Ann Widdecombe became a British Member of Parliament in 1987. A Conservative, she was socially at the right of her party, opposing LGBT rights and abortion and even supporting the return of the death penalty. When in the Home Office, she ruled that prisoners who give birth during their term of imprisonment should be shackled, and she left the Anglican church in favour of the Roman Catholic church when the former allowed women to become priests.
In short, Ann Widdecombe is an objectionable woman with prehistoric attitudes and the power, during her lengthy 23 years as an MP, to enact them into law. And yet, at the time, you would think that her worst sin was failing to live up to feminine standards of beauty.
With so much to legitimately criticise, Widdecombe should be an easy target. She consistently voted against laws such as equalising the age of consent for gay men, writing “one of the sundry horrors for which this Government is likely to be remembered will be that it gave its imprimatur to sodomy at 16“. She wrote an amendment against repealing Section 28, worked to restrict access to abortion services, and voted to limit laws that would aim to reduce climate change.
But you would be forgiven, if you saw comments about her throughout the nineties and beyond, for believing that the worst thing she had ever done was fail to – what? Have plastic surgery? Lose weight?
In recent months she has come out of her political retirement. She stood as an MEP candidate for the Brexit Party and won, so we have more Widdecombe coverage to look forward to for the remainder of our time in the European Union.
I guess she was perceived to fail to care about her appearance, which is a deadly depravity for a woman. But it is not just women who get this treatment. This week, I saw Nigel Farage – guilty of so very many genuinely awful things – criticised for the state of his teeth, while Trump is consistently laughed at because of his weight.
Don’t make me defend Farage and Trump, too
Somebody’s appearance is an easy target. There are no objective ways to assess whether somebody is attractive or not and, for women in particular, being considered to be anywhere on the attractiveness scale can work against you. Too pretty? Bimbo. Too ugly? Hag.
So if we’re talking and you bring up Widdecombe’s terrible voting record, I will join you in slating her. I could do that for hours. But if you bring up her breast size or her facial features or her weight, I will stick up for her with a vehemence I don’t often make visible. We should not care about those things, and we are hurting others when we are cruel about them.
If we call her fat and laugh, then anybody else who has ever been called fat will know you are also laughing at them, too.
If we call her ugly and cringe, then anybody else who has ever been called ugly will know that you are also cringing at them, too.
If we point at Farage’s mouth and groan, then anybody else whose teeth have ever been mocked will know that you are also mocking them, too.
Choosing to criticise somebody over their appearance rather than their actions creates toxicity. And the people you are hurting are those around you. Those on your side. Those you love.
Who cares if Trump eats McDonalds food all the time, for instance? The people who care are those who point out that he’s fat, or alternatively those who want to highlight his weight without being too overt. So while I don’t eat McDonalds food all the time I see the laughter and know that, if they could, they would be aiming the same humiliation at my fat body.
It’s not as if there are not legitimate other things to criticise these people for. Each of these three examples have a plethora of terrible decisions and abominable actions that we could talk about for hours on end. But it’s Widdecombe or Trump’s hair, not their votes or their laws, that come up repeatedly.
Because when you fat shame somebody you hate, you are also fat shaming those you love who are fat. There is no way around this. They see you laughing at somebody for a feature they share, and they feel detested and disgraced. They feel shame. Trump may or may not care about those who laugh at his appearance but those around you do care when you attack a feature they, too, have.
It is fat shaming. It is poverty shaming. It is working class shaming. It is racist. And it is disablist. There are elements of each of these intersections in attacking somebody for their appearance and, on the left, we must work to eliminate this aspect of bias from our political criticism and worldview.
Photo: Ithmus