Context
Yeeeaaahhhhh not his call.
What gay men do amongst each other is wholly irrelevant to whether or not they get to call women they’re trying to bully on Twitter “babe”. If the woman you’re trying to bully says no, you don’t get to push back because gay men call each other it. Sexism is sexism even when gay men do it.
Funny how all these people who are trashing her are suddenly so concerned with Rowling’s “reputation.” At this point it’s pretty clear that a), among most people her reputation is fine and b), she doesn’t give a fuck. She is secure enough that she doesn’t have to bow down or knuckle under. She’s more of a vertebrate than most of the party leaders in the UK, who have opportunistically given their brains over to thought-ending mantras, and who wish Rowling (along with all the other women who say “NO”) would just shut up, “be nice”, and surrender their hard-won rights quickly and quietly. They are all embarassed and surprised that their unwarranted, naive belief in a swift, easy victory for trans “rights” has turned into a long, protracted war. Mistaking Trans Twitter for the entirety of the world, they’ve witlessly nailed their colours to the mast of a campaign of aggressive, misogynistic, colonialist appropriation. They look prepared to go down with the ship without so much as an inquiry into taking swimming lessons. They continue to intone “TWAW,” and still smear their opponents as being of a piece with right wing bigots, who are secretly funding the Terven in their diabolical oppression of Trans Kids. (Yes, TERFs are simultaneously a tiny, insignificant minority on the Wrong Side of History who can be safely ignored, and an All Powerful Dark Force bent on killing all the helpless marginalized trans folk.) The ocean of reality is unforgiving, and they’re unlikely to evolve gills in time to save themselves. Nature bats last.
In the meantime, though, these wilfull idiots will do plenty of damage while they have the power to wield power, and that will result in misery and suffering for too many women in the here and now. That these so-called “leaders” fail to see this, that they actively support the harm that has occurred and is occurring, is criminal.
I’m sure babe can be used in a very similar way to mate. In New Zealand mate is one of our most overused words, probably much the same in Aussie. It fulfills many functions in speech. Not as many as fuck to be sure, but certainly getting up there. Here’s a really simple example where context and intonation mean everything. If I said ‘hey mate’, depending on my intonation and context that could be a greeting, a sign of disgust, disapproval, disappointment, disagreement, or even a threat. In much the same way, calling someone babe could be a term of endearment, ridicule, or sundry forms of ridicule and dismissiveness. I wonder, was Casper behaving in an endearing way to JKR, or being snidely dismissive of her when he used that diminutive in that context? I’m pretty sure that if he claimed it was really endearing I would respond ‘mate’ in a very particular tone.
If memory serves, some years back, Owen Jones took it upon himself to lecture intransigent lesbians on the evils of trans-exclusionary dating habits (by which, of course, he meant exclusionary of trans-identified heterosexual males; trans-identified homosexual females tend to remain in the lesbian dating pool). When a lesbian asked Jones if he would perform cunnilingus on a trans-identified heterosexual female—who, by Jones’ belief system, would ostensibly be a fellow gay man—Jones reacted with disgust and outrage: gay men, he declared, have no desire to perform cunnilingus. (True enough—but by the same token, lesbians have no desire to perform fellatio.)
What I’m getting at here is this: Owen Jones is a raging hypocrite and misogynist. He knows what biological sex is just as well as J.K. Rowling does. However, unlike Rowling, he lacks the talent to make a living writing fiction, and so he instead makes a living telling lies.
I guarantee you that Owen Jones would not refer to me saying “babe”, as I am heterosexual and not cowed by gay men who think that they are clever. It’s worth thinking about the dynamics there: he wouldn’t say it to me, but he’ll say it to women. Gee, I wonder what the difference is.
(Which is not to say that the women he’d like to refer to that way are not uncowed either, just that he assumes that his position in this world gives him the right to bully women.)
In British culture you call your girlfriend/boyfriend babe as an endearment, and maybe you call your mates that. Addressing a strange woman, especially a middle-aged one, as “babe” would be very rude. Does OJ call Kate Viner, the editor of the Guardian, “babe”? I bet he doesn’t. Babe hasn’t settled into the language like “love” or “duck” or “hen” as a general term of address.
Some African Americans may on occasion refer to one another using the N-bomb, but I suspect that wouldn’t fly as an excuse if some white guy casually dropped it in a conversation. What say ye Owen?
My mother was as far from a feminist as it is possible to be; she hated them. But a man calling her babe was likely to find out whether or not she could deck him. I usually bet on my mom; she was ferocious when angry. I was brought up in a world that regarded that widely as an insult, condescending, and a way of infantilizing women. And, did I say, this was from not only a non-feminist, but an anti-feminist? (I suspect my mother’s anti-feminist ideas were part of what led me toward feminism.)