Victimhood.

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.