BY STEWART SLATER
Who am I? Who are you?
Don’t worry, you haven’t wandered into an undergraduate philosophy seminar. No, the point of the questions is the answers that you would give. I, for example, am a male of a certain age, born in Scotland. I attended a fee-paying school, the world’s best university and worked in the City. I write a bit (you’ve probably worked that out already, to be fair), am divorced and have two children. I could, were I slightly more narcissistic, go on. As could you.
We are all individuals, and we all exist across many dimensions. Not in the California woo-hoo, “we’re all energy, man” sense, but in that there are many equally valid ways of describing us and many roles we play in society. Each of these describes part of us, but not all of us. To do so, would require complete self-awareness and that is probably beyond us – we are all, fundamentally, a mystery to ourselves.
If our knowledge of ourselves is incomplete, then our awareness of others is yet more fragmentary. Even our friends, we do not know very well – we know some of their characteristics and, over time, can come to predict their responses in certain situations but they can still surprise us because we do not present all facets of ourselves all of the time – the parts of us which are knowable depend on a particular context. You would know, for example, that I am a writer because you are reading something I wrote, you would not know about my marital status had I not told you. As a result, we form judgements about people which are partial, based on what we can see, rather than who they really are.
One characteristic which is almost always present is our looks. We always know whether we find someone we see or meet attractive. And, for those whom we do, the rewards are substantial – good-looking people are likely to earn more and have more children. They are seen as more likely to be trustworthy and intelligent. In part, this is ascribed to the “halo effect” – as a convenient shortcut, we assume that those who possess one good quality possess others, in part because attractiveness relates to body symmetry, and that is assumed to be a sign of good genes. The people we find attractive are the people we assume will help us produce good offspring. We are, as science likes to remind us, nothing more than machines for passing on our genes. It may be shallow, but what can you expect from a species of monkey with ideas above its station?
At any given time, in any given interaction, we are probably presenting several different characteristics. In a physical meeting, there will be an interplay between how we look, why we are there, what our interlocutor knows about us, what we say and how we behave. All of these things will feed into how we are seen and the view formed of us. Over this, we have next to no control. I may prefer that you read this article and come to see me as a man of titanic intellect whose collected works should be in every library, you may have read my self-description, decided that I am a privileged so-and-so and only carried on in a “hate-read”, each finely chosen word merely driving you deeper into a spittle-flecked rage about “my sort”. That is your right and you may well be right. I do not have the right to insist that you see me in any particular light or that you base your judgement of me on any particular characteristic.
As the world and his wife (her husband/partner perhaps, to be modern) knows, the media loving nothing more than talking about the media, GB News has had a bit of a problem with Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox, after the latter asked on the former’s show which “self-respecting man” would “climb into bed” with the journalist Ava Evans. At the time of writing, both are suspended from the channel after a wave of criticism (some to be fair, from its own presenters) and accusations of misogyny. Some, to be fair, its competitors, have called for it to be closed.
I hold no candle for either Wootton or Fox. Neither, to my way of thinking, adds anything to public life and it would not suffer unduly were they to take a vow of silence and live out their days tending the garden of some far-flung monastery.
However, what is the crime here? Fox’s comments were certainly ungallant and inappropriate, the type of utterance associated with the building site or, several pints in, the pub rather than the television studio. But is this misogyny?
He certainly discussed Ms Evans in the context of a potential sexual partner which she felt was inappropriate and undesired. She wished to be seen, and discussed, purely as a journalist and commentator. But the species is here because we see, and think of, others as potential sexual partners. It is one of the many characteristics which go to make up who we are and a characteristic which we struggle not to notice. It is certainly likely that he would not have made the same type of comments about a male journalist but, to the best of my knowledge, he is straight – straight men do not, in my experience, spend much time speculating about getting it on with, for example, David Dimbleby but maybe I need to get out more.
Nor were his comments disobliging about her physical characteristics, it was her beliefs which gave him what young people, I believe, call “the ick”. His chances of walking away from her at a bar, he said, were huge if “that was like sentence three…We don’t need these feminist 4.0. They’re pathetic and embarrassing.” If we are to take this as evidence of misogyny, presumably the 76% of American millennial women who see a man being a MAGA Republican as a red flag, and the 60% who include using the phrase “All lives matter” in the same category, are guilty of misandry. Indeed, to be fair to Fox, between talking about walking away in a bar and “s**g[ing] Ms Evans, he explicitly said, “We need powerful, strong, amazing women who make great points for themselves”, hardly evidence of woman-hatred.
At its heart, the controversy reflects two pernicious trends in modern society. Firstly, we have an increasingly reductive view of humanity. We shrink ourselves and others to a small number of characteristics, be it race, sex or orientation and those are expected to explain our totality. I am a white straight male, and that explains everything about me. I may have had countless experiences which are unusual for residents of these isles, experiences which have gone someway to making me who I am, but they are irrelevant. Ms Evans is a journalist and that is all she is.
If she does wish to shrink her identity to “female journalist”, she obviously has every right to do so, but she (and those who have come out to support her) appear to believe that everyone else must go along with this. She should be able to decide who she is, and others must respect that and treat her accordingly. Not only do people have the right to choose their identity, they have the right to be treated in exactly the way they wish to be treated. It would certainly be polite to do so, but it is not incumbent on anyone to do so. Just as a boy who decided he is a girl can only be addressed as “she”, so Ms Evans can only be treated, discussed or thought of as she chooses, as a journalist. That may work for her, but it seems a bit of a constraint on the freedom of everyone else.
GB News is, I feel, the opposite of alcohol – it should only be consumed before noon. But as we ready the torches and pitchforks, we should consider whether we wish to be a society in which others can only see us as we choose to see ourselves.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.