Tag: masculinity

Gender, communication and Trump v. Musk

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Last week the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk ended in a spectacular war of words on social media. As the world watched, the US president and his “First Buddy” traded accusations, threats and insults. But while some people just reached for the popcorn, others apparently saw a golden opportunity to expound their pet theories about language and gender.  

Jack Posobiec, for instance (described in Wikipedia as “an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent, conspiracy theorist and former United States Navy intelligence officer”), expressed impatience with people who found the spectacle unseemly:

Some of y’all just can’t handle 2 high-agency males going at it and it really shows. This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric)

The last time I saw words like “phallocentric” and “gynocentric” being bandied about in public was probably in the 1980s, when poststructuralist theory was all the rage. Had Posobiec been dipping into the work of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray? On reflection that seemed unlikely: more probably he was just recycling what my book of the same name calls “the myth of Mars and Venus”, a set of stereotypical generalizations about men, women and communication which were popularized in the early 1990s in a series of bestselling self-help books, and went on to be repeated so widely and so often that they became part of our culture’s mental wallpaper. For instance:

  • men are rational and action-oriented, women are more emotional and more attuned to others’ feelings
  • men talk about things in the world, women talk (aka gossip) about people and relationships  
  • when men have something to say they say it directly, whereas women favour indirectness
  • men can tolerate verbal conflict (and may even engage in it for fun), but women avoid or try to defuse it
  • when women do engage in conflict they prefer indirect, manipulative or passive-aggressive strategies to the overt aggressiveness of men

Posobiec was not the only right-wing commentator who invoked these ideas to explain the Trump/Musk bust-up as a clash between two elite Martians. (“I know you’re not used to it”, he added, implicitly referencing the alt-right belief that the modern quest for sex equality has turned the once-noble cultures of the West into soft, effeminate places where manly men are in short supply.) The same point was made by another online MAGA-supporter, the aptly-named Joey Mannarino. “People forget”, he mused, “how men with testicles spar. You’re watching two people with balls the size of the moon debate an issue. This is what masculinity looks like.”

But to many people this take was not convincing. What struck them about Trump and Musk’s behaviour was not its manliness but on the contrary, its reliance on communication strategies which are stereotypically associated with teenage girls and/or effeminate gay men. One commentator called the unfolding saga “Mean Girls, White House version”. The Hollywood Reporter headlined a report on it “The girls are fighting”. Elsewhere we were said to be witnessing “a catty gay breakup” or “two gay dads divorcing”.  

It’s not hard to see where this view came from. Approving references to what the two men were doing as “sparring”, “debating” or “going at it”—all terms which imply direct, head-to-head combat, whether physical or verbal—gloss over the point that they were not talking directly to one another, but rather using social media (in each case primarily a platform they owned—X for Musk and Truth Social for Trump) to address attacks on each other to their own followers. This is an indirect way of sending a message to your actual target; it’s a digital-era version of the time-honoured mean girl tactic of saying nasty things about your enemy behind her back, while knowing full well that they will soon get back to her.

Musk in particular deployed a range of stereotypical mean girl moves in his posts attacking Trump. These included emotional manipulation (“I got him elected, how can he be so ungrateful?”), spreading damaging rumours (“he’s on the list of [child abuser and trafficker] Jeffrey Epstein’s associates”) and calling for other people to shun or punish him (“he ought to be impeached”). Trump made more use of direct threats (in particular, to cancel Musk’s lucrative government contracts), but he also used the classic manipulative technique of trying to discredit an adversary by accusing him of being crazy (“Elon has lost his mind”). At one point he insinuated that Musk’s behaviour reflected his excessive consumption of Ketamine. That may of course be true—and I don’t rule out the possibility that the Epstein rumour is also true—but my point is about the strategic weaponizing of rumour and gossip, which is stereotyped as something women rather than men do.   

Also interesting in this regard were some of the interventions made by fans of Trump and Musk. Not all were of the type I’ve already mentioned, attempting to reassure anyone who was worried that what the two men were doing was just normal behaviour for “people with balls the size of the moon”. Some used language that was more reminiscent of the worried best friend in a romcom attempting to get the lead protagonists’ relationship back on track, or the wise elder in a marital melodrama urging the warring parties to stay together for the sake of the children (one right-wing billionaire urged them to “make peace for the benefit of our great country”). Others sounded as if the children themselves were pleading with their parents not to split up. Kanye West’s much-lampooned response, for instance, was “Broooos please noooooo. We love you both so much”.   

