A common thread in many such academic clashes is the enthusiastic substitution of fierce emotion over argument among those who feel themselves to have been sinned against, a modern adaptation of Descartes that runs: “I am upset, therefore I am.” And Prof Lebow has subsequently warned that the cultural hysteria is creeping to the UK: “‘This is another example of where, alas, the UK imports the worst of America as opposed to the best. There is a chill in universities.”
At the heart of this are questions of scale and intent, both of which are now routinely rendered indistinct in professional rows about sexism. Some feminists have sought to highlight “microaggressions”, popularising the idea that there is a spectrum of sexist behaviour which has a thoughtless remark at one end and violence or sexual assault at the other. Yet they have also been resistant to the idea that some kinds of male “offences” are much less serious than others, since they reserve the right to locate the seriousness of any incident almost wholly in the perception of the complainant.
Hyper-vigilance to offence doesn’t help women – it damages our cause.
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By such criteria, if you feel sufficiently outraged or upset about something, it is therefore unquestionably a legitimate source of outrage. Objective categories of seriousness – such as necessarily exist throughout our criminal justice system – are deliberately blurred: all behaviour one dislikes can be covered by the umbrella words “inappropriate” and “misconduct”.
That is, perhaps, why Prof Lebow’s “lame” joke, as he himself called it, apparently caused Prof Sharoni to “freeze,” feel “shaken” and later feel that Lebow had been “victim-blaming” by refusing to admit culpability. Since Prof Sharoni says she felt this way, we must take it on trust that she did. And yet, speaking from outside her own set of intense responses, it is difficult to see what she was ever actually a “victim” of.
The trouble is that this hyper-vigilance to offence, including exaggerated responses backed up by a nervous authority, does nothing practical to help women in the wider world: in fact, it damages our cause. When even a mild joke can be so heavily policed and censored, it not unreasonably makes decent men nervous, and likely to retreat both from the company of female colleagues and from formal and informal discussions that might help women succeed professionally.
At the heart of this modern syndrome lies the cultural prosecutors’ firm belief in ideological purity – the conviction that the world can be radically improved if only every tiny deviation from the path of an accepted script is “called out” and punished. Such believers are full of pungent certainty, and officialdom is frequently somewhat cowed by it. When students posted protest messages around Theresa May’s portrait in Oxford’s school of geography recently, for example, the authorities could have either removed the messages or kept them there and used them to spark a controlled debate. Instead, they temporarily removed the portrait.
Jokes – with their innate subversion and nonchalance – are especially challenging to the ideologue’s world-view
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There can be, of course, hard-edged workplace “jokes” – often repeatedly directed at the same target – that are intended to demean and are indicative of bullying (an employment lawyer I know once told me that his heart sinks when he hears the words: “It was just banter.”) Prof Lebow’s was far from that kind of joke, and it is also true that jokes – with their innate subversion and nonchalance – are especially challenging to the ideologue’s world-view.
In his novel The Joke, the Czech writer Milan Kundera describes how a young student and enthusiastic Communist party supporter fell foul of the authorities when he scribbled a joke ending in the words “Long Live Trotsky!” on a postcard: thereafter he is expelled from the party, his college and spends the next few years working in the mines.
Our authorities in academia and other workplaces can’t send anyone to the mines for “inappropriate” comments, but they can cast an unfair blight over a formerly respected career. Yet it is profoundly important to have some objective criteria for the taking of offence. Offence-blurring does women no favours: distinctions and proportion matter. Women often need strong language to describe situations of domestic violence and serious work-place harassment. We also need the goodwill of supportive men. We should have the good sense not to squander either on a joke.
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