”I am furious with Gregg Wallace”
A few weeks ago I, like masses of my friends, was glued to Disney’s new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. It’s a total riot. But watching it made for uncomfortable viewing at times. Because, boy, did the women – particularly the young ones – have to put up with some unwanted attentions from the men in their retro, fictional world.
One piece of advice stood out, however. “Don’t be sad, be angry,” urges an older secretary to a young woman who has just been assaulted. I thought of this when Gregg Wallace, who, by several accounts, appears to be a sex pest worthy of a minor Cooper character, blamed “middle-class women of a certain age” for his downfall. Well, hold my beer while I roll up my sleeves. Because I, too, am a middle-class woman of a certain age. And I am furious.
We’ve had enough of this shit. It’s no longer the 1970s, and yet not enough has changed. I don’t know how much other alleged Wallace-esque behaviour Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, radio host Aasmah Mir, comedian Emma Kennedy and the other whipsmart women who have called him out had to put up with quite a lot of as they climbed their way up the ladder. I can, however, guarantee that if you ask any successful woman in her 40 and 50s for examples of times a colleague has made a completely professionally inappropriate ‘lols’ remark that made her feel uncomfortable, they’ll be legion.
I used to have a male colleague who thought it was really funny to talk about boobs, a lot, under the guise of pitching features about bras (note: he was not a fashion journalist). Like Wallace, he was also married and had several kids, and he’d also bring up his wife in conversation (often sharing wildly inappropriate insights into their private life) as if, somehow, the fact that he was still happily and faithfully married made all the bantz a-okay. It was both boring and awkward, especially for younger colleagues who didn’t quite know how to react.
It’s all so unbelievably, tediously predictable. We all know that men who resort to making rubbish sex jokes aren’t generally clever enough to come up with something wittier. They’re usually also fairly insecure, and intimidated by clever women. So they metaphorically get their penis out and start waving it around to try and put us back in our boxes. And if you don’t laugh, they think it’s you that’s the problem.
Well, enough already. As Wallace is right now finding out, you mess with us at your peril – and, as the comedian David Baddiel joked on X: “It’s not often that the internet gets behind middle-class, middle-aged women these days, but thanks to Gregg Wallace for making it happen.”
Because what has come pouring out of the woodwork is not only more allegations about Wallace, but tale upon tale of similarly inappropriate workplace behaviour. Women of all ages are sharing their experiences of being subjected to sexual harassment at work; of what happened when they reported it (often, nothing); of being told not to make a fuss and to suck it up. Some of it is inappropriate comments. Some of it is that and then some – comments that turned into unwanted advances; a workplace culture that turned a blind eye to certain sexual behaviour. Behaviour that, in their 20s, they were too frightened to challenge. But now they’re midlife professionals and they give no f***s, especially when they’re riled. Maybe it hasn’t happened to them. Maybe, like Emma Kennedy, they are speaking out on behalf of a younger colleague, or someone who doesn’t have the voice, or the confidence, to do it themselves.
But we do. We know our value now. In Good Housekeeping’s Gentelligence survey of almost 3,000 women, 88% say they make sure to get their voices heard. Sixty eight per cent have actively campaigned about an issues that matters to them in the past year alone. We know the value we hold, too – after all, we middle-aged women control a vast amount of wealth and have significant consumer power. We are loyal to the brands we trust and happy to turn our backs on those that let us down. So watch out MasterChef – because who on earth does Gregg Wallace think watches it, if it isn’t middle-class women of a certain age?
So, come on my fellow midlifers, you’ve seen what happens when you speak out. Let’s keep doing it. Let’s start getting angry about the other stuff, too: the male grooming gangs preying on young women; the traffickers selling women into sexual slavery; the porn industry and how it preys on our young men and turns them into oafs like Wallace, who apparently think that women are just pieces of meat there to serve his purpose. Gregg Wallace is right to complain about us. Because when we’re furious, there’s nothing that we can’t do.
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