As a 46-year-old mother of three and self-confessed Waitrose Woman, who has put up with decades of snide and sexist comments from men like Gregg Wallace, I can tell you why women like me find his latest comments so enraging.
The 60-year-old co-presenter of MasterChef, who said yesterday on Instagram that the 13 accusations about his inappropriate behaviour on the show had come from a “handful of middle-class women of a certain age,” represents every inappropriate male, pale, stale bloke we’ve had to overcome. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has since stated that his comments were “inappropriate and misogynistic.”
While Wallace has since apologised for the remark, his comments are underpinned by deep-rooted misogyny – the sort we finally have the confidence to challenge in those who should know better.
We were children of the eighties and came of age in the naughty nineties when ‘lads mags’ were all the rage and men like Donald Trump, Hugh Heffner, and Bill Clinton got away with whatever they liked. We are no longer prepared to accept it. We demand that they be held accountable.
When I look back now and think of all the times I’ve been made to feel uncomfortable, from walking into a friend’s father’s study to find Pirelli calendar pictures of barely covered women’s breasts and being told, confusingly, that it was ‘just art’ to an unwelcome pat on the bottom from a random man in a bar, it makes me shudder.
Of all the times I’ve been tailgated by male drivers, from those driving white vans to those in sports cars, to the ‘cheer up love!’ or wolf whistles from men, often those working on a building site, to the multitude of mansplaining, hostile comments and messages I’ve unwittingly received on social media as a journalist for the national press.
The truth, as the brilliant feminist writer and activist Gloria Steinem once said, will set you free, but first, it will piss you off.
I remember when I was in my late twenties and working as a deputy editor, being at a table of men at an event we were running. Many of them were business owners, and the topic of maternity pay came up. Several looked at me and joked that they wouldn’t employ me because I was “a woman of child-bearing age.” “You’d only go off and get pregnant, wouldn’t you?” one said. I was shocked but tried to brush it off. I think I might have even laughed along with them. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t right.
This is why comments like this from men like Wallace, who has been married four times, are so irksome.
Yet unfortunately, it is generally only women like me, who are, reluctant as I am to admit it, privileged — be it that we are financially secure or in a prestigious job, as is the case of television presenters Kirsty Wark, one of Wallace’s accusers, or Ulrika Johnson who said that Wallace made a grossly inappropriate rape “joke” when she was on the show. Or, even, also the daughter of a baron, à la Kirstie Allsopp, who said Wallace “boasted” of a sex act with his then partner while she was on the show and made her feel uncomfortable.
We are the sorts of women who are not only fed up with this sort of inappropriate “banter,” but also have the resources, confidence and economic stability to call this behaviour out and brave the consequences. We are no longer dependent or reliant on men like Wallace for our job prospects or financial wellbeing. We are no longer trying to seek approval or validation from them.
Our partners and/or husbands, if we have one, have evolved and wouldn’t dare to say or speak in the sort of way Wallace does. Nor, incidentally, would my 80-year-old dad or either of my two sons, who are 12 and 15 and who, despite being raised at an age where the likes of Andrew Tate are rearing their ugly heads. They know what is and isn’t appropriate.
Yet, unfortunately, younger women or those who aren’t in such a privileged position as us, who might be starting out in their careers, might not have the power or the confidence to challenge men like Wallace. Men who have, by virtue of the fact they work on a popular, long-running show on the BBC and are high profile from being beamed into our living rooms, week after week, able to get away with disrespecting women for far too long.
The fact is, as this latest furore shows, with women, including Labour politician Rupa Huq, calling for MasterChef to be taken off air, the tide has turned on men like Wallace. He represents the sort of dinosaur we no longer want to have to deal with and an outlook and arrogance which belong to a bygone age of chauvinism.
I hope Gregg Wallace comes to regret picking a fight with us middle-class women of a certain age. Because, as he is hopefully realising by now, we are not the sort he wants to mess with.
