Thoughts on televised debates

... and debates more generally.

I was invited on to my first TV debate in 2013. I was thrilled, being a somewhat naive, keen young feminist writer. I was 29, was still getting used to the thrill of seeing my name in print (thanks Bitch magazine! Thanks TLS! Thanks BBC Academy, Ms Magazine, Telegraph Books) and was still inexperienced enough to accept being underpaid or not even paid at all for my writing (cheers Independent, I loved you but no wonder you went to the wall!).

However, when a pleasant sounding woman rang me on my mobile and asked if, with 24 hours notice, no pay and questionable terms I would appear on a major Sunday politics TV show, I immediately heard warning bells. The subject was, predictably, feminism. I knew from having watched enough Newsnight episodes with Laurie Penny, that feminists did not get given an easy time on TV.

Instead, they were usually portrayed as any or all of the following: shrill, unreasonable, paranoid, anachronistic, man-hating, humourless, sexless.

Paranoid and anachronistic I'll admit to; I'm an old soul in a young body, and yes I do consider the world at large threatening, incomprehensible and overrated. However, I refuse to even consider the other charges.

Which is why I ultimately said no to the pleasant lady on the phone.

I'd seen how London Feminist Network were portrayed on a documentary the previous year. Members were constantly asked if they were angry, and why, as if women's anger was SO unusual, so remarkable, and SO interesting that women should have to explain it, even though we have daily evidence of the results of men's anger. You only have to turn on the news to see where male anger gets us. But men's anger is the default, you see, and is justified, even if it results in wars, murders, mutilations, maimings, rapes, bombings and pissing contests involving nuclear arms.

But I digress.

I wasn't interested in paying money I didn't have, to spend a Sunday which I had already earmarked for a dear friend's birthday celebrations, to sit in a studio and not get paid while people tried to paint me and my people (that would be women and anyone else who considers women full human beings) as complete harridans.

I said fuck that, and got on with my weekend. And it was fine. I lost no sleep, no work, no money.

Later that year I would be asked to appear in a debate at Glasgow University Union, a place which has a deeply dodgy history  when it comes to treating female speakers with respect, or indeed admitting them at all. I asked for other feminists' views on Twitter - should I do this debate or not? Again, no fee was offered, and this was at a time I was still doing a LOT of tutoring and care work to supplement the abysmal writing rates I was being offered, from £0 to maybe £90 per 1000 words if I was very lucky, and living back with my parents to save up money. So I wasn't that keen to hop a train to Scotland anyway - but then came the abusive emails.

One polite but passive-aggressive missive from a female student who wanted me to know just how feminist GUU was - presumably so feminist that its cheerleaders took the time to harass a busy, skint feminist writer and try to persuade her to take down her cruel tweets where she had the GOD DAMN NERVE to  wonder if Glasgow University was worth a visit.

I soon got my answer. The frothing young feminist had obviously let slip to a male friend that a Nasty Older Feminist had dared to ask "GUU - worth speaking at?" on Twatter and this Fwend sent me a poisonously worded email about my "little display on Twitter" as if I were a naughty four year-old--rather than a 29 year old long sick of little boys and their bruised egos. This young upstart did not even ASK me to apologise to his Very Feminist Friend, he actually INSTRUCTED me to.

BIG MISTAKE, little man. 
HUGE.

I replied to neither email but instead promptly forwarded them both to GUU's head and told them this was how their representatives were behaving online. The apology I got from GUU was grovelling, to say the least, and at pains to distance the Union and the University from the Big Brave Boy who had decided to prove how NOT SEXIST his university was by harassing a woman!

[Oh, and son? If you're out there and haven't learned from your mistakes, do us all a favour and stay the fuck away from women. Or just everyone, you nasty little coward. Don't piss off a writer, you silly young boy. We always, always get our revenge in print, and we are MASTERS of the long game.]

Finally, a few months after that fiasco, I turned down a request to 'debate' the rights and wrongs of lads' mags on a local BBC radio station,. AGAIN, no payment was offered and by this point in my writing career I was getting tough on such nonsense. I freelance for the Beeb so I know that they can and will pay very nicely when it suits them; ergo, I ain't giving them my time for free. Sorry Auntie, but you're not actual family. You don't get my expert opinion for nothing. My real family do, and regularly, and usually when they're not interested, so God help them.

