‘Ride me to Narnia, bitches’
Last year, I wrote a version of this article below as a LinkedIn post. It was a popular post so I thought I’d add it here as it serves as a good example of sexism in the media purporting to be progressive (yes, a year ago – I’m a bit rubbish at keeping my website up-to-date!).
I wrote this piece in response to Channel Four’s release of a spoof public apology video for their ‘overrepresentation’ of diversity. Interestingly, looking now, the video has had 3 million views on YouTube and just over 700 ‘likes’.
The video promo is fronted by newsreader, Phil Gayle, and begins with him directly speaking to camera in sombre tones while the national anthem is played in the background, before moving on to show clips from an array of C4’s shows.
Gayle, a Black man, is I one of (I think) 3 people in the (roughly 50) representations shown that is over the age of 40ish. The other 2 people are white men who speak and represent the ‘PC gone mad’ critique. Certainly, no women over age 40 speak.
I raise this gendered context because the final line spoken by Gayle is ‘ride me to Narnia, bitches’. It’s meant to be an ‘in yer face’ take it or leave it, this is what we’re about kind of message.
I have a problem with it.
‘Bitch’ is almost exclusively used about women and in a derogatory sense (when it is occasionally directed at men, it is also derogatory). The word is often used as a way of silencing women (‘shut up, bitch’) or of suggesting that the woman says or does nasty things (‘she’s a total bitch’). It’s a sexist term, wherever it is used about people.
Carried over into this promo and used generically for all people, it brings those silencing tones with it – the messaging is ‘shut up bitches’ at the end. Interestingly, when I questioned the use of the word on CEO Alex Mahon’s LinkedIn post promoting the piece, someone swiftly stepped in to tell me to ‘step away from my important and vital perspective’ – a version of ‘shut up (bitch?)’. The promo is an enabler of this behaviour, in my view.
If we imagine another derogatory term usually referring to one group of people carried over in this way, I think it helps to illuminate the problem:
‘Ride me to Narnia, puffs’
‘Ride me to Narnia, cissies’
‘Ride me to Narnia, n*****s’
‘Ride me to Narnia, r**ards’
It’s hard to imagine C4 using any of these in a promo about how fabulous its diverse representation is. The normalisation of sexism is at play here. It’s like wallpaper, so much part of the background that many don’t see it.
I am absolutely all for diverse representation. But that does mean *all* and it does mean not using insulting language at the expense of women.
We know that grey-haired women aren’t cool 😉 We are underrepresented on screen (and in production) and we don’t earn the same as male actors when we are there.
We also know that feminists like me have no sense of humour 😉
Out of interest, I looked up C4’s gender pay gap stats, which tell their own story. The link’s in the comments but headlines are:
* women earned 76p for every £1 that men earned (comparing median hourly pay)
* women made up 49.4% of employees in the highest paid quarter, and 71.5% of employees in the lowest paid quarter
* women’s bonus pay was 21.8% lower than men’s (comparing median bonus pay)
Will look forward to a promo film about this one day.
