A career in misogyny might look like easy work for any man with qualifying levels of resentment. But in an increasingly competitive profession, with limits to public disquiet, practitioners face significant challenges.
How does a newcomer create enough misogynistic outrage to stand out, without generating retaliatory sympathy and thus better outcomes for his targets, inadvertently feeding the hand that bites him? Is it the fate of any successful misogynist ultimately to promote the very interests that peaked him into corrective action?
Consider Joey Barton. A former footballer and manager who appears to have excelled particularly in acts of extreme violence, Barton, currently at a loose end, recently relaunched himself as a rival to established experts like Andrew Tate, Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson, Laurence Fox. His theme, not unfamiliar in the field, is that “the woke agenda” has been unfairly advantageous for people non-white, female and sometimes both, including, most enragingly for Barton, in football. “We have to get to work before the Simps, the Feminist’s (sic), the Racists and the Woke get there (sic) way,” he wrote last month. “You’re going to have to kill me you cunts”.
Like Morgan he condemned the public’s choice of Mary Earps as sports personality of the year. “I’d score 100 out of 100 penalties against Mary Earps. Any day of the week. Twice on a fucking Sunday. #perspective.” Barton is too modest to add that he could also punch Earps unconscious much more quickly than the other way around, any day of the week: yet another talent for which men like him get no credit.
Female football commentators vex him for being, he thinks, underqualified. With a view to correcting this unfairness, Barton identified two of them on X, where he has 2.8m followers, as “the Fred and Rose West of football commentary”. Fred and Rose West being the murderers of at least 12 women. Although there is in fact no proof that these female commentators are not just better at covering up, the comparison was enough for Barton to (a) provoke a media commotion, including ministerial proposals for censorship and therefore (b) style himself a free speech martyr and (c) distinguish himself, with this novel, serial-killer line of attack, from less inventive misogynists. “I will be calling them all serial killers from now on,” he tweeted. Perhaps carelessly, even the most dogged Meghan haters never thought to compare her to Harold Shipman or Jack the Ripper. Barton was rewarded with an interview with Piers Morgan. “If we’re not careful,” he warned, “sexism will rise. It has to be a meritocracy to get people qualified to do these roles.”
Last week, when one of his target female football commentators, Eni Aluko, described the distress his attack, in provoking a wave of abuse, had caused her, Barton merely redoubled his scorn. “Cry me a fucking river.” Later, along with other slurs, he added: “race card player”. By way, presumably, of advertising his more elevated perspective, he varies abuse with quotations and verses, some defiant, some melancholy. Notably, Larkin’s Nothing to be Said (“Life is slow dying”) and some indignant Milton: “When straight a barbarous noise environs me / Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs …”
What Barton’s combination of misogynistic bullying and poetry appreciation tells us about the improving power of verse is a question perhaps best left until the next National Poetry Day. But until recently his selections would have been received as vindicating his reputation, one long co-existing with his physical savagery, as a fascinating, in some ways exemplary savant. One forgiving interviewer applauded his “meaningful and progressive” life. Barton’s well-advertised enthusiasm for Nietzsche, Orwell, Virgil, the Smiths and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, along with his reflections on austerity and free speech, featured repeatedly in doting profiles; before long he was accepted as “football’s great enigma”, the closest British football would ever come to Eric Cantona. “Perhaps I’m too intelligent to be a footballer,” he reflected. And yet not quite intelligent enough, it turns out, to not alienate his most effusive admirers.
Little has been heard, to date, from writers once happy to overlook a whole anthology of Barton attacks, including his stubbing a cigar out in another player’s eye, attacks on and off the pitch, and a six-month prison sentence (another was suspended) for common assault and affray. His supporters may even think it proves Barton’s “wokeism” point that, while sustained, occasionally criminal violence barely dented his prospects, some abusive tweets about prominent women will now have ended any he might have had in mainstream sport or cultural appreciation.
Though, aside from his own videos, there’s still GB News, for which his tweets can read like an extended job application, and it might not be too late for Barton to inquire at the New Statesman. A publication in which JK Rowling is currently described, for writing bestsellers featuring bad people, as “brittle, insecure, cruel” might still appreciate the thoughts of Joey Barton the literature-loving misogynist on, for instance, Jane Austen: “Only a manipulative cunt could have created Mary Crawford.”
Elsewhere, anyway, Barton has much to celebrate: a few ugly tweets have introduced him, via generous media coverage, to audiences previously unaware of his existence. Rishi Sunak and his sports minister, in contesting Barton’s idiocy, have been more respectful than many commenters on X.
Still, instructively, in the same week that Sandi Toksvig questioned the absence of women presenters from primetime television, Barton’s behaviour has raised awareness of what social media does to intimidate women from venturing into public life. An international report, Monetizing Misogyny, concluded last year: “Young women all over the world are being discouraged from speaking out or from considering a political career because of online misogyny and gendered disinformation.”
And now Barton has done his bit. Maybe banning himself permanently from football will turn out to be a price worth paying?
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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