If we don’t raise a voice about sexism it will never go away

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/14/sexism-misogyny-alex-salmond-tim-hunt

Version 0 of 1.

I arrive fresh from a bust-up with Alex Salmond on BBC’s Radio 5 Live, during which he told me that I didn’t understand Scottish idiom; and I thought I was being entertaining when I wasn’t – and I accidentally called him Alec. The topic was his “behave yourself, woman” instruction to the small business minister Anna Soubry.

I have a news-led moral compass and thought I no longer cared, the event in question being over a week ago. It turned out, I did care; the expiration of my objection to misogyny is longer than 11 days. It is a simple fact that using the word “woman” is different to using the word “man”: it is scornful. To use it domestically is simple power play, the establishment of the male as superior by birth; to use it in public life has the additional intimation that the woman doesn’t belong in that sphere, that her presence is only suffered for as long as she knows her place. If Salmond thinks that he’s identified some alternative Scottish usage, he should try to imagine himself using the word as a compliment. You might well call somebody an intelligent woman, but you would never address her “woman” in the expression of that point. It’s subtle, but simultaneously deeply obvious, right the way across the English-speaking world.

We need to separate the women who mocked Hunt with the hashtag “#distractinglysexy” from the institutions that fired him

The critical question is not, is this sexist, but rather, the pub brawl dilemma: is this worth it? Does it matter if it’s parliamentary normality to treat women disdainfully, when they’re all so vile to one another anyway? Does it filter into the wider culture, or is nobody listening? I was pretty agnostic, especially on this last point, and would never have sought Salmond out to chastise him, but since he was right there … “Nicola Sturgeon says I’m the least sexist person she’s ever met! With respect, she’s known me a lot longer than you have.” I didn’t know Scottish idiom well enough (with respect); I didn’t know him well enough (with respect); my expertise was insufficient, therefore, for me to adjudicate this incredibly simple matter. Adversarialism between men tends not to have this as the immediate presumption, that the oppugner is simply too ignorant to belong in the conversation. Which I suppose answers the dilemma: it remains routine to deploy, as an argument or a gambit or a joke, the notion that women are aberrant or less equipped or in some respect unworthy for whatever environment they’re in.

The issue is particularly piquant in the wake of the Nobel laureate Professor Sir Tim Hunt (I give him his full title to indicate my elaborate respect for his plentiful science), who lost his jobs following what has come to be described as a feminist witch-hunt. To a conference in Seoul, he explained the problem with women – you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry. By the end of the week, he had lost his posts at University College London, the European Research Council and the Royal Society. “I am finished,” he said, in an interview with the Observer. “I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this country and in Europe, but … I have become toxic.” This looks like the best possible case against making a fuss: the price he paid was out of all proportion to the remarks he made, which were jocular and minor. He was tried by Twitter and convicted by his employers, unable until it was too late to make a case in his own defence.

We first need to separate the individual women who mocked Hunt with the hashtag “#distractinglysexy” from the institutions that fired him. Most of the social media response was, itself, pretty jocular. While plenty of people said that Hunt distilled the working environment in science, and the reason women can’t thrive in it, it didn’t follow that those people were calling for him to be sacked.

The institutions have reacted in an unintelligent way: they think they’ll be on the right side of the PR curve if they cave in to a public response, not realising that the response itself had many layers and a rich history. Nobody would react to Hunt or any other man, making this or any other remark, were he not symbolic of a larger problem, with profound and demonstrable effects. To think you have addressed that problem by erasing the symbol is a hasty, ironically rather emotional, response. Hunt thinks he has been “hung out to dry”, his side of the story never solicited; in fact, his side is pretty lame. What was really lacking here was rational thought – what was the anger really about, and will the decapitation of Hunt’s career make any difference? As an aside, I doubt his career really is over: I can see universities lining up right now to offer him honorary posts, as a brave stand in defence of science against feminist mobs. But whether it’s over or not, his career is not in itself an argument against objecting to his remarks.

The truth is, for every big scalp felled by the mysterious (rather short-lived) influence of these great explosions of public disapproval, there are hundreds of thousands of scalps who never get to be pre-eminent, who are simply lost to the world of power, by the expectation that they aren’t up to it.

It is incredibly boring to be the person who always points out sexism, and we could perhaps use some of our household skills to organise a rota for it. But every gobbet of casual misogyny is meaningful; every one has to be countervailed; it doesn’t go away on its own.