Patriarchy withers on the (Sarah) Vine...
Sarah Vine, columnist for the Daily Mail, is scathing about the recent ‘revelations’ regarding politicians and their sexual improprieties. I’m sceptical about the term ‘revelation’ because the idea that men abuse their power for sexual advantage is about as surprising as a Jeremy Clarkson racial slur. Regardless, Sarah tell her readers that
"most of the accused are over 40; most of the accusers are in their 20s. In other words, it’s the revenge of the millennials."
In fact, women of every age group, from every part of the globe, and from every area of life, from actresses to politicians, from business women to homemakers, have described their experiences of inappropriate and unwelcome behaviour from men abusing their positions of authority to letch at, grope, and unfortunately even rape women. Sarah Vine suggests women need to lighten up about such behaviour, women who ‘have had their senses of humour surgically removed at university’. I can just imagine what a laugh a younger Sarah might have had, a Sarah at the outset of her career, faced with the sweating bulk of a naked journalistic equivalent of a Harvey Weinstein, bottle of massage cream in hand, promising career advancement in exchange for a quick hand-job. Don’t like a fat man masturbating in front of you? Where’s your sense of humour
ladies?
A similar sense of humour must presumably be required by women encountering men who act on Donald Trump’s advice to ‘grab them by the pussy’. If another parliamentary researcher wasn’t such a whinger, time wouldn’t have been wasted by her reporting four times, that she’d been sexually assaulted. Jeez, no need to be such a snowflake about it darling! And what about the secretary of government minister, Mark Garnier, called ‘sugar tits’ by her boss and asked as part of her professional duties to buy sex toys for him? Get over it love, just a giggle, ‘high jinks’ as Garnier called it. Sarah Vine says ‘grow up and deal with it’.
It’s hardly surprising that a tabloid hack writing for a paper of which Alf Garnet would heartily approve, thinks sexual exploitation is no more than a bit of a laugh. Alongside Vine’s article in the Mail online, is ‘news’ about ‘busty Rhian Sugden’ and Dannii Minogue’s ‘ample cleavage’. The Mail regularly trades on the sexual objectification of women, so why would they not defend the exploits of men who treat women similarly? And of course, Sarah Vine is married to Tory cabinet minister and all round nice-guy, Michael Gove. Vine has previously used her position at the Mail to further her husband’s party leadership ambitions, and now she uses it to defend his friends and colleagues.
Interestingly, when the story broke that Defence Secretary Michael Fallon had acted inappropriately with female colleagues, the Mail branded him ‘vile’. The next day, when Tory colleague Andrea Leadsom confirmed such behaviour, the Mail led with a headline which suggested that Leadsom had ‘stabbed him in the back’ for his job, which incidentally, she didn’t get. One might accuse the Mail of inconsistency, but of course this isn’t the case. The Mail will advance any story which slavers and drools over sexual impropriety, and particularly one that can be combined with the suggestion that career women are conniving and self-serving. Considering this agenda, the Mail have been wholly consistent.
But of course, none of this is news. The male abuse of power, tabloid exploitation of sex scandals, and the networks of patronage which allow the wife of a Tory cabinet minister to defend the indefensible antics of her husband’s colleagues in national newspapers are not ‘revelations’, we all know these things to be widespread; hardly, as Sarah Vine suggests, products of the imagination of women in their twenties. But if we want to continue reading about sex scandals and pontificating on the size of women’s breasts, we have to justify such behaviour; otherwise, no more stories. The justifying role is the one Sarah Vine plays, she’s a kind of enabler.
Even though it’s clear that the problem of sexually predatory behaviour towards women has been ubiquitous across the ages, Sarah Vine believes it is more a problem of overreaction by the current generation of women in their twenties, women whom ‘feminism has taught…are entitled to equality and respect even if they have done nothing to earn it’.
Here we have the crux of the historical problem. What do women have to do to deserve equality and respect? Surely women should not have to specifically prove they are entitled to equality with men, their equality should be respected by right, should it not? Is the ability to deal with unwelcome sexual harassment really a necessary rite of passage for women wishing to work in our political system, the business community, the acting profession?
Vine’s ideas are nothing new. They are a continuation of an ideology developed and formalised, concretised, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, predominantly by an emerging politically active middle-class who demanded greater socio-political and parliamentary representation. Traditionally, political authority had been a right of birth for the aristocracy and the upper echelons of society, on whom God had seen fit to bestow wealth and privilege, and the education and access to political power that went with such benefactions.
Contesting aristocratic authority, an increasingly wealthy commercial middle class portrayed the aristocracy very differently, as lazy and immoral, a sexually licentious bunch of inveterate gamblers, drinkers and womanisers. Consider for example, Hogarth’s famous series of paintings, Marriage a la Mode, or modern marriage, with its debt-ridden and drunken syphilitic aristocrat and his sexually promiscuous wife, ‘entertaining’ men, even servants, all night whilst her husband frequents the prostitutes of London.