Is this kind of emotional outburst really “what masculinity looks like”? In the mythological universe of Mars and Venus, definitely not; but in the real world it’s a bit more complicated. I’ve written before about the concept of “fratriarchy”, a modern form of male dominance (aka “patriarchy”) which depends less on the absolute authority of fathers (over younger men as well as women) and more on the homosocial bonds men of similar status forge with each other. Those bonds are maintained through various practices, including and especially forms of talk, which are culturally coded as female, though in reality they are not gender-specific—their function, whoever uses them, is to cultivate intimacy, trust and loyalty. We saw this, for instance, in the gossipy, confessional talk between Trump and a couple of other men that was captured on the infamous Access Hollywood tape; we also saw it at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexually assaulting a high school classmate. The Republican Senators who came to Kavanaugh’s defence were nothing if not emotional—some were moved almost to tears by the suffering he claimed the accusation had caused him.

These were both classic cases of—putting it crudely—“bros before hos”, which is essentially fratriarchy’s motto. And when fraternal bonds fracture, as they have between Musk and Trump, that will often provoke emotional responses: it undermines the assumption that you can always count on your brothers, and forces men like Kanye West, who feel a strong allegiance to both parties, to decide where their loyalties should lie in future. (Musk obviously grasped this: one of his posts rather pointedly noted that 78-year-old Trump had only a few more years in office while he, unelected and much younger, would be around for decades to come.)   

For me what this sorry saga has highlighted is (as I argued in The Myth of Mars and Venus) that men are from earth and women are from earth. Communicators of both sexes have access to, and make use of,  the same broad range of communication strategies. Whether a particular way of communicating is interpreted in context as masculine “sparring” or feminine/effeminate “cattiness” depends not on the objective qualities of the language being used (e.g., whether it’s direct or indirect), but on who is using it and what lens we view it through.

It’s not, of course, a coincidence that the “masculine” interpretation of Trump and Musk’s behaviour was advanced by their supporters on the right, while the “feminine” reading was used by more liberal commentators to mock them. (As usual, “feminine” was the negative term–something progressive types might want to consider when they criticize powerful men for acting like girls.) But it surely says something about the power of Mars and Venus mythology that gender was the lens through which both sides viewed Musk v. Trump. Commentators reached immediately for well-worn gender stereotypes and metaphors: either the two men were “going at it” like rutting stags, or else they were catty, passive-aggressive mean girls proving that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

There are other metaphors these commentators could have chosen that would arguably have been more illuminating. What came to my mind as I watched events unfold was not the binary opposition between male and female but the contrast between adults and children. These ultra-privileged, wealthy and powerful men were behaving like giant toddlers, having tantrums in public and throwing their toys out of the pram. They displayed a toddler-like lack of self-control and self-awareness, along with the toddler’s uncontrollable rage when crossed; it was their egos rather than their balls which were “the size of the moon”.

To me this childish behaviour is not so much “what masculinity looks like” as what autocracy looks like–self-aggrandising, thin-skinned and vengeful. And while it’s true that autocrats tend not to like being laughed at, it generally takes more than ridicule to bring them down.    

Daddy’s home

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It’s a truism that all political careers end in failure. But last week the former prime minister David Cameron, a man whose career we might have thought was a textbook illustration of that principle (he resigned in 2016 after calling and then losing the referendum that led to Brexit), made an unexpected comeback. In his latest rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Tory Titanic, Rishi Sunak appointed Cameron to the position of Foreign Secretary. This didn’t please everyone in his party, but some Conservatives were delighted to learn that, in one MP’s much-quoted words, “Daddy’s home”.

That reaction was widely mocked (the word “cringe” was used a lot on social media), but for me it raised an intriguing question about the use of gendered language in politics. Who, politically speaking, is “Daddy”?  

In the past I’ve had more to say about “Mummy”, because the use of maternal labels for female politicians is a cliché of modern political discourse. The Mother is one of the traditional female archetypes (others include the Seductress and the woman warrior or “Iron Lady”) which are used in patriarchal cultures to make female authority intelligible. It’s most popular on the political Right, where it resonates with conservative ideas about women’s nature and social role, and it is often embraced by women leaders themselves. In Germany, for instance, Angela Merkel was originally given the nickname “Mutti” by her opponents, who intended it to portray her as an overbearing nag; but she was able to turn it into a more positive symbol of her motherly concern for her fellow-citizens and her determination to do what was right for them. In the most recent French presidential election, similarly, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen softened her previous hardline image by promising to govern like a “mère de famille”. And though Margaret Thatcher’s main persona was the “Iron Lady”, she also presented herself, when it suited her, as a down-to-earth housewife and mother.

