Mary Whitehouse - a reappraisal

I wonder if all the female TR campaigners will similarly look back at GC feminists and people like JK Rowling differently when so much more shit comes to pass in the future.

That's just false, there is a tiny minority of people, often part of fringe religious cults, who think that way. Among conservatives generally, even religious conservatives in the US, there are plenty of accomplished an influential women. Women in politics, women with careers, women in academia.

I know lots of conservative women of that type and they tend to be well read, active, often highly educated, they aren't more likely to have stereotypical feminine hobbies, etc. They do tend to deal with motherhood and family life in a different way if they have kids, but you could also argue that is because they value motherhood very highly - which is not an "unfeminist" thing.

It is much easier to operate on the level of "do I like or dislike this person?" rather than engaging with a set of, possibly conflicting, ideas.

This point in visual form.

But do be careful what you wish for.

This is so utterly tedious. Be careful that I wish people had listened to her about the harmful effects of porn which is causing no end of misery in our society today? Why can’t I wish for that? Wishing for that does not in any way also mean that I am wishing that all of her other ideas and beliefs were listened to.

I wish people, society as a whole, would bore off with the idea that everything everyone ever says, or has ever said, in the present or from people long dead, has to be acceptable in the purity spiral for it to make anything they’ve ever said credible or acceptable.

Even the whole “stopped clock” comments about people are utterly trite. Come up with a new way to point out to everyone that you struggle to admit people you don’t like said something you agree with. Grown ups are able to agree on things and disagree on things and acknowledge that it doesn’t make you the devil incarnate for doing so.

Oh, and on the point of women knowing their place and staying in the kitchen - (a) Mary Whitehouse herself didn't do this, and neither did Margaret Thatcher, whom she admired; and (b) her granddaughter talks about her on the archive documentary linked above, and says MW did very little cooking and other routine housework, she left it to her husband and anyone else who could be pressed into service. So much for forcing all women to comply with those gender stereotypes.

I don't think anybody's saying we should implement everything Mary Whitehouse wanted. One of the things that annoys and worries me about our social media-dominated world and 'cancel' culture is this tendency to say 'X is wrong about this, so X is a bad person and I won't listen to anything X says'.

Mary Whitehouse worked as an art teacher, i dont think she was in favour of women "knowing their place".
Is not always a package deal with beliefs.
My Grandmother was a committed Christian of the same vintage as MW who definitely believed in no sex outside marriage and agreed with MW about protecting children from adult content but she was a highly educated career woman (hospital consultant) who was not racist.

As I recall, MW was anti-abortion, severely homophobic and in favour of strict enforcement of gender stereotypes.

'Women, know your place; stay in the kitchen and keep the home proper for your man.' ... 'Gay people are morally corrupt abominations.' ... 'Women and girls, you have no rights to control of your own body especially when a man has used it.' (IIRC)

OK , a stopped clock is right now and then. But do be careful what you wish for.

I wonder who personifies everything that is wrong in the 2020s?
For some reason a particular face has come into my mind.

LMAO. Nailed it in one.

We only need to look at the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known as Liberty) and the Liberal Party (now subsumed into the LibDems) to see what can happen when ill-informed and over-optimistic people take others at face value and suspend all critical thinking.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26352378

PIE [Paedophile Information Exchange] was formed in 1974. It campaigned for "children's sexuality". It wanted the government to axe or lower the age of consent. It offered support to adults "in legal difficulties concerning sexual acts with consenting 'under age' partners". The real aim was to normalise sex with children.

Journalist Christian Wolmar remembers their tactics. "They didn't emphasise that this was 50-year-old men wanting to have sex with five-year-olds. They presented it as the sexual liberation of children, that children should have the right to sex," he says.

It's an ideology that seems chilling now. But PIE managed to gain support from some professional bodies and progressive groups. It received invitations from student unions, won sympathetic media coverage and found academics willing to push its message.

... One of PIE's key tactics was to try to conflate its cause with gay rights. On at least two occasions the Campaign for Homosexual Equality conference passed motions in PIE's favour.

