Credit, first, where it’s due. As with so many celebrated public nuisances, from David Starkey and Jacob Rees-Mogg to Nigel Farage and the wider Boris Johnson family, it was the BBC that first identified Laurence Fox’s potential to cheapen public life.
The instincts that just got Fox dispensed with by GB News – for reducing a woman to the sum (zero) of his sexual interest – are those that, once showcased on BBC One’s Question Time, revealed him as the natural choice, as guest or presenter, for any proudly feral television channel.
Until 2020, when he argued about racism on Question Time, Fox was known principally as an actor, with a still obscure sideline in denouncing political correctness and advertising his aversion to women in whom it had taken hold. “I feel compelled to be mean to the Wokies,” he told a Times interviewer. Ideal for Question Time, then, on the nights Farage couldn’t make it.
This historic appearance was an early example too, of the way Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, inadvertently standing proxy for all troublesome members of her sex, inspires responses in some men that come close to looking unhinged. Dismissing the idea that Meghan had experienced racism, Fox claimed victimhood, instead, for himself: “to call me a white privileged male is to be racist”. After this made news, Fox doubled down on social media, as is routine in professional woke-taunting, saying the reaction to his appearance was like “Christmas come early”, “Speak truth to nonsense”.
Three years later, in the commotion that followed his “who’d wanna shag that?” remarks to a sniggering Dan Wootton, Fox embarked on a similar show of defiance, only to find that former safe spaces for misogynists had become suddenly inhospitable.
Now that a long-moribund Ofcom is showing signs of life, you gather that standards in public debate are in fact defensible, even at GB News. While that channel suspends its former darlings, Piers Morgan, of TalkTV’s Piers Morgan Uncensored, comes dangerously close, in his extravagant disgust for Fox, to sounding woke. “There’s been this descent into just trying to be as appalling as he can possibly be and trying to pretend it’s free speech.”
Less than a year ago Morgan welcomed, in one of several interviews, Andrew Tate. The Meghan-haters discussed the Sun column by Jeremy Clarkson that the Independent Press Standards Organisation subsequently found to be “pejorative and sexist”. Tate, yet to face charges including human trafficking and rape, was then merely an internationally celebrated misogynist who said things like “females are sheep”, and talked about picking them up “by the titty”.
Along with the sanctioned woman-hating in his various workplaces, Fox may also have been emboldened by the high-profile men who have engaged just as transparently, and sometimes more frequently, in shaggability discourse, with no adverse career consequences.
The revered Spectator, Sun and Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle once dedicated an entire column on sexual speculation about Harriet Harman, when she was Labour’s deputy leader. “Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober.”
Most astonishing, after the ugliness, was the realisation that, like Fox and Wootton at GB News, Liddle did actually think that women, in deference to male opinion, should accept their sexual evaluation, including for allegedly lighthearted purposes, as an inevitable aspect of public life.
Though not only by Liddle, and Sky Sports commentators, obviously. The late Silvio Berlusconi would soon be heard calling the German chancellor Angela Merkel, who made the professional mistake of not being a teenaged escort, “an unfuckable lard arse”.
These outstanding contributions to the genre were then eclipsed by Donald Trump’s habitual recourse to sexualised insults about women who have, for whatever reason, provoked him. After the US presidential debate where he prowled behind Hillary Clinton: “Believe me, I wasn’t impressed.” Of a woman who accused him of sexual assault: “Look at her.” About his rival for the Republican presidential nomination Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” And of the author and HuffPost founder, Arianna Huffington: he could “understand why her former husband left her”. Not that the shaggability argument needs to be so explicit. Lee Anderson, GB News presenter and deputy Tory party chair, has just – post Fox – taunted Carole Vorderman about plastic surgery. Clare Short was called, by a still-flourishing Blairite, a “bag lady”. Putting her roughly in the same place in the sexual social order as a “mad cat woman”, as Andrew Neil ridiculed one of my colleagues.
JK Rowling is now one of many gender-critical feminists subjected, by representatives of the right side of history, to the same sort of insults that the Sun used to aim at “jealous” critics of Page 3.
That these evaluations are revealing only about the speakers’ limitations points to the depths of misogyny keeping them in constant use, 50 years since Robin Lakoff’s essay “Language and Woman’s Place” showed how women were viewed “as secondary beings: as having an existence only when defined by a man”.
Comments about women’s looks on social media and below the line – overwhelmingly about the appearance of female contributors – confirm that Trump, Fox and the rest still speak for countless men, of all political tendencies, whose resentment of uncontrollable women recalls the ridicule once directed at suffragists. And before that, at bluestockings, whose attempts at intellectual engagement were said to doom them, as unmarriageable scolds, to lifelong spinsterhood: the backward, 18th-century version of Fox’s “Who’d wanna shag that?”
Along with a tepid apology, Fox has said that rather than compromise – it’s not clear on what – he’s willing to “scrub toilets for the rest of my days and retain my dignity”. Provided he sticks to male ones it seems a fitting use of his talent. No woman should have to look up from washing her hands and see in the mirror behind her one of the world’s premier misogynists, weighing up her qualifications for a shag.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
