17 November 2016

The Paxman Doll

A tale of perversion?

By Chin Chin

Offended, and quite right too.  The complaint (see Week in Brief UK) may have been a little late, but who could deny that Jeremy Paxman’s joke about Reading University’s University Challenge team taking a hand-knitted doll modelled on him to bed was misogynistic, racist, against the disabled and generally Republican?  To be fair, it wasn’t actually his doll.  They had brought it along as a mascot but nonetheless it presumably looked like him and was imbued with his spirit.  Why, after all, had they adopted it as their mascot if they didn’t believe that it would influence the competition in their favour?  In a sense, then, he was imagining himself in all their beds at once, and (four-in-a-bed sessions being associated with the athleticism of youth) he was pretending to a virility which at his age he is unlikely to possess.  It was not just perverted. It was Putinesque.

The young lady who captained the Reading University team was right to protest, but it says little for the metal of her male companions that they have said nothing.  Leaving more exotic combinations aside, each of them is probably gay or straight.  If gay, why should he be less offended than the young lady?  If straight, how dare Paxman imply the opposite?  It is the silence of the victims which encourages casual sexism and this is a sad example of it.

As far as we know (at least those few of us who do not spend our evenings watching Reading University struggle to master the rules of University Challenge) none of the contestants was black or disabled.  Still, they could well have been, and to expect a man like Paxman to temper his remarks in these circumstances would be like expecting Donald Trump to be converted to Obamacare.  No, he would have made just the same joke, heavy though it would have been with the implication of miscegenation or devotism.  “He would, therefore he did”, to adopt the cadence of Descartes.

Anyway, thank goodness it’s all been rumbled and decent people can produce knitted dolls imitating television personalities without any risk of being laughed at.  The BBC and all its works have been exposed by brave and clever young people coming, albeit slightly improbably, from Reading.  There is some point in having a University there after all.  How wrong Betjeman was.  Or was that Slough?  I forget.  Oh well, “same difference” as they probably say down at the students union in their more lucid moments.

Just as I was reading, with some complacency, about the discomfiture of Mr Paxman, a nasty thought struck me.  Hadn’t I read something about not glorying in the inadequacy of others?  A passage about “motes” and “beams”, if I was not mistaken. The source was quite an authoritative one, too.  A quick flick to Google and there it was.  Matthew Chapter 7, the Sermon on the Mount.  Okay, delete the word “quite” in the sentence before last.  Still, it was rather worrying.  Suppose that things which I said myself gave offence.  Then I wouldn’t be able to sneer at Jeremy Paxman.

When I began to think about it, perhaps I was guilty too.  What about that woman I opened the door for at the supermarket?  Yes, I had only done it to be helpful, but wasn’t there an implicit male superiority in my gesture?  She seemed perfectly healthy and could doubtless have got her parcels through the door on her own.  Oh dear, how could I have been so insensitive?  It would have been worse if she had been disabled, of course.  Often disabled people don’t like to have a disability noticed.   What if I had opened the door for someone with a walking stick?  Never mind, next time I shall just barge through and knock everybody out of the way.  You cannot cause offence doing that.

Then, another nasty thought.  What about the man I spoke to in the post office queue? His family clearly came from India and, the first test having been drawn, I had exchanged the odd word about the failure of the England spinners to break through.  Well, at least I was talking about an English failure but was it really right to mention cricket?  That is an imperial game introduced by Victorian Britain to its colonies as part of the export of “English values”.  How patronising of me to raise it in conversation with someone from the subcontinent.

Embarrassing though these lapses are, I do not think that I am exceptional.  Every day, throughout the land, people inadvertently loose their solecisms against other races, against other sexes, against the disabled.  What is to be done?

There is only one answer and that is education.  Not just an extra module at school, that would only change the young.  No, something much broader that would educate the population as a whole.  I know.  Why don’t we have a new Christmas game?

It could be called “Taking Offence” and each player would draw a card on which there would be marked a particular sensitivity.  One player would be sensitive to sexual innuendo.  Another would be sensitive to remarks about race.  Another to remarks about disability and a fourth to insinuations about his or her intelligence.  If there were more than four players you would have to add additional sensitivities.  Ageism might be one and then possibly religious discrimination.  The last would of course be more difficult as you would need a basic knowledge about religion to know whether it had been sneered at or not.  Still, at a pinch you could take offence without knowing, in line with generally accepted practice.

To actually play the game, the participants would have to hold a conversation but you would be entitled to interrupt (and score a point) every time your sensitivity was offended.  The game would be best played after Christmas lunch and could end with a count up of points or, in the racier version, with a vote as to who comes through as the most bigoted individual.  Play it in Reading and the participants will soon begin to lose the distinction between the game and real life.  Then they will punch each other’s heads.  You never know, they may knock some sense into each other.

 

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