I feel a bit like I’m stating the bleeding obvious here, but I think there are some quite misogynist elements about the way that the recent controversy surrounding Iris Robinson has been reported in the media.
Obviously, there are legitimate legal and political questions to be raised about Ms Robinson’s conduct in failing to disclose her financial dealings in the Members’ Register of Interests. Coverage of this aspect of the case is clearly in the public interest.
Many liberals will also feel that a hardline Christian fundamentalist, who has in the past issued the most intrusive and offensive attacks on other people’s sexuality, deserves to be publicly pilloried for having an extra-marital relationship, because she has broken the rules by which she has herself harshly judged others. I happen to disagree with this view – to misquote a phrase from an Ian McEwan novel, if it’s OK to have an extra-marital relationship, it’s OK for a homophobe to have an extra-marital relationship. What’s not OK is to be a homophobe – but I can understand the reasoning behind the alternate view.
But what flabbergasts me is that, to read many of the media reports on the subject, you’d think that the most morally questionable thing about Robinson’s conduct was the age of her lover. The words “her lover” rarely appear in reports on the case without being separated by “teenage” or “toyboy”, as if that were the most salient point about the controversy.
The media usually accepts men dating women decades their junior as natural and normal. These men are often depicted as objects of envy. Where they are viewed more critically, it is often in the “There’s no fool like an old fool” tradition, with the man viewed as a vain and credulous sap and the female lover cast in the role of manipulative golddigger.
Yet when a woman dates a much younger man, she is frequently accused of something morally reprehensible. The Daily Mail’s headline when artist and film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood began dating a 19-year-old actor was “A bit late for the school run, Sam?” Now that she has announced that she is pregnant by said 19-year-old, the tabloids and celebrity blogs are full of implications that she has done something weird and twisted, or that she has trapped a barely pubescent child into life-changing adult responsibilities for which he is patently not ready (despite the fact that the man concerned is a sentient adult who appears delighted with their joint decision to start a family). And yet when Ms Taylor-Wood’s former husband recently dated a celebrity 22 years his junior (almost identical to the age gap between Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson), there was barely an eye batted in the media. And when middle-aged male celebrities impregnate teenagers, there is rarely any moral indignation. There is certainly no sense that he has “stolen her youth”, although having a child is likely to have a far heavier impact on the woman’s life than on the man’s.
Admittedly, in cases of real child abuse, the double standard often operates in the opposite direction, with abuse committed by a woman portrayed in the media in a trivial, salacious way, as either comic or erotic or both, as long as the children involved are over the age of about eleven. But, nonetheless, sexual stories about women are treated very differently in the media from those about men.
The other thing which concerns me about the Robinson media coverage is the way that Iris Robinson’s behaviour is perceived to reflect on her husband. Again, I accept that the question of whether he knew about her financial dealings and failed to report them is salient (although I do find the assumption that a husband must have total knowledge of his wife’s business affairs somewhat archaic). But I am deeply disturbed by implications from some commentators that he should have had better control over his wife’s behaviour (as if she were some kind of unruly pet, rather than a autonomous human being with the right to make decisions on her own) or that her sexuality is some kind of conduit for the family honour and that he is thus somehow “tainted” by her having had an affair.
This puts me in mind of the Sachsgate controversy last year, when neither Russell Brand’s critics nor his supporters seemed to question that, by publicly bragging about having had sex with Sachs’s granddaughter, he was insulting and humiliating Sachs (rather than breaching the trust and privacy of the young woman concerned). One side seemed to think that Brand’s behaviour was vulgar and wrong, the other found it justifiable because it was “edgy” and amusing, but neither seemed to take issue with the basic premise that it was all about Sachs. Both sides seemed to take it for granted that Georgina Baillie had no importance as an autonomous human being – merely as some kind of Sachs family property, whose sexuality could be used to shame her menfolk.
Remind me what century we’re in again…