Today, the Spectator published an article by Gerald Warner, defending the conduct of a bunch of idiots who heckled female speakers during a debate at the Glasgow University Union debates. According to Warner, women should just laugh off being discussed salaciously in terms of their looks, and being booed for even mentioning feminism in a speech – his solution is that they should have derailed their speeches, and heckled back. “The problem is today’s politically correct debaters… cannot tolerate contradiction or ridicule. It simply is not in the script.”
Of course, Warner misses the point – these women have advanced to the final of a national debating competition, and deserve to have their speeches heard, without interruptions from people without the intellectual capacity to get to that level. Would Warner support racist hecklers at the sidelines of the Olympics, booing Mo Farah for being black? Tell him to just toughen up, deal with it?
Gerald Warner is living in the past, in more ways than one. He seems to think minority groups just need to toughen up, to take the banter. As one of the debaters in question, Rebecca Meredith, says here, not only does the Glasgow Union regularly boo and heckle women, but ethnic minorities too – for nothing more than the temerity to be not born white and male. Is that ok, Mr Warner?
Warner goes on to lionise the rowdy, laddish banteriffic culture of the Glasgow University Union, and then goes on to tell us of the illustrious history, of competitions won, of presidents who have advanced on into politics, of 1960s occasions where ANC leaders were voted in as rector. An illustrious past does not make up for a shameful present – a quick look around the Facebook profiles surrounding the GUU swiftly uncovers that as recently as 2010, a GUU Secretary “follow[ed] tradition with a joke about raping freshers whilst blacked up. No means yes, yes means harder.” I wonder what the former ANC rector would make of “blacking up to rape” gags?
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It looks more like there is something sick within the Glasgow’s debating society – the Everyday sexism in the GUU page makes for distressing reading. On it, anonymous commenters talk about “games” like “fat girl rodeo” – where you grab a girl in a club, tell her you are going to rape her, and then see how long you can hang on for. Board members allegedly proposition freshers with lines like “You look like a fucking slut who is gagging for it”. The men who blocked women from being members of the Union are looked on as heroes. The shameful exclusion of women from the Union until the 1980s has been taken up as a rallying cry by misogynists within the Union – which might explain why it has done so badly at debating for years.
Gerald Warner’s assessment of the quality of the GUU is years out of date. As he rightly points out, they used to be good. But they haven’t won the national debating competition (the Mace) or even reached the elimination stages of the World Championships in over a decade. Maybe if they were less hostile to women or people of colour, that might change?
The truth is, 14 years ago, when I was regularly debating, this sort of revolting, discourteous booing and catcalling and generalised misogyny was the norm; I distinctly remember a Glasgow judge grabbing my debate partner’s breasts and saying “If you’d showed more of these, we might have let you win”. At the time, Oxford and Cambridge were almost as bad – I recall speeches where a Cambridge debater divided up an audience into “sluts” and “frigid girls you’d marry”, and a president of the Oxford Union told me that the fact a speaker from my “toytown former polytechnic university spoke on the floor of the Oxford Union denigrated the whole institution of debating”.
The rest of university debating has moved on since – particularly through the efforts of charities like DebateMate, Idea, and the English Speaking Union, debating has been democratised, and is now a much more welcoming and pleasant place. I hope that women and ethnic minorites feel welcome – indeed, women have been the top speakers in the world several times in the last few years. Contrary to Gerald Warner’s assertion that “as with politics, fewer women want to debate. The rough and tumble of a dialectical free-for-all is not for them”, female participation is at an all-time high – and a large part of that comes down to people refusing to tolerate misogyny, and it gradually being stamped out.
What Warner wants is a return to a misogynist free-for-all, where any insult, no matter who delivers it, counts as a valid argument to be rebutted. He laughably characterises any attempt to stand up to that culture as “Stalinist”. In which case, I’d like to say that if Gerald Warner thinks misogynist insults are a valid part of debate, then he’s a paranoid dinosaur, with all the writing grace of a dickless baboon. Is that a valid argument, Mr Warner?
Willard Foxton was once the 7th best speaker in the world for “toytown polytechnic” the university of the West of England, and twice won the world’s funniest debater prize.
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