Claudia is my Darling

The laptop I acquired not quite two years ago came with a gallery of standard screen-savers: pleasant autumnal and wintry landscapes; coffee beans; even teddy bears. Not particularly caring for any of them, I added a picture of the actress Claudia Black, sporting a very low-cut tank-top (the image was found at the wikipedia entry on her, and last time I checked it was still there). If you have to look at something on screen during the longeuers of intermittent composition of a dissertation, went my reasoning, it might as well be a lovely woman, and they don't come any lovelier than Miss Black.

Ours is a time of hypertrophied sensitivities, and simply to avoid tiresome arguments with the prudish and censorious, when I use the laptop in a public place (say, one of the libraries in the University of Toronto system), I generally try to position it so that the screen is not readily visible to others unless they're straining their necks, bending around corners, in other words, really trying. I take the view that if anyone easily offended catches sight of Claudia Black and objects, I have the argument-ending response that those who peer over the shoulders of others have no right to object to what they see. I wonder how that argument would work with Irene Mathyssen.

The previously, and rightfully, obscure Mathyssen, as we have all had the pleasure of learning in the last day or so, is the NDP MP for London-Fanshawe. She interrupted the House of Commons the other day with a point of order. Conservative MP James Moore, she claimed, had a picture of a 'scantily clad' woman on his laptop, which he was showing to others. This, she claimed, was disrespectful of women, and indicative of a congeries of attitudes and sentiments that leads in the end to......the Montreal Massacre.

Mathyssen has since withdrawn her accusations against Moore, after his explanation that the woman in question is his girlfriend. He has not made the picture public, on the grounds that the lady in question has no desire to be a public personality. Fair enough. But it's worth asking, 'would it matter if she were not his girlfriend?' If Mr. Moore were simply showing another MP a picture of an attractive woman in some state of deshabille (in the present case we have to guess what the woman was wearing, but I gather it was either a bathing-suit or lingerie), would the matter rise to the significance fitting the subject of a parliamentary interruption? It seems to me that if it's essentially harmless for him to show a seat-mate a picture of his girlfriend, it's no less so for him to show him a picture of anyone else (even the lovely Claudia, for that matter).

There is, of course, the argument that the House of Commons is Mr. Moore's place of work, and that the Canadian taxpayer does not retain his services so that he can look at pictures of appealing women on the job. On the other hand, those at all familiar with the lives of our parliamentarians know that their free time is scarcely their own, so if they are to kick up their heels a tad when ostensibly on the clock, we need not fear we are being fleeced. (Aside from that, ogling revealing photos of attractive members of the other sex is one of the least harmful things MPs can get up to when in that Chamber.)

The Irene Mathyssens of our time are prone to retort that the act of looking at pictures of attractive women is at best a contribution to a workplace environment that is hostile or demeaning to women. Yet it's not as if James Moore were plastering the walls with beer-company calendars illustrating the charms of bosomy coeds. Unless the screen on his laptop had the dimensions associated with a large-screen TV, or he were holding it up well above his head, I doubt that anyone other than his seat-mate, or the Member directly behind him, would have a clear view. That Mathyssen saw enough to take offense is only because she acted as a snoop and a voyeur.

The sensible response in the House, or any other workplace, would have been for her to avert her gaze, ignore the offending image and shut up, much as if she had walked by and accidentally overheard part of a conversation between two co-workers about a private matter. It is precisely through such tactful accommodation of one another's harmless foibles that we manage to get along tolerably well, on the job or anywhere else. It is tempting to look for psychological explanations for Mathyssen's buffoonery; ungallant as it is, I must confess that this incident provoked me to audible rumination on the frequency with which the woman shouting the loudest that she does not want to be treated as a sex object is the one with the least cause to fear that particular fate.

But there is a wider point. Mathyssen and her ilk, alas, are too much the prisoners of ideology to engage in the mutual accommodation of human fallibility. They take the inarguable commonplace that men sometimes degrade women by drawing attention to their sexuality or appearance, and so reshape their attitude to life such that no occasion in which a man appreciates a woman's beauty or remarks upon it to a friend, can be construed as harmless, but only as part of a spectrum running from adolescent jollity to rape and murder. Captives of one idea, they cannot conceive of any acknowledgement of a woman's sexual charms as essentially innocent. The problem with intellectual slippery-slopes, of course, is that we look awfully foolish when we fall off them, and in my view Mathyssen looked just as foolish before James Moore said the picture in question was of his girlfriend as she did afterwards. Gratifying as it is to see her hysterical antics make her a laughingstock, it would be more gratifying still were the nature of her folly better understood.

As a practical matter, I suppose I need to reconsider what to do if anyone complains about my screen-saver. As an undergraduate, I knew someone whose office contained several framed photos of a fetching young lady in provocative poses. He told occasional visitors who expressed curiosity that she was his girlfriend. A shared acquaintance informed me that he subsequently came across the same photographs in old fashion magazines, from where my acquaintance had lifted them. Since then, I've thought of the pathetic trick of claiming the pretty girl in the pictures is your girlfriend as 'pulling a Bosman' (for such was his name). But now, it seems, this claim can get you out of noxious exchanges with the incurably prudish. So, meet my girlfriend, Claudia Black. She's a corker.