Bullies

“This is your Northern Line via Bank train,” says the announcer at Highgate Station. As it happened it WAS the train I wanted to take, but that still didn’t make it MY train, and fifty per cent of people waiting on the platform were waiting for the Charing Cross branch. What’s wrong with “this is A Northern Line via Bank train?”

This sort of ghastly misappropriation of the English language is plainly part of an attempt to make official or formal language seem more cozy. Sadly, to my ears, it’s just as jolting as someone using “myself” to sound fancy when they simply mean “me.” “Who can I talk to about this problem?” “You can talk to myself.”

A rather unpleasant woman decided to squeeze herself into the tube carriage behind me as I made my hour-and-a-half commute to Peckham yesterday morning. She seemed entirely unaware that the space in front of me was being filled by my suitcase, but clearly felt I ought to be standing further forward, so kept thrusting her belly into my back and bum, which I found highly aggressive and, actually, a bit repulsive. I wondered how she would have responded to a man standing behind her doing what she was doing to me. Police have been contacted for lesser issues...

One of the things that #meToo has triggered in me is a desperate desire for parity in the way that we respond to issues relating to gender. These things have to work both ways. Yes, men CAN behave terribly, but, despite being pretty sure the woman’s motives yesterday morning were aggressive rather than sexual, I still felt a little violated by what she was doing.

Women can also be bullies and, in fact, throughout my career, I can pinpoint several times when I’ve been bullied by women, and actually fewer times where I’ve been bullied by men. I remember, on one occasion, a female executive producer literally screaming at me on the phone as I was trying to enter a recording session for the film we were working on. She shouted so viciously that I entered the studio shaking so much I had to sit down. The same person was thrown out of our sound edit for violently throwing books at the equipment when she didn’t get her way.

Strangely enough, I’m not sure I recognised that I was being bullied back then. I knew it was unreasonable behaviour and I knew it made me very distressed, but I don’t think it would have occurred to me that women even COULD have bullied men. In fact, I think many people, women included, still believe it’s impossible for a woman to bully a man. Men don’t have feelings, after all...

Within the last few months I experienced another dose of bullying from a woman, and, for the first time in my life, I called her out on it. She was utterly incensed, but, rather tellingly, instead of apologising, or asking what specifically she was doing which made me feel bullied, she instantly went on the attack and played the gender card: “if a man had said the same to you, would you have accused HIM of bullying?” Did my comments stop the bullying? No. They made it considerably worse.

And that’s how the viscous circle begins. A man is told that he can’t possibly feel bullied, and the bullying continues until he can bear it no more, and he puffs himself up to full size and growls like a lion. At which point he is instantly told he’s a bully!