Allison Pearson
The journalist Suzanne Moore was writing a thoughtful article about the pressures on women in a hyper-sexualised society when she reached for a comparison, as writers do. Moore suggested that, increasingly, women felt they should look like “Brazilian transsexuals”.
You knew exactly what she meant. The Brazilian transsexual and the Thai ladyboy are both shorthand for a kind of streamlined, ravishing ultra-femininity. Those of us whose idea of personal grooming involves a quick Bic in the bath, rather than a waxed deforestation followed by a litre of yak butter, can only marvel at the sheer effort which those chaps who have joined our gender bring to the business of being a woman.
Personally, I would be thrilled to be mistaken for a Brazilian transsexual. So much foxier than a Hobbit in Boden or a mum in pyjamas on the school run. Suzanne Moore meant no offence. It was not the Brazilian transsexuals who were the object of her concern: she was worrying about women who feel miserable because they don’t measure up to supermodels. She might just as easily have asked, “Why do our daughters need to look like Barbies?”
I bet she wishes she had. There would have been no hysterical complaints from wounded members of “the Barbie community”, claiming to have been trivialised or marginalised or stigmatised. So far, plastic dolls with implausible boob-to-hip ratios have not organised to lobby angrily for their minority rights, though you never know.
Unwittingly, poor Suzanne incited the ire of transsexuals on Twitter, where indignation spreads like a forest fire. On social media, it takes a matter of minutes for an innocuous aside to be inflated to “bullying”. Formerly a very grave charge, in our brave new world of tolerance, bullying now basically means: “They said something I don’t like.”
An organ called Pink News demanded that Moore apologise for what it solemnly called “her recent transphobic outburst”. Just to add to the atmosphere of sweet reason, Julie Burchill wrote an article for the Observer, defending Moore and machine-gunning what she called “bed-wetters in bad wigs”. Shamefully, the editor added injury to insult, pulling the Burchill piece from the website after it had had been published: a move that was simultaneously repressive and useless. Then Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone weighed in, calling for Burchill and the Observer’s editor to be sacked. I think you may have got the wrong country, Lynne love; this is Britain, not Communist China.
So, a perfectly valid comparison is blown up into “a transphobic outburst”. A decent writer wrongly accused of bullying refuses to apologise for an imaginary offence and is then bullied into closing her Twitter account by the Monstrous Regiment of the Thin-Skinned. I’m afraid that this is where political correctness has got us. Taking Offence is the new national sport, and the moral high ground is so bloody crowded it’s more bad-tempered than Waitrose car park on a Saturday.
Dear reader, when did we get so damned touchy?
Hey, who are you calling touchy? I’m not touchy. I’m just in touch with my feelings and aware of my right not to be offended by anything or anyone ever. Got that?
I think we all knew this offence business had got out of hand when, five years ago, a young lad was fined £50 for saying “Woof!” to a Labrador in front of police officers. Kyle Little was charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act for “insulting language”, though the Labrador did not seek counselling and was believed to have carried on wagging its tail.
Thankfully, this week that barking bit of legislation has been expunged from the statute book. It is not the business of government to banish insults. Nor should it be up to the police to make partial value judgments on what might be considered offensive to a hypothetical person. As the comedian Rowan Atkinson warned, the law had created “an outrage industry” and a society of “an extraordinarily authoritarian and controlling nature”.
I still remember my profound shock, six years ago, when I got a letter from a Chief Inspector Brough of North Wales Police, informing me that he had received a complaint after my appearance on Question Time. Someone had found my remark about “Little Welshies” offensive and belittling. As it happened, I knew for a fact that I had not caused any offence whatsover. I was billed to appear, but had pulled out of the show due to illness; it was someone else who had used the phrase. Furthermore, as I am in fact both little and Welsh, I surely could not be guilty of inciting racial hatred against myself.
The stupidity of the police was troubling, though not half as scary as the thought that they had a Thought Crimes Unit writing letters “to make you aware of how your remarks were perceived”. Franz Kafka, eat your heart out.
We shouldn’t need to worry how our remarks are perceived, not unless they threaten a real person. No more than an airport worker need be afraid she will be suspended for wearing a cross into work. This is a free country, and the price we pay for that freedom is letting silly insults or harmless asides roll off us.
The thin-skinned Offence Brigade would do well to remember the advice of the great Thomas Carlyle: “No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.”
Oh, and two small words of advice to all the transsexuals “offended” by Suzanne Moore: man up!
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