Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny, this time for writing a
short piece describing how she had received excellent treatment at a New York hospital. While she was on her sickbed, she reflected that in the States, ‘Those who are wealthy enough to afford decent healthcare have their
needs met in relative luxury, while those who are poor live in fear of getting ill, worrying that one misadventure might leave you with yet more debts to pay off.’
This humane thought inspired one Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph to pen a whole column condemning Penny . ‘I have no intention of defending the American healthcare system,’ he says, and then excoriates Penny for not defending it either. He depicts her as a dogmatist and a bore. ‘This article isn’t interesting, it won’t change anyone’s mind about anything,’ he claims – an accusation I would be careful of throwing around if I were in his shoes.
Why is he bothering to waste energy on a damning a fellow writer, who has produced an unexceptional piece by using a personal experience to draw wider political lessons, as writers do every day? Perhaps it is an unconditioned reflex; a conservative version of Tourette syndrome. Certainly every time Penny appears, the right-wing press cannot stop itself from shouting obscenities. For want of anything better to do, Telegraph columnists have claimed that she is ‘pretentious,’ ‘impossible to take seriously’, ‘beyond parody,’ and a writer, who ‘combines unblinking dogmatism with little-girl vulnerability: think Rosa Klebb disguised as Audrey Tautou.’
They are trying to turn her into a new Polly Toynbee, who also attracts extraordinary vitriol. Every week you can find a nasty throwaway remark about her in conservative papers – often for no reason at all.
If you think that such attitudes are confined to the Right, consider the loathing of the left-wing press for Melanie Phillips. A Guardian headline writer trying to come up with the worst insult he could think to throw at the heir to the throne wrote ‘Prince Charles is the voice of Mel Phillips, not the people’ (note the condescension of that ‘Mel’) This year alone the Guardian has accused her of being ‘poisonous,’ the ‘queen of mean’ and condemned her ‘ludicrous ideological outbursts,’ her ‘hell-in-a-handcart rants’ and so on and on. As with the Telegraph and Penny, its writers want to make her an absurd figure no respectable person should listen to. On occasion, she can be worse than that. I was at a debate a few years ago, when a liberal philosopher on the panel was stumped by a question. Clearly floundering, he resorted to saying ‘if you go down that road you will end up like Melanie Phillips’. The audience had only to hear the evil woman’s name to recoil in horror and forget about the speaker’s inability to explain himself. It was as if she were a demon.
You might say that newspapers are not as misogynist as they appear, and are merely engaging in rough and ready political debate. Conservatives want to criticise leftist writers and vice versa, why should we be surprised or concerned? But most of the time journalists on, say, a liberal paper, just take it for granted that conservatives journalists will have conservative views. They don’t fly into rages and publish vicious denunciations, but shrug their shoulders and get on with their work. Indeed on occasion, they display their broadmindedness by saying “I don’t agree with Smith, but he writes well,” or “Jones is my favourite Tory. I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help liking him.” No male writer gets the kind of going overs Polly Toynbee, Laurie Penny and Melanie Phillips receive as a matter of routine. The exception to the rule appears to be the Independent’s Johann Hari, but the cases are not comparable. On Fleet Street it was common knowledge for years that Hari made it up, but no one apart from Private Eye told the truth about him. Finally, bloggers rather than journalists provided conclusive proof of his malice and mendacity. Even after they had exposed Hari, most of the mainstream press and the BBC played down the biggest scandal a serious newspaper has seen in years, while the Independent’s editors strained every muscle they had to suppress the details of the affair.
Imagine the reaction if Toynbee, Penny or Phillips had committed a tenth of the deceits Hari perpetrated, and then try to deny misogyny has nothing to do with the treatment they receive. A great many male writers, and quite a few women journalists, find a special thrill in attacking women who write forcefully about politics. Look again at the insults. On the one hand, their critics say that they are preposterous figures, grotesque anomalies, who have no business being in a man’s world. They then explain their presence by depicting them as the worst type of woman, the termagant, the hysterical nagger, the unfeminine shrew.
A few months ago, women writers complained about the filthy abuse they received on the Net, often with the complicity of newspaper managers, who are happy to demean their staff by allowing anonymous libellers and sex pests to fill their comments boxes. The cases of Penny, Toynbee and Phillips show the hollow-eyed masturbators on the comment threads are not alone. Journalists are more than willing to encourage them.
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