Nothing to See Here

“There is a danger if one makes any remarks about females in motorsport that one will instantly be abused by fervent feminists and self-righteous male do-gooders.”

These aren’t my words. These words form the opening line of a recent Joe Saward blog. I can’t blame him for starting his article like this. The format of ‘when you say A then group B often responds in manner C’ is an effective way to placate the more critical members of your reading audience and convince them to at least give your article a chance, even though they may not agree with all of its content. Many writers use this technique, at times myself included, and I love the way it gently encourages people to open their minds to new opinions and broaden their worldview.

Even so, the manner in which Mr Saward uses the if-A-then-B-does-C-technique instantly set my hair on end when I first saw it. I would have thought nothing of reading an opening sentence along the lines of “there is a danger if one makes any remarks about females in motorsport that one will instantly be criticised by those who dearly wish to see a woman compete at the highest racing level”. That sentence would’ve had a fairly neutral tone. And moreover, I would’ve agreed with its message. There truly are people in the world who are so invested in their wish to see a woman race in F1 that they sometimes get carried away.

However, Mr Saward’s decision to use the words “fervent feminists” and “self-righteous male do-gooders” gives his opening sentence a decidedly different undertone – one of anger and threat. As a reader, I instantly felt attacked. There I was, on the verge of reading an article, not even having the faintest idea yet what it was going to be about, and I was already being told that if I dared to have the audacity to not agree with the author, that then my entire personality – everything I think and say and do and am – would automatically be downgraded to that of a stereotypically negative, irrational feminist.

I was severely tempted to quit reading right there and then, but after some deliberation I didn’t. I’ve been taught not to judge a book by its cover nor a blog by its opening sentence. So I read on and discovered that the article was about Susie Wolff’s OBE, given to her by Queen Elisabeth II for raising awareness for women in (motor)sport. The news of Wolff’s royal decoration was announced a few days ago and has since sparked quite a bit of controversy. Some applaud the Queen’s decision, while others, like Mr Saward, are infuriated by it. All this made reading Mr Saward’s article an interesting activity. His words gave me a lot of food for thought. I instantly came up with several things I would’ve loved to say about them on my own blog.

I would’ve loved to say how I was intrigued by Mr Saward’s quote of the Women in Motorsport Commission’s chairperson. How I agreed with him that Wolff’s awareness-raising foundation Dare To Be Different is perhaps still too young to already have its effectiveness judged correctly. How I was surprised by his argument that women in motorsport shouldn’t “be rewarded for anything other than their actual achievements”. How I can’t understand why he defines ‘achievement’, without any supporting argumentation whatsoever, as something that can exclusively be realised in a race car, on a race track. How it puzzles me that he compares the world titles of Button and Hamilton to Wolff’s off-track women-in-motorsport promotional work; surely those are apples and pears? How I fail to understand his constant implications that Wolff’s on-track results played a role in her getting an OBE, even though the official announcement states she got the OBE solely for raising awareness. How I think Wolff has actually done a great job raising awareness for women in motorsport. How I can’t help but remember a past conversation with someone working for BBC F1 who told me that Wolff was the most wanted female racer for TV items because no woman driver had ever managed to attract as much attention for the sport in the UK as she had. How I can’t help but wonder if the real point of Mr Saward’s article should perhaps have been that race car drivers aren’t awarded equally by the Royal House, especially compared to other types of athletes, with some getting an OBE, others an MBE, and again others nothing. How I can’t help but feel that maybe it would have been better if Mr Saward hadn’t used Wolff as the main topic of his article, but simply as an illustrating example. How I believe that, had he done that, his article would have been a lot stronger.

The problem is, however, that I can’t say any of these things. The moment I do so, thanks to the opening line, I will degrade myself to the stereotype of “fervent feminist”; a woman who is half-crazed and unstable, who probably hates men and everything they do and write, and who – for goodness’ sake! – should never be listened to. So instead of arguing with Mr Saward, I won’t say anything. Nothing at all. Everyone can consider me mute. In fact, let’s just pretend this entire blog page is a blank, shall we?

Fluffy Fluffy Fluffy Fluffy

It’s not easy being a journalist. For one thing, you’re expected to do interviews. Every time you do that you’ll find yourself battling the spoken-written word differential gap. The what?! The gap that separates the spoken and written word, and makes them fundamentally different. Many people don’t realise this, but speech rarely comes out of our mouths the way it is printed in magazines.

When speaking, we use fillers like “ehm” and “well” to verbally fill the time we need to think about what we’re going to say next. We also use stop words. These are words that we repeat often, usually without realising it. I think motorsport’s most common stop words are “obviously” and the dreaded “for sure”. Most importantly, when producing live speech we don’t always finish our sentences. We tend to cut out words or just cut off the entire sentence half-way through. Because of this, it’s common to hear something like “know what we should do, let’s eh… really wanna go get frites”. Weird as the formulation may be, your brain’ll understand the message.  It’ll fill in the information holes with such ease that under normal circumstances you don’t even notice anything’s off.

Unless of course you’re a journalist who has interviewed someone, recorded the entire thing, and then sat down to type up the conversation for publication. All of a sudden every cut-off sentence, every stop word, every filler stands out. Sometimes the transcription of a perfectly coherent spoken conversation can prove to be perfectly illegible on paper. The journalist is then forced to take the verbal mess and edit it into something  readable. This is a tricky process that takes years to perfect and that, even then, can cause you trouble. How often haven’t we heard a celebrity complain about a magazine publishing something they didn’t say “like that”?

I’ve always felt that converting spoken to written words is especially difficult in sports. After all, as a sports journalist you’re not only facing the differences between speech and writing, you’re also confronted with strong emotions. I’ll give you an example. I learned long ago that at a circuit drivers are the best sources of information. So when an Audi mysteriously retired from last year’s Blancpain GT feature race in Zandvoort, I decided to ask the driver what had happened. I got a pretty clear answer.

“It’s fluffy unbelievable. He eh… we just got fluffy hit at the fluffy start! From fluffy behind! Some people fluffy terrible. Don’t have fluffy brains. Really… I’m so fluffy pissed. I was in a fluffy good place. He was behind me, should have stayed there. But no. He fluffy didn’t break and fluffy smashed into me. Broke the fluffy car. They ruined the entire fluffy weekend! It’s all just fluffied up. Really really fluffy, this.”**

While hearing these words, I felt relieved I wasn’t there as a motorsports journalist. I wouldn’t have known what to do with such a high-spirited quote. I don’t think literal publication would have been an option due to lack of family-friendliness. But if not that, is it possible to normalise this type of speech? And if yes, would the written text still have any relation to the original words? How big would the risk be of publishing something that no longer has roots in reality? Is that desirable? Or admissible? Maybe the safest route would’ve been a paraphrase: “Driver X made it known he wasn’t happy.” It’s probably best if we leave this conundrum for the professionals to solve.

**He didn’t actually say ‘fluffy’.  I just used ‘fluffy’ to replace another (ruder) stop word.