Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze
Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze: a pamphlet asking staff to refrain from using titles such as Miss or Mrs. Apparently these titles are considered archaic and a hangover from the past, as they ‘indicate’ a woman’s relationship to a man. According to Strasbourg, Ms is the politically correct prefix all us women should adopt; for despite being impossible to pronounce without sounding as though one is impersonating an angry mosquito, using Ms doesn’t — God forbid — denote a woman’s marital status.
Shortly before going on air, the presenter Matthew Bannister politely asked how I’d like to be introduced. ‘As Mrs Standing,’ I replied. Married — happily as it so happens — for 25 years, I instinctively sensed that by wilfully ‘trivialising my independent status’ I’d send my adversary, Ms Julie Bindel (radical feminist writer and articulate, feisty lady), into a foaming fury of indignation. I was right. I verbally lit the blue touch-paper and just sat back and listened to the fireworks of self-righteous fury explode.
The main problem I have with arguments like these that propose to chip away, alter or altogether banish age-old traditions is that they tend to be largely imagined slights, what-ifs and worst-case scenarios dreamt up and dramatised by an incredibly small number of people. I find I deeply resent the majority-rule principle being both ridiculed and dismissed and I don’t like being made to feel like a wet, old-fashioned anti-feminist for failing to empathise or grasp the bigger picture. I loathe the fact that normality is under constant threat of being marginalised.
I elbowed my Miss title when I chose to get married. I chose to become Mrs Standing. Patently my title ‘indicates’ my relationship to a man. But not just any man; my man happens to be my husband. Had I wanted to stay a Miss or to morph into Ms Sarah Forbes in the workplace, I could have done so, yet having embraced the convention of marriage, there seemed little point in then rejecting my married name. Hardly anyone ever addresses me as Mrs Standing apart from the nice lady in the haberdashery department at Peter Jones, nervous young men coming to take my daughters out on first dates, and those irritating BT employees that call late at night asking if one has five minutes to complete a pointless customer survey. To everyone else — myself included — I’m just Sarah Standing.
Men apparently have it all ways. Their unaltered lifetime title, Mr, means they never have to reveal or ‘indicate’ their marital status in the workplace, and this is what the European parliament is trying to drum up into a sexist argument.
What most bureaucrats fail to take into account, though, is that everyone has a voice they’re at freedom to use. It’s called conversation. When I asked Mr Matthew Bannister if he was married or single, he told me he was married. Sometimes it’s good to talk. And like it or not, most women are ‘masters’ of that.