; but after 2011 its use in reference to rape and sexual assault increased significantly. As well as referring to alleged rapes and alleged perpetrators (which may be necessary for legal reasons, to avoid prejudicing a future trial), newspapers began to use the previously very uncommon phrases alleged victim and alleged incident (the latter so cautious as to imply doubt, not just about whether what took place during an encounter was a criminal assault, but whether the encounter itself actually happened). At the same time, they developed the habit of stating explicitly that the man who had been accused of rape denied it, and the verb deny was often accompanied by a strengthening adverb (e.g. “which he vehemently/ adamantly/ categorically denies”).

The result was to establish a pattern of language-use in rape reports which does not maintain a neutral stance on the two parties’ competing accounts. Women’s claims are reported in language that emphasizes their status as unproven and possibly untrue, while men’s counter-claims are reported by simply repeating the men’s own, strongly-worded denials, with no suggestion that they should not be taken at face value (though a man accused of a serious criminal offence surely has at least as much reason to falsely deny his guilt as a woman has to make false accusations).

Tranchese believes that the media’s frequent and unbalanced usage of alleged/allegedly since 2012 has subtly changed the way it’s interpreted. Though the dictionary definition of an allegation is an as-yet unproven claim which may turn out on investigation to be either true or false, in the context of rape reporting it has acquired such a strong association with the idea that women lie, it now primes readers to believe or suspect that whatever has been “alleged” is most likely false. She points out that there are other words the media could use which would enable them to report the facts accurately but more neutrally. For instance, they could refer to the woman as the complainant rather than the alleged victim, to the man as the accused (or, when a case comes to trial, the defendant), and to the incident/assault as reported. These alternatives, however, are rare. As I noted in this 2019 post, the formulaic pairing of rape/assault with alleged is now so entrenched, it was even used by most of the press in a case where the victim, a woman in a residential care-home who had suffered catastrophic brain-damage, was completely incapable of “alleging” anything (rather she gave birth to a child, which in the circumstances could only mean she had been raped).

On the reasons why this pattern has emerged since 2012 (getting a further boost around 2014/15), Tranchese has some interesting things to say. One is, ironically, that it reflects the success of feminist activism around sexual violence. Some of the stories that used to be told to deny or excuse rape—in particular, the old story about women provoking men’s uncontrollable urges by dressing or behaving in certain ways—have become less acceptable and less believable than they once were, and their prevalence in news reports has declined. Unfortunately, what has replaced them is not a new openness to believing women’s reports of rape, but a renewed emphasis on their supposed tendency to lie. As Tranchese memorably puts it, “women’s credibility is the new short skirt”. It’s part of a more general backlash in which the central argument is that the pendulum has swung too far, giving women the power to ruin innocent men’s lives by making false accusations.

But Tranchese also relates the resurgence of the “cry rape” myth to recent changes within the news media themselves. Since the 2010s (the decade when most UK newspapers began producing online as well as print editions) more and more “news” coverage has been devoted to the doings of celebrities. This “celebrification” is also visible in coverage of sexual violence: the most extensively-covered cases in the data sample were a mixture of the ultra-extreme and therefore notorious (e.g., the case of Josef Fritzl in Austria, who kept his daughter prisoner and raped her regularly for many years) and those involving celebrities—men in politics and public life, the entertainment industry or sport. This emphasis on celebrity cases may help to explain the shift to excessively cautious language. Celebrities tend to have money and easy access to lawyers, and the media are terrified of being sued (an increasingly common tactic even among non-celebrities). They may also be reluctant to alienate a celebrity’s fans, who are often very vocal in defending their idols.

The pattern of language Tranchese draws attention to was particularly noticeable in cases involving sports stars, such as the footballers Neymar, Robinho and Ched Evans. In these cases it’s easy for men’s defenders to fall back on the common-sense argument that they don’t need to rape anyone, since hundreds of women are desperate to have sex with them. These women are stereotyped as either “groupies” (who seek out casual sex with famous men) or “gold-diggers” (who hope to have relationships with wealthy men), and those stereotypes become the basis for the contention that a woman who claims to have been raped by a footballer must be lying. She’s either a gold-digger hoping to make money from the accusation or else she’s a groupie crying rape to deflect attention from her own promiscuity. In addition, sportsmen benefit from a particular form of what the philosopher Kate Manne calls “himpathy”, meaning the tendency to sympathize with and make excuses for violent men. In most sports the stars are young and their careers are relatively short: this leads to concern about their lives being ruined and their prodigious talents wasted. Even in cases where their guilt is not in doubt, it’s argued that they shouldn’t lose everything because of “one youthful mistake”.

