Modern feminism is a movement riven with conflict and disagreement. What is a woman? Is sex work work? Is having a vagina a microaggression?

Thankfully, there’s one thing on which we can all agree: Jeremy Clarkson is a massive misogynist. We’ve known this for years, but now more than ever, it’s important to remember that some things are an immutable fact. 

In his recent Sun column, Clarkson described hating Meghan Markle “on a cellular level”, claiming that he dreamed of a Game of Thrones-style punishment “when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”. 

Sexists come and go, but sexism is never out of fashion

I do not believe he wrote this without knowing the legitimate outrage it would cause. His Boris Johnson-esque non-apology, in which he adopted the “oh crumbs!” tone of a Beano character caught scrumping apples, was just another act of trolling. Like Katie Hopkins or Donald Trump, Clarkson engineers scenarios to get a rise out of the libs, bolstering his self-perception as some ageing enfant terrible. Responding to him feels like a moral obligation but also an act of complicity. You’ve joined in the game, but then what else could you do? 

All the same, this time I feel there’s a certain relief amongst those who’ve gathered to denounce him, from Nicola Sturgeon to Guardian columnist Zoe Williams to the Fawcett Society. Finally, some proper, straight-down-the-line misogyny, the naming of which causes no political inconvenience to anyone who finds “feminist” a useful identity. Both Clarkson and The Sun belong to the baddie, wrong-side-of-history contingent. They are unfashionable, belligerent, right-wing. 

Second-wave feminism emerged, at least in part, as a response to left-wing men’s insistence that misogyny was the province of Clarkson/Sun-reader types, and hence would vanish without any self-examination on their part. Now that feminism has become a more mainstream concern, there are some for whom this myth has become incredibly important. 

As women and girls face a backlash on multiple fronts, it can be comforting to retreat to a fantasy in which the problem is not what the male sex class wants from the female sex class — across all social strata, transcending other political differences — but men such as Jeremy Clarkson. This may be why many of those who’ve expressed justifiable horror at his column have remained silent when female peers have been the target of comparable abuse from those on “their” side. 

Jeremy Clarkson, whilst he may be a problem, is not the problem. He may have a column now, but he is yesterday’s sexist. He knows this himself. A large part of his selling point, expressed in multiple, repetitive books, relies on the idea that he is the last of his kind, bravely speaking out on behalf of other men who feel their honest-to-goodness, telling-it-like-it-is bigotry has been sacrificed to political correctness. 

They are on their way out — sexism isn’t. Sexists come and go, but sexism is never out of fashion. An effective feminist movement recognises that sexism moves with the times.

There’s a reason why the liberation of women was not done and dusted with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, or first-wave suffragettes, or second-wave protestors. It is not because earlier women were inferior, or just too oppressed to work out what real liberation would be. When she was taking on Rousseau, I doubt very much that Mary Wollstonecraft could have imagined that women centuries hence would be faced with an even less edifying adversary in the form of an ex-Top Gear host, but here we are. It’s all been said before, but it needs saying again.

The sad truth is that what the author of The Social Contract and that of As I was just saying …: The World According To Clarkson Volume 6 want from women and girls has not changed. It’s compliance — the performance of man-made femininity, sexual and reproductive servitude. This is the problem feminists face: the intractability of our difference and the way men reconfigure it. It’s not a reason to give up — many victories are won and matter — but it is a reason to dispense with the delusion that younger men are being embarrassed out of becoming their generation’s Clarksons. They just aren’t. 

It is entirely possible to express the same sentiments towards Meghan Markle as Clarkson did and get away with it, should you be the kind of man who sees himself as feminist ally rather than a lone warrior against the Guardian-reading, lentil-eating elite. The rage Markle provokes in men is related to the age-old trope of the manipulative, privileged woman who plays the victim in order to consolidate female power, with Markle’s privilege being seen as particularly undeserved because she is not white. 

Is there any left-wing circle in which denouncing Clarkson is controversial?

The Markle-hater wishing to remain on the right side of history could, for instance, write an academic paper called The Princess Problem: Fantasies of Punishment in the Carceral Imagination, or maybe Cersei and Meghan: Filth, Shame and Normative Bodies. In it, he might propose that having chosen to enmesh herself in narratives of privilege, norm enforcement and colonisation by using her thin, cisgendered body to win acting roles before marrying a prince, Markle represents the typical performer of weaponised femininity, albeit one who transgresses the usual racial boundaries. He might then waffle on for several thousand words before reaching the conclusion that to fantasise about enacting violence on Markle is the marginalised person’s last defence against psychic erasure. 

I am not suggesting one form of misogyny is more morally reprehensible than any other, or that it is wrong for Clarkson to be pulled up. What I do feel is that not only are the same underlying impulses expressed on both left and right, but that they end up supporting one another. The Game of Thrones walk of shame is a pornified, misogynistic fantasy. Clarkson applies it to a real, live woman in The Sun. Men who wish to enact fantasies of humiliation and degradation on real, live women in real, live settings are supported in this by the left’s support for the sex trade. A feminism that is only willing to cast a critical eye on one small segment of this — the segment that reassures her that sexism is the province of the right-wing dinosaurs — lines women up for more abuse. 

It bothers me greatly that many female MPs and journalists will denounce Clarkson but, to quote Labour MP Nadia Whittome, don’t “really care about the men who are purchasing sex”. What if some punters want to throw shit at a woman whilst chanting “shame”? Is it all okay if the price is right, and we all pretend it is entirely disconnected from the more fundamental hatred of women we see in Clarkson’s writing? I realise this is a more inconvenient question, and that it may seem I am milking the Clarkson situation to push a more radical feminist agenda. I make no apologies for that. Clarkson makes men feel legitimised in their hate, but he is not as close as many — some of them women, some of them self-described feminists — to changing actual laws. 

Clarkson is not a scapegoat; his misogyny is real and should be named. At the same time, he functions as a potential stand-in for patriarchy itself, a figure around whom people who will not speak up for women and girls as a class can gather in order to launder their counterfeit feminism. 

If you are a woman who denounces Clarkson and The Sun, you can tell yourself you are speaking truth to power. Is there any liberal feminist circle — any left-wing circle — in which to do such a thing is remotely controversial? Without a willingness to place this “cellular level” hatred for women in a broader context, what exactly are you doing, other than positioning misogyny as an out-group flaw? 

As a famous author once wrote, “it takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends”. Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t like difficult women; he doesn’t like powerful women; he doesn’t like women who, as far as he is concerned, are playing the victim, and he fantasises about them getting their just deserts. In all of this, he is not unusual, and his kind — once you strip away the self-consciously bad styling — is not about to disappear.