The Daily Telegraph - Features
The ‘pale, male and stale’ argument doesn’t stand up in these bountiful times
The “pale, male and stale” were getting it from all sides yesterday. First, there was Shakespeare, always an easy villain to cast in the great diversity panto, and new accusations levelled against the Bard are, well, nothing new.
He’s been propagating “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives” for too long – and this has to stop.
Then there’s that bastion of pale maleness, Oxford University, which has so consistently elected members of this prehistoric breed as their chancellor over the centuries that the electoral rules have been changed in order to avoid this happening. And finally, we have the pale, male row surrounding the Garrick club still rumbling on.
It’s a row that has been joyfully reignited once a year for as long as I have been a Telegraph columnist, with men protesting that “white males cannot win”, and women countering this with a deadpan: “And yet they always do.”
Shakespeare is a case in point. He’s been in the top spot for over 400 years, and according to a new taxpayer-funded £800,000 study conducted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, there’s a “disproportionate representation of William Shakespeare in scholarship and performance”.
Which is a bit like saying that Kylian Mbappé takes up too much space on the football scene or that Magnus Carlsen really needs to stop sucking up all the oxygen in the chess world.
“Diversity” is all that matters. The Garrick supposedly makes a mockery of this, as does the long list of white men elected chancellor at Oxford, where committee members have in the past appointed the likes of former prime minister Harold Macmillan, Edward Wood, the 1st Earl of Halifax, who was viceroy of India, and current chancellor Lord Patten of Barnes, who will retire at the end of this academic year. Now that the university’s council has ruled it will vet all candidates, however, “the principles of equality and diversity” are to be observed.
In all three cases, the crime is the same: “exclusion.” Because what do we all want? Inclusivity! Only as with so much woke lingo, I’m struggling to understand the logic. Surely an institution, company, person or body of work can only be “exclusionary” if there is no other option available to us?
Yet we live in a world of endless choice, a society where the number of options available to us on every front can, at times, even be suffocating.
There are countless fine playwrights out there – studied and performed – who are not pale and male. There are women-only clubs (minutes from the Garrick), children’s clubs, cat and dog owner’s clubs, if that happens to be your thing.
Apply “exclusionary” logic to everything that has been branded with the word – the list goes right down to foodstuffs and clothing – and it frequently fails. Meat-based dishes cannot be “un-inclusive” when there is a limitless array of vegan options on offer; “one size” only high-street chains cannot be discriminative, given the abundance of plus-size clothing out there. Whereas they may once have had a point, in our bountiful times the exclusion argument all too often collapses at the first hurdle.
There are, however, instances where we should consider breaking a cycle that has become hardwired. While squabbles about Shakespeare and the Garrick are absurd enough to have become little more than a national pastime, reactions to Oxford’s new vetting procedures are telling. Already critics have accused the university of “managed democracy” and trying to “stitch-up” the next election to ensure that the job doesn’t again go to an older, white, male politician, but perhaps a woman or
We live in a society where the number of options open to us can be suffocating
someone from an ethnic minority.
Would that really be so bad? Not since 1715 has the position been held by anyone other than a leading male politician of the era. Where there is no other option on offer, isn’t it right that we should do whatever possible to level the playing field? Now, were I suddenly to be awarded the chancellorship in the immediate aftermath of this row, I might deliberate over whether to accept the position. I would hope that the committee’s decision is based not on virtue-signalling but merit.
What a shame it is that the “inclusivity” warriors keep letting themselves down. By adopting an opaque – and deeply irritating – language and directing their ire at silly, attention-grabbing targets, they have only succeeded in alienating many. As long as we keep being preached to about “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”, progress will be slow – and fraught with obstacles.