"Gregg Wallace & other sexist dinosaurs I’ve met - and am still meeting"
“Cheer up, love, it might never happen!”
“I’d shag her, but I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole”
“Don’t you have a sense of humour? Come on, love!”
As young women in the 1990s and noughties, we were made to feel like we were uptight if we didn’t laugh at such casual throwaway sexism. Now, two decades on, Gregg Wallace is facing a slew of criticism after being accused of making a range of sexually inappropriate remarks during his long career as a TV presenter. Over the weekend, he made things much worse by taking to social media, dismissing the allegations and saying his accusers were a “handful of middle-class women of a certain age”.
Rewind to 20 years ago and I’m travelling with a senior male colleague on a business trip. The stewardess brings us our meal. “That asparagus looks just like a penis!” my male colleague says loudly, knocking back the first mini bottle of wine and laughing, “Look, it’s like the shaft of a penis! Not my penis, though – mine is much bigger than that.”
I feel myself folding in on myself. Where had this comment come from? I was a junior colleague and we would be travelling together all week. I felt tired even thinking about it. The week then continued with more sexual comments. Sometimes they were whispered – usually about other women we were working with and how attractive he deemed them to be. In the reception of the hotel one morning, he looked down at me: “You look effing awful!” he said. “I wouldn’t want to wake up to you in the morning.”
I remember feeling oddly stoical at the time. I also felt rough after a week of travelling and late-night meetings. I didn’t have the balls to say he looked rough as hell too. The thing is, these comments, this casual sexism was the elevator music of the time, the comments coming not only from men I worked with but also from strangers when I was going about my day. The van drivers. The men on building sites. The guy who grabbed my boobs on my way to the bus stop, so quickly that I questioned whether it had even happened. The man in a bar who told me I “wasn’t his type” but he wouldn’t kick me out of bed “because with a blow job it doesn’t matter what you look like anyway”.
I think, like many women, I learned to ignore this toxic elevator music. To not get angry and to hope that future generations of men would be more highly evolved. Although once, when I became more senior, I called out some of the behaviour of male colleagues – in particular someone who slept with a female intern. I was told it would be “taken care of”. A couple of weeks later, the intern left. Nothing had changed at all.
Has it now? These “cheeky” comments are often minimised as a “bit of a laugh” or “harmless fun”, but when they’re made, they’re clearly, actually, about power. Women, of course, are well aware that there is a threat of menace behind them. A question mark that says: Will you laugh at this? Or will you make a big fuss?
They also reduce women, in the space of a sentence, to mere sexual objects. They work as a reminder that, despite decades of progress, despite the hard work, we’re still divided into two categories: women that men want to sleep with and those they don’t. Then there’s the very real fear that your reaction could impact on your professional career. Traditionally, it doesn’t pan out well for women who make a fuss in the professional world.
I think back to the dinosaurs. Nobody knows what wiped them out in the end. It could have been an asteroid. Or a rapid change of the Earth’s temperature. Perhaps they didn’t evolve quickly enough to keep up with the times. Men like Wallace don’t need to be wiped out, of course. They need to evolve. To see that it isn’t just a bit of fun. They need to acknowledge the damage they’ve done.
The wrath of the middle-aged woman is harsh. It’s not going to be held back any more. It’s coming towards us right now like a glittering asteroid. It’s actually quite beautiful to behold.
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