Free Speech!

In my youth people said things that would get you dismissed from your job today.   We fought for Women’s rights (well I didn’t personally, but I benefitted) and we were quite tough.   Women today can join the army, the police, play football,  become boxers, but apparently cannot cope if a man asks to see their tits, something that used to be quite common – in both senses of the word!   The response then being either to show him or tell him to get lost depending on how you felt, but not to report him to the police!  In the good old days a large breasted girl could scarcely pass a building site without some wag shouting out ‘You don’t get many of those to the pound’.   And when I worked in the City the Christmas party was a minefield.   I had been brought up in a family that enjoyed the odd gin and tonic and a glass of wine, but many of my female colleagues hardly ever drank so come the party they would down several Snowballs (I presume people still drink this disgusting combination of Advocat and lemonade) and then throw up into the wastepaper basket but they still had the sense not to follow Mr Snodgrass into the stationery cupboard where he would claim that he had a Christmas surprise for them  – more likely a nasty shock.  Had he looked like George Clooney I feel that people would have been trampled underfoot in the stampede to get into the stationery cupboard!

 I would never want to trivialise any serious assault whether sexual or otherwise but a coarse remark or even a pinch on the bottom hardly merits women claiming that they are still traumatised twenty years later.   It is minefield out there – luckily I live in rural England among people who are pretty robust both in their behaviour and their language.   We can tell the difference between silly banter, offensive language and a serious assault.   I’m perfectly happy if someone calls me ‘love’ or ‘darling’  although, perhaps irrationally, I don’t really like people who ring up in order to sell me something, calling me by my first name, or what we used to refer to as a Christian name!   I hate to think that I burnt my bra – figuratively speaking – all those years ago to reinforce the view that men and women are equal only to have today’s generation have a fit of the vapours over a risque joke or an off colour remark.   I doubt that Mrs. Pankhurst would have turned a hair.   Human nature doesn’t change much but social mores do and time was when you would have been more surprised if someone didn’t pounce on you than if they did.   There was a man I knew who was infamous for his wandering hands and no woman was considered safe in his vicinity – he wasn’t very attractive and I would never have countenanced his advances, but I was irrationally quite annoyed to discover that I was the only woman at his 40^th birthday party that he hadn’t propositioned!

There was a song many years ago that went “It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it and we were taught,  ‘It ain’t what you say but it the way that you say it’.   We were forced to enunciate everything clearly and, in my parents’ view, properly.   My voice is an anachronism today from being made to say ‘How Now Brown Cow’  in the evenings after school to make sure that my vowels were acceptable!   And tongue twisters were all the rage, I can still say ‘If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked’ and ‘How much wood would a wood chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood’ at speed and without hesitation!   It was deemed very important to speak clearly with the Queen’s English.   We weren’t allowed to say certain slang words.  ‘OK’ was forbidden! because it was American along with other prohibited items such as chewing gum, jeans and Coca Cola.   And we also learned John Betjeman’s a famous poem ‘How to Get on in Society’ that meant something to us, but I doubt that anyone today would understand it.   You can look it up and see for yourselves!    Nancy Mitford wrote of U and non-U and people took it all seriously although it was intended to be humorous.   A different and rather snobbish age.   Today people have much lazier speech – their sentences are littered with ‘Like’ and ‘You know’, endings are left of words and nasal speech is pretty ubiquitous.  My hearing is not what it was, but if I listen to a radio play from forty years ago I can hear every word- not so much today, particularly when I struggle to make out the mumbling over loud ‘background’ music.

So the world has changed and we can accept sloppy speech as long as we don’t say the wrong thing and we have to be alert to change.   I can understand that it might be sensible to change the name of a character in Swallows and Amazons from Titty to Tatty – presumably we didn’t know the word Titty as if we had we would have sniggered away like mad.   And as for the N word in Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo, Catch – it obviously makes sense to catch a Tigger by his toe – although good luck with that!   But it does keep one on ones toes making sure that you are not inadvertently causing offence by misgendering someone or addressing a room full of people as ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ – as for emojis – probably safer not to use them at all!

So much for free speech.