Angry, impolite, shrill-sounding, hysterical women

Calm down, dear. David Cameron was undeniably patronising towards female MP Angela Eagle, but there’s more to that phrase than just superiority and arrogance. I’ve done a lot of thinking lately about my own tone, particularly on online platforms like Twitter, wondering if I should indeed calm down. I’m furious with the Tories over the cuts; I’m sick to death of the widespread sexism in media; I tell brands who cement old-fashioned gender stereotypes to piss off; yes, I’m pretty sure that if you ask any of my followers on Twitter, they’ll say if not that I need to calm down then at least that I seem pretty angry a lot of the time.

So I thought to myself that maybe I should take a chill pill. Maybe this is not how deliberative politics should work, after all. Michael Kelly of The Irish Catholic certainly finds the anger a bit much: people should be able to disagree on various issues without the debate getting out of hand, he insists. We must be polite.

There you go, I thought, an Irish Catholic who has more sense than I do – I definitely need to calm the hell down. So far so good. But Kelly uses the word ‘calm’, too. Senator Ivana Bacik claimed during a hearing that the Catholic Church’s anti-abortion stance was based on sheer hatred of women, an opinion which, according to Kelly, wasn’t expressed quite calmly enough:

‘Calm? Hardly. … A gentleman is one, the old saying goes, who can disagree without being disagreeable. The same surely applies for ladies. Shrill caricatures have no place in mature debates.’

See, I don’t think this is about civilised debate.

‘Many Irish people passionately believe that gay couples ought to be allowed to get married, many others believe that marriage should be a unique institution between a man and a woman. This should be a point that people of good faith can legitimately disagree about. … Sadly, however, it usually descends into name-calling and charges of homophobia.’

This is a bit like the neoliberals who don’t like to be called neoliberal, not because they aren’t, but because the word is sometimes used in an accusatory manner. You know, thinking you have the right to tell someone what they can or can’t do simply because they’re gay is homophobic, at least in my vocabulary. Calling a spade a spade is not name-calling.

But when Cameron tells Eagle to calm down and Kelly refers to Bacik’s voice as shrill, they consciously or subconsciously evoke the idea of female hysteria. What Kelly fails to understand is that the abortion debate simply cannot be polite and civilised – that’s the nature of the debate – and this is the case with most women’s rights issues. We can disagree politely for all eternity, but politeness is not – I’m sorry, Caitlin Moran – what gave women the right to vote. Asking politely is not what changed this shocking situation in the 1970s in Ireland.

‘Any woman trying to speak about [sexting] will be greeted with a volley of “you’re just jealous as no one wants a photo of your fanny”,’ as Grace Dent put it. Or you’re not polite enough. Or you need to calm down. Or your voice is starting to sound a bit shrill. Or you’re just hysterical and need a good seeing to. ‘Too often in our political discourse reasonable voices are shouted down by shrill opponents. It’s not a sign of maturity when some voices are silenced or bullied out of the public sphere,’ says Kelly. Or, maybe, voices become shrill, loud and angry in a discourse that keeps silencing them. Because you can say a lot of things about the climate for the current abortion debate in Ireland, but you can’t say that the conservative, anti-choice voice is being bullied by a bunch of progressives in a liberal left-wing hegemony. You can try, but with only 15% women in the Dáil and a constitution that still talks about women’s duties in the home, as a middle-aged white man you’ll only sound pathetic at best. When one group starts telling another to calm down, you can be pretty sure that they’re not in any major rush to challenge the status quo.

So am I angry? No, I’m well beyond angry, and no, I won’t calm down. I’ll calm down and be polite when women are treated as equals – in political debate and in society as a whole. Until then, I’ll be as shrill as I want to be.

Inequality and social unrest - this is politics

“Keeping people safe is the first duty of government,” said David Cameron in the House of Commons after recalling parliament. Not a particularly surprising statement coming from a true conservative. But put into context, where what the prime minister is really saying is that the government’s main task is to protect one part of society from another, it not only explains to some degree how we ended up in this situation in the first place, but also expresses the idea of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ which could lead to further segregation and unrest.

Cameron went on to say that the riots were “not about politics or protest – it was about theft,” and that “in too many cases, the parents of these children, if they’re still around, don’t care where their children are.” In other words, don’t blame the government – blame the parents. Which parents? Those in the ghettos, who don’t belong to ‘us’. Those from whom the government will protect you.

It’s easy to fall into the mindset of anger and vengeance and agree with Cameron. We’re all angry about what’s happened to our city: the amount of people who have lost their homes and livelihoods; the amount of taxes required to recover from this; how many of us suddenly no longer feel safe in our own streets. These crimes are inexcusable, so why pretend they’re justifiable?

They’re not, of course. This kind of deliberate destruction is never justifiable, be it in London or in Norway or in Iraq. But that doesn’t change the fact that it feels a bit as though a rhetoric comfortably suitable to the boys in charge – and I’m talking about the government here, not the rioters – has been shoved down our throats and we’re too angry to question it.

There’s an inherent flaw in the argument that these people are mindless scum and hence the whole thing is apolitical. Aren’t we suggesting that they’re too ignorant to see what they’re doing to their own communities? Aren’t we saying that they’re mindless enough not to care? Well that, people, is politics.

If thousands of young citizens are convinced that there’s no place in society for them, if they’re so disconnected from their own city that they feel like they have nothing to lose and it makes no difference if they go and smash it to bits and burn it down, then we’re failing somewhere.

It could be the British class system and the segregation, or perhaps the increase in higher education fees and slashing of means-tested grants. Perhaps it’s the sometimes completely unjustified stopping and searching of certain groups of people (intended to keep other groups of people safe, I guess). Maybe it’s a cocktail of all of the above, along with a long list of issues which I, as a middle-class creative in Crouch End, don’t even know exist.

Then there’s the added complication of the fact that peaceful protests don’t work, that people came out in droves to show their dissatisfaction with the suggested increase in higher education fees and were ignored. Some would say that the government lost its mandate right there and then. Those rioting in the streets of London and other cities may not have had a political agenda in mind, but we’re not exactly encouraging them to either: it’s pretty clear that the politicians don’t want to listen to them. That politicians, on top of that, show a complete lack of respect for public funds by abusing the expense system probably doesn’t help.

We’ve got to dare to ask ourselves what went wrong that led to these riots, and in doing so we have to admit that these people are real citizens who have to be a part of society. The right-wing rhetoric of making the rioters into mindless monsters may fit very well in with an ideology that insists that a certain level of unemployment is necessary as an incentive for people to work hard, but it’s not only proven wrong by the events in Britain over the past week – it’s also exactly the kind of talk that confirms to these people that they don’t belong and that society doesn’t want them.

Cameron wants to protect one part of society from another, the one outside of it. On Twitter, another suggestion came up: how about social justice and equality instead?