Each day, like credulous children, we rediscover misogyny anew as if putting our hands in the earth and pulling out something astonishing. What is this strange thing? What is its nature?
The unearthed object this week is the presenter and judge of MasterChef: the ludicrously named Gregg Wallace. (He is irate if you miss the second “g” because he is the thin skinned one). Wallace, who is off TV for now, is accused of making sexually explicit comments to at least thirteen women over seventeen years, including Kirsty Wark of Newsnight. He allegedly asked women for massages; told a woman he wasn’t wearing underwear; asked a lesbian colleague rude questions; walked around the studio with a sock on his penis.
This is not flirting, even gauche flirting, because it has nothing to do with seduction or desire. This is a demonstration of masculine power, designed to put women where they belong: on your back or on your knees and, if that is implausible, at a professional disadvantage. Consciously or not, sex talk in workplaces is about diminishing women, and taking their space for yourself: reminding us what we are really for in their eyes, and thus inhibiting both our pleasure in work, and, often, our ability to do it well. Many women flee it. The price is paid in sundered dreams, and not those of the perpetrator.
All women know this. At my first day at a national newspaper a senior reporter told me I looked like Monica Lewinsky: and would I like a cigar? This, of course, was a reference to a sex game Lewinsky played with Bill Clinton. I knew what was required of me, were I to have a second day at a newspaper: I giggled. I may have even tossed my hair while thinking: what a fool. A former cabinet minister said something so sexually explicit to me I refuse to repeat it. He laughed when he said it, because of my discomfort. It felt like theft. Women, when they complain of “banter”, are often accused of not being team players. The opposite is true.
As always, the BBC is a disgrace. You might think they would have learned from the James Savile catastrophe: the BBC – and the hospitals he haunted – were just about the only organisations that knew for sure that he was abusing children, and still they junked the Newsnight report that exposed Savile in favour of hagiography when he died. (Twice Newsnight has tried to save the BBC. Its thanks was to be stripped to be the bone).
Wallace made a bewildered statement, almost pitiable for its lack of understanding
There is similar idiocy now. First, they failed to remove Wallace, even though Wark complained about him in 2011: if Wallace is incapable of controlling himself, surely the broadcaster must? Then, news of his removal from MasterChef led the BBC News channel, though Syria is aflame. It was piece of humblebrag, and posturing: too much, too late. The BBC snatched defeat from victory. Again.
Wallace made a bewildered statement, almost pitiable for its lack of understanding. He said that in two decades of working on MasterChef there were thousands of women who hadn’t complained about him. The best analysis of this pathetic claim was on X, of course, which imagined Peter Sutcliffe saying: “During 20 years in Yorkshire, I met over 4000 women and only 13 of them had a problem with me”. Quite so.
Then he blamed, “middle class women of a certain age” for inciting the fury against him. He means female newspaper columnists and broadcasters, who can’t help but both mind sexual harassment and be of a certain age. By the time you are a newspaper columnist or broadcaster of a certain age it is harder to take things from you. Where Wallace and similar are concerned we are immune.
I have lived through at least three waves of feminism. They are rightly characterized as tides because you cannot stop a tide, even if it is covered with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion paperwork. That we are kinder now than we used to be is a myth. In America women die from lack of reproductive rights. In Afghanistan women are in chains. I hear the great drumbeat of misogyny under so-called progressive politics too: are we really for the Houthis of Sudan and, if so, why? Anyway, this is the outrage of the week. No.10 has issued a statement, and there are calls for MasterChef to be “paused”, as if it has been subject to chemical warfare, leaving young chefs in despair. Wallace’s career will likely be destroyed. Then, nothing.
Tanya Gold is a London Standard columnist