In 2016, after David Cameron resigned, the ensuing Tory leadership contest featured two women candidates, Andrea Leadsom and the eventual victor Theresa May, who were both referred to as “Mummy” in private exchanges among MPs. At a time when the Brexit referendum had divided both the party and the nation, Mummy’s appeal lay in her reputation as a firm disciplinarian: she would sort out the squabbling children and restore some much-needed order. At first glance “Daddy’s home” has a similar vibe, casting the former prime minister as a father-figure whose wise counsel will put a divided and chaotic government back on course. But despite the obvious linguistic parallel between “Daddy” and “Mummy”, politically there are important differences between them.

“Daddy” is not as “natural” a persona for a male leader as “Mummy” is for his female counterpart. Familial labels in general are less commonly used for men in politics, and when they are used the implications are not always positive. In cases where they are positive, the term of choice tends to be the more formal “father” (as with the conventional description of certain revered, and often deceased, politicians like Washington, Gandhi and Mandela as “fathers of the nation”). More familiar/ affectionate labels are liable to be seen as disrespectful, and in some cases they are overtly insulting. “Centrist Dad”, for instance, is a derisive label for middle-of-the-road male politicians who are seen as uncool and ineffectual; “magic grandpa” is a dig at elderly male radicals like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders (and indirectly at the younger activists who support them).

“Daddy” also has another set of meanings which are not so directly linked to a male politician’s politics. While writing this post I found an instructive illustration in Buzzfeed Australia, which had declared 2015 “the year of the political Daddy”. Among the men who featured in its list of political daddies were Malcolm Turnbull (at the time the prime minister of Australia) and Justin Trudeau (who had just become prime minister of Canada). Both led broadly centrist parties (centre-right in Turnbull’s case and centre-left in Trudeau’s), but that wasn’t why they qualified for the “Daddy” label. Turnbull was a daddy because, in the words of a young person whose tweet the article quoted, “he’s a silver fox with good teeth who’d take care of you. He has an i-Pad and an Apple Watch so he’s clearly got money to spare and he could buy you things”. He was a sugar-daddy, in other words. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, was the daddy equivalent of the “yummy mummy” or the “MILF”—mature and responsible but also hot (or as Buzzfeed put it, “a fine slice of Canadian bacon”).  

Though this piece was obviously meant to be humorous, I think it still tells us something about the political connotations of “Daddy”. And what it mainly tells us, put simply, is that “Daddy” is a trivializing label. Of course you could say the same about “Mummy”, which trivializes women leaders by likening their political power to the pettier authority that mothers have over children. But “Mummy” also serves a more serious purpose: it is used to counter the still-common perception of female leadership as unnatural and female leaders as sexless viragos. “Daddy” does not have an analogous function. Male power, being the historical and cultural norm, does not need to be defended against the charge that it’s unnatural or that it makes a man less manly. On the contrary, one reason why familial labels can be used to insult or trivialize male politicians is that these terms assign men to a domain which is seen as inferior, apolitical and feminized.

In fact, as any feminist will tell you, the institution of the family is far from apolitical: it is one of the foundations of patriarchy, and historically the paterfamilias was an important archetype of male power. But the later “separation of spheres” made the home a domain in which women had control. Though theoretically they remained subordinate to the male “head of household”, in practice they were allowed and indeed expected to take charge at home so that men could devote their energies to more important tasks outside it.

The personae constructed by modern male political leaders are typically based on these public roles: the archetypes they draw on include the patriotic soldier, the inspirational preacher, the hard-headed businessman and the efficient “scientific” manager. A persona like “Daddy”, which locates a man primarily in the domestic rather than the public sphere, risks implying that a male leader is soft or lightweight, preferring the comforts of home to the challenges of public life.

You might wonder, though, if what I’ve just said is out of date. Aren’t male politicians today—including Conservatives—keen to stress their “modern man” credentials by being photographed in their kitchens, parading their families as electoral assets and taking every opportunity to present themselves as “hands-on” parents? Wasn’t Boris Johnson, the father of numerous children (though the exact number remains unconfirmed), sharply criticized for his admission that he had never changed a nappy?

