“Rape, rape, rape.” Last week saw news of police investigating a group of young men, believed to be members of Cambridge’s drinking society The Wyverns, who had been videoed chanting this while marching down Oxford’s high street. This came days after it was revealed that Premier League chief Richard Scudamore had exchanged emails with senior colleagues in which women were referred to as “gash”.
These incidents gave grist to recent discussions about whether sexism has become particularly vicious – for instance, Zoe Williams has described a “new nastiness, something gleeful in the anger…that amounts to the bullying of young women that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.” The recent BBC documentary Blurred Lines presented other examples, such as the now-ubiquitous rape joke and the Twitter abuse directed at high profile women such as Mary Beard and Caroline Criado-Perez.
The growth of the internet and social media, alongside the backlash against women’s rights, seems to be emerging as a central theme in analyses of this “new sexism”. This was evident in Blurred Lines and a Guardian piece preceding it, in which five high-profile feminists discussed the internet as “a cauldron of hate and vitriol, led by men against women.”
There’s no doubt that the rapid growth of online spaces, together with their relative anonymity and potential for hair-trigger reactions, has contributed to sexist bullying, as well as that directed at other marginalised social groups. But we also need to use a wider lens, to capture the context in which the online world was born and exists. The internet isn’t the Amazon, after all – new technologies are deeply embedded in the structures and discourses of neoliberalism.
Neoliberal economics and politics focus on individualisation, privatisation and unfettered market capitalism. As Henry Giroux argues, this “legitimates a culture of cruelty and harsh competitiveness…wages a war against public values…saps the democratic foundation of solidarity…and tears up all forms of social obligation.”In a neoliberal world, we are all out for what we can get.
This contemporary cut-throat culture is the perfect breeding ground for the most brutal types of bullying. It’s everyone for him – or herself, with others positioned as threatening adversaries or whinging victims who have failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Neoliberalism tells us that we are all free to create our destinies through consumer choice. The flip-side is that we constantly fall short of our ideals, assess the competition and judge those who don’t measure up to the new self-improvement morality. The “chav”, for example, that alleged benefit-scrounger who uses their dole money to bathe themselves in bling, is persona non grata in neoliberal society.
The “battle of the sexes”, in this context, has become particularly ferocious. Women who have benefited from feminism’s gains (still largely white, middle class, straight, cis) are a threat to male privilege. In a hyper-competitive culture equality is a zero-sum game – gains in women’s rights are seen as being at men’s expense, with “boys’ underachievement” and the alleged “crisis of masculinity” often blamed on girls and women. In the words of Universities Minister David Willetts, “feminism [has] trumped egalitarianism” – women’s equality must be hurting men, because in a dog-eat-dog environment somebody has to get eaten.
Conversely, women who dare to point out that inequalities remain, especially for those whose gender intersects with other aspects of identity such as race, class or sexual orientation, are vilified. Feminist critique is dismissed as “political correctness”, or a form of “victim politics” which clashes with the neoliberal rhetorics of freedom of speech/expression and personal responsibility and choice. This happens in left – as well as right-wing circles, with left-wing antifeminism most recently finding its figurehead in Julian Assange, who on being accused of sexual assault by two women, claimed he had fallen into a “hornet’s nest” of revolutionary feminists.
All this adds up to a culture in which women are feared and despised as either menacing ball-busters who are too big for their boots or mewling martyrs who expect special treatment and can’t take a joke. Either way, they deserve to be taken down a peg or two – and in a world where the only principles that matter are market ones, there are few limitations on how that can be done. Intimate personal insults and rape threats? That’s just freedom of speech. Sexual harassment? That’s just “having a laugh”. Women can choose to be offended or not – because after all, it’s all about personal choice.
In an interview with Blurred Lines presenter Kirsty Wark, Mary Beard articulated some of the obstacles to women speaking out in such circumstances. And if these could potentially subdue someone of Professor Beard’s brilliance and gravitas (thankfully, they haven’t), what hope is there for the rest of us?
Fortunately some young women are refusing to be cowed, as the rise in feminist activity amongst students and other groups attests. Outspoken women of all ages deserve our gratitude and respect. And to fully appreciate what they are up against, we need to understand how the “new sexism” combines age-old forms of misogyny with contemporary free-market heartlessness.
Alison Phipps is Co-Director of Gender Studies at the University of Sussex and works on the politics of women’s bodies – she can be found on Twitter @alisonphipps.
Her book The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age is published by Polity Press.
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