It’s a matter of opinion, but many people probably think Theresa May got off quite lightly when Jeremy Corbyn muttered that she was a ‘stupid woman’. She clearly identifies as a woman and she is the UK’s second ever female Prime Minister. And some people feel, quite strongly, that the decisions she has been making in choosing how the country is run, indicate a lack of basic intelligence. Given the way she has handled Brexit, the worst b-word, some people are surprised that Corbyn didn’t plump for a different b-word in his assessment. Yet ‘stupid woman’ isn’t a mild insult. It isn’t a fair assessment of the situation. It’s pernicious, loaded and reductive. Like so many gendered swear words, I think the expression makes it clear that Corbyn believes it’s May’s womanhood – not her skill set, or professional experience – that makes her bad at her job.
I’m going to attempt to explain myself by revisiting everyone’s grandparents’ favourite sitcom, Dad’s Army. If you weren’t forced to watch it as a child, the premise is that it follows the adventures – and I use that term quite loosely – of the Home Guard during the Second World War. The Home Guard was formed of volunteers who were too old, infirm or otherwise unsuitable for military service. The characters were all advanced in years, with the exception of 17 year old Private Pike, who was too young to join the army.
Captain Mainwaring, the head of the Home Guard, is constantly calling Pike a ‘stupid boy’. This catchphrase made audiences fall about in the seventies, and the point of it is that Mainwaring uses it to reduce Pike to his youth and inexperience. ‘Stupid boy’ is weary and dismissive and implies that Pike’s alleged ‘stupidity’ is borne of a factor that Pike himself has absolutely no control over. On Dad’s Army, it’s just a running gag, but it was chosen by the writers as an effective insult, because it does its job in the same, grim way as ‘stupid woman’. ‘Stupid boy’ and ‘Stupid woman’ both imply that the person being insulted is trying to operate beyond their innate capabilities – in a way that ‘stupid man’ does not suggest. While I don’t doubt that ‘stupid man’ has been used as an insult, it does not roll of the tongue. It is not an expression that exists comfortably in our vocabulary. We do not reach for it.
If we want a potted history of gendered insults in the 21st century, we should look no further than Donald Trump. (Sorry.) It appears that nearly every single time that Trump has referred to any woman – including his own daughters – he has used words, often slurs, that focus entirely on the female attributes of the person he is insulting. We’re not sure exactly what he meant when he said that NBC News’ Megyn Kelly had ‘blood coming out of her wherever’ because he did not like the questions she asked him during a Presidential Debate, but we can hazard a guess, and make the assumption that this is not how Trump would have responded if he were asked those questions by a male broadcaster. During Trump’s election campaign, his supporters made unofficial merchandise featuring pictures of Trump and Hillary Clinton, and the slogan ‘Trump that bitch’. (If you want to know who else is enlightened and broadminded enough to call Clinton a ‘bitch’, here’s Brett Kavanaugh).
‘Bitch’ is a complicated word. It’s a pejorative that many of us have tried to reclaim. The successful writer, actor and showrunner Tina Fey said ‘bitches get stuff done’. Many people have observed that women are branded bitches for being focused, forthright, determined and unwilling to compromise – the attributes that make a woman a ‘bitch’ are the same ones that make a man ‘successful’. The former editor of Vanity Fair Tina Brown told the journalist Mishal Hussain that Clinton needed to ‘own her inner bitch’ in order to engage with the voters. However, the slang expert Tom Dalzell believes that the meaning of ‘bitch’, and other gendered swearwords, has become more offensive and harmful in recent years. Because we’re supposed to be especially aware of the equality, and the importance of treating everyone fairly, Dalzell says the word ‘has come to show hatred in a way that it didn’t 30 years ago.’
This is at the nub of my problem with ‘stupid woman’. In the past, it was so unusual to see any woman doing anything powerful in public that ‘stupid woman’ did not register as sexism. It’s a phrase that comes from a time when womanhood held us back, when it was assumed we probably wouldn’t want to do the same jobs as men, and we probably wouldn’t be good at them. In 2018, it’s jarring because we know womanhood itself does not make anyone incompetent or incapable, and it’s unacceptable to suggest it might. We have been fighting constant barrages of sexism on so many fronts. Sometimes it feels as though we’re sliding backwards, but I hope it’s because we’re operating in a zero tolerance zone and noticing that the world has been shaped around some fundamentally sexist concepts.
When you think about what some people call us, ‘stupid woman’ seems mild enough to ignore. But it comes from the same sexist, loaded family as every single gendered insult. When you call a woman a ‘bitch’ or a ‘cow’, you mean that you think she is a ‘stupid woman’. Last June, JK Rowling unfollowed the writer John Niven on Twitter after he called Theresa May a ‘whore’. She posted a tweet explaining ‘I’m sick of ‘liberal’ men whose mask slips every time a woman displeases them, who reach immediately for crude and humiliating words associated with femaleness, act like old-school misogynists and then preen themselves as though they’ve been brave.’ This is my problem with Corbyn’s words. They’re insidiously awful. He has chosen what he believes to be the least obviously offensive way of saying the most offensive thing. He didn’t swear. He didn’t say anything cruel, or crude, or sexual. He found the one way of reducing a powerful woman to her gender that still sounds just about acceptable. It isn’t. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you’re calling someone a ‘stupid woman’ or a ‘stupid bitch’. If you wouldn’t insult a man in the same way, I have two words for you. Sexist idiot.