Brocialist

I learnt a new word today.  If it is, in fact, a word and not one of those made up things that Ofsted invented to catch out six year old children who think they can read.  I saw it on a tweet, which said something like, 'the brocialists are out in force to tell me what is sexist or not.'

Wow.  "That's handy.  There are people called brocialists who know what is and is not sexist," I thought.  Because it can be so hard to tell, can't it?  Sometimes you find that you have been unintentionally sexist without even knowing.

A friend and I sent each other pictures of people we hoped would be on the Police Commissioner ballot last Thursday.  We went through everyone from Frank Drebbin to Officer Dibble.  Everyone except Jane Tennison, Scott and Bailey, Cagney and Lacey, the woman from the Gentle Touch and any other female TV cop.  After the excitement of the wobbly wooden booth and stubby pencil on the string and after the Long Suffering Husband had complained that the pencil had run out and the string was too short to vote to cheer up the bored election officers, we were cross with ourselves for not even considering a woman.  When we saw each other we discussed our disgusting betrayal of the female role models and our abandoning them in preference for the men.  She told me about a friend of hers, who is a politician, who had not won the seat she had contested.  This politician had sent in her nomination papers without telling her husband.  We laughed that not winning had probably saved her marriage.  Later, I started to wonder why we had thought that was funny.  Surely men apply for jobs without telling their wives all the time?  Most of the the time I expect that even wives who are unhappy about it will go along with the idea and those who don't will be accused of unfairly holding him back.  Why, I wonder, do we think women should ask permission?

I was thinking about how I might have been unintentionally sexist when my Facebook timeline filled with people signing a petition to get Laura Kuenssberg sacked.  Ms Kuenssberg is the Political Editor of the BBC and people think she has shown a lack of impartiality in her reporting of the the local election results.  The facts are that Labour won lots of seats and Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour party.  The BBC reporting has focused on whether that is enough and whether the results are an endorsement of Mr Corbyn's leadership.  Whilst I agree that it would have been nice if the BBC had reported the results in a more positive way before undertaking any analysis I'm not sure it's a sacking offence.   I listened to her analysis, which was quite anti-Corbyn and thought that I disagreed with almost everything she said but couldn't help be impressed by the way the words were put together.

People in positions of power (and BBC Political Editor is a position of power) often come in for public criticism and people will often call for them to be sacked when they don't agree with them. The thought occurred to me that people were being harsher with Ms Kuenssberg than they had been with anyone else they disagreed with and I wondered if it was because she was a woman.  This wasn't the first time I heard people say things about her.  I heard two women talking in a coffee shop.
"That Laura Kuenssberg"
"Oh, I hate her."
"Me too.  She has such a funny mouth."
"And I can't be doing with her accent."
"Who does she think she is, anyway?"
"I know.  Always on TV, flicking her hair and telling us what to think."
I wanted to say that she thinks that she's the BBC's political editor and that apart from the hair flicking (which I had never seen) it was her job to tell us what to think.  I could have pointed out that it's their job to decide whether to agree with her or not.  I didn't because it wouldn't have been polite to show that I had written down their whole conversation. They continued,
"I don't expect she has children."
"No she can't have.  She's probably a lesbian."
"Do you think?  Well, it would be very difficult to have a husband when you are on the telly all the time."
"It's a good thing then.  Think of her poor children if she did have them."


The language around this petition had the air of a 'witch hunt' Twitterers post things like, "She seems such an awful, horrifying person but it's her lack of bias that warrants her dismissal."  The attack seems personal.

But I wasn't sure.  Some Corbyn supporters see quite angry.  Maybe they would be just as personal about a man who said anything nasty about Jeremy.

If only there was someone who could tell me whether it was a campaign based, partly, in sexism.

It was time to find out more about the Brocalists.

How disappointing! There is no group of people who have the answers on sexism, rather brocalism is an invented insult word that combines the word Bro and Socialist (I think) and describes a male socialist who believes in equality and fairness for everyone but still treats women like sex objects and belittles their thoughts.  I found this definition: Richard Seymour: My experience is that ‘brocialists' don’t openly embrace patriarchy; they deny it’s a problem. Or they minimise it. They direct your attention elsewhere: you should be focusing on class. You’re being divisive. You’re just middle class (quelle horreur!). Or they attack a straw ‘feminism’ that is supposedly ‘bourgeois’ and has nothing to say about class or other axes of oppression. Or they just ignore it. To me that’s quite straightforward. Obviously it would be difficult, given their egalitarian commitments, to openly defend a gendered hierarchy; but their defensiveness about this issue suggests they associate a challenge to patriarchy with some sort of ‘loss’ for themselves. The question is, what do they have to lose? 

So, if I asked the Brocalists they would say that I'm making it up.  Laura Kuenssberg isn't being picked on because she's a woman, that people, of course treat women in the same way as they do men.  The problem is because I'm looking at the wrong thing.  I should be looking at class and how the middle classes, like Laura, are not taking Jeremy Corbyn's desire to protect the working class seriously.  They will tell me that there have been petitions to sack other BBC political editors, which is true. The one to sack Nick Robinson received 1600 votes in it's lifetime, while the one for Laura currently stands at 30,625 and is rising.  I'd love to live in a world where men and women are treated equally but for now I will just think carefully about all the possible  reasons we are being asked to sign a petition.