I've tried to be very patient with our Prime Minister. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt but, slowly and surely, my wilful optimism has been eroded by the ebb and flow of her bad decisions.
We may have a female Prime Minister in Theresa May but she's no feminist. It was bad enough when she refused to say whether or not she was a feminist when asked by an interviewer, oversaw the detention of vulnerable women at Yarl's Wood as Home Secretary, was soft on Donald Trump's unashamed sexism even when Nicola Sturgeon was quick to condemn him or went on the One Show to tell our nation that there are 'boy's jobs and girl's jobs' but still, I hoped. 'She can't be that bad' I thought to myself, trying not to get drawn into all the reductive 'evil Tory' memes flying around on social media. She might just pull through, she's probably playing a very smart, very canny long game to sort out the mess David Cameron made when he allowed a referendum on our membership to the EU, I thought.
How wrong I was. Our Prime Minister has pushed me too far. She is the only, yes, the ONLY, European leader who has not made a public statement to condemn Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Instead, she has allowed a spokesperson to express our governments 'disappointment' which packs about as much of a punch as a daddy longlegs. A feeble insect rumoured to be the deadliest in the world if only its fangs faced the other way.
And, if this wasn't enough (which it really really was), Theresa May has also defended a Conservative party parliamentary candidate who holds what I think we can all agree are regressive, sexist and anarchic views about women and rape. And there you were thinking that it was Jeremy Corbyn trying to take us back to the 1970s...
'You what?!?" Yes, you read all of that right. Let me explain. Peter Cuthbertson is the candidate for Darlington. He's in his early 30s and before deciding to run for public office he worked as a public affairs consultant. This basically means he advises big companies on how best to communicate with politicians so their best interests can be looked after.
It all started when The Guardian unearthed a series of blog posts written by Cuthbertson in the early 2000s on a website called Conservative Commentary. In one he says that a woman's 'promiscuity' is relevant in determining whether or not she has consented to sex in rape cases. Writing in 2002 he wrote: 'new laws proposed by the government to cash in on public sympathy over the Ulrika Jonsson rape case will now require that men accused of date rape prove they ensure the woman in question gave her consent. in other words, any man who cannot prove his innocence will be convicted.'
He went on to write, and here's where it gets really, really insidious: 'worse, defendants will now be restricted in bringing up a woman's sexual history. Of course, it is relevant how promiscuous a woman is in determining how likely it was she consented.' Is it, Peter? Is it only chaste women who get raped? Do we still see sexually active women as Shakespearian lascivious wassails? It seems that, in 2002, Cuthbertson was actually more moralising Victorian than Elizabethan Shakespeare fan. He argued that 'a woman of low morals is more likely to consent to sex, and to lie'.
When asked about this at a press conference yesterday, Theresa May stood by her man and said 'Peter has made clear that his views have changed.' She then went on to talk about her own record on domestic violence which is fine, but not what anybody was asking her about. Perhaps Peter has changed his views, perhaps Peter is completely reformed and has seen the error of his ways. Perhaps, if elected, he will be a great ally for and champion of women. That's not the point.
Our Prime Minister should have condemned this thinking without hesitation because it's this sort of internalised misogyny that underpins the ubiquitous sexism we still every day in every corner of our society. It is this sort of thinking that makes young women afraid to report rape in case they are judged, these are the attitudes which instil in girls that they cannot trust their instincts and that they are, somehow, lesser than their male counterparts.
In another post , Cuthbertson talks about a 'courageous priest' who has been 'jailed in Sweden for preaching against homosexuality'. Elsewhere on the website he waxes lyrical about STIs: 'I can say with absolute certainty' he writes, 'that 99% of the girls in question will know exactly how to use various contraceptives. The reason they don't on the whole seem to bother is the same as the reason they mate like animals in the first place: no one hopes for or demands anything better from them than that they conform to the most base instincts for instant gratification, whatever the morality of their actions and whatever the consequence.'
These blog posts would have been written when Cuthbertson was aged between 18 and 20. When asked about all of this by the Guardian, he said that he does not hold the same views as his adolescent self and made a jokey reference to Diane Abbot's changing hairstyles analogy.
Do people change? Yes, they absolutely do. But when someone if running for public office, when they want to be a representative of our society, when they seek the power to make laws, it's not enough. If Cuthbertson had apologised or showed some remorse perhaps it would be different, but he didn't.
At a time when reported rapes in England and Wales are rising while convictions are falling and 1 in 7 women report experiencing serious physical or sexual assault during their time at university it's clear that we have a cultural problem in this country, one that endangers women.
What's more, our Prime Minister doesn't seem that bothered either. Why was her first instinct not to point out that obviously, obviously, the views Cuthbertson once held are abhorrent? Are any of us comfortable with anyone who holds or has held views like that becoming a representative in our modern parliamentary democracy, an institution which is supposed to both shape and reflect our values as a nation?
What we say matters as much as what we do. It's who we are. If our Prime Minister, the most powerful woman in the country, can call Cutherbertson's remarks out for what they are: abhorrent sexist rubbish, then what sort of message does that send to young women everywhere? It tells them that sexism should be overlooked and forgiven and that those who express sexist views will not be reprimanded but rewarded.
Will the real Theresa May please stand up.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.