So this is how middle age begins, maybe; and it’s not with creaky knees, gardening catalogues or a yearning for Radio 2. The first telltale sign is when you start to feel first disconcerted and then just faintly exhausted by arguments about the correct response to bog-standard but still irritating incidents of everyday sexism.
This week’s moral maze comes courtesy of 27-year-old human rights barrister Charlotte Proudman, and the male lawyer who responded to her request to connect via the business networking site LinkedIn by chirping: “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect, but that is a stunning picture!”
Proudman promptly gave Alexander Carter-Silk both barrels, firing off a crisp lecture about how she wasn’t on LinkedIn to be objectified by sexists twice her age, and then naming and shaming him on Twitter; she will be referring matters to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority. (It should be said that Carter-Silk insists he was merely congratulating Proudman on the “professional” quality of her headshot, since most of those on LinkedIn are rubbish.) Cue endless golf club bores harrumphing about how feminists can’t take a compliment, when what one suspects really bothers them is the fear of young women no longer politely humouring older men’s clumsy advances.
Proudman is perfectly entitled to be annoyed that her face attracts more comment than her PhD, just as Liz Kendall had every right to be shocked when a journalist asked how much she weighs. Harping on endlessly about a woman’s hair, legs and handbag instead of her ideas and achievements can be horribly belittling, a way of refusing to take her seriously as a professional. And besides, it’s no longer a “compliment” when it makes the recipient feels worse rather than better, just as it’s no longer a joke if nobody’s laughing.
But that said, there’s a difference between setting out to undermine women and a cheery “nice shoes!” to your deskmate – just as there is between professional misconduct and a shaky grasp of LinkedIn etiquette. And it’s the grey area between these things that makes many otherwise reasonable people feel confused, anxious and faintly past it.
So is this now a thing, that you can be referred to a disciplinary body for saying you liked someone’s photo? When your junior colleague had a haircut and you said it suited them shorter (even though it didn’t, and you were just being polite) – was that actually a bit seedy? Have women’s appearances now become completely off-limits for public discussion, and if so, why do they keep Instagramming their shoes at me?
And then, of course, the killer: if you are a woman who tends to roll your eyes at messages like this on LinkedIn or Twitter but ignore them on the grounds that life’s too short, are you a traitor to your sex for not calling it out? Or worse still, in danger of becoming an old battleaxe who fails to notice that things have moved on and younger women won’t put up with the nonsense you did? Asking for a friend, obviously.
Invoking the regulatory authority could seem a little over the top in this case, to be honest; arguably, she could also have made the point while keeping him anonymous. But looking back at some of the stuff I let slide at Charlotte Proudman’s age, on the whole I wish I’d been rather less silently mortified and rather more assertive.
When I first started covering parliament at 26, I didn’t furiously upbraid the MPs who constantly mistook me for a secretary – something that strangely didn’t happen to young male reporters – for making sexist assumptions. Instead I secretly worried that it was my fault, for somehow lacking the required gravitas.
So it feels like progress to me that a decade later, when the then newly elected Labour MP Stella Creasy was challenged in a members-only area of the House of Commons by a colleague who’d assumed that as a young woman she must be a researcher, she kicked up a public stink. Times change, surprisingly often for the better, and if younger women’s zero tolerance attitudes occasionally feel disconcerting or over-zealous to older ones – well, maybe we don’t have a monopoly on deciding where the goalposts are. Better to be thrilled than resentful if other women don’t seem to have it as tough as you did, surely; to admire their fearlessness, their confidence in the workplace, their freedom from self-doubt.
And besides, none of this means the act of giving and receiving compliments is dead, so much as constantly evolving.
Proudman says she spoke out because she was sick of her partner getting job offers over LinkedIn while she got propositioned by men treating it “like Tinder”. And judging by the dodgy LinkedIn messages gleefully uploaded by other young women yesterday, she’s got a point. Apps never intended for picking people up are now routinely hijacked for that purpose.
But since the same is true of unlikely places in real life (what, you’ve never been chatted up at a bus stop?) it shouldn’t be impossible for all of us to cope even in this novel environment, basically by remembering that shouting “phwoar” at random strangers or asking if they’re single gets broadly the same response on Twitter that it would in Tesco. There’s a time and a place for flirting, which is why what’s practically de rigueur at a wedding would look downright creepy at a funeral – and slightly desperate on a site people visit once to upload their CVs before wondering for ever more why they bothered.
And if that’s too complicated, here are three simple rules that should keep most men out of trouble. First, if you need to preface something with the words “horrendously politically incorrect”, then you probably don’t want to be saying it to a total stranger in a work context.
Second, if you routinely compliment someone on their looks but never on their thinking, you’re basically saying that you don’t take them remotely seriously. Amazingly, people dislike this.
And third, as ever, it’s all about tone and context. From someone junior at work, “nice dress” can be smarmy; from someone senior, it can be faintly pervy. But from someone who has always treated you as an intellectual equal, isn’t visibly panting or staring down your cleavage and generally isn’t a jerk? I reckon we can all live with that.