I’ll get the embarrassing confession out of the way quickly – I have been watching Celebrity Big Brother. I’ve been ill! I’ve had the flu! But there’s no excuse. I started watching in the hope of some Liz Jones-generated outrage, which predictably hasn’t materialised. I kept watching after getting hooked on a love triangle between some bloke out of Blue, a glamour model and an actress. But I’m stopping watching now. The hatred and aggression towards women from the male housemates has reached despair-for-humanity levels, and I can’t take it any more.
I know what you’re thinking – you’re watching Big Brother, and you’re surprised that it’s making you despair for humanity? But hear me out. What’s making me despair is not the shocking revelation that Jim Davidson, Evander Holyfield and Dappy from N-Dubz are misogynists. The depressing and dispiriting thing is how ordinary and everyday their attitudes are, so much so that their chauvinistic beliefs and harassing behaviour can pass by without challenge or comment, either from their fellow housemates, or from the show’s producers.
The main target of their hostility is 26-year-old Luisa Zissman, cupcake entrepreneur and runner-up in last year’s series of The Apprentice. Perhaps she is a very difficult person to live with, although that hasn’t come across. Her main crime, it would appear, is having the audacity to be young, beautiful and self-confident, and to admit to having a healthy and active sex life. She has been very candid and open about her bisexuality and her enjoyment of group sex, and although I’ll admit to finding people who go on and on about all the wild sex they are having a little bit tedious, that’s as far as my judgment goes. In the Big Brother house, however, her sex life is a weapon to be wielded against her, a tool to discredit her in disagreements.
In Saturday night’s episode, Dappy – a man who deliberately leaked a photograph of his genitals to promote his own career – followed Luisa around the house, shouting at her that she is “dirty, disgusting, loose”, that she is a slag and a whore, that her daughter should be ashamed of her. He proclaimed loudly and surely that such things are different for men than for women; that while a man who sleeps with five women is a pig, a woman who sleeps with five men is a slag, and “I would rather be a pig than a slag”. Despite Luisa’s clear, calm, but obviously distressed pleas for him to walk away and leave her alone, he followed her from room to room, repeating his sexist tirade, and encouraging bystanders to join in the denunciation. Meanwhile, Evander Holyfield mocked Luisa and her friend Jasmine for thinking there could ever be such thing as equality between the sexes. Jim Davidson apportioned fifty per cent of the blame for the abuse on to Luisa herself – something he later explained by the fact that “I’m a male chauvinist pig”. So that’s alright then. I had assumed he was a nasty, bullying woman-hater, but it turns out he’s just one of those loveable male chauvinist pigs you used to hear about it.
The sexist attitudes held by Dappy and his allies don’t surprise me, and nor does his aggressive and harassing manner of expressing them. But what shocked and disturbed me was that nobody intervened. The rest of the housemates were studiously silent, and when pushed to comment, were keen to interpret it as an argument where blame lay equally on both sides. And if the programme-makers noticed the sexism and harassment that was going on, they didn’t share their concern with the viewers. A few days earlier, Evander Holyfield made some pronouncements about homosexuality being abnormal and like a disability – comments which rightly saw him quickly and publicly rebuked by the show’s producers, and which may result in an Ofcom investigation. It is striking that the public expression of one category of morally reprehensible views is so unacceptable that the programme-makers are forced into condemnation; but when the target of your views is women, it is unlikely that anyone will even notice. You can jokingly and self-deprecatingly make reference to your sexism, as Davidson has done, and still be cheered by the crowds assembled outside.
We know that the Big Brother house is rarely a hotbed of liberal, progressive thought. But the “Jade Goody Big Brother racism row”, as it is now officially known, prompted an important debate and a great deal of national introspection about race relations. The individuals at the centre of those events had to be carefully ferreted away from the crowds and the cameras, while the conversation about what this means about our society and our culture dominated the media. As I watched Saturday evening’s episode, what frustrated me most was not the sexist behaviour I was watching, but the certain knowledge that the hatred towards women being expressed in there isn’t going to trigger any national soul-searching about societal misogyny. And not just because I was the only one watching.
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