Give Him Some Rope!

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I've been listening to BBC World Have Your Say recently, and while I admire their courage in opening the phones to everyone, I am not so impressed with their handling of diverse opinions.

In a recent session the topic was "Do women need protection?" (in reference to the beating somewhere of women caught endangering their morals in a bar or something). OK, sort of a dumb question, but in addition to all the PC female crowd they actually got a live one calling in from somewhere in Africa. He was quite well-spoken and tried to express his un-PC opinions calmly and clearly, but he was interrupted halfway through every sentence by either an irate feminist or (for crying out loud) the moderator, all of whom seemed intent upon shouting him down and preventing him from making his case. When he calmly suggested that their hysterical reactions were evidence of female inability to control emotions, of course they all went ballistic and we didn't hear any more from him.

What a pity. And what a disappointment. If these people had any faith in the actual correctness of their politics, they would have welcomed the chance to let a real, live sexist explain his rationale for believing that women are weak, irrational, driven by their endocrine system and needful of protection by big, strong, rational males. Didn't they believe that this guy would trip himself up with inconsistent or directly falsifiable theories? I was looking forward to hear him make a fool of himself, but instead he came off looking like the persecuted truth-speaker!

I have always been of the opinion that women tend, on average, to be less ruled by irrational emotions than men (which isn't really saying much); and I still think that is the case, but now I am convinced that people who are so ruled by their political commitments that they don't feel they can afford to allow conflicting opinions to be heard are, in fact, incapable of learning from discussion.