That dismissive word “mistake” reflects another well-worn belief which was amply attested in Tranchese’s study—that rape in and of itself is not a serious or violent crime. Unless a celebrity is involved, there is a strong tendency for the UK national press to report only those cases where rape or sexual assault is perpetrated by a stranger and accompanied by other forms of violence, like abduction, torture or murder. As Susan Estrich pointed out long ago, these cases are what the police, the courts and the public think of as “real rape”, but the vast majority of actual cases do not fit that template. Most are perpetrated by someone the woman knows (like an acquaintance, colleague or date) and they don’t involve the use of weapons, restraints or threats of killing. The fact that these more typical cases get so little attention in the news media gives a highly misleading impression of how common rape is and what the experience does to its victims (psychological damage is more common than the physical variety).  

Tranchese also found that, along with multiple, Savile-style assaults on children, extremely violent rapes (especially when followed by murder) were the only cases in which the media were willing to condemn white, professional and “respectable” or famous men unequivocally. More commonly these men benefited from himpathy, whereas other groups of men (e.g., poor men, migrant men, members of certain minority ethnic groups and men living in the supposedly “backward” societies of the Global South) were more likely to be demonized. This is not a great surprise if you’re familiar with the UK press, but once again it ends up presenting readers with a seriously distorted picture of reality.         

The corpus of data this study was based on included the period when #metoo attracted significant news coverage (the hashtag first trended in October 2017), and the last part of the book investigates how it was reported and what difference, if any, it made. Tranchese notes that commentary on #metoo, including feminist commentary, was polarized: on one hand there was the view that it had changed, or was going to change, everything, while on the other there was a tendency (one which intensified as time went on) to portray it negatively, whether as an unjust war on men, a political failure which in practice had accomplished little, or—for some feminists—yet another example of privileged white women hi-jacking a campaign and excluding those who in reality were most in need of support.

Tranchese is critical of these arguments. Her data show that while #metoo did increase the quantity of reporting on less “extreme” forms of sexual violence or coercion (in particular sexual harassment), in other ways it didn’t change the picture dramatically: many of the negative trends it was accused by critics of causing had actually started several years earlier (e.g., the obsession with celebrities and the renewed, “backlash”-related emphasis on women’s supposed power to ruin men’s lives with false allegations were both underway by 2012).

She also argues that when some feminists blamed other feminists for #metoo’s “failure”, they were overlooking the extent to which the wider reception of #metoo was controlled not by feminists, but by the mainstream media. It was the media, for instance, that persistently referred to #metoo as a “movement” and wrote stories in which it was talked about as an entity with agency, as if it had been a pressure group or an NGO with a mandate to lobby for change. In fact it was just a hashtag which individuals could use to link their own testimony to that of other women. These hashtag users did not constitute an organized political group with a set of demands; the most #metoo was ever likely to accomplish was to encourage the formation of such groups. And if the voices of less privileged women were either absent or ignored, that too had something to do with the mainstream media’s preference for the glamorous over the ordinary.

Another thing Tranchese criticizes is the way media coverage of #metoo both reflected and promoted what she calls “social amnesia”, presenting the upsurge of feminist anger in 2017 as a sudden and unprecedented awakening, when in fact it had numerous precedents. Her own sample revealed that a lot of the arguments around #metoo were effectively re-runs of the discussion that took place in 2011, when the IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of raping a Senegalese maid in a New York hotel; but she also gives examples from earlier decades, such as Whoopi Goldberg’s announcement that “it’s 1994 and the shit is hitting the fan: women are pissed!” (Goldberg was commenting on a series of recent events that included the case of Loreena Bobbitt, who cut off her abusive husband’s penis, the testimony of Paula Jones against Bill Clinton and some early expressions of concern about Michael Jackson.) The truth is that women are perennially and perpetually angry about male violence, but every time there’s a public explosion of that anger the news media will report it as if no one had ever noticed the problem before (it’s called “news” for a reason: amnesia is in its DNA).

“Celebrification” is not the only 21^st century development that it would be relevant to consider as an influence on recent and current rape reporting (though I’m not faulting Tranchese for concentrating on trends she has hard evidence for: that’s very much a strength of her book). Another is the rise and rise of “churnalism”, the reliance of journalists—whose numbers at many news outlets have been savagely cut in the digital era—on copying and pasting news stories from press releases, agency copy and, increasingly, social media. That’s not the only reason why their rape reporting recycles myths and stereotypes, but it certainly doesn’t encourage a more thoughtful approach, whereas it does encourage the repetition on autopilot of formulas like “alleged incident”. There’s also the fact that, as we learned recently from no less an authority than Rupert Murdoch, more and more “news” is essentially designed to make money by telling people what they want to hear, even if those doing the telling know it’s garbage. We live, apparently, in a “post-truth” culture: if a certain story is popular, if it resonates with the audience’s preconceptions, who cares if it’s biased and misleading?

Nevertheless, I’d love to see Tranchese present her findings in a way that would make them accessible to reporters and editors. Not all may be in a position to buck the trends she has uncovered, but—on the assumption that many or most of them aren’t actively supportive of rape culture—they should at least have the opportunity to reflect on the contribution conventional news reporting makes to it. 

