When I read a headline proclaiming that viewers were “furious” at an “inappropriate” outfit a guest wore on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen at the weekend, I was intrigued.
What could have caused this outrage?
Halloween is fast approaching. Perhaps a guest chose to wear a bad-taste costume or one which was too gory for daytime TV?
This scandal centres around a cooking segment. Did the offender wear something highly flammable, like a shirt made of crepe paper or a tie that had been pre-doused in lighter fluid?
Given the array of dangerous and distasteful attire I had conjured up in my mind, you can imagine my disappointment when I scrolled down further into the article and discovered what actually happened.
There were no guts. No gore. No hazardous haberdashery. Just a run of the mill ’Woman Wore Clothes and the Internet is Mad’ news story.
Kate, one of the owners of the popular St Andrews takeaway The Cheesy Toast Shack, appeared on Saturday Kitchen along with her husband, Sam.
Ahead of the show, Kate told The Courier that she wanted to use the slot to highlight local businesses.
“We want to shine a light on local traders. Sam was born in Dundee and is proud of his roots’’ she said.
A noble aim indeed. But unfortunately, it seems angry people on the internet had other ideas.
A normal person might have watched Kate’s appearance on the show and thought “mmm, cheese toastie”.
They might have felt happy for a small local business getting a prime-time slot on one of the UK’s most popular cooking programmes.
But people who spend too much time online don’t react to things like normal people do.
Their lives are a never-ending hunt for reasons to be angry and offended. In their minds, this grievance-scavenging gives them the green light to then be mean to (and about) people they don’t know.
The outfit which provoked such ire was a top which – and you may want to sit down for this – showed Kate’s collar bone and, whisper it…bare shoulders.
Some expressed sentiments that amounted to “put it away’”.
Others said Kate’s outfit was distracting them from the recipe.
I would gently suggest that if a woman’s shoulder flesh is too discombobulating for you then you shouldn’t be anywhere near a hot stove in the first place.
Others wrapped their weird fixation with her clothes up in concern.
“What if her top falls down on live TV!?” they asked.
Well it didn’t, did it, Steve? So you can uncross your fingers now and stop squinting so hard at the television screen.
A lot of the comments directed towards Kate were predictably crude, cruel and sexualised. That shouldn’t be an expected feature of appearing on television but for many women, it is.
Sexism is the problem, not how women dress
And the thing is, we can’t win. Too much make-up attracts comments, but no make-up does too. A woman wearing the baggiest outfit she can find will be mocked just as relentlessly as the woman who shows her shoulders or knees.
The problem isn’t women and how they present themselves.
It’s the old school sexism that means a woman is always judged by her appearance and the new-age digital tools that make that sexism easier to express than ever before.
I doubt Kate will pay much attention to the silly headlines and the unasked-for opinions of random internet strangers.
She has a successful business, a family that loves her and an endless supply of delicious cheese toasties at her disposal. She’s winning.
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