I love being called someone’s missus

FEMINISM in 2018 has become an orgy of sweating the small stuff, writes Claire Harvey. Who cares if a bloke called a colleague missus? There’s much bigger fish to fry.

OK, here’s a challenge for all the feminists out there.

Let’s drag our cause back out of the sixth-grade ‘go away boys, girls can do anything!’ phase we’ve regressed to, and get it back on track.

I’ve despaired this week as women around the country get themselves into a tizz about the word ‘missus’.

The guy who was ABC chairman at the start of the week, Justin Milne, allegedly once used it to describe the broadcaster’s chief executive, Michelle Guthrie, whom he and the rest of the board sacked on Monday.

That prompted a wave of concern about the denigration of women implied in the use of the word ‘missus’.

“There is a deep problem with such gendered signifiers of a (professional) woman’s place,” wrote Wendy Tuohy in the Fairfax papers. “Calling someone ‘my missus’ is code for, ‘that person of lower status, over whom I have power and control, and whose opinion matters less than mine’; it’s that patronisingly prehistoric and it’s that simple,” wrote Tuohy, who’s a smart lady and former News Corp colleague.

I think if you need a trigger warning for ‘missus’, you’ve completely missed the point.

ABC chair Justin Milne, ABC Managing Director Michelle Guthrie and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at Parliament House in August 2018. Picture: Alex Ellinghausen/pool

My rule of thumb for life is never to get annoyed about something that’s intended kindly: the bloke in the cafe calling me ‘darl’, an older male colleague saying ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’.

None of those people intend to be unkind or embarrassing; in fact, it’s the opposite. None of them are sexists. Real sexists — and I’m saying this from experience, believe me — can summon plenty of other phrases that are genuinely disrespectful hurtful.

Because sexism is not a word or a phrase. This is mind-blowing for all the linguistic totalitarians out there who think equality is the right to decide your own gender and have everyone call you ‘they’ — but sexism ain’t someone holding open a door or saying you look nice.

That’s just good manners.

Sexism, in 2018, is a hell of a lot more subtle. It’s the juries (of men and women) who acquit rapists because they can’t comprehend how a prostitute, or a party girl, could be a victim. It’s football codes that don’t consider domestic violence to be a crime. It’s organisations that don’t understand why flexible work is crucial if you want women over the age of 30 making decisions.

I can vividly remember one of my first bosses in a newsroom saying “Good … person!” as he praised something I’d done. I felt really sorry for him. He’d started out saying “Good girl,” then realised that would sound patronising and possibly annoy me, and had backed off into “Good person,” which made him sound like a robot and kind of ruined the moment. But his intention was purely kind — and I was 18: a girl. I liked his fatherly affection. I loved that he was proud of me.

So here’s a confession. Before Justin Milne’s alleged penchant for the word ‘missus’ came out, I wrote a story in this very paper last week in which I used the very same word in the first par.

I think ‘missus’ is respectful and sweet. It’s a nice piece of Anglo-Australian vernacular. It’s not offensive; it’s a generic way or referring to your partner or girlfriend or wife or special friend without going into detail about which of those she is. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting, in my view, than ‘life partner’, or ‘significant other’.

In Justin Milne’s case, in a joking turn of phrase, he allegedly (he denies it) had said ‘missus’ about a woman whom he had appointed to be chief executive (what a sexist!), with whom he worked closely, and was required to put on a bit of a double act when lobbying politicians.

Milne made plenty of errors of judgment — including underestimating the blowback he’d cop from sacking Guthrie. That’s why we’re finding out about all this, and why Milne has rightly resigned after he was revealed to have demanded the heads of two senior ABC journalists — a disgraceful overreach.

Here’s the most important thing about ‘missus’ and words like it: this is the way men speak. If we, as feminists, turn men into the enemy and criminalise their everyday language, we’re only harming ourselves. We’ll lose the women who we need to be with us, and we’ll totally alienate the men who don’t understand what we are banging on about. Men are our greatest asset in the fight for equality: we need to bring them along in the fight for the things that really matter: like a society-wide acceptance of the complexities of domestic and sexual violence.

I’m proud to be someone’s missus. Oh and I use the word ‘chicks’ all the time too.