First Shadow Out of the Cabinet

And it really is a shadow...
The much written about exposure of Andy Gray and Richard Keys as sexist broke last week, and has been condemned so widely that I'm not going to bother to add my voice to the clamour. But scouting around the internet produced interesting responses to this story. Lots of men responded to this story with a kind of perverse logic which seems to have gained traction in recent years: 'Men may be sexist, but women are sexist too, which means they have no right to complain'. This is first and foremost a gross misrepresentation. Female culture (although this sort of generalising should really be avoided) does not have any sort of inherently anti-male strain in the way male football-orientated culture does. One only has to watch the utterly moronic Soccer AM to see the truth of this. Women are much less likely to talk in a derogatory manner about men than vice versa.

One comment I saw argued that Gray and Keys did nothing wrong because advertising is sexist against males! This is quite obviously bonkers. Reducing an argument like this one to its core components runs something like this: 'while sexism against females is wrong so is sexism against males, so rather than attempting to stop either kind of prejudice we should merely accept the 'status quo' and continue to allow women to be leered at and men portrayed as slobs in adverts'. As we are all taught at a young age: two wrongs make a right! We definitely should not allow people to take the easy way out, characterising oneself as a victim in order to maintain the status quo is cowardly. If sexism against women is wrong then it is right that sexism against men should also be acknowledged as wrong too. However, clearly women suffer more at the hands of gender prejudice. Attempting to rationalise men as being victims too just undermines the seriousness of sexism as a social problem.