Standing Room | 28 March 2009

Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze

Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze: a pamphlet asking staff to refrain from using titles such as Miss or Mrs. Apparently these titles are considered archaic and a hangover from the past, as they ‘indicate’ a woman’s relationship to a man. According to Strasbourg, Ms is the politically correct prefix all us women should adopt; for despite being impossible to pronounce without sounding as though one is impersonating an angry mosquito, using Ms doesn’t — God forbid — denote a woman’s marital status.

Shortly before going on air, the presenter Matthew Bannister politely asked how I’d like to be introduced. ‘As Mrs Standing,’ I replied. Married — happily as it so happens — for 25 years, I instinctively sensed that by wilfully ‘trivialising my independent status’ I’d send my adversary, Ms Julie Bindel (radical feminist writer and articulate, feisty lady), into a foaming fury of indignation. I was right. I verbally lit the blue touch-paper and just sat back and listened to the fireworks of self-righteous fury explode.

The main problem I have with arguments like these that propose to chip away, alter or altogether banish age-old traditions is that they tend to be largely imagined slights, what-ifs and worst-case scenarios dreamt up and dramatised by an incredibly small number of people. I find I deeply resent the majority-rule principle being both ridiculed and dismissed and I don’t like being made to feel like a wet, old-fashioned anti-feminist for failing to empathise or grasp the bigger picture. I loathe the fact that normality is under constant threat of being marginalised.