My thoughts on the sexism storm on LinkedIn
Barrister Charlotte Proudman has caused some uproar with her revelations about comments made on her LinkedIn account. The Daily Mail have put their oar in, unsurprisingly, and all sorts of idiots have crawled out of the woodwork as well.
Here is the comment as stated by Proudman in the i paper from Friday 11 Sep:
"Charlotte, delighted to connect, I appreciate this is probably horrendously incorrect but that is a stunning picture!!! You definitely win the prize for the best Linked in picture I have ever seen"
To summarise Proudman's response, she did not appreciate her appearance being commented on or the unwanted attention. LinkedIn is for enhancing your career prospects, it is not a dating or modelling website. So she leaked the man's name in the interests of exposing the behaviour. She hopes that men and women can work together in stamping out this kind behaviour. It was a stand against sexism in her view.
Let's examine the comment more closely. It was obviously made with a mind to not being inappropriate. The commenter tried to be respectful. However, we still have a problem - there is no prize for best LinkedIn photo. I also wonder how many LinkedIn photos he's seen. The way he's describing it as a competition, gives the sense that he has been trawling though many women's profiles, judging them on their appearance and got to "appreciating" them so much that he felt he had to tell his favourite, Charlotte, how awesome she was. In the wrong way, though. He is moving his own grubby fantasy into the real world.
This bears an uncanny resemblance to the way men behave on glamour or soft-core porn sites. In fact, the situation dictates that to be more appropriate.
I should know about this because I have considered making similar comments in past but whether it was shyness or sense that stopped me, I didn't. I'm glad too, because little good comes of it.
There seems to be an obsession everywhere that any criticism of the comments means "men can no longer pay compliments". This shows an astonishing lack of attention to detail. Although you might think the comment Proudman received is a compliment, there's more to it than that.
In my view the comment was more about the man putting a voice to his sexual desires than it was paying a compliment. LinkedIn is not a website designed for looking at women: it's not glamour or softcore porn. Neither is it a dating website.
There's a serious problem when we live in a society that likes to obligate women to accept compliments at all times from men, and also to feel obligated to reciprocate them in some way. This is in the past how men have been able to take their pick of women, do what they want with them, and creates a very unequal society. I want no part of it.
So we can trace a logical path from the commenter's unfulfilled sexual desires to his comments towards Proudman. Consider the cat-calling builder who shouts and wolf-whistles to passing women. The comment to Proudman was different only in degree and not category, if you consider both carefully. This is why I have a problem with it. We are back into the territory of unwanted attention and gender power dynamics that favour men considerably.
Some of the commentary on this issue misses the mark by the widest possible margin. We start talking about "the principle of paying a compliment" amidst very conservative views on relationships, and pretend we're being objective. The question "Is giving a compliment misogynistic" is asked seriously, as if it wasn't a crazy oversimplification of the true situation.
A hysterical Sarah Vine in the Fail writes "If that is what counts as "objectification" and "misogyny" these days, the human race is in trouble. Heaven help the poor man who tries to ask (Proudman) out on a date, let alone try to get her into his bed. He'd have better luck propositioning a porcupine"
I agree that those terms are over-used but it wasn't Proudman who used them (not in her i paper article - only to refer to the backlash). Who can account for what the extremists on both sides are going to say?
And as for the second sentence, it shows that Vine thinks it's necessarily incumbent on men to make the move in relationships. As a man, I don't appreciate that. It may be so that Proudman has worked herself into the position that she needs to be the prime mover in her own relationships, but I don't see why that's so bad. To claim that any change to a system that puts all the onus on men is bad, is ludicrous rubbish from Vine. She appears to be an ultra-Conservative cis-hetero woman with seemingly no other perspective, who also can't dream of another perspective either. No imagination.
"Tarzan strong. Tarzan must win Jane." Some of us have moved on.
But it's worse than that. Vine's comments show no regard for the meta-view, no hint of change with the circumstances. If Proudman was all dressed up for a date and waiting for her man to turn up...then a similar comment was made, I don't think we'd be hearing about this. LinkedIn is different to going on a date. Context matters, someone please tell Vine. When situational differences can't be taken into account, that's when I despair.
Elsewhere, other observers also have little of use to add. A typically clueless Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator, rambles: "To describe (the commenter's) compliment as "misogyny" confirms that the word has been utterly drained of meaning by the new tweeting-and-bleating feminist set. Misogyny is deep hatred of women, saying something nice to a woman is the opposite of that".
Does this man have an IQ of 80? He doesn't, but sometimes you wouldn't know it. He can't write sentences with any complexity at all. The first one is almost a truism, granted. But again, extremists. And it does play into a culture which denigrates women, so there is a link, albeit indirect.
The second sentence shows a staggering lack of appreciation for what is really going on. Although "You win the pwize for the pwettiest woman on LinkedIn" might appear to be "nice", it also reveals more about the sense of privilege and sexual repression that the commenter has than it does about anything else. To me this is just another example of people reacting to their own internal desires because they haven't got what they need. Then instead of getting what they need, they are more interested in insisting on their right to act on their own repressions, regardless of consequences.
Whilst Proudman could simply have replied with a sarcastic "Gee thanks" to the commenter and left it at that, I think she probably did the right thing. This should be a learning experience for quite a few people, but somehow I doubt it.
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