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.

Between children

On the first day of the first full week of the new school year, the BBC reported that cases of ‘sex abuse between children’ had doubled over a period of two years. In 2016-17 the police in England and Wales recorded just under 8000 incidents where both the abuser and the victim were minors; in 2018-19 the figure was over 16,000. During the pandemic the number fell, but there were still more than 10,000 cases recorded in 2020-21. And since these figures include only cases which were reported to the police, they almost certainly understate the true extent of the problem.  

This news would, of course, be shocking whatever words were used to report it; but I couldn’t help being struck by the phrase ‘sex abuse between children’. This formula seems to have originated with the BBC (the statistics were compiled for its long-running current affairs programme Panorama). But it soon became ubiquitous: as so often happens in contemporary news reporting, the language used in the original source got picked up and recycled by other media outlets with minimal or no alteration. The Times’s headline, ‘Sexual abuse between children more than doubles in two years’, was almost identical to the one that appeared on the BBC website (‘Reports of sex abuse between children double in two years’). The Mail Online had an expanded version, ‘Reports of sex abuse between children doubles [sic] in two years to 16,000 cases in England and Wales – with 10% of youngsters accused aged 10 or under’. The Sun was an outlier, diverging from the ‘between children’ formula and going with ‘Reports of children sexually abusing other kids DOUBLE in a year to almost 16,000 cases’.

One thing that’s notable about all these headlines is their use of gender-neutral/inclusive terms like ‘children’, ‘kids’ and ‘youngsters’. That pattern continues in the body of the reports, and in quotes from named sources like the psychologist Rebekah Eglinton, who said that unwanted touching and being pressured to share nude photos had become ‘a part of everyday life for children’. There were also quotes from politicians who affirmed their commitment to ‘keeping children safe’ and ‘creating a safe learning environment for children’.

In most contexts this would be unremarkable—neutral/inclusive terms are the default choice—but in this case it’s striking because the issue under discussion is by no means gender-neutral. In the words of the BBC’s report, ‘a big majority of cases involved boys abusing girls’. Later the report spells out what ‘a big majority’ means: around nine out of ten abusers were boys, while eight out of ten victims were girls (figures which suggest that there must have been as many cases of boys abusing other boys as there were of girls abusing anyone). The framing of sexual abuse as something ‘children’ do to other ‘children’ glosses over this enormous imbalance. Apart from the BBC, most media outlets treated it as an incidental detail: the Times and the Sun each devoted one sentence to the information that most abusers were boys, while the Mail didn’t mention the issue at all.  

But when I first heard ‘sex abuse between children’, what caught my attention wasn’t primarily the word ‘children’. In the headlines, at least, I found the choice of ‘children’ understandable: the point, I assumed, was to flag the topic of the story as cases where both abuser and abused were under 18, as opposed to cases where children are abused by adults. Still, to my ear there was something not quite right about the phrase–and on reflection I concluded that the problem was ‘between’.

My guess is that ‘between’ was chosen for the same reason as ‘children’—to emphasise that the report dealt with cases where both the perpetrators and the victims were minors. More familiar phrases like ‘sexual abuse of children’ wouldn’t have made that clear. But ‘between children’ is jarring, because it tends to imply that what’s being described is in some sense a joint activity. That’s how ‘between’ works in phrases like ‘a quarrel between neighbours’ or ‘a fight between rival gangs’. The activities referred to are inherently adversarial, but they are nevertheless understood to require reciprocity. You can’t quarrel or fight with someone who isn’t also quarrelling or fighting: if your adversary doesn’t reciprocate you’re not having a quarrel or a fight, you’re just ranting at them or beating them up.

‘Sexual abuse between children’ is apparently constructed in the same way, but it doesn’t fit the template, because reciprocity is not part of the meaning of ‘sexual abuse’. You can see this even more clearly if you turn the nouns (back) into verbs. If it’s true that ‘the Jets fought the Sharks’ then it’s also true that ‘they fought [each other]’; but ‘Jack sexually abused Jill’ does not entail that ‘they abused [each other]’. Sexual abuse, by definition, is something one person does to another without their consent, let alone their active involvement. That’s what makes ‘sexual abuse between children’, and indeed any reference to ‘abuse between Xs’, so peculiar.  

As I’ve already said, I don’t think whoever came up with ‘sexual abuse between children’ actually intended to convey the idea of mutuality or reciprocity. It’s more likely they just didn’t notice that implication. But I still think it’s a problem, as is the consistent preference for gender-neutral or inclusive terms. These linguistic choices are part of a larger pattern—one I’ve commented on in several previous posts about the representation of both sexual violence/abuse and sexism/sexual harassment in schools.

