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Yvette Cooper is right that women should stand up for Theresa May – even if we profoundly disagree with her politics

I always had a sense of unease regarding the way in which men in particular expressed their personal disgust at Thatcher’s politics. It feels like an excuse for the guilt-free indulgence of misogyny

Victoria Smith
Monday 22 October 2018 15:08 BST
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If you’re afraid to speak up for her, you’re afraid to speak up for all women
If you’re afraid to speak up for her, you’re afraid to speak up for all women

As Sean Hughes put it, “everyone grows out of their Morrissey phase. Except Morrissey”. It took me longer to do so than most but songs such as “Margaret on the Guillotine”, the closing track on the album Viva Hate, certainly helped.

“The kind people,” he croons, “have a wonderful dream: Margaret on the guillotine.” To which I found myself thinking, well, I know Thatcher’s been responsible for enormous suffering but even so – is this really OK? Does being “kind” have to involve telling someone whose politics you disagree with to “please die”?

Of course I worried that this was just me being a woolly liberal, unwilling to embrace the revolutionary rhetoric of the dispossessed. Perhaps if I truly cared I’d have been having the same fantasies too! Nonetheless, I always had a sense of unease regarding the way in which men in particular expressed their personal disgust at Thatcher’s politics. Always the same references to violence, the same intimation that all this was fine because she wasn’t a real woman anyway. It felt more than a little like an excuse for the guilt-free indulgence of misogyny.

Three decades on and the Tories have another female leader, one about whom members of her own party have been using phrases such as “bring her own noose” and “knifed in the front” to express disagreement with her policies on Brexit. One could claim these are mere turns of phrase, were it not for the fact that we’re also just two years on from a female Labour MP being slaughtered in broad daylight to cries of “Britain first!”

Harsh, violent rhetoric has always been used against female politicians, or indeed any woman who dares to speak her mind without the prior approval of men. It is neither hyperbolic nor politically opportunist to connect this to the violence against women we see in real life.

One could – and some will – argue that some threats are valid, others not. It depends on whether the woman is a goodie (Jo Cox) or a baddie (Thatcher or May, aka Thatcher-Lite).

Yvette Cooper to Theresa May 'You can't keep saying nothing has changed'

Yet this doesn’t alter the fact that violent language used against one woman makes all women unsafe. It doesn’t alter the fact that when men talk about stabbing or hanging or beheading women, they do so in the context of two women a week being murdered by men. There’s a reason why Boris Johnson and David Cameron can lead the country off a cliff edge but not be the ones pictured with a rope around their necks.

The way in which we talk about members of a particular group is inextricably linked to their social position and the way in which we treat them. That’s why we have concepts such as incitement to violence and hate crime, even if the latter does not yet apply to attacks on women.

From right-on rants about Thatcher to today’s all-round policing of everything a woman dares to tweet, it seems we’re always on the lookout for get-out clauses. This rape threat/choking fantasy/death threat isn’t misogyny because Because it’s just the rough and tumble of political discourse. Because this woman has handed back her ‘member of an oppressed group’ card by acquiring too much individual power. Because, actually, she’s the privileged one (I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve witnessed white males justifying their attacks on women on the basis that the latter are “cisgender white feminists”). Because in imagining this particular woman with a knife to her throat, I’m promoting the cause of others whose suffering is greater.

As far as I am aware, no one has ever been lifted from poverty and saved from oppression by some bloke picturing some woman having her face smashed in. There may be no remedy to the utter disaster that is Brexit, but one thing’s for sure – it won’t be found in adding yet more poison to the misogynist air we breathe.

Yvette Cooper is right to reach across the political divide in her defence of May against what she calls “vile and dehumanising language”. While in this instance the language may come from May’s own side, both left and right are male dominated and neither has impressive credentials when it comes to treating women with respect.

You don’t have to approve of Theresa May’s economic policies – you may even, like me, still be outraged at the expression “magic money tree” – to know that men who use violent language to express their disagreement with women are not brave warriors for righteousness and truth. They’re misogynists, whose other political convictions will always remain somewhat cloudy (is that what he really thinks? Or is he just in it to give a woman a kicking?).

There should be no place for misogyny in politics. Instead, I suspect far too many still believe there’s no place for women. We all must challenge this. I may not want to lend support to a woman whose politics I reject but if I’m afraid to speak for her, I’m afraid to speak for all of us.

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