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.