There was a lot of pushback, but the NCCL allowed PIE to affiliate to it and itself campaigned to lower the age of consent to 14. I expect they'd rather forget all this now.

Some of the tactics mentioned in this article may seem familiar from a current controversial campaign. Forced teaming is the term, I believe.

If I could have apound for every time my DH says, 'bring back Mary Whitehouse', I would be rich.

She was right about a lot of things. We are more prudish in a lot of ways but far more liberal in a lot of damaging ways.

For some reason a particular face has come into my mind.

Nothing will change my opinion that she was everything that was wrong with the U.K. in the 60s and 70s

I wonder who personifies everything that is wrong in the 2020s?

Ultimately people don’t need someone like MW to coddle them. They have an off button on their tv.

I think ofcom and the watershed are fairly positive things which allow choice while still encouraging responsibility.

Lots of terrible people also achieve positive things.

It was the racism that I had issues with.

Whilst people might look back and read about her or see a film about her and think she was a force for good. Nothing will change my opinion that she was everything that was wrong with the U.K. in the 60s and 70s

Stuffy, puritanical and religious with a large helping of homophobia and racism thrown.
If a programme was about domestic violence or racism then the message of the programme would be lost as she was too busy concentrating on counting words than to take notice of what context those words were used in.

Ultimately people don’t need someone like MW to coddle them. They have an off button on their tv. Comparing audience numbers from the 60s and 70s to today we can see people aren’t bothered with game shows, reality tv and soap operas and have pressed the off button.
Anything we want is at our fingertips it is up to us what we watch.

She was right about some things and wrong about others. It’s really not a difficult concept to grasp; it’s just like the rest of us.

I struggle to get past her views on homosexuality.

MW was from the conservative side of feminism - which has tended to be unrecognized as such by liberal and left wing feminists. Frankly I think it was convenient to do so because it allowed their views on women's issues to be discredited without really addressing them as the considered views of women. Her views on abortion are good example, women are actually more likely than men to think abortion should be restricted to some degree, but if you frame that as an anti-woman view you can dismiss it out of hand.

But yes, she had a good sense of the way in which the things people think about and what they do form their attitudes toward sex more generally. If sex becomes a commodity or a no-strings hobby activity (in person or through a screen) inevitably that will affect how people think about it's use and misuse.

It wasn't a popular view at the time among liberals and not only with regard to sex related subjects. There was an idea that society could function just fine with the removal of all kinds of normative behaviours and structures and institutions that might seem old fashioned. Both serious ones and less serious, but there are a lot of cases where, once they are gone, people realize they did actually serve a function.

I'm not up for rewriting history about Whitehouse. I remember her not just as a hyper-religious vilely homophobic forced birther but also as a woman who believed that women should keep their legs closed until marriage, thus perpetuating 'loose women' myths. She was not on the side of feminism.

Thanks for the link to the radio 4 doc, will listen tomorrow. She was clearly a remarkable woman with a great raft of achievements and ovaries of steel. Again, teen me was only aware of her being laughed at by the alternative comedy scene, including Spitting Image. And of course, there was "The Mary Whitehouse Experience" pisstake comedy moniker, 4 privileged, Cambridge graduate males and a good dollop of misogyny that us cool girls laughed along with. God, the benefit of hindsight, eh?

I was born in 1976 so only knew what other said
I mostly heard she was homophobic

In 2008, I saw a drama about her. So I read up on her and I realised that barring the homophobia, she made a lot of good points.

That abuse of a woman does look rather familiar in the 2020s, doesn't it DomesticatedZombie?

In November 1974, she wrote to the attorney general suggesting the law be amended to ensure that juries were 50% female.

Ofcom has its origins in the Broadcasting Standards Council set up in 1988 - the outcome of her decades long push for ordinary citizens to have an ongoing role in the monitoring of broadcasting standards.

She braved death threats, verbal abuse, actual assaults and, in one case, students lowering an effigy of her on a rope as she spoke, often showing a remarkable sense of humour.

Wow.