Forgetting The Moral Maze is the most aggravating radio
program ever I listened to them mauling the subject of Victimhood and the Tim
Hunt debacle. Argh! In relationship psychology there’s a diagram, ‘The
Co-dependent Triangle’. It contains three stances, victim, persecutor and
rescuer. It defines a poorly functioning relationship where each role
undermines the other person in some way. Obviously there’s a wide variation in
a peoples susceptibility to Victimhood from the weak and sensitive to strong
and resilient. Some brush it off while others succumb to it rather too easily.
Tim Hunt remarked that men and women fall in love, nothing wrong in that, we
all do and often with colleagues, and women cry if you criticise them. In my
mind and his I imagine this was a gentle joke about sexual stereotyping. OK he
shouldn’t give up the day job and join the comedy circuit but then women often
complain that men don’t show their emotions so it might have seemed acceptable,
but that’s immaterial compared with what happened next. The sensitive end of
the spectrum immediately assumed Victimhood. Those less sensitive came to their
aid in sisterhood and the robust gave them the benefit of the doubt. As the
twitter storm gathered the counter voices, not wishing the flack to land on
them too, mostly fell silent. In essence there was a domino effect in apparent
support of the most sensitive and their tendency to co-dependency, a widespread
landslide towards a poorly functioning relationship. In less than an hour the
victim became the persecutor and Tim Hunt was shunted into hopefully happy
overdue retirement. Might it be that social media is reducing constructive
thought to the nearest knee-jerk reaction and bringing us all into a poorly functioning co-dependent relationship? Even The Moral Maze circled the
margins of sanity and proved incapable of useful analysis, but then that’s what
it’s know for. But in the end Tim will be free to watch Wimbledon, Twitterers
have been shown up as twits and the biased situation of female scientists has
had an airing. One nil for free speech.
