SHE’S good, that Oprah.
I was determined she wasn’t going to break me.
From the moment I heard news reports claiming “It was the best speech ever given”, I was determined to hate it.
Nothing grinds my gears more than hyperbolic declarations labelling the latest flavour of the month the GOAT (that’s greatest of all time to the non Twitterati).
Really?, I think immediately. Better than Martin Luther King’s `I Have a Dream’? Better than Churchill’s `We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches’? Better than Susan B Anthony’s `It Was We the People, Not We the White Male Citizens’? Better than Tony Blair’s `Hand of History’?
OK, I’m joking about that last one (Still scundered for him).
So I plugged my headphones into my computer and sat back, preparing to take them out again in about 10 minutes time and declare: “Yeah, it’s Okaaay…”
But then she did that Oprah thing, the one where she tells a story about an actual historical person who went through harrowing times but never gave up.
And, once she’s hooked you, she reels you in with an inspirational message about how change isn’t just on its way, it’s banging at your door and has brought its own tea and biscuits.
May have shed a tear.
It was a great speech.
I’m not completely sold though. Love the message, admire the delivery, but sadly just because Oprah is saying it doesn’t make it true.
She’s spot on, “for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men”.
I’m less sure “their time is up, their time is up, their time is up”.
It would be a mistake to think that the high-profile exposure of predators in Hollywood means the culture of sexual exploitation and abuse of power has been smashed.
That won’t change while power is concentrated so comprehensively in male hands. Where there’s an uneven distribution of power, there will always be the temptation to abuse it.
I’m reminded of a famous quote from another great speech: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.”
So spoke Hillary Clinton when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008.
A decade later and the US has still not elected a female president.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the female prime minister’s recent reshuffle of her cabinet was billed as making the government look “more like the country it serves”.
That apparently means a rise in female representation from 25 per cent to 30 per cent (with a gender pay gap of 11 per cent) and ethnic minorities now making up seven per cent.
It also means sacking one female, gay minister, Justine Greening, after she refused an effective demotion, while allowing male colleagues to refuse to shift, and failing to promote any politicians of colour to the high offices of state.
More than a third of the top team are now privately-educated (five-times the figure for the actual population) and almost half attended Oxbridge.
Then again, it would have been difficult to have made that particular cabinet look less like the country it serves.
And what was the reaction to that tentative tip-toe towards parity?
`Massacre of the Middle-Aged Men’, declared one headline, below a picture crammed full of middle-aged men.
Imagine the vitriol that would have been spat out if that picture actually resembled the world the rest of us live in.
Similarly when BBC China editor Carrie Gracie resigned after discovering she was earning 50 per cent less than her male peers, Radio 4 stalwart John Humphrys `joked’ with a colleague: “Dear God. She's actually suggested that you should lose money. You know that, don't you?”
Folklore has it that every creature, from the spiteful wasp to the bombastic bear, is at its most vicious when it is mortally wounded.
There is no doubt that those who have long wielded the levers of power are feeling fearful about how long they will maintain their ascendancy.
But threats have come before and been comprehensively squashed.
Time will tell if it is indeed `up’, if we are witnessing death throes or an effective push-back.
Yes, the fight against abuse of power and for equality must be loud, it must be visible and it must be relentless.
Victories must be celebrated to give heart to those too scared to speak out, to fight.
But mistaking winning a battle for triumphing in a war would be a fatal mistake.
