Celia Walden Why I love being called ‘love’
CELIA WALDEN
‘We’ve taken things to a whole new level: one where human beings are now capable of feeling “offended” by the warmth and kindness of others’
Two weeks ago, a black-cab driver called me “babycakes”. I thought I’d misheard, but then he did it again and something inside me snapped. Enough. Enough of being spoken to like a child when I’m a 41-year-old woman with a child of my own. Enough of this casual sexism that grinds me down and belittles my achievements day after day. It was time to take action. So I took down the cabbie’s licence number, called the Public Carriage Office and lodged a complaint that I hope has led to that man’s dismissal. Because if we all work together, maybe, just maybe, we can make this world a better place.
Of course none of this actually happened – aside from the “babycakes” bit. A black-cab driver did in fact call me that most ludicrous of epithets, twice, but since I’m not a thin-skinned maniac in desperate search of victimhood, and since I actively enjoy being called “love”, “darling”, “sweetheart”, or any other term used to soften the hard edges of everyday life, I laughed. I laughed and I carried on laughing as the cabbie helped me with my bags (strike two), and waited until I had shut my front door to drive off – a gesture that always seems astonishingly sweet in a world where few are generous with their time and chivalry can be recompensed with a lawsuit.
I wonder how Beth Bellamy would have reacted to being called “babycakes”? Bellamy is the lady who has decided to boycott Tesco after being called “darling” by the supermarket’s female checkout staff. Poor little poppet feels the word is both “patronising” and “offensive”, and this is only a departure from the usual attentionseeking faux feminist griping because there is no sexist or sexual element to her complaint at all. So while the French are wrangling over whether to make wolf-whistling illegal, we’ve taken things to a whole new level: one where human beings are now capable of feeling “offended” by the warmth and kindness of others.
I’d explain to Beth Bellamy, and anyone who backs her campaign against human kindness, what a term of endearment is (and how they call them “sweet nothings” because they’re intended to be inconsequential), but I still don’t think she’d get it. You see, just like Ashley Judd, the American actress who publicly upbraided an LAX airport official last month for calling her “sweetheart” and made a Facebook video expressing the mental pain this “experience” had inflicted upon her, Ms Bellamy was looking for something to feel offended about. She was longing for something to feel offended about.
In that respect, I do think we could help her out, as well as the Ashley Judds of the world. Female genital mutilation still affects 200million women and girls: they could be offended by that. Terrorist material that leads directly to the massacre of innocent children is still knowingly being broadcast by internet giants: they could be offended by that. Over in North Korea, there’s a guy in a really bad mood with his finger on the nuclear button, and a few days ago a bomb was detonated on a London Underground train.
When hate and evil are so omnipresent, are we really going to take a microscope to the most humane forms of behaviour in the hope of finding an infinitesimal slight in every interaction? Are we really going to rob those interactions of the two things that elevate and bind us: warmth and humour? Or should we instead show proof of the tolerance we’re always asking of others? Yes – even in the face of gratuitous verbal assaults like “love”, “darling”, “sweetpea” and “babycakes”.
Sweet nothings
When did it become offensive to call someone ‘darling’?