In commentary on these issues there’s a persistent tendency to present coercion or exploitation as mutual engagement. One way in which this is often done is by exaggerating girls’ maturity, agency and power. You see this a lot in court cases involving the sexual abuse or exploitation of children by adults, where it is clearly intended to minimise the adult’s culpability. By presenting the girl as an autonomous agent who voluntarily engaged in a relationship with an older man, defence lawyers hope to persuade jurors, judges and/or public opinion that the so-called ‘abuse’ was in reality no such thing: though her age makes it technically illegal to have sex with her, her precocity makes that a victimless crime, and the verdict or punishment should reflect that.

The idea of female precocity can also be invoked in cases where the abuser is a minor rather than an adult. Boys, the argument goes, mature later than girls both sexually and socially, and this is a reason to cut them some slack: they’re not really bad, just clumsy and impulsive (and easily manipulated by more sexually sophisticated girls). Both versions of this discourse represent girls as more grown-up, and more equal in their relations with boys and men, than most really are, or than they tell researchers they feel.

In relation to schools there is also a persistent tendency to frame sexism and sexual harassment in terms of an eternal ‘battle of the sexes’ which ‘naturally’ expresses itself in conflict between boys and girls. In 2015, when the Institute of Physics issued some guidelines for combatting sexism in schools, commentators regretted that this po-faced political correctness might bring an end to (in one Telegraph writer’s words) ‘the days of boys and girls cheerfully baiting each other in the playground with terms such as “sissy” and “cupcake”’. Like the ‘between children’ formula, ‘baiting each other’ implies reciprocity: the combatants are by implication positioned as equals, ‘cheerfully’ engaged in the mutual ‘baiting’ which has been a feature of playground culture since time immemorial.

The IoP made it easier than it should have been for the media to take this line. Though its intervention was prompted by concern about the way sexism affects girls, its guidelines made a point of being inclusive, treating sexist insults directed to boys, like ‘sissy’ and ‘man up’, on a par with those directed to girls (most of which are far more degrading than ‘sissy’). Other reports published since 2015 have taken a similar approach: though they invariably report that both verbal and other forms of harassment are experienced far more frequently by girls, they end up paying disproportionate attention to the minority of cases where boys are targeted. Presumably this even-handedness is meant to counter accusations of anti-male bias; but when the evidence shows clearly that sexism in schools affects girls far more commonly and more seriously than boys, a representation which suggests otherwise is itself biased.

The same bias is apparent in comments like the one I quoted earlier from the psychologist who said that unwanted touching and pressure to share nude photos had become ‘part of everyday life for children’. It is overwhelmingly girls for whom those things are ‘part of everyday life’, just as it is girls who make up the great majority of victims in cases of ‘sex abuse between children’ (while boys are an even larger majority of abusers). In both our language and our actions we need to face up to the reality of that difference, and of the power imbalance that underpins it. We will never solve the problem of sexual violence and abuse if we habitually use linguistic formulas that obscure what the problem really is.   

What’s in a frame? Misogyny/hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When words fail us

Nearly 50 years ago, Robin Lakoff considered what feminists might learn by paying close attention to language:

Linguistic imbalances are worthy of study because they bring into sharper focus real-world imbalances and inequities. They are clues that some external situation needs changing.

Everyday ways of speaking and writing are highly revealing about the attitudes and assumptions which our culture takes for granted; analysing language can help to make these visible, and show us more clearly what needs to change–which is not, as Lakoff goes on to point out, just language itself, but the ‘external situation’ which has made certain ways of speaking and writing seem reasonable, natural and self-evident.   

This week we’ve had a grim demonstration of that point, in the way various people and institutions responded to the news that Sarah Everard, a London woman who went missing in early March as she walked from Clapham to her home in neighbouring Brixton, had been murdered. On Wednesday we learned that a search had uncovered what are now known to be her remains, and a man (identified as an officer of the Metropolitan Police, which is also the force investigating the case) had been arrested on suspicion of abducting and killing her. Women responded with an outpouring of rage that lit up social media to the point of becoming news in its own right. But the reactions this anger prompted showed how powerful certain assumptions, and the linguistic formulas that encapsulate them, still are.

There are many examples I could give: I could write, for instance, about the number of men who expressed their sympathy ‘as a husband and father’, or made an analogy between sexual violence and theft (‘it’s too bad that your lives are limited by the threat of male violence, but that’s just the way of the world: you wouldn’t leave your car unlocked with the key in the ignition either’), or pointed out that more men than women are murdered (because god forbid that the killing of a woman should spark a conversation about, specifically, violence against women). But since this is just a blog post, not a treatise, I’m going to concentrate on what is arguably the most basic of all the inadequate and misguided responses we have heard this week: the idea that women, those irrational creatures, were ‘getting things out of proportion’.

