In the past they would put a witches’ bridle on women who yapped too much. Any woman judged to be a gossip or a hysteric or just too darn opinionated risked having this iron muzzle attached to her head to keep her babbling tongue in place. That’d shut her up.
Today, more subtle methods of tongue-clamping are used on outspoken women. Who needs metal contraptions when women can be Twittershamed into silence? Public humiliation and the threat of social ostracism have replaced muzzling as the preferred method for taming shrews.
Cancel culture grows fatter and more crazed with every retraction it extracts
Just ask Róisín Murphy. The great Irish songstress, the queen of new disco, has been humbled by a misogynistic mob. Her offence? She expressed an opinion. Worse, she expressed an opinion on transgenderism. Surely she must have known that no woman is permitted to do that without first having her thoughts vetted by the mostly male guardians of correct gender thought?
It was on her personal Facebook page that she gave voice to her blasphemous beliefs. ‘Puberty blockers are fucked, absolutely desolate, big pharma laughing all the way to the bank’, she wrote. ‘Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true.’
She pre-empted the witch-trial that would likely darken her door as a result of her utterance of a gender-critical thought. ‘Please don’t call me a terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist], please don’t keep using that word against women’, she said. It fell on deaf ears, as surely as yesteryear’s cries of ‘please don’t call me a witch’ would make no dent in the mob’s urge to string up some woman for her unruly behaviour.
Murphy was instantly branded a terf by furious fellas online. They damned her as a transphobe. Don’t buy her records, they cried. Don’t book her for gigs, they instructed venues. Ms Murphy has a huge gay fanbase – yet now we know, said her persecutors, that she doesn’t give a toss about LGBTQ people. She’s a fraud.
It was relentless. The digital mob in full, foul bloom. And, sadly, it appears to have been too much for Ms Murphy. She’s issued an apology. Strikingly, she does not retract her comments about puberty blockers, but she does express regret that her comments were ‘hurtful to many of you’.
Then comes the most telling and heartrending line in her statement. ‘I should’ve known’, she writes, ‘that I was stepping out of line’. There it is. Proof of the extraordinary pressure put on women to know their place. Only that pressure no longer comes from gruff old sexists who think women should stay in the kitchen but rather from leftish social justice warriors who think of themselves as perfectly right-on.
These are the kind of people who wring their hands over misogyny in the music industry. Over the sexist questions interviewers ask of stars like Taylor Swift or the fat-shaming of Lizzo. And yet here they are wagging a hairy finger at Róisín Murphy and telling her to shut her trap if she wants to keep selling albums. They’re as bad as any antiquated brute in a record company boardroom.
The mobbing of Murphy shows how sinister cancel culture has become. Murphy made her comments about ‘fucked’ puberty blockers on her private Facebook account and yet still she was dragged for them. Her personal beliefs were turned into a public spectacle in order to whip up an orgy of malice against her.
What’s more, she is right to be concerned about puberty blockers. Numerous experts are too. There are ‘gaps in evidence’ on the long-term effects these hormone suppressants are having on kids, said the Cass Review of gender services for children. Even the New York Times is now alert to the potentially serious harms that can come from pausing puberty. In my view it is flat out wrong for society to greenlight the blocking of puberty, that transition into adulthood that every young person has a right to undergo without shame or interference. Murphy is correct that ‘little mixed-up kids’ need to be protected, not pumped with drugs.
The truth of your beliefs won’t save you from the mob, though. Other big names in pop have likewise found this out in the past week. Alice Cooper lost his deal with a cosmetics company after he said transgenderism is a ‘fad’ that’s causing confusion among the young. Carlos Santana apologised for saying ‘a woman is a woman and a man is a man – that’s it’. Such a cool, calm statement of biological facts is one of the riskiest things you can say in the deranged 2020s.
People are slamming Murphy for her apology. The Daily Mail calls it ‘grovelling’. I agree one should never apologise to the mob. It only emboldens them. It fortifies their anti-social lust to drag down all who disagree with them. Cancel culture grows fatter and more crazed with every retraction it extracts.
But let’s keep our eye on the ball. The problem is not Róisín Murphy saying sorry – it’s the existence of such a swirling climate of sexism, shaming and censure that women feel they must never ‘step out of line’. It’s this tyranny that should be cancelled.
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