So, it turns out it’s Misogyny July. We’ve
had InverdaleGate, where a complacent and corpulent male journalist chose to
focus on the looks of a superb athlete right at the moment she reached the
pinnacle of her profession. We’ve been shown the sickening outpourings of idiot
tweeters about the same woman. We’ve had MurrayWadeGate, where much virtual ink
was spilled on 1977 and 1936 and 77 years and Marray and Haydon-Jones and all
that. But the really disturbing indicator of how our society looks at women didn’t
happen anywhere near the All-England Club. It’s happening in and around a TV
programme that the media doesn’t really take any notice of any more, and it
stinks.
Hazel O’Sullivan is an Irish model, and is
single. Daley Ojuederie is an English boxer, and doesn’t seem too sure whether
he’s single or not. In the last couple of weeks, they’ve been flirting up a
storm. She’s been grinding her behind against his crotch. They’ve been tapping
out Morse Code messages on each others’ hands. There has been draping. All this
is something, I’m informed, that Young People Do. But unusually for such
couples, we who have never met them can be certain that they have never kissed
each other, or had sex. We can be certain of this because they have chosen to
spend their summer in the Big Brother house.
Ok, yes, this is about Big Brother. They’re
Big Brother contestants. But don’t stop reading just yet, because I promise you
that what is about to happen to Hazel O’Sullivan is an example of a scarier,
more insidious, more prevalent kind of misogyny than anything Inverdale could
have dreamt of in his wildest Wimbledon fantasies.
So, Hazel and Daley are in the Big Brother
house together. They’ve been there for just shy of a month and have started
doing the ritual sexdance of reality show contestants. Canoodling and
whispering and everything I mentioned above. You may remember that I also
mentioned Daley’s uncertain relationship status: he claimed when he went into
the house that he had a girlfriend, but in the last few weeks he has, what with
all the canoodling and that, recanted. He has said that his relationship is ‘in
a pickle’. He ‘doesn’t know’ whether he has a girlfriend or not. He ‘wishes he
could find out’. O’Sullivan, in the meantime, just so you know, knows she’s
single. And her knowledge of Ojuederie’s relationship status is what he’s told
her: all the vague ‘pickle’ stuff.
Now, let’s guess who Britain- or that part
of Britain which watches and
writes about BB, at any rate- has decided to hate, shall we? That’s right.
Cherchez la femme.
Hazel is odds-on favourite to be evicted
this week. She will exit the house on Friday to a storm of boos. She will be
labelled a ‘homewrecker’, and a ‘slag’, and a ‘slut’, all because she did some
dirty dancing and some flirting and some cuddling with a man who told her he
was more or less a free agent.
Just to rub it in even further, Big
Brother’s spin-off, public show invited Daley’s is-she-or-isn’t-she girlfriend
Katie on for a tearful interview last night. She insisted that Daley was lying
when he said that their relationship was, to coin a Friends, on a break. She
insisted that, and she cried. It was upsetting, and she came across as sincere
and devastated. At the same time, her take was treated as gospel, when as far
as any of us can know, Daley, trapped in the house without an interviewer, is
telling- confusedly- the truth
about their status. Immediately after the interview with Katie, presenter Emma
Willis asked the studio audience what they thought… of Hazel. She didn’t ask what
they thought of the putative cheater; she encouraged them to boo the
co-respondent.
Now look. I’m not under any illusions that
Hazel O’Sullivan is a sister. Her
behaviour on the show has been at best ill-advised. She may be a thoroughly
unpleasant individual; only people who know her can say what she’s like. And
it’s only Big Brother, after all. Who cares? It’s a trashy reality show.
But in this case, I think this particular
trashy reality show is tapping into something which is bigger than the show, an
attitude whereby any sexual interaction between a man and a woman has to be
driven by her. After all, if we’re going to blame anyone for Daley’s
girlfriend’s tears- are they really Hazel’s fault? Are they not, you know, his? Let’s
assume, as the programme-makers did, that Daley and Katie were rock-solid
before he entered the house. If we then say ‘Ah, but Hazel went after him
with her wiles and he was powerless to resist’ are we not backing up every
anti-woman story from Eve to ‘she shouldn’t have been walking through the park
in that skirt’?
I remember all those storifys from the
weird individuals on Twitter who were insulted that Bartoli had the temerity to
win Wimbledon: Bitch, they said. And Cunt. And Slag. And Whore. And it’s easy
to get angry about them, because they’re so obviously undeserved.
But another woman is about to get a
beasting, on the same social media we deplore for the Bartoli stuff. She’ll be
called bitch and whore and cunt and slag and nobody will mind all that much.
And I know you don’t watch Big Brother, but
I think we probably should mind about that. Because people who win Wimbledon
are basically going to be ok. Whereas Hazel O’Sullivan is about to be publicly
labelled as a bitch-whore-cunt because she didn’t quite kiss someone who wasn’t
sure whether he had a girlfriend or not. And I think that’s much more worrying
than Inverdale being crass about an athlete’s looks.