My answer would be “yes and no”. It’s true that contemporary politicians are expected to demonstrate “authenticity” and “relatability” by opening their personal lives to public scrutiny, and that has made it prudent for male leaders to cultivate the image of the “family man”. David Cameron was a case in point: his wife Samantha featured prominently in his election campaigns, and he presented himself as a fully-involved, caring father (though this was slightly undermined when he accidentally left his daughter in a pub). His excruciatingly dull WebCameron channel even featured a video of him doing the washing up.

But these are still largely superficial, token gestures–as we saw during the most recent Tory leadership election, when Rishi Sunak answered a question about the greatest sacrifice he had made by saying that since becoming Chancellor he had been, he was sorry to say, “an appalling husband and father”. This was calculated to tick not only the “modern man” box, but also and more importantly the “you can count on me to focus on the job 24/7/365” box. I’m pretty sure a comparable female politician would not have underlined her dedication to public service by describing herself as “an appalling wife and mother”. “Mummy” is expected to juggle her public and domestic responsibilities: nowadays she’s allowed to talk about how difficult she finds it, but not to admit she has failed or given up. An imperfect mother may be relatable, but one who chooses to neglect her children is just cold and heartless. “Daddy”, by contrast, can be candid about his negligence so long as he presents it as a sacrifice he has had to make (and not, like Boris Johnson, as a badge of alpha-male pride).  

Another problem with the “Daddy” persona has less to do with gender per se than with the way gender intersects with age. Though a literal father can be a (post-pubescent) male of any age, metaphorically paternal labels are ageing. The “centrist Dad” is (attitudinally if not literally) middle-aged—he’s staid rather than adventurous, reliable but dull—while the sugar-daddy is middle-aged-to-old.

These associations sit uncomfortably with the increasing tendency, at least in western democracies, to favour younger men as political leaders. There’s currently an obvious exception in the USA, where it seems likely that both candidates in the next presidential election will be almost 80; but by recent standards that’s unusual. Presidents Clinton and Obama in the US, President Macron in France and Prime Ministers Blair, Cameron and Sunak in the UK were all in their early-to-mid 40s when they took office. For men this appears to be the new sweet spot, the point at which a leader is old enough to have the gravitas his role demands, but also young enough to be perceived as energetic, dynamic and “modern”. For women, on the other hand, it is difficult to appear both youthful and authoritative: if anything political “mummies” are advantaged by being older.

“Daddy’s home” as a reaction to the return of David Cameron was presumably intended to evoke the more positive associations of ageing (experience, wisdom, stability, etc); but there are obvious reasons why so many people found this ludicrous. When Cameron entered Downing Street at the age of 43 he was the youngest British prime minister for almost 200 years; when he resigned he was not quite 50, and as he returns to frontline politics after a comparatively brief absence he is still a few years shy of 60. It’s absurd to cast him as a father figure, an elder statesman returning to the fray to give a new generation the benefit of his wisdom. He isn’t much older than his Cabinet colleagues, and in the short time he’s been away he’s done nothing that would make him any wiser. Where the Blairs and Obamas of the world set up foundations and get involved in international diplomacy, he has devoted his post-prime ministerial years to writing his memoirs and shilling for dodgy financiers.

That it’s possible even to attempt to rebrand Cameron as a wise counsellor or a stabilizing influence speaks volumes about the awfulness of the last seven years. The fact that the Tories have gone through four prime ministers since 2016 makes the Cameron era seem not only more distant in time than it really is, but also, by comparison with the Johnson era or the Truss moment, less politically disastrous than it really was. It was, after all, Cameron’s misjudged referendum gamble that paved the way for the chaos that followed. Now the fire his carelessness started has run completely out of control. The idea that he’s the man to put it out and save his party from electoral oblivion is a delusion born of desperation. (What do his supporters think he’s going to put it out with, the trusty watering-can of blandness? Cringe, indeed.)  

But pondering Cameron’s less than statesmanlike record does bring to mind another aspect of “Daddy” as a cultural archetype. In cartoons and sitcoms he is often a hapless figure, well-meaning but ineffectual; he’s the bumbling fool who doesn’t realize he’s a fool because his family pretends that he’s in charge. So, perhaps Daddy really is home after all. Though not, we may devoutly hope, for long.         

You cannot be serious

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Simon and Mary.

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

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

👊 (that’s a fist bump not a punch)

H

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A very naughty boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death of a patriarch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You have no authority here’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘In contrast’, the article goes on,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A short history of lads in (British) English

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Take me to your leader

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

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

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

EVJu96LUYAESjpp

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandemic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gentlemanly sexism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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