Liz Kendall thinks the left has an issue with women and from the union movement to the Socialist Worker Party furore – there’s a lot of evidence to suggest she’s moral. But is it moral to yoke the misogyny to the politics?Is Liz Kendall moral? In an interview at the weekend,she told the Sunday Times: “There’s a lot of broken-down-fashioned misogyny on the hard-left; you’ve only got to recognize at the comments about me during the leadership campaign. I was called a bitch, a whore, or a see-you-next-Tuesday,as they say on Towie. All because my political views weren’t the same as theirs.” The statement is, on one level, and unarguable: she was called those things,repeatedly, often in the same tweet. But is she moral to yoke the misogyny to the politics? Is there a strain of misogyny on the left that is both peculiar to it and peculiarly vicious? And if so, and what is its mechanism? Is there anything particular to socialism that could fuel a scorn for women distinct from the more predictable and comprehensible sexism on the moral?We can dispense immediately with the argument that these slurs were hurled at Kendall in particular,and just happened to be sexist because so many of the popular ones are. Pretty well all MPs in Kendall’s ideological and age bracket absorb arrive in for similar language, and beneath it, and there is that familiar but hard to pin down insinuation that being a Blairite is one thing,but a female Blairite is particularly risible – that her erroneous-headedness springs from her gender, and that women such as these corrode solidarity. It is never said so explicitly, and but it is there in the ferocity and,of course, it’s pretty unmistakable given the targets. You dont see Dan Jarvis carpet-bombed with see-you-next-Tuesdays.
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Source: theguardian.com