Because the Middle Ages in Europe were a long and tedious era to be alive in, and because humanity was not happy to just hang around waiting for gifs and Buzzfeed quizzes to be invented, we learned to make our own entertainment. One of our main sources of fun was charivari, which was when the village decided that someone had done something the village didn’t like – often, though not always, something involving being a woman and having sex – and would get together to show its disapproval by banging pots outside the miscreant’s house.
Now we have smartphones, which means that we can leave the stockpot in the cupboard. We barely have to take half an eye off the newest farting otter or skateboarding goat when it’s time for a bit of charivari: we can just type “LOL SLAG” into Twitter and then get on with what we were doing, knowing that communal justice has been served. Which is a long way round of saying that the internet pasting being given to Josie Cunningham, after the aspiring celeb told the Mirror that she would have an abortion in order to get into the Big Brother house, isn’t much of a cultural novelty. What is remarkable is that she seems to have very deliberately set out to be loathed.
Only good thing about being so disliked is a decision is mine, and not having to worry bout people disliking me makes thing remotely easier.
— Josie Cunningham (@JosieCOnline) April 14, 2014
Everything we know about her, we know because she’s volunteered it. Her privacy hasn’t been invaded, her words haven’t been twisted. She sat down, with a camera on, and said things like: “I’m not having the abortion for the money, because I could get more money for the baby pictures.” Whether Cunningham is likeable obviously doesn’t have anything to do with her right to an abortion – although if you listened to some columnists, you’d think that foetal personhood existed in inverse proportion to the personableness of the pregnant woman, so the more they hate Cunningham, the more likely they are to talk about the “innocent baby” or “unborn child”. But in her determination to incite outrage, Cunningham is basically Abu Hamza with a double-D cup.
And Cunningham’s chest is further evidence that she knows what she’s inciting, because her previous moment of greatest fame (and the reason she’s even under consideration for Big Brother) involved having a breast enlargement on the NHS, then talking to the papers about it. On her website, you can find a picture of her posing with nothing but some NHS tape over her cannonball tits to conceal the nipples. Her public career, such as it is, consists of trolling through elective medical procedures. And the media loves it. The Mail, the Sun, the Mirror, now me in the New Statesman – Cunningham gives everyone something to talk about. She fits our purpose.
In the Mail, Jan Moir calls her “another silly, silly young woman who has been encouraged to believe in her own specialness and suffering”. For the Mirror‘s Carole Malone, she’s “the poster girl for all that’s dirty, immoral and sick in our society”. And maybe she is, though not exactly in the way these writers intend. Like Moir and Malone, who are paid to “say the unsayable” and take the consequences, Cunningham is evidence that “hate figure” is tantamount to a valid profession for a woman.
A montage of news coverage, from Cunningham’s website.
There are obnoxious male journalists, of course, ones who revel in their own unpleasantness – the Liddles and the Littlejohns. But there’s no male equivalent of, say, Samantha Brick. A man writing a column might intend to offend, but when it’s a woman offering the outrage, her very existence becomes part of the affront. Men can make careers directing hate at other people; women find it easier to channel it towards themselves. Sometimes, as in the case of Katie Hopkins, they do it so well that they make the jump from reality show monster to tabloid monsterer. If Cunningham needed to refine the art of saying something appalling and then turning public revulsion into profit, Hopkins would be the perfect place to look.
The demand for these permanently burnable witches seems easy enough to explain: it’s down to cultural misogyny. Less obvious is why women show such alacrity in taking on the role, but perhaps there’s an answer in Cunningham’s backstory. According to her account, she was ferociously bullied by boys at school for having small breasts. “I may not have been suffering in a visable [sic] manner, but mentally I was suffering for over a decade,” she writes on her official site. Maybe once you’ve learned to be hated, and learned to be the best at hating yourself, it begins to make sense that you should get some benefit from it. #
Bring on the pots and pans; Josie Cunningham is apparently ready for all the noise you can make, as long as you pay her.
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