How much does the Daily Mail hate women? It obviously hates female celebrities, despite featuring them so heavily. The paper and, to a larger extent, the website is pretty much built upon a foundation of "articles" – though that word does seem a stretch – about female celebrities who all fall into the dichotomy of being either thigh-rubbingly salacious ("Look at this sexy young woman in minimal clothes! Look! Look at her!") or eye-poppingly repulsed ("Look at this woman who is older than 30, and over nine stone! Ew! Look! Look at her!") Sometimes the two genres are combined.
Martin Clarke, Mail Online's editor, recently explained his editorial ideology to Lauren Collins, staff writer for the New Yorker. When Collins asked why Clarke decided to run the agenda-setting story of a young actor suffering from acne, Clarke replied: "Well, we all just looked at the picture and went 'Yuck'. Look, she's an actress in 90210, and she's spotty."
It obviously hates its female readers, too, despite women making up 53% of its readership. The general motto of the Daily Mail seems to be that a woman's role in life is to be pretty, thin, get married, quit work, have children and, ideally, disappear or die before getting embarrassingly old and fat (it is no wonder the paper loved Diana so much.) The paper is full of scare stories warning its female readers about the terrible repercussions of diverging from that course, usually written by female columnists who regret the terrible life choices that have led to them being childless and unmarried at the shockingly geriatric age of 40 plus. Few of them ever talk about the terrible life choices that have led to them selling their souls to the Daily Mail, a development many would probably see as far more tragic than not being married.
Which leads us to the issue about how much it obviously hates its female writers. Again, and not coincidentally, it has plenty of those in abundance. There was much talk a few months ago about how poorly represented women are in the media. As Kira Cochrane pointed out in her extensive piece on the matter, the Daily Mail comes closer than any other British paper in achieving parity of male and female bylines, yet this paper overturns the assumption that gender equality among writers is, in and of itself, the goal. The paper uses its female writers as Trojan horses to voice its most misogynistic attitudes, whether its having them embody the worst kind of female stereotypes (Liz Jones as the label-obsessed bitter single woman, Amanda Platell as the high-flying but lonely single woman, Jan Moir as Glenda Slagg, etc etc) through their confessional journalism, or having them write horrible things about other women, such as Lynda Lee Potter's notorious take on Mo Mowlam or Allison Pearson's opinion on Princess Beatrice's body.
Yet it's one thing for highly paid, experienced staff writers to be used as bait by the paper – it's quite another when inexperienced freelancers are.
Yesterday, an article by a woman called Samantha Brick appeared in the Daily Mail extolling the difficulties of being beautiful. It promptly went viral, attracting 1.5m hits. Almost 5,000 people commented beneath the article on the paper's website and many more did so on Twitter, with the majority of the comments sniggering at Brick's Zoolander-esque self-descriptions and the seven photos of her that the Mail published, all but begging for cruel comparisons to be made.
Clearly Brick's piece was misguided and ridiculous, and that has nothing to do with how she looks. Personally, I don't think that it's any worse than her previous pieces for that paper, especially one headlined "I use my sex appeal to get ahead at work … And so does ANY woman with any sense", but such are the whims of internet virals. Whether it merited the amount of bullying it attracted on Twitter and on other social media became a moot point because as soon as the attention grew and the cruel comments snowballed, the Daily Mail – far from protecting one of its writers – put the article front and centre on its website. Obviously, one can make the argument that it's a cold, cruel world out there and if an article is attracting attention, of whatever kind, it's only natural that a website would showcase it. One can also argue that Brick set herself up for the fall, really, with her silly piece and her photos.
But such a viewpoint requires a harshly capitalistic mindset, one that does not believe it is an employer's responsibility to maintain some kind of pastoral care for employees but instead should sacrifice their reputation and mental health on the altar of web clicks.
I have no idea what Brick's intention was in writing her article, or whether any of it was changed by the editors. But there are legions of stories out there by female freelancers whose articles for the Daily Mail were slaughtered to fit that paper's agenda and attract attention, generally of the negative kind.
It is easy to condemn the women themselves for writing for that paper at all, but times are tough for freelancers, and one can hardly blame a writer for going to a publication that commissions so much from women writers, even if it does then change what they've written.
In 2009, Laura Scott was interviewed by the paper about her decision to not have children which, she wrote, stemmed from a lack of desire for biological children. The article was changed into a ghostwritten first person piece intimating childless adults hate parents and was full of factual inaccuracies. In the piece, Scott's friend Marie calls her "selfish" for not having children. "I do not have a friend called Marie," Scott wrote on her blog.
Writer Anna Blundy has blogged about her experience writing for the Daily Mail after writing an article about how it felt to have a war correspondent as a father who died on the job when she was younger. The editors wanted her to spin her article as an attack on female war correspondents who leave their children behind and therefore stuck in lines such as "I strongly disagree with Janine di Giovanni," which Blundy kept deleting. Due, presumably, to her refusal to condemn Di Giovanni and her late father, Blundy says her piece was spiked.
In 2010, Cat Hughes says she pitched an article to the Daily Mail's Femail section about how coming off benefits had helped her self-esteem.
"Let me start by admitting that yes, I was incredibly naive. I was also ill and, frankly, desperate to earn money as a freelance writer (that being all I can do now as I have to work from home). The fee that I received was like a dream come true for a mother of four kids who used to be the main breadwinner and whose incapacity was leading her family towards huge debt and the likely loss of their home," Hughes told me when I interviewed her for this piece. "I wanted to write about my experience of being horribly ill, but finding solace and focus in work."
However, when the article was edited she was portrayed as lazy and a scrounger, even though the editor of her piece, Hughes says, knew she had just come out of hospital. She was given almost no time to read over the article and was not expecting a headline like "Middle class and hooked on benefits". The predictable online reaction to it the next day made her collapse. "It broke my heart and the gradual confidence I'd been building as a writer was destroyed. I was humiliated, gutted, mortified. I got threats via my blog," she says. "I did complain to the PCC. It got me precisely nowhere as you might imagine. I did get the online article pulled, but no apology."
As I said, one can argue that these female freelancers bring it on themselves. But times are especially hard for freelancers these days and there is never any excuse to bully and expose vulnerable writers the way the Daily Mail does.
Samantha Brick writes in her inevitable follow-up article about the reaction to her piece, "Until this week I never really understood the term 'Trolling' – used to describe when anonymous people viciously attack others on the internet. Now I do!" She sure does, but not in the way she thinks. The real definition of an internet troll is someone who posts something outrageous purely for the sake of getting a reaction – and the commissioning, editing and publishing of Brick's article is trolling, pure and simple.
The Daily Mail uses its female writers in precisely the same way it uses its female readers and celebrities: frequently, centrally and, always, cruelly. Like an abusive husband, the Daily Mail courts women and needs women, but will always turn around and punch them in the face. Because the Daily Mail hates women.
