Last week I said we should stop worrying about grown women when it came to sexting and bullying. I take it back after an episode of virtual sexual violence against an older woman so shocking that future historians of the internet, the emeritus professors of social media, may well still be referring to it in decades to come as The Trolling Of Mary Beard.
It all started when Mary went on Question Time – even though the critic A. A. Gill said she was too ugly for TV.
She spoke soothingly about immigration, which is the UKIP voter’s No 1 bugbear (you wouldn’t think so after last week, but Europe actually trails in third, after crime).
Mary Beard, 58, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, went on Question Time, pictured, even though the critic A.A. Gill said she was too ugly for TVA. A. Gill is right to point out Mary doesn’t look like a pneumatic autocutie. She looks like a 58-year-old Professor of Classics at Cambridge, which is exactly what she is.
Her real crimes are these: not saying what her audience wanted to hear, and not playing along with the convention that all women must be young, blow-dried and painted as if for open-casket viewing before they are deemed fit to appear on screen.
As she appeared on QT, there was the usual reaction on Twitter, but something also stirred on a site called Don’t Start Me Off!, which decided it would be funny to launch a tirade of sexual abuse at her. There was also a graphic close-up picture of a sexual organ with the academic’s face superimposed on it.
More... We MUST defeat the sexting bullies (... and I don't mean the guys who've been swapping snaps of my cleavage) RACHEL JOHNSON: Working mums need Dave to do just one thing - watch Borgen! Rachel Johnson: Put the lardbutts on a diet - but leave my Pinot Grigio alone!
This kind of behaviour is not as unusual as you might think. It is a brave woman who goes on a telly programme and then puts her name into Google – if you did, you would never show your face again, let alone go on national TV.
I did Channel 4 news last week and, as an experiment, looked at Twitter afterwards. The kindest comment I could find was that I ‘looked like a yeti’.
As Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, says, it’s not just women on TV, it’s ‘women in the public eye full stop’ who get this sort of treatment.
What was unusual was not the trolling. No, it was Beard’s response. After QT went out, she thought she’d try to shame her trolls into ending their abuse.
If it worked, she reasoned, then other people online might think twice before posting personal abuse about females they’ve never met.
That would make it easier for all women to participate more widely in public life.
So Beard blogged, uploaded the same picture and all hell broke loose. The Don’t Start Me Off! website was closed down and its host apologised.
Don't Start Me Off! website launched a tirade of sexual abuse at Beard; and there was also a picture of a sexual organ with her face superimposed on itMary’s decision to be quite contrary worked and may bring lasting dividends.
What she did may deter viewers from abusing women online, which in turn could lead to more women saying yes to appearing on programmes – at the moment, male ‘experts’ on TV outnumber female ones by ten to one.
The reason women say no to TV now is partly the internet, and particularly Twitter, which can turn nasty very quickly.
It can whip up a storm of ‘gobsmacking misogyny’ (Beard’s phrase) against a lone female, which feels like a frightening, aggressive, online gangbang. Indeed, just the word ‘gangbang’ suggests to me those who sit at home alone with their laptops are on the same spectrum as the ‘Eve-teasers’ of India.
They think the young woman who goes on a bus in Delhi, and the older woman who goes on Question Time in Lincoln, are alike in one deeply unpleasant sense: both are ‘asking for it’.
Still, there is cause for hope. The fatal gang rape of one woman in India has awoken the world to the horror of a culture of violence in which a female is raped every 22 minutes – and prodded the Indian authorities into greater action.
So perhaps The Trolling Of Mary Beard will also come to be seen as a significant milestone – after which those who gleefully threaten strangers with sexual violence online, under the coward’s cloak of anonymity, will not be treated with such tolerance as before.
Lord knows I hate to sound heavy, especially after my airy insouciance last week, but if people don’t protest, and make like Mary Beard when it happens to them, there will be no end to it.
Look, we all know it’s tough being the younger brother or sister of a more famous sibling.
Pippa is having trouble over her book-writing career and Prince Harry had a rough week last week, too.
Might I, a fellow ‘sister of’, be allowed to suggest a way forward?
My @pippatip for Miss Middleton is as obvious as keeping cake in a tin. Marry Harry, Pippa!
My tip for Pippa Middleton, pictured left, is to marry Prince Harry, pictured right; they both suffer from 'famous sibling syndrome'On Primrose Hill sledding and Coco the dog disappears. Whenever I yodel her name, only beautiful girls with long blonde hair in trapper hats look up.
As I weave among whooping trendies, looking for her, my mobile rings.
It’s my husband, in the Far East.
I don’t know what country he’s in, as we’ve not yet had radio contact, but as Coco’s AWOL I know why he’s calling – his mobile number, not mine, is on her contact tag. ‘So, you’ve lost Coco again?’ he opens with. I admit I have temporarily mislaid our pet among the Primrose Hill set.
He then admits he is in Phnom Penh having dinner with an old girlfriend, and then I spot Coco and all is well.
When I relate all this to a friend later, she tells me of the one, solitary occasion when she managed to sneak away on a girlie yoga break, leaving her husband, a QC, in charge of their tiny son and a golden retriever. ‘However, no sooner had I arrived in Kenya than I got a call asking me to pick up Muffin from the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens,’ she says.
‘So I call E from Lamu and he confesses he’s not only lost the dog, he’s also lost our older son in Hyde Park, which really disturbed my chi!
‘I’ve never left him in charge since . . .’
Ah, the conversations that only couples divided by continents and united by a canine can have.
My husband called from the Far East as I temporarily mislaid our pet, Coco the dog, in Primrose Hill, pictured
Watch Prisoner Number A26188 – on BBC1 tonight at 10.25pm – for a piece of simple, devastating reportage.
Lisa Bryer goes to Cape Town and films her aunt Henia, who says she wants to be remembered not as a woman who survived three concentration camps and the death marches – but as a mother, wife, grandmother and friend.
If I were the Education Secretary, I’d put it on the curriculum, and if I were the BBC, I wouldn’t just show it on Holocaust Memorial Day.
