You might have noticed, I am not the biggest fan of Nadine Dorries. I really, really wish that she will get raptured and piss off and leave the rest of us alone. When I saw this, though, even I felt a little bit sorry for her.
In the clip above, Dorries asks a question at Prime Minister’s Questions. It is a silly question, a rather standard PMQs jeer jeer guffaw pantomime piece attacking the government from the right. Cameron’s response–and the response of much of the rest of the House of Commons is far nastier than Dorrie’s unpleasant question.
Cameron declares, with a schoolboy grin on his face, that he knows Dorries must be “extremely frustrated”. The House hoots like gibbons and claps like seals. HO HO HO! THE LADY ISN’T GETTING ENOUGH WILLIES UP FANNY!
This is hardly the first time Cameron and his cronies have displayed casual sexism in the House of Commons: he has a previous record of telling a woman MP to “calm down, dear“, to great honks of laughter from his regressive boys’ club buddies.
Not in the clip is Dorries storming out of the House following this.
What is shown is fairly interesting: Dorries’s immediate reaction. The face she pulls is a classic: I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it a thousand times before. The expression that says “that’s totally fucking not on, but I don’t want to look like a cunt by expressing anger, so if I just laugh sweetly, maybe they’ll like me.” Presumably after this, Dorries had her “fuck this shit” moment and stormed out.
And I’m with Dorries. It’s totally fucking not on, and fuck that shit. That sort of behaviour in a place of work is never acceptable. That sort of behaviour is never acceptable anywhere. To laugh at a person because of presumed amount of sex they are getting is not on.
The last time I received street harassment, I got told I “need a good length” when I failed to react to the “hey baby, wanna party” with the good grace the beery bastard wanted me to. This is a fairly standard response, based on some kind of notion that women are only pissed off because they are not receiving the adequate dose of cock. A similar situation takes place with men: consider the insult “sad wanker”. The implication here is that oodles of heterosex is the only thing stopping people from becoming a cavalcade of miserable gits.
With women, though, a double standard applies. We can use Dorries as an example here, too. For a short while, Dorries was dating a married man. She was met with scorn for this, and a lot of the response to it looked like slut-shaming. Certainly, there is a legitimate criticism of hypocrisy when Dorries claims to believe in abstinence and the sanctity of marriage, but is it really acceptable to attack her for the sexual behaviour alone? Of course not.
Dorries manages to be both a slut and a sexually-frustrated harpy. The attacks come from both critics and her own allies. And that isn’t fair, and I do not think that this should have to happen to anyone.
My sympathy to Dorries stretches as far as this. However, on the same day Dorries encountered sexism in Parliament, she pushed her own sexist agenda and tried to shove through an amendment which would pave the way for biased abortion counselling. She also voted to begin the destruction of the NHS that same day.
In terms of basic human rights, I have Nadine Dorries’s back, and do not think she deserves some of the shit she gets, because nobody does. As a politician, though, I sincerely hope that come the revolution she finds herself at the back of a human centipede. Nobody deserves oppression, but, equally, people must not pursue oppressive policy.