Tory justice secretary Dominic Raab thinks misogyny can be a ‘woman against a man’
Dominic Raab, Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor, and Secretary of State for Justice at the Conservative Party Conference. (Getty/ Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
Dominic Raab – justice secretary, deputy prime minister and the man who once said men get a “raw deal” because of “feminist bigotry” – has discussed misogyny ‘against men’ on live TV.
While it has become apparent that queer rights and tackling anti-LGBT+ discrimination are far from the top of the government’s list of priorities, if you thought the UK’s justice secretary might at least have a grasp on other forms of discrimination, you would seemingly be wrong.
Appearing on BBC Breakfast on Wednesday (6 October), Raab rejected the idea that misogyny should become a hate crime in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard.
He then went on: “Misogyny is absolutely wrong, whether it’s a man against a woman or a woman against a man.”
To be clear, the dictionary definition of “misogyny” is “hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women, manifested in various forms such as physical intimidation and abuse, sexual harassment and rape, social shunning and ostracism”, or the “ingrained and institutionalised prejudice against women”.
It’s people like him deciding for us whether misogyny should be made a hate crime… *punches a wall* https://t.co/KkjEvxQwUB
— Rachel Parris (@rachelparris) October 6, 2021
When read out the dictionary definition of the word live on air, Raab didn’t seem to understand the mistake he’d made.
He said: “What I meant was, if we are talking about things below the level of public order offences of harassment, intimidation, which are rightly criminalised – if we are talking about, effectively, insults with a sexist basis, I don’t think that criminalising those sorts of things will deal with the problem that we have got at the heart of the Sarah Everard case.”
A lot of you are calling him “a thick fucking pie in a suit he borrowed from his pie dad” which is very misogynistic— James Felton (@JimMFelton) October 6, 2021
This joke would have been thrown out of a writers room for making the character look too unrealistically dumb https://t.co/zNQPb68iS1— Zing Tsjeng (@misszing) October 6, 2021
Look, I oppose misogyny against men as much as the next woman, but I am a nice girl. Do you hate women?— Frances Weetman (@francesweetman) October 6, 2021
Dominic Raab once said men get a ‘raw deal’ because of feminists
In 2011, shortly after the implementation of the Equality Act 2010, Dominic Raab again expressed his concern about discrimination against men.
In an article for PoliticsHome, he declared: “From the cradle to the grave, men are getting a raw deal… Feminists are now amongst the most obnoxious bigots.”
He claimed that “some of the most flagrant discrimination” was “against men”, and added: “One reason women are left ‘holding the baby’ is anti-male discrimination.”
Challenged on the comments in 2019 on The Andrew Marr Show, he doubled down, and said it was “really important that in the debate on equality we have a consistency and not double standards and hypocrisy”.