This was, among other things, the official message put out by the police (and then echoed by other authorities like the Mayor of London). After initially telling women in the area where Sarah Everard disappeared that they should avoid going out alone after dark, the Met pivoted to insisting that there was no reason to feel unsafe, since, in the words of Commissioner Cressida Dick, ‘it is thankfully incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from our streets’. ‘Abducted’ is doing some heavy lifting there: the fear Sarah Everard’s case prompted was primarily a fear of being killed, whether or not the killer abducted them first. And if Dick’s real point was that it’s rare for women to be killed by strangers, well, it depends what you mean by ‘rare’. The women who run the UK’s Femicide Census provided some helpful input: while their data show that most women victims are killed by men they know, around one in every twelve is killed by a stranger. If we applied that statistic to the data for the last 12 months (as presented last week in Parliament by Jess Phillips MP)–bearing in mind this record is probably incomplete because some recent cases remain unsolved–it would mean that around 10 women have been killed by strangers since March 2020. That’s one every 5-6 weeks. With all due respect to any statisticians reading this, most people would not define something that happens every few weeks as ‘incredibly rare’.

But at least Cressida Dick’s words were meant to be reassuring. Other contributors to the discussion seemed more interested in upbraiding women for their ignorance and irrationality. Marian FitzGerald, a Kent University criminologist who was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, said:

I think I’m entitled to say, as a woman, we shouldn’t pander to stereotypes and get hysterical. Let’s not get this out of proportion and let’s not wind each other up to be unduly fearful.

The reason we become so fixated on cases like this one, she opined, is not that they are somehow typical, but on the contrary, because they are so unusual.   

Boiled down to basics, FitzGerald’s ‘rational’ argument seems to be that it’s stupid to worry about such low-probability events as the murder of a woman by a stranger. But violence against women exists on a continuum: while it’s true that the probability of being murdered by a stranger is low, the probability of an encounter with a stranger that could potentially turn violent is extremely high. This week UN Women UK reported on a survey which found that 97% of young women had been sexually harassed in a public place; for all ages the figure was 80%. Women know that most of these incidents probably won’t escalate, and certainly not to the extreme of murder (though violence doesn’t have to be fatal for us to want to avoid it). But we can never know for sure if a specific encounter will turn nasty, or if a particular male stranger is basically harmless or actively dangerous. (Read, for instance, this account by the Guardian writer Marina Hyde of a recent encounter with a stranger in public, and ask yourself if she was ‘unduly fearful’.)

It is hardly irrational for women in this situation to err on the side of caution. Nor should we overlook a point made by Fiona Vera-Gray, who has researched women’s responses to male intrusion in public space—that there’s no way to measure how many potential crimes are averted by women’s evasive action. The mere fact that nothing ultimately happened does not license the conclusion that a woman ‘got things out of proportion’: it’s possible that she correctly assessed the risk, and did what she needed to do to prevent the worst from happening.  

Another thing FitzGerald’s argument glosses over is that women don’t just get ‘wound up’ about male violence because of fear, but also because of anger. And the anger isn’t just about what some men do to some women, it’s also about the way that constrains all women’s lives. A woman who lives for 100 years without ever experiencing male violence directly will still have expended significant time and mental energy on the kind of ‘safety work’ Vera-Gray describes—knowing all the while that whatever happens, the consequences will be on her. She’s supposed to be able to judge, as one of Vera-Gray’s respondents put it, what would constitute ‘the right amount of panic’, and in hindsight it will always appear that she either under- or overreacted. If she’s attacked people will say she didn’t do enough to protect herself; if she isn’t they’ll call her ‘unduly fearful’ or ‘hysterical’.

Women are also angered by the (copious) evidence that most men who attack or threaten women will face no serious consequences. The police officer who has now been charged with the murder of Sarah Everard may appear to be an exception, but it’s emerged that he was reported a few days earlier for allegedly exposing himself in a fast food restaurant; whether his colleagues acted appropriately on this complaint is now the subject of an investigation. Meanwhile, another man who sexually assaulted a woman walking home in Oldham (he followed her, deliberately bumped into her, pulled her to the ground and had begun to touch her breast and genitals when she managed to activate the SOS function on her phone, at which point he fled) was given a suspended sentence because, in the words of his lawyer:

He is married and is a father to a four-year-old child. If you feel a custodial sentence is required, he would lose his job and he is the sole earner for his family, so this would have a significant impact.

The lawyer also argued that his client was not a serious threat on the basis that his crime had been ‘quite opportunistic’: he didn’t go out with a plan to assault a woman, he just seized an opportunity that happened, by chance, to present itself. ‘Opportunistic’ is another linguistic formula which tells us something about our culture’s common-sense understanding of male violence. What was this ‘opportunity’ that a man, acting on impulse, seized? It was simply finding himself in close proximity to a woman who was walking home alone. (What are the chances of that happening, eh?) While the lawyer did not condone his action, he presented the impulse itself as unremarkable–as if it were obvious that any man in this situation would see an ‘opportunity’, even if not all men would take it.