The middle classes juxtaposed themselves as the opposite, as the morally upstanding, hard-working, family-centred and Christian backbone of England. Such qualities didn’t just justify greater middle class inclusion in political power, they were essential for the well-being of the nation. The central idea at the heart of middle class identity was the family, and the ‘separate spheres’ of male and female activity. Men were rational and robust, emotionally and physically strong, and well suited to the rough and tumble of the public world of business and politics. Women by contrast, were physically and emotionally weaker, guided by their emotions rather than rational thinking, delicate and sensitive, suited to the private world of the home. There the woman played a role as vital as men’s public activities, but based on her ‘natural’ nurturing and caring characteristics, supporting her husband and educating her children to take their own places in the public and private spheres of society in their turn.
The very success of Britain as an imperial global power was, so the middle classes ventured, based on such domestic arrangements and the appropriate and different spheres of activity for men and women. As Elizabeth Rigby, a reviewer for the highly influential and widely read periodical, the Quarterly Review, put it in the mid-nineteenth century,
"Every country with any pretensions to civilisation has a two-fold aspect…a home life as well as a public life, and the first quite necessary to interpret the last. English superiority is attributable to nothing less than the domesticity of the English character".
Rigby wrote anonymously, ostensibly as a man. Women who pushed at the edges of the ‘separate sphere’ conventions were frowned upon, they had a responsibility to do their duty, as another nineteenth-century writer pointed out:
"The ordinary women cannot be got to see that she is not only herself but also a member of society and part of an organisation; and that she owes, as a duty to that community, the subordination of her individualism to that organisation."
Women who ventured into the male sphere of public activity were dangerous, irrational, emotionally unstable, and unable to control their passions, offering sexually subversive temptation to men. Here we see the formalisation of the conflicting universal portrayal of women, as both angel and slut. Under effective and proper supervision, male domestic control, women’s qualities could be harnessed in positive ways. Outside of such control, they were dangerous and sexually divisive. Such a portrayal of women ran through every aspect of nineteenth-century culture, literature, art, politics, religion and social comment. In many ways, it still does. Consider Vine’s treatment of the Weinstein story. Yes, Weinstein was ‘vile’, but why were those
actresses in his room in the first place? Why has it taken them so long to speak out? Was his attention really so unwelcome, or a momentary annoyance well worth the career boost? In some sense, were these actresses to blame for Weinstein’s behaviour, were they in some way ‘asking for it’ as the historical discourse has always gone? Using sex for their own advantage?
Sarah Vine believes "the real test of feminism is whether… you can cut the mustard on a par with the men." No Sarah, it is not! The test of feminism is the degree to which women are free from prejudices and barriers as a result of their sex. But for Vine and the Daily Mail, continuing the nineteenth-century ideology of ‘separate spheres’, men exhibit a ‘gold standard’ of behaviour, by the simple fact of being male. Women must live up to and conform to the expectations of men if they are to compete in the same environment. Is the real test of calls for racial equality, whether black people can ‘cut the mustard’ with white people? Do white people automatically set the standards which black people must conform to if they are to be allowed equality? Perhaps the Mail thinks so.
So why do men provide the standard for women? Because women’s ‘natural’ characteristics do not lend themselves to successful careers in the public world of politics or business. If they must venture out of the private sphere, ideally this would be in a supportive role more suited to their ‘natural’ talents. As Sarah Vine says of women objecting to sexual harassment in Westminster, echoing nineteenth-century views,
"they can’t take a joke, let alone dictation — so is it any wonder they can’t handle the pace at Westminster or the rough and tumble of parliamentary banter".
Unfortunately, commentators in the UK have turned the story of the abuse of power by sexually predatory men into a story about the trustworthiness of politicians, thus diverting attention away from the historical problem of infantilising women as primarily sexual objects, incapable of operating in a ‘male’ world; women Sarah Vine calls ‘fragile’ and ‘angry snowflakes’. Angry perhaps, but fragile? I suggest that Sarah Vine’s dinner parties, already short of a Defence Secretary, will be hosting a good few ex-cabinet ministers and politicians in the near future. Harvey Weinstein is unlikely to be seen any public role again, and perhaps the same for Kevin Spacey.
Reactionary conservatives like Sarah Vine and the Daily Mail are fond of saying there is a culture war going on. If so, bring it on Sarah. You may peddle the patriarchal line for male approval and a seat at their table, but a later generation of women won’t settle for capitulation and submission. Sexually predatory men are falling everywhere and running for cover. Seems to me that the fragile snowflakes are kicking your backside.
