This latest round of “hound the woman!” is pissing men off just as much

By Charlie Rainbow

Parliamentary expenses abuse. Parliamentary expenses abuse.

The Google AdSense text ad I have on my screen this moment on my gmail account is an ad from the BBC. It reads ‘Watch Dawn Butler’s shame.’ … Uhuh. You got that? ‘Watch Dawn Butler’s shame.’

Yep. Roll up, roll up, it’s Your BBC. Your Mark Thompson. What we’re broadcasting this week at Your socioeconomic category is one of the two black female Members of Parliament, who has (justifiably) complained about the sexism and racism that came her way upon entering Westminster, who may have taken some liberties with parliamentary expenses, and we’re now showing her up in full-blooded shame. (You have to admire their being frank about it at least; few media outlets would have been so blunt about crucial new footage of Maddie the summer before last.)

So the BBC’s buying into the Google network’s ad system and targeting people interested in politics. And before you pose the question, ‘are those ads not automatically generated?’, the answer’s yes, by Google (matching users to advertisers), but no, not at the BBC’s end. Someone, somewhere made an editorial decision to type that headline, place that story onto the Google ad system, drive clicks to their website, maximise throughput, hike up the volume and pose like they’re offering some sort of shining gleaming culture-that-caused-credit-crunch ‘value’ to the license fee payer.

Which brings us neatly to the scandal du jour:

Above the deaths of 22 football fans in the Ivory Coast, just weeks before the Hillsborough anniversary. Above the preparations and protests in London surrounding what may arguably become the most important gathering of national leaders for over 60 years. Above the revelation that the recently bailed out Dunfermline Building Society actually publicly reported in 2007 that they had £3.3 billion in assets, alongside £117 million in capital, a leverage ratio of 28:1, and that the FSA and news media sat on their hands, called it ‘success’ and said ‘good luck to ‘im’.

Above all of this is the public interest story of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith accidentally putting a media bill on her expenses, and some mole (possibly breaching data protection laws) leaking the critical fact that £10 of our taxpayer pounds were spent watching high-quality adult cinema; obvious subtext, what the editors want you to have a hard good think about – that Jacqui Smith doesn’t satisfy her husband.

The story led on the BBC right throughout Sunday, right through Monday, and was only quashed when the Prime Minister had to propose making a rash blanket cut to the parliamentary allowance that would have left the Chartists horrified. The story was deemed a potential runner solely because her husband watched a couple of porn movies, at the expense of £10 to the taxpayer, which will be paid back.

So why make this the story that gets to be a runner, repeat reporting, a 5-time headline leader on our public broadcaster? Why, it’s good old fashioned public humiliation, at its most obvious and insidious. It may well be that neither Jacqui Smith nor her husband gave two hoots about him watching a couple of adult movies, before apologising for the sake of putting out a pointless fire that was conflagrating before their eyes.

In the case of Dawn Butler’s second home allowance, the claim cost the taxpayer £37,000 over the past two years. The failure of regulators, politicians and media to hold to account a secretive and short-termist management corps of British financial institutions has just cost the UK taxpayer £250,000,000,000.

If we are to continue to be slavishly in thrall to the emotional daddy-whack of big numbers, I calculate (correct me if I’m wrong) that this forms a ratio of 6,756,756:1 in terms of cost to taxpayer, or (for Jacqui Smith’s £116,000 of expenses claimed) a more modest 2,155,172:1 ratio in terms of cost to taxpayer.

And so to formally tune my level of outrage and moral panic I would propose that the media matches the two days spent sniggering over Jacqui Smith’s accidental expense claim with approximately 5,900 years henceforth spent sniggering over the intellectual redundancy of financial, regulatory and political leadership and the catastrophic delusions and erasure of basic historical lessons that culminated in this Kondratieff-cycle-ending f*ckup.

Now don’t get me wrong. The issue of MPs abusing parliamentary expenses is certainly worthy of critical corrective attention, but is not the subject of my article. But to give so little lens to Lord Adair Turner of the blindspot-ridden report, and so much to Dawn Butler and Jacqui Smith (who surely aren’t making real, grown-up, daddy-type decisions?) – it grates, and exasperates, and keeps us stuck confined in a cultural place that seems increasingly unfamiliar to young people in Britain today.

While for many feminists, this story’s elevation will have a wearying inevitability to it, and may add further fuel to a sense of victimhood and systemic rot in the public information system, for men, this is the subtler equivalent experience of liberal Jews getting quick association with the practices and strategies of the Israeli military-industrial-political complex.

The BBC may well argue that most of the Sunday rags led with the story and so it was quite clearly ‘of the moment’, but this further begs the broader question: why in the name of Lord Reith and his noisily turning grave, does the BBC have to follow suit every time a cadre of blood-sucking mountain-toppers decides that a folk devil, a moral panic, a public humiliation is what’ll sell papers and make the grey juice run – as if plurality in our media system can be assured by flagging up the BBC’s fringe offerings?

The BBC appear over the past few years to have badly lost their bearings, in terms of their commitment to what counts for informative wide-ranging views on important public matters, in terms of aspiring to a sort of impartiality and editorial autonomy, the very areas that I suspect lie behind the license fee payers discomfort. (Why does BBC News 24 need an self-aggrandising ad for themselves, and a stultifying slogan – ‘Whenever you need to know’…ugh!)

BBC News has become to the Daily Mail what UK politics has been to the US during the Bush II years. They no doubt have entrenched a strategic fear of upsetting these papers and seeming to be ‘unlike them’ (i.e. foaming, planet cuckoo, communists). They are no doubt terrified of the BBC-bashing puritanism that’s now sweeping Britain like the latest alien craze. Or maybe the managerial positions at the BBC have kept going to those who worked in a media environment that was contrary to the culture that the Reithian ideals were meant to engender, thus blurring the gap that BBC News is empowered to uphold from privately-owned and more corporately-involved media.

That Jacqui Smith (a Home Secretary who could be called to account for countless wasteful, authoritarian, media-watchdog-suitable reasons) is being dragged at her heels on the intimated grounds that she does not satisfy her husband, seems to me to exemplify part of what well-meaning progressive men and women are up against when having their media institutions ‘serve’ warped distortions of their given identity, holding back the public instantiation of the 4th wave of feminism, in which men would be relaxed about women’s formal power, and women wouldn’t cry victim at a dude’s more relaxed remarks.

The publication of a Google text ad ‘Watch Dawn Butler’s shame’ is somehow okay in the sort of Britain Mark Thompson envisages his broadcasting end-users want to live in. No doubt their market research deciphers their user preferences according to the most skewered and reactionary framing discourse. No doubt even if they found the blokes demographic to be baying for this kind of news coverage, it is no longer in the BBC’s remit to establish its own kind of moral dimension to news coverage, to act as a social glue that works by elevating the public rather than finding the lowest common denominator and then protesting that ‘our audiences aren’t stupid’.

I do not make this argument as a male feminist looking to score points with my sisters. It’s my view that certain strains of feminism nowadays come across as a very thinly-veilled cover for an altogether newer and tediouser form of domination and injustice.

I am a bog standard, root and branch, gender respect and equality feminist. The sort that feels a uniquely male rage at the skinny models thrown at young girls in magazines, the sort that doesn’t think old men with white collars around their necks should have any say about the legalities of reproductive freedoms, the sort that’s relaxed about free will amateur pornography (though wary of what counts for this). In short, the kind I think most men would count as themselves (even if they shun the designation).

So if the BBC is to reflect a truer, prouder culture of Britain at a time when society and economy are being recast, they can begin by banning the dickishness that alienates their younger viewers.