As Brand rots in jail, let’s talk about misogyny and status

Résumé détaillé

We men are very good at making things awkward for women. Yet, somehow, we can be astonishingly delicate when the person we might embarrass is a man we like. The post As Brand rots…

At the British Comedy Awards in 2004, Jonathan Ross told the audience that the awards were 15 years old and, as such, were probably “going home with David Walliams”.

In June of 2008, on Russell Brand’s BBC Radio 2 show, a woman who worked in the same building said the comedian-cum-bible-aficionado had exposed himself to her in a bathroom. On air, Brand’s co-host Matt Morgan asked him when he’d last dragged a woman into a cubicle, then supplied his own answer: “It’s been 25 minutes since he showed his willy to a lady.” Brand laughed.

Earlier this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to cheating on his wife with a woman now suspected of being a Chinese spy. He told staff, “My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do.” Within a day, a reprobate on X was explaining that Jensen’s wife of 41 years, Lori Huang, looked like her husband’s grandmother and that wives who let themselves go could “force the man to upgrade”, making the passage of time a woman’s fault.

Meanwhile, Tony Abbott, 14 years later, still thinks Julia Gillard took things too far with her famous misogyny speech in 2012. On the ABC this week, he called the renowned takedown “a pretty over-the-top and unjustified attack”. He remembered his own preceding remark as “a bit of a niggle”. While arguing Gillard should seek an election mandate for a carbon tax, Abbott had demanded she “make, politically speaking, an honest woman of herself”, reaching for a phrase about marriage and a woman’s respectability to make a point about tax policy.

In a series of online experiments, sociologist Tagart Cain Sobotka found men were likely to judge how sexist other men were based on status. Show them sexist behaviour from a high-status man, and their own endorsement of sexist beliefs went up; show a low-status man doing the same thing, and it went down.

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End result: the man who gets away with it will expect he’ll get away with it again.

It’s not that…

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