A ROW connected to the phone-hacking scandal, and yet also completely unconnected to it, erupted last week.
It was a Twitter row (aren’t most of them these days?) and it involved the UK MP for Corby, Louise Mensch.
As background, Mensch is an English author and Conservative Party politician. She was elected to her Corby seat in the 2010 UK general election. Under her maiden name, Louise Bagshawe, she writes chick lit fiction. I don’t know if it is any good. She is one of the higher-profile Tories and isn’t afraid to do the rounds on the comedy panel shows (I’m including Newsnight in that).
I was alerted to the ‘row’ involving Mrs Mensch by someone I follow on Twitter, Grace Dent, the columnist who recently decamped from The Guardian to The Independent. She’s another doyenne of the panel shows but is one who manages to make me laugh much, much more than Louise Mensch, and for the right reasons.
In fact I can honestly say that if I could only read her tweets, as well as those of her sparring partner and fellow writer Caitlin Moran, I’d probably be midly amused in 144 characters or fewer forever.
A retweet of Grace’s (originally posted by singer and impressionist Kate Robbins, so you could say I should really be following her) actually cheered up a pretty awful time I was having the other day. It was a picture of a name sign on a door which said Dr A Hedgeh, under which was a note written by the above-mentioned practitioner which said ‘FAO: whomever keeps adding “og” to the end of my doorsign. STOP IT. Dr A Hedgeh.’ Someone had written ‘og’ in biro at the end of his name on the note.
It is still making me giggle now.
Anyway, I have digressed.
Basically, Grace Dent alerted me to the fact that Louise Mensch was coming in for some pretty heavy-duty slagging off for her stance on the whole Rupert Murdoch ‘not a fit person to run an international company’ report (she and other Tory members of the Commons media committee behind the report disagreed with the inclusion of that line by Labour members).
Intrigued as to why a glamorous TV critic would care about a Tory MP under fire, I clicked on the link and soon discovered the reason.
Some of the language being used to disagree with the opinions she had expressed was downright offensive. And it was all tinged, to say the least, with an aggressive, misogynistic, violent undertone.
A police officer has since said some of the comments used against Mrs Mensch could be illegal. Stuart Hyde, Cumbria Police chief constable, who has national responsibility with the Association of Chief Police Officers for e-crime, said: ‘I have read the comments made about Louise and it is sexist bigotry at its worst.’
It highlights once again the danger of idiots who don’t understand that there’s a big difference from being an idiot in the pub to being an idiot on a social media forum visible by the world.
Yes, Twitter allows us all to have a global conversation, or whatever waffle jargon e-speak is being used to describe its utter importance this week, but it is precisely that: a global conversation, not a private one.
Whatever you think of her opinions (and I’m certainly not saying I agree with them), respect her right to voice them – at least when the entire world is reading what you write.
There are two reasons for this bit of advice. I’ll go with the least serious one first and move on to the more disturbing issue after that.
Reason one: those people on Twitter who attacked Mrs Mensch in such personal terms have now made the story about that, rather than about whether or not Murdoch is actually fit to run an international company. They have made it about Louise Mensch (something I’m not entirely sure she’s actually upset about), they’ve made it about the role of Twitter in today’s society (yawn) and they’ve made it about a spat between Tories and Labour (I’m actually in a coma now). But, most importantly, they’ve made it about reason two.
Reason two: the people who did not, in this case, respect Mrs Mensch’s right to voice her opinions disrespected her in a very disturbing way. They bullied her with personal slurs concerning her looks and the fact that she is a woman. They used words like ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ and used sexually violent imagery. Would this have happened if a male MP on the committee had made the same comments? No. It simply boils down to the gender of the person expressing their view, and that’s terrifying.
Mensch herself has said it is not Twitter’s fault, it is for the people who made the comments to regulate themselves, and I agree with that. Twitter is often used for good (see the Dr Hedgeh picture) but, like anywhere where a large number of people gather, society’s lowlifes are going to emerge.
In this case, they’ve given someone I don’t like very much the moral high ground, and that’s really annoying. The way in which they did it doesn’t lend itself to the word annoying, though, more to the word ‘worrying’.
Sexism is alive and well and thriving in cyberspace. Go out now and buy a copy of Caitlin Moran’s How to Be A Woman. It will make you think anew about what is and what isn’t acceptable to you in this confusingly fast-moving, brave new world. In Caitlin’s own words, it’ll make you ask yourself ‘was that polite?’ and ‘would it have been said/have happened if I were a man’?
Not only that, it will make you throw up with laughter.