Fergus Finlay: We need to take a stand and make misogyny a criminal offence

A computer-generated pornographic image of Gráinne Seoige was circulated online prior to the election in November.

Another woman raises her head and decides to have a go at politics. Good on her. Except this was Gráinne Seoige, who had done nothing wrong except to show a bit of ambition for public service. So someone decides to attack and demean her by using artificial intelligence to make a pornographic image of her and put it online.

She’s not the first woman to be attacked for having the temerity to show a public face, although this may be the first time AI was used. Again and again, women in public life are being made the object of disgusting misogyny. In fact, women are being driven out of public life by it.

Can we not just make misogyny a crime? I’m serious — could we not actually legislate to take misogyny seriously? More than just sickening abuse of women, an actual hate crime, perpetrated exclusively by men against women? A crime manifested in specific acts, where a motive doesn’t have to be proved because there never is any real motive. So the only proof needed that a crime had been committed would be the establishment of facts.

Many years ago, when I was a lad, I was sort of in charge of a battle between post office white-collar workers and their employer over working conditions. In the course of it I discovered a little piece of legislation called the Office Premises Act. It dated from 1958, and it imposed certain minimum standards on offices all over the country (and there were post offices everywhere!).

Breaches of the act were criminal offences. Not huge criminal offences — the courts could impose a fine of 20 pounds on the minister if he was found guilty, and a fiver a day if the offence continued. It was never going to break the bank, but no minister wanted to find himself in court on a criminal charge.

The beauty of it was that I didn’t have to prove motive or intent. I just had to measure the offices, take a photograph of the loo and the access to the loo, and take out a District Court summons.

Over a year I did that up and down the country and we won every single case — and little by little standards began to change. 

It was all about the facts. That was the lesson I learned from that experience — understand the facts, express them correctly and truthfully, and there’s a good chance the law will be on your side

If you’ll forgive me putting it this way, that’s the beauty of misogyny too. The facts of misogyny are simple and clear. Misogyny is hatred. The Concise Oxford Dictionary is never far from my desk when I’m writing. It’s on page 758. “Hatred of women”. From the Greek for “hatred of women”. Simple, clear, and, in my view, ought to be the basis of a law. A law that makes misogyny a crime. A punishable crime.

There are already some crimes that have misogyny at their hearts. Rape and sexual abuse are misogyny. So is physical abuse and domestic violence. So is controlling and coercive behaviour. Once proven in a court of law — often after trials that are more traumatic for the victim of the crime than for anyone else — they can be punished.

But only after they have been proven. The facts are always contested in cases like that. Intent must be proved. There will be attempts sometimes to make the person who has been abused complicit in their abuse, or to blur the lines around consent. We’ve all read reports of those trials. We know the courage and resolve it can take for someone who has been abused to face their abuser in court.

But a trial for misogyny would require none of that. If a man uses artificial intelligence to create pornographic images of a woman and put them online, that’s misogyny. If a man posts threats or insults to a woman’s social media, that’s misogyny. If women are treated to double standards in the workplace — a woman should never be allowed on a building site or to join the army — that’s misogyny. If a man constantly makes women the butt of crude remarks or inappropriate jokes, that’s misogyny. It’s all about the facts.

Objections

I can hear the objections already. Sure, some examples of misogyny are easy. But if you’re not careful about definitions you’re going to end up blaming things like unequal pay on misogyny, or the fact that not enough company CEOs are women. Sometimes, that’s just the way things are (yeah, right), nothing to do with hatred of women.

And it’s just another example of wokeism, isn’t it? Have you no sense of humour? Branding a joke or a silly picture as misogyny is another step on the road to killing free speech, isn't it. Another manifestation of the hatred of men that is consuming western society?

There are powerful people on social media now, men with enormous followings, who preach misogyny to young men and boys. They intellectualise it, and they pretend it’s something else, but they have contributed to a rise of hatred.

And maybe they don’t realise that hatred leads to violence. It is on the rise everywhere, and it has led to a virtual epidemic of sexual violence

There are fantastic initiatives in place to stress the importance of consent, but I sometimes wonder if a losing battle is being fought. The conflation of misogyny with free speech is a deeply troubling development. Witness, for example, the appalling speech made by JD Vance in Munich the other day, when he explicitly compared the struggle against hate with the death of democracy.

We have to address it. And we have to address it without the fear being generated by entirely spurious arguments about free speech. The idea that the principles of free speech can be used to justify hate and the promulgation of violence against women is an obscenity. Any man who uses artificially generated pornography to demean or degrade a woman is placing her at risk, just as much as if he were lurking outside her house with a knife.

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There’s a big problem of course. Laws are made by men. Court cases are often conducted by men. And we’re all complicit. I haven’t stood up often enough in the face of sexism. I’ve laughed at the jokes and refused to call out the demeaning remarks.

There are, however, two men in charge of our government now. I don’t know them well but I believe they are both men who have no truck whatsoever with misogyny, and they are surrounded by women, in their personal and professional lives, who know exactly what misogyny means. They understand all too well, I reckon, what a scourge misogyny is — how it demeans not just the women at whom it is aimed but everyone.

They could legislate. They’ll be attacked as woke, treated as enemies of free speech, but they know it’s a lie. If they take the issue seriously, they could turn back a tide of hate that is doing nothing but damage. And they could leave a legacy that we would all be grateful for.