Source: Twitter. Public domain.“Saw you on QT last night. What a vile lefty bitch. Thought you was going to explode. Calm down bitch.” This was the tweet sent by a man calling himself Suzuki Steve to the scholar Sarah Churchwell, in the wake of her appearance on BBC Question Time last Thursday night. If the trolling was depressingly predictable, the focus on the speaker’s anger – a motif in several other, similarly aggressive tweets – is worthy of examination, because we are likely to see a lot more of this kind of thing over the coming months.
It is no longer socially acceptable to tell a woman to ‘calm down, dear,’ à la the late Michael Winner – except, it seems, in the realm of political discourse. In 2011 the then prime minister, David Cameron, used that exact line on Angela Eagle in the House of Commons. As the anti-Trump movement grows, it is entirely foreseeable that its opponents will draw from the same chauvinistic well to shut down dissent. Hysterical women, emotional blacks, the gist is the same: you are angry because your objectivity is clouded by a constitutional weakness that is integral to who and what you are. It is a devastatingly self-serving, self-reinforcing logic – bigotry backing up bigotry. Here, the political ideology and its discourse are indistinguishable.
Belittling the emotionalism of women, ethnic minorities and LGBT people is a privilege of those who have, by and large, never been harassed or felt their physical safety threatened just because of who they are. In the present political context, it means invalidating fears that are legitimate and real. More to the point, for the purposes of discourse, it is a control strategy, and some element of willful exaggeration is intrinsic to its execution. There is a milder variant of this in the world of association football, where, from time to time, the tabloid media will label as a ‘rant’ – usually prefixed with the adjective ‘bizarre’ – any vaguely leftfield post-match exposition by a foreign manager, notwithstanding that the ‘rant’ was coherent and controlled. The affectation of bewilderment is integral to the act: it’s the classic bully’s technique of dissembling incomprehension of their victim, to break down the lines of communication. The point is to put you in your place, and make you think twice about speaking out again.