Why such ‘opportunistic’ acts should be treated more leniently, or their perpetrators as less likely to reoffend, remains—at least to me—a mystery. And in any case, there are reasons to question the absolute distinction between ‘opportunistic’ and ‘planned’ or ‘premeditated’ sexual violence. I find it hard to believe that a man would commit the kind of assault described above without ever having imagined or fantasised about this scenario, or to put it another way, planned it in his head. Yet when we talk about sexual violence we seem remarkably uninterested in the contents of men’s heads—the heads we feel the need to rummage through are women’s.

Since Wednesday’s explosion of female rage there has been a steady stream of commentaries and think-pieces musing on why women are so afraid of men and whether their fear is justified. (Here’s one, by a man, entitled ‘Why Don’t Women Feel Safe?’, which concludes that the problem is (a) rooted in female psychology and therefore (b) intractable) That question has attracted far more attention than another, at least equally pertinent one—namely, why do so many men persistently choose to behave in ways that make women afraid?

One piece which did grapple with that issue, written by Rachel Hewitt for the Guardian, suggested that the answer in most cases has nothing to do with seizing random ‘opportunities’ for sexual gratification. Rather, this behaviour is an assertion of men’s social dominance. Some men clearly do get a kick out of women’s fear, but even when they don’t, Hewitt writes, ‘street harassment is how men mark out public spaces as their own, making women into trespassers on male territory’. It’s also, as I have noted before (see here and here), a way of impressing on women that men are entitled to demand their attention—and to punish women who withhold it—at any time and in any situation.

Which brings me to the last linguistic detail I want to comment on: the constant use of the words ‘safe’ and ‘safety’. This is how the issue has been defined—not only by the authorities and mainstream commentators, but also to a large extent by feminists. You might wonder why I’m raising that as a problem: surely the issue is precisely that women don’t feel safe in public space. But what’s really at stake here is women’s freedom rather than just their safety, and I would like to see that f-word given more emphasis. To explain why, let me quote Kavita Krishnan, who put it far more eloquently than I ever could when she spoke at a protest in 2012, following the gang-rape of Jyoti Singh on a Delhi bus:

Women have a right to freedom. …I am saying this because I feel that the word ‘safety’ with regard to women has been used far too much. Women know what ‘safety’ refers to. It means – you behave yourself. You get back into the house. You don’t dress in a particular way. Do not live by your freedom and you will be safe. A whole range of patriarchal laws and institutions tell us what to do in the guise of keeping us ‘safe’. We reject this entire notion. We don’t want it. The Delhi police is running an ad campaign… [with] a Hindi film actor exhorting people, ‘Be a man, join me in protecting women’. I want to ask, what about the brother who cuts his sister’s head off when she dares to marry into a different community? Is he not playing the role of a male protector too? This machismo is not any solution to the problem of violence against women; it is, in fact, the root of the problem. This is what we need to understand.

The focus on women’s safety, rather than their freedom, is what has allowed so much of this week’s discussion to revolve around the legitimacy of women’s feelings and their behaviour—are they overreacting, getting things ‘out of proportion’, being ‘hysterical’? It is possible to debate this because (as a million Reply Guys reminded us) most women will not become victims of violent crime. What is less debatable is that the fear induced by what happens to some women makes all women less free.

As Kavita Krishnan would doubtless have predicted, ‘safety’ was quickly invoked by the police to stop women holding public vigils, aka protests, in response to a murder with which a police officer has been charged. Instead we were told to stay at home and light a candle, or to carry a flower when out and about, and post a photograph of it by a street sign with the hashtag #ReclaimTheseStreets. (Candles! Flowers! That’ll show them what women are made of!) Though the police have used the current Covid-related restrictions on public gatherings as the basis for the prohibition, I’m inclined to regard that as largely a cover for other concerns about women coming together and speaking out about the way our institutions—especially though not only the police and the rest of the criminal justice system—have failed us. Their words, and the words of many commentators on this week’s events, have also failed us. Both the words and the world they come from need to change.  

Isolated incidents

If you read the news regularly, you may have noticed that a lot of women die in ‘isolated incidents’. Between 22 May and June 19, for instance, Melissa Belshaw suffered fatal injuries in an isolated incident in Wigan (a man was later charged with her murder); in Stockport a woman’s body was found in a park following another isolated incident (a man was arrested shortly afterwards); and in a further isolated incident outside Norwich, Gemma Cowey was stabbed to death while walking in the grounds of a disused psychiatric hospital (the police arrested a man who has since been identified as her husband).  

The cases I’ve just mentioned are only the first three I found when I searched recent news coverage for the phrase ‘isolated incident’. There have been others: in Britain these ‘isolated’ incidents occur at a rate of 2-3 a week. ‘Isolated incident’ is police-speak, and it’s meant to reassure: ‘don’t worry, this killer isn’t a danger to the public. He only had it in for the woman he killed’. But it’s also shorthand for a larger narrative which frames each killing as a unique personal tragedy–a relationship gone wrong, a man who couldn’t cope, an act of violence that, supposedly, no one saw coming (though it will usually turn out that the victim saw it coming, and not uncommonly that her warnings went unheeded). The existence of a pattern, suggesting a social rather than purely personal problem, is effectively denied.   