However, it wasn't just the lack of cash I was getting highly fucked off with. It was the constant request that I expose myself, my belief system and my people to criticism, mockery and probably being stitched up in the name of a ten minute segment that would inevitably be rushed or edited so that  we had no hope of getting our real point across. Trust me, I write BOOKS on feminism and sometimes 80,000 words is not enough to say everything I need to say on the matter.

So what hope could a feminist possibly have of coming across well in a radio segment squeezed between the shipping forecast and the traffic news? Who's going to listen or care or stand a chance of changing their mind?

Round this time, I did notice the UK media actually starting to - GASP! - consult the people whose right to exist it was debating. I heard the excellent @PastaChips being interviewed in a (I think) Woman's Hour segment on sex work, and thought TOO RIGHT! About time we heard from an ACTUAL, CURRENT sex worker rather than an exited one or a famous one or one like Dr Brooke Magnanti, who hasn't been a sex worker in 10 years. Not that the other women and men don't also have the right to have their say, but UK media and government seem USELESS at finding current sex workers and actually asking them how they feel.

On the rare occasions it does happen, they're usually not paid for their time (and has ANY sex worker EVER been paid for those stock images scantily clad women in windows and doorways that outlets love to use? I'd GENUINELY like to know!), are pumped for tales of degrading or horrible or comical encounters, and are treated somewhere between the Victorian stereotype of the fallen woman and her 19th century counterpart, the circus freakshow.

So yes, I thought good on ya Glasgow Sex Worker for speaking eloquently on live radio about how actually, deep sea fishing is far more dangerous than sex work but funnily enough no one ever suggests that fishermen are just too weak or stupid or brainwashed by, er, matrirarchy to know that they're choosing a hazardous line of work. But I was glad it wasn't me trying to sum up my viewpoint and also (insultingly) being asked to justify my right to exist and work without harm, on a ten minute slot on a grey Tuesday morning.

I don't think I could have remained so calm.

This is why I'm grateful when fantastic non-binary and trans activists such as @TheLolaPhoenix publicly point to me and my writing as friendly to trans/NB people. The impetus for Lola's statement  was an understandably pissed off thread by a fellow NB person Owl, who had been asked to 'debate'...something to do with gender, I don't know if the Beeb ever even specified.... live on TV, and was not having any of it.

I did not blame Owl one bit.
At the age of nearly 34, I feel like I've been arguing for women's right to be treated as full human beings MY ENTIRE LIFE.

I am not exaggerating. One of my Asperger's tendencies is unnerving recall regarding dates, ages, numbers, conversations.
I first told a man "You are just afraid that women will think you're rubbish and gang up on you"* when I was no older than 7. I said this to my grandfather, then in his 60s, when we were in the car with my dad, brother and grandmother. My grandmother had dared to suggest that she wanted to listen to Woman's Hour; my granddad loudly huffed that it was "just a load of women talking bloody nonsense."

[I had correctly identified exactly his and every other sexist man's greatest fear, but of course at the age of 7 no one takes you seriously.] 

By 10 years old, I was disgusted that I lived in a world where things like rape and child molestation existed, and furious that the state of my vagina was considered public property

(You could have been raped! bellowed Papa Scott when I was five minutes late returning from a friend's house that summer. I wanted to smack someone, or puke, at the idea that my being raped was somehow a man's business. I still do want to do all those things.)

By 16, I was baffled that other girls didn't seem to notice or care the persistent sexism around us, even though it pushed the intelligent, privileged girls at my Posh School to act like morons whenever boys were around, and the amoral gits from the local Boys' School to look through any girl who didn't simper, smile or otherwise seek male approval.

So when well-meaning friends or family said to the 29 or 30 year-old Chas that "It's telly! You should just do it!" I had to take it with a pinch of salt. I don't CARE about telly. It's just a medium, just another glowing screen in a world where screens have taken up my time, sanity, wrecked my wrists and my mental health. I love BOOKS. I am THRILLED by BOOKS. I LOVE the fact my name is on PROPER, PUBLISHED BOOKS and I can pick one up and read it and show it to my mum and build a HOUSE out of my books should I so choose.

But telly? Just to be dismissed as another sexless, humourless bitch carping on about First World Problems? Naaaah.

Been there, done that.