Calm down, dear
Yesterday David Cameron’s carefully constructed mask slipped as, during Prime Minister’s Questions he told Labour MP Angela Earle (shadow chief secretary to the treasury) to ‘calm down dear’. George Osborne found it hilarious. Nick Clegg remained stony-faced. Ed Balls demanded an apology.
‘Calm down, dear’. It’s not the most offensive thing you’ve heard in your life, so should it have become the furore it has? I think so. Women are massively under-represented in government and part of the reason is the public-schoolboy locker room culture. PMQs are little more than shouting matches most weeks, so why did Cameron particularly feel someone needed to calm down? Because she was a woman, and woman are emotional, hysterical, shrieking - incapable of the rational argument on display in parliament so often. It’s really telling of how Cameron really views women in parliament and how little respect he has for them. It has been widely documented how hard the government’s spending cuts will hit women, but Cameron’s government also has a pretty poor record of including women in the Cabinet and decision-making positions (just 4 of the 23 Ministers are women)
But it’s not just Cameron or MPs who clearly show little respect for women in parliament. Earlier this week Lucy Jones, assistant comment editor of the Telegraph, wrote a short blog post entitled ‘PMQs: Whose boobs are these?’. The post showed a still from BBC News of Ed Miliband with an un-named woman behind him showing, apparently, a little too much cleavage. The boobs in question were circled in red and Lucy Jones referred to her as a ‘busty lass’. It’s stunning an assistant comment editor can find nothing more relevant or important to write about than the cleavage on display. I’m fairly sure national broadsheet newspapers don’t speculate on the trouser bulges from men in parliament with a slight too-wide seating position. Again, women are treated as lesser - less relevant to politics and less able to contribute to meaningful debate. They’re there to be looked at, if we pay attention to them at all.
So no, it’s not just a harmless catchphrase that David Cameron threw out, showing his sense of humour. Even in the ad, which is 10 years old, the catchphrase was meant to put down a hysterical woman - it was patronising and belittling. Cameron used it in exactly the same way.
