When a public figure is in danger of annoying me so much that it risks impinging on my quality of life, there’s an easy trick I play on myself in order to put the irritant back into their box and into perspective. Rather than take them seriously, I simply reframe them as a comic creation in the style of David Brent of The Office fame. This strategy worked a treat with Meghan Markle when I had to watch the Netflix mockumentary for work.
With the latest mis-step in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s anti-sexist #HaveAWord campaign, the time has come to view him too through the prism of Ricky Gervais’ supreme buffoon. The campaign is peak Brent; faced with an epidemic of murderous misogyny, what could be a better use of public money that the the new Transport for London (TfL) ‘SAY MAAATE TO A MATE’ posters which will apparently stop sexism in its tracks if men give their friends a stern look and a short bleat of ‘MAAATE’ on hearing any dodgy banter?
Is this an attempt to outsource women’s public safety to the man in the street/pub/club now that many women in London do not trust the Metropolitan Police? The Met are, of course, merely the rotting head of a national police force which often not only fails to protect women but counts among its number the actual shock troops of misogyny. Some officers even seem to view sex with the women they are supposed to protect as a ‘reward’ for their supposed hard work in keeping society ‘safe’. Met officer David Carrick committed 48 rapes over 17 years; Wayne Couzens, killer of Sarah Everard, was affectionately known as ‘The Rapist’ by his Met colleagues.
Never fear – Citizen Khan to the rescue! This campaign started in March last year as an expression of the Mayor’s determination to tackle the ‘epidemic of violence and misogyny that countless women face on a daily basis’.
There’s no doubt that this is a real thing, but I’m not sure that spending large sums of cash on a poster campaign telling men to scold their friends if they remark ‘Have you seen the new girl? I’d give her one’ is going to address the main sources of female fear.
One of these fears is rape, now effectively ‘decriminalised’ according to Victims Commissioner Dame Vera Baird; there are currently 25 rapes reported each day in London alone, and as many women say that they wouldn’t report rape, who knows how many more take place?
The second is domestic violence, which takes the lives of two women a week. The law can hardly be trusted to take this seriously when one considers that serving police officers sometimes go unpunished following domestic violence incidents. The risibly low prison sentences routinely handed out to wife-killers also shows the lack of concern for cracking down on these appalling crimes. In the face of such an onslaught, the TfL posters seem positively insulting; they are literally lip service.
‘Maaate’: would that be a suitable response to a racist remark from a friend? Of course not. We’d be expected to denounce them in public and never have anything to do with them again. In the Specials song ‘Racist Friend’, we are told that: ‘If you are a racist/Our friendship has got to end/And if your friends are racists don’t pretend to be my friend’ before being told to apply this to our families too:
‘Be it your sister/Be it your brother/Be it your cousin or your uncle or your lover/Is it your husband or your father or your mother?’
But your sexist friend gets no such banishment; just a limp little ‘Maaate’. It’s telling that while racism is quite rightly considered too serious an issue to be addressed by eye-catching posters, Khan’s previous similar battle was against ‘junk food’ which led to a poster for a play being banned as it featured a cake. As long as sexism is portrayed as the amiable little brother – falling short, but meaning well – to the certified nut-job racism, the epidemic of misogynist violence which Khan refers to will never be truly tackled.
‘Maaate’: would that be a suitable response to a racist remark from a friend? Of course not
This campaign is so box-ticking and prissy, with no real effort involved on the part of either those who thought it up or those it’s aimed at. Compare it to the initiative by L’Oreal Paris which, in 2020, developed a ‘bystander training programme’ Stand Up Against Street Harassment. Now completed by more than 1.25 million people in 42 countries, it teaches citizens to actively go to the assistance of those they witness being bothered. No doubt soft-lad Khan might see this as a dangerous move towards vigilante justice – but what a judgement on the impotence of modern politics when a cosmetics company has a more robust attitude to combating street misogyny than a Labour politician.
This poster campaign has been compared – in the light of a London where Mizzy is a role model, daylight machetes are nothing remarkable and knife crime terrifyingly high – to the rearranging of those mythical deckchairs on the Titanic. But I see it more as the rearranging of magnetic plastic letters on a fridge door, which Khan wants us to read in any but the most obvious and sensible way: DETECTION + PUNISHMENT = LESS CRIME.
This won’t be helped by putting money into things which are not crimes while apparently giving up on things that are, so why not go after the 100 or so men known to be a persistent nuisance to women in the capital and leave the rest of us alone to be as nasty as we please, which may well include flirting in the workplace?
The real dangers to women aren’t the blokes on the building sites or the players in the pub. They’re those boys in blue, like Carrick, who consider raping women as a perk of the job; and the men in frocks advocating ‘punching TERFS in the face’. So maybe have a word with those people first, Mayor, before you lecture the rest of us and our ‘maaates’.
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