Why are we all so desperate to take offence?
LoRRAIne KeLLY, presenter of ITV’s midmorning chat show, has been accused of ‘body-shaming’ Gemma Arterton for describing her as having a ‘normal’ figure during an interview to promote the actress’s new film.
Thousands ‘took to Twitter’ (as the tiresome cliche goes) to complain about the alleged insult. Very quickly the perceived slight had become a case of Kelly actually calling Arterton fat, and from there the outrage spread.
By lunchtime, poor Lorraine was the subject of a full-blown social media lynching, her questioning condemned as ‘uncomfortable’, ‘insulting’ and ‘weird’.
what utter madness. Let’s be clear: Lorraine did not call Arterton fat. She was merely pointing out that compared to most of the half-starved, carb-free celebrity waifs she usually interviews, Arterton (who’s 5ft 7in and a size 10) was pretty normal-looking.
Lorraine probably thought it was something Arterton (who seems pretty dull) might want to talk about — after all, the actress did once say that pressure to be thin was ‘an issue’ in the industry.
Instead the icy expression on the ex-Bond girl’s face made it clear that she considered the assertion unflattering — leaving poor Lorraine digging herself ever deeper.
The question of whether Arterton is or isn’t ‘normal-sized’ remains unanswered. what’s certain, however, is that overreaction to anything other than the blandest and most carefully scripted behaviour — whether from TV presenters, politicians or anyone else in the public eye — is now, to borrow a word, normal.
HAS humankind in all its history ever been so damn touchy? The more cossetted and free our lives become, the more we seek out utterly bogus forms of prejudice or discrimination to get our knickers in a twist about.
I don’t imagine, for example, that the mother of a starving child in Aleppo would be too upset if her daughter were described as looking ‘normal’.
It’s the young who seem to have the thinnest skins, as each generation digs ever deeper to find something fresh to be offended by — from mollycoddled students with their ‘safe spaces’ (where no one can say anything remotely challenging) to the white, highly privileged members of the protest group Black Lives matter — one of whom is called natalie Geraldine Twisleton-wykehamFiennes, for heaven’s sake.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon at home, too. my daughter, who is dyslexic, is lucky enough to go to a school where they give her extra help with her learning. The official name for these classes is Sen (Special educational needs). I can’t remember this, so I once referred to it as ‘special needs class’.
my daughter was horrified. Apparently this is an inappropriate term (obviously, I now jokingly say it as much as possibly just to annoy her).
The point is, what does it matter what her extra lessons are called? At least she gets them. which is more than my generation ever got.
when I exhibited similar difficulties at her age, I was simply labelled ‘backward’ and, once, ‘a bit of a retard’. Can you imagine the outrage if someone called a child either of those things today?
of course there are causes worth fighting for, abuses against the weak and dispossessed that need to be challenged. But if this pattern of hysteria in response to very minor slights continues, our culture will be rendered so sterile that nothing of interest will ever be said or written again.
Future Joseph Conrads (racism) Charles dickenses (anti-semitism) and martin Amises (sexism) will be run out of town before they’ve even had a chance to put prejudice to paper.
As for Shakespeare (all of the above), he’d banished from public life for ever.
If we’re not careful, all traces of humour will soon have been bred out of the human race, followed swiftly by the expunging of intelligence, common sense and any appetite for debate.
we’ll all be reduced to nothing more than nodding dogs, smiling like beatific robots as the world descends into intellectual stagnation.