Feminists have long argued that the narratives a culture constructs around male violence against women are very much part of the problem. This blog has also made that argument several times before–about rape, sexual harassment, domestic homicide and mass killings perpetrated by self-proclaimed ‘incels’. Stories are powerful, especially when they’re constantly repeated. But what I want to ask in this post is, why do the media go on repeating them?  

It’s not because no one ever complains. Every so often, the reporting of a case will prompt an outcry. In February, protesters in Mexico targeted the offices of La Prensa after it reported on the Valentine’s Day murder of Ingrid Escamilla under the headline ‘It was Cupid’s fault’. Last year there was anger about the media’s coverage of the trial in New Zealand of the man who was ultimately convicted of murdering the British tourist Grace Millane. More recently, the Sun newspaper’s decision to run a front page story headlined ‘I slapped JK and I’m not sorry’ (‘I’ being JK Rowling’s first husband, whose abusive behaviour during their marriage she had written about on her website) prompted over 500 complaints to the press regulator IPSO.  But the effect, if any, is usually short-lived. Even if the media have been forced to apologise for one story, the same narratives invariably reappear the next time around. 

The piece I’ve just linked to about the Millane trial offers one explanation:

Sadly, profit is and always has been the solitary pursuit of any given news outlet, and cultural appetites for stories featuring details of violence against women are seemingly insatiable. 

But while I don’t dispute the importance of the profit-motive, I think we also need to pay attention to the way news stories are produced, and the way certain narratives get entrenched and normalised through the routine reporting of ‘ordinary’ cases. 

To explain what I mean, I’m going to focus on an example I came across back in February. More exactly, I saw the headline which had appeared in the Independent: ‘Teenager pushed woman over balcony after she rejected his advances during houseparty’. The case was in the news because the trial had just ended, and the defendant, 19-year old Yusef Ali, had been found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm to the 18-year old woman he pushed over a balcony (she fell four storeys to the ground, sustaining serious injuries to her back and neck). I decided to look more closely at the way this story had been reported across a range of media outlets.

I chose this example because it was ordinary: a bread-and-butter Crown Court case which was not seen as newsworthy enough to merit blanket media coverage (but for a single ‘spectacular’ detail–the balcony–it might only have been covered in the local press). The sample of reports I managed to compile included items from two national newspapers (the ‘quality’ Independent and the tabloid Sun), two free papers aimed at commuters (the Metro and the Standard) and one local paper (Southwark News), plus the website of one national TV news channel (Sky) and–as an example of non-mainstream coverage–the Christian webzine Joy 105.com. 

I also found two other important texts: the statements issued at the end of the trial by the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. They’re important because it was clear they had served as the main if not the only sources for the news reports in my sample. Pressure to minimise costs (which also means staff) has made the news media increasingly reliant on official statements and press releases. Unless a trial is a major news event, they’re unlikely to send a reporter to observe the proceedings directly. That’s one reason why the reports are all so similar: their writers are working from the same sources, reproducing the same information (complete with the same gaps) and not uncommonly recycling large chunks of the text, right down to individual words and phrases.

Before I look more closely at some of those words and phrases, let me outline the facts of this case. In August 2019 Yusef Ali and a friend hired a fourth-floor flat in a building in Bermondsey where they planned to host an all-night party. Word of this event spread, and the young woman who became Ali’s victim was among a number of people who turned up on spec. According to witnesses Ali immediately began harassing her: he grabbed her neck, pulled her hair and slid his hand through a slit in her jeans to touch her thigh, telling her ‘this is what I do in bed’. Witnesses described her as becoming agitated, but they also said she made no direct response. Later Ali got into a fight with a group of men; as it escalated he took a knife from the kitchen and started lashing out indiscriminately. Other guests began to flee, including the woman he had harassed. But as she waited for the lift, he ran at her and pushed her over an internal balcony. He then tried to leave the building, but the police had been alerted and were waiting to arrest him. 

When the case came to trial the court heard that the young woman had been lucky to survive. Six months on, she was no longer in a wheelchair, but she was still unable to work or study. Clearly she had suffered a very serious, unprovoked assault. Yet that wasn’t quite how the media told the story. The way they told it reflects some troubling assumptions about men and women, sex and violence.  

For the purposes of this post I’m going to concentrate on the headlines. Research has shown that headlines are important (they’re also one thing news outlets don’t generally copy from press releases). It’s not just that for many readers (those who scroll through without clicking) the headline effectively is the story;  even for those who do read on, it’s been shown experimentally that headlines prime us to read what follows in particular ways, and that the presence of clarifying details in the story doesn’t always dispel assumptions based on the initial reading of the headline. With that in mind, let’s look at the headlines in my sample. 

