How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

permanently outraged. When were you last offended on somebody else’s behalf? This morning I saw a Facebook post in which the black politician Diane Abbott’s face had been superimposed onto the body of a morbidly obese woman in an ill-fitting superhero bikini-style costume. The ‘punchline’ was ‘Beware of Blunder Woman’ and I took a moment to ponder both why I felt the person responsible, an Irish newspaper journalist in his early sixties, had crossed a line, and precisely where my own moral compass had drawn that line. Would I have felt the same if the target of the ‘joke’ had been white? On reflection, yes. Abbott receives industrial amounts of racist and misogynistic abuse every single day, but here it was the overt sexualisation of the image and, the judgment of her perceived ugliness that offended me. Would I have felt the same if the target had been a man? No. As a straight man, my life is effectively free from any threat of sexual violence. I had an ugly eye infection a couple of years ago which prompted a glut of ‘hilarious’ fourth-rate photoshopping from internet trolls, but nothing like an image designed to render a woman simultaneously sexual, vulnerable and unattractive.