On The Mock Horror Over Political Profanity

Scoop

15-05-2025

Heavens to Betsy. Let me get this right. In her own opinion column, a female journalist (the fearsome Angela Vance) used a bad word to refer to female politicians who had just extinguished the ability of about 150,000 women to get fair pay for the work they do. The nation reeled, and expressed its outrage – mainly at the journalist for using that bad word.
Without a trace of irony, Brooke Van Velden, the ACT politician who is leading the government's attack on the principles and practices of pay equity, said this in Parliament about Vance's us of the C-word and other derisive terms: 'The women of this government are hard-working, dedicated and strong. No woman in this Parliament, nor in this country, should be subjected to sex-based discrimination."
Good grief. The low-paid women that Van Velden and her well-paid cronies have just dumped on so harshly – with actions, not words – are just as 'hard working, dedicated and strong.' Surely, they didn't deserve to be 'subjected to sex-based discrimination' either, as imposed on them by Van Velden and her colleagues.
Should we have been surprised at the hypocrisy of Van Velden/ACT/the government playing the victim card in this context? Not really. It seems par for the course. Meaning: the ACT Party's pearl clutching over the C-word stands in marked contrast to the message they have repeatedly given to everyone on the receiving end of hate speech. Here's what David Seymour has to offer when someone else is on the receiving end:
' Free speech is a bedrock of modern New Zealand. That means sometimes hearing words and ideas that challenge us. [My emphasis.] If we sacrifice such a fundamental principle, we are losing something precious. Freedom of expression is central to who we are as Kiwis.
So to everyone else, ACT is saying: 'suck it up' in the name of free speech. But when harsh criticism is directed at them...All proprieties must then be respected – whether it be by journalists like Vance, or by the Te Pāti Māori MPs who issued a haka challenge to ACT's Treaty Principles Bill.
Seymour is quite the walking contradiction. On the Te Pāti Māori haka, ACT has come out as the Punishment Party ('They got off lightly.') Currently, they're hardliners when it comes to what free speech and which cultural expressions are deemed permissible within the Parliamentary sanctum. Radical conservatives, or conservative radicals? Or maybe, just hypocrites.
The Victorian Gent
Across the Tasman, the conservative coalition led by Peter Dutton has just been hammered by voters who felt Dutton was tone deaf on issues affecting women. Here, feigning outrage over Vance's alleged misogyny enables the Luxon government to dodge some of the flak for the misogyny central to its blitzkrieg against the pay equity legislation.
That said, the public furore over the use of the C-word in this instance has also been an oddly illuminating Rorschach Test. On RNZ for instance, a couple of Victorian Gents pondered whether Vance might have been better advised to use less 'extreme' language to express her opinions, given that she did have other options. Maybe she was that angry though, they surmised. (Still, no excuse for bad language, right?)
Moreover, they also intimated, unless Vance, her publishers at Stuff, Chris Hipkins etc did not renounce and denounce such language...well then, so much for their ability in future to credibly criticise the abuse that's commonly levelled at politicians!
To which one could reply: mate, that would depend entirely on what vile things the politicians may choose to do in future. Long ago, Tom Wolfe had this to say about the Victorian Gentlemen who, he felt, were always trying to set the tone of acceptable media discourse:
In all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole... Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one's private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances.
Right. I would argue that day in week out the media's tonal problems have less to do with genitalia, and far more to do with an excess of gentility. One of the few interesting commentaries on this whole non- affair was by Anna Rawhiti-Connell in The Spinoff. She noted a double standard, in that using male genitalia as a means of criticism is barely an issue, and she's right about that. On an almost daily basis, there is good reason to conclude that David Seymour is a cock acting like a dick, and yet no-one would even blush if you said so, publicly.
And as for expressions of misogyny...there was hardly the same outpouring of national outrage earlier this year when one female politician – Education Minister Erica Stanford – referred to another female politician – Labour's Jan Tinetti – as a quote, 'stupid bitch' unquote. With all that in mind, as Rawhiti-Connell suggests, there is a strong case for actively defusing the C -word.
Thankfully, we can turn to popular media, in the shape of the tech industry satire Silicon Valley to see how to do this. Because context is everything – right? – here's how the woman at the centre of a job interview scene at a tech start-up was being considered for employment:
And then...once Alice, the woman in question, gets the drift, she decides to put these guys through the wringer. Warning: there is more calm, objective and satirical use of the C-word in this 57 second excerpt than you would have thought to be humanly possible:
Footnote One: Friends, we should have seen this coming. In all likelihood Brooke Van Velden will continue to play the victim card, any chance she gets. Yet before she scrapped 33 pay equity claims and post-postponed (at best) and entirely prevented (at worst) the chance of any group of women workers in future being able to launch a successful pay equity claim…there had been a lot more in a similar vein.
As Workplace Minister, Van Velden has all but exempted small business from health and safety requirements. She has also abolished the ability of workers in the gig economy from seeking redress in court for the unfair pay and conditions they were forced to swallow in order to get the job at all.
In short, Van Velden has set out to be a radical politician, one more than willing to demolish the procedures and protections essential to achieving a just balance in the workplace. In doing so, she has cashed in her right to be thin-skinned. Regardless, she is expecting as of right, to be shielded from any fierce blowback for what she is doing. Some people really do expect to have it all.