• Teenager pushed woman over balcony after she rejected his advances during houseparty (Independent)
• EVIL REJECT: Teenager pushed girl, 18, off luxury flat’s 40ft balcony after she spurned his advances at a party (Sun)
• Man found guilty of pushing teen who rejected his advances off fourth-floor balcony in south London (Standard)
• Party host pushed girl off balcony after she rejected his advances (Metro)
• Man pushed woman from fourth-floor balcony in SE1’s Long Lane after making inappropriate advances to her at a party (Southwark News)
• A man has been convicted after pushing an 18-year-old woman off a fourth-floor balcony after she rejected his advances and stabbing two people at a party he was hosting (Sky News)
• This 19 year old boy was flirting with this 18 year old girl: she declined and he pushed her off a balcony (Joy 105)

These headlines show some variation, but there are also some striking similarities. Most strikingly, four out of seven include the formula ‘rejected his advances’, while a fifth, the Sun’s, offers ‘spurned his advances’. Southwark News has ‘inappropriate advances’. Only Joy 105’s headline avoids the term ‘advances’ (though the word does appear in the story, along with ‘spurned’): instead it describes Ali’s behaviour as ‘flirting’ and tells us that the victim ‘declined’.

The fact that so many reports converged on the same or very similar formulas suggests that the writers were working from the same template–the CPS statement, which contains both ‘rejected his advances’ and ‘inappropriate advances’. It doesn’t have ‘spurned’, but it does describe Ali as ‘scorned’ (‘a scorned man who pushed a girl off a balcony after she rejected his advances’). It also describes him as behaving ‘disrespectfully’ towards the victim, and that word too appears in several reports.

The first objectionable thing about this is the mismatch between the language and the acts it describes. In what universe does grabbing someone you’ve never met or spoken to by the neck, pulling her hair and sliding your hand underneath her clothing constitute an ‘advance’, or ‘flirting’? Those terms belong to the lexicon of courtship: they denote ways of signalling sexual interest using words, gaze, posture and perhaps innocuous forms of touching, as part of an initial negotiation that may (or may not) lead to more intimate physical contact. What Ali did was far more aggressive: ‘inappropriate‘ and ‘disrespectful’ don’t begin to cover it. 

The second objectionable thing is the use of ‘rejected’, ‘spurned’ and ‘scorned’ to describe the woman’s response to Ali. Even the more neutral ‘declined’ suggests a level of engagement that’s at odds with witness testimony that the woman’s resistance was entirely passive. It’s a stretch to equate her non-response with actively ‘rejecting’, let alone ‘spurning’ or ‘scorning’ her assailant (verbs which imply that she set out to humiliate him). And that equation is significant, because it’s the basis for a narrative in which his later attack on her was payback for the earlier ‘rejection’.

I don’t think this is deliberate victim-blaming. All the reports are unsympathetic to Ali: the story ‘he pushed her over a balcony because she rejected his advances’ is told to explain his behaviour, not excuse it. But that’s still a problem, because it depends on an assumption that does get used to blame victims, and more generally puts the onus on women to prevent or contain male violence. It assumes that men will ‘naturally’ feel aggrieved when women don’t reciprocate their sexual interest. That’s one of the axioms of rape culture: it’s something every girl is taught she must manage. She must learn how to ‘let him down lightly’, in case he treats her lack of interest as a provocation. Men’s inability to tolerate rejection is also a common trope in reports on domestic homicide, where perpetrators are often said to have ‘snapped’ after a woman ended a relationship.

Can these narratives be changed? Feminists have tried: in 2018, for instance, the campaign group Level Up produced new guidelines for the British media on the reporting of domestic homicide, and in 2019 they succeeded in getting them endorsed by the press regulators IPSO and IMPRESS. Though newspapers are not obliged to follow them, the regulators’ endorsement does establish them as recommendations for ‘best practice’, and in theory that should strengthen the hand of anyone who complains about a breach. 

But complaining isn’t always a solution. It’s probably most effective in a case like the Sun’s ‘I slapped JK’ story, when the issue is a single newspaper overstepping the mark on a particular occasion. It’s not so useful when whatever you’re complaining about appears in every paper’s version of the same events.

Formulas like ‘isolated incident’ and ‘rejected/spurned his advances’ are not unusual or sensational: rather they are normalised and taken for granted. You can’t complain that they ‘overstep the mark’, because they are the mark; they’re clichés writers reach for (or copy and paste from other sources) because they’re seen as the obvious way to tell a certain kind of story. Of course it’s important to keep trying to raise awareness; but when even the CPS, the institution responsible for prosecuting crime, talks about ‘scorned men’ and ‘inappropriate advances’, it’s clear we still have a long way to go.