A Distasteful Encounter with a Male Columnist

Naoise Dolan

As an undergraduate in Dublin, I spoke in a chamber debate against a male columnist I’ll decline
to name. (Life is too far too short to have him @ me.) The Male Columnist a) views women with
contempt and b) finds us threatening. I don’t envy him having to square these two positions. I
suspect the way he does it is by not realising that he holds them. And as with anyone who paints
feminists as humourless, ‘funny’ is the quality in a woman that intimidates him most and that he
can least forgive her for having. He was more upset that night when I made people laugh at him
than when I made them clap1 .

He’s also one of those people who thinks that the fact that he’s formed an idea makes it
worth expressing. This is understandable. Thoughts are scarce commodities for him, so I have
some sympathy for his desire, when his efforts do yield one, to put it up on the mantelpiece. And,
indeed, to keep it there: the speech he gave that night was a near carbon copy of one he’d rolled
out before at the Oxford Union.

I won’t bore you too much with the debate. The Male Columnist retched out his usual
claims about freedom-hating millennials. My side said things that the audience found more
convincing, and so we won. I spoke well. Fluid sentences left my mouth. I was as interested as
anyone else to see where they went2 . Anyway, the fun part happened afterwards. The Male
Columnist came up to me and claimed I’d only won because I was a) female and b) blessed with a
crowd-pleasing Irish accent. (Personally I think I just made better arguments, but you know how it
is – some people just can’t help bringing identity politics into everything.)

Having put me in my place, he went on to say that this was especially unfair because he
himself is, in fact, Irish. He just doesn’t sound it. ‘My name is [Diasporic Monicker Redacted], for
crying out loud’, he said, with the look of someone trying to talk their way back into Electric Picnic
after losing the wristband. We can then summarise his beliefs thus: trans people don’t deserve
recognition, but the fact that The Male Columnist has some Irish heritage means we are violently
erasing his struggle if we don’t acknowledge that he personally died in the Famine at least twice.
Stepford Students make everything about gender, but if a woman beats him in a debate, it can’t
just be that she spoke better.

The conversation dragged out longer than this implies. I’m highlighting the most extreme
bollocks he produced, but of course he started with more moderate claims and worked his way
up to the ‘Hath not a Plastic Paddy eyes?’ stuff. I told him to shut up because I’d won fair and
square. Afterwards, I cried. I’m brilliant at not crying when someone I hate is around, but terrible
at holding back once they’re gone. Once I’d escaped, I broke down in tears. I could have talked to
him for hours without giving him that satisfaction. That’s what I’m like.

I tend to be cynical about my debating career. As with anyone’s, it had two phases: a)
craving approval, followed by b) enjoying having others seek mine. But I’ll say this: being The
Male Columnist’s Waterloo was one of the times I’ve most explicitly told a sexist that they don’t
get to decide my worth. I may be many things it’s better not to be, but stupid ain’t one3 – and
anyone who thinks otherwise is on some serious Dunning-Kruger. Of all the men I’m glad I’m not,
The Male Columnist’s the worst.

1 Two years on, I maintain a healthy and normal grudge over unfunny men being asked to speak in comedy debates at
TCD when I wasn’t. Not a single one, guys. I was, of course, reliably enlisted for anything on women or queers. The
irony is that the straight men who were asked to do comedy debates when I wasn’t were mostly so very unhumorous
that the degree to which I was funnier than them far exceeded the degree to which I was womaner or queerer. Behold
my Oxford Union meme and behold their memes, if they even MAKE memes, and behold that they were asked and I
wasn’t, and tell me there’s no problem with women not being recognised as FUCKING FUNNY.

Healthy and normal.

2In ‘Even If You Beat Me’, Sally Rooney nails the experience of hearing yourself shoot out a speech lightning-quick
without feeling like you’re the one doing it.

3I didn’t always know that. One of the reasons I didn’t come to Oxford for undergrad was that I’d feared everyone I met
at interviews had thought I was an idiot. I now realise it was unfair on my part to assume that teenaged Etonians spend
enough time thinking about other people to decide they’re thick.