Thinking about the c-word

In which i decisively come down on the side of everybody

Nicola Willis appears on Alice Taylor’s Instagram interview series

I’ve spent the week trying to work out my thinking on the media story of the year. As you’ll probably know, Stuff journalist Andrea Vance referred to a group of female ministers from the coalition government as c-words in her Sunday newspaper column.

Turns out you can have it all. So long as you're prepared to be a c*** to the women who birth your kids, school your offspring, and wipe the arse of your elderly parents while you stand on their shoulders to earn your six-figure, taxpayer-funded pay packet.

The best hot takes are easy to understand and easy to yell, but I think this is one of those times when several things are true. If you believe all of them then it’s very hard to end up on a particular “side”.

Here’s what I think:

It is extremely hard to get journalistic cut through in 2025

Whatever you think of the c-word, it is clear that no other word or combination of words would have got this column onto the radar of most adult New Zealanders.

Good people can do things you don’t agree with

Even if you think that using the c-word is morally indefensible, and that the journalist bears the entire responsibility for it (rather than, say, the editor who let it through) you can still maintain the view that Andrea Vance is probably a nice person of great talent who is trying to do the right thing. I was at the media awards Friday night where she won a prize and gave an endearing, vulnerable, charming (well, she has an Irish accent) speech. It’d be hard to square that person with the villain we’ve all heard so much about.

Right wing women might get it worse from the media than left wing women

I think there would have been much more moral outrage and anger towards Andrea if she’d used the word against Marama Davidson. Imagine if Heather Du Plessis Allan had used it against Chloe Swarbrick!

Left wing women might get it worse from the general public than right wing women

I’d prefer to be Chloe than Nicola Willis if I was attending the media awards. But if I was walking down the main street of Whanganui I’d prefer to be Judith Collins than Jacinda Ardern.

It may have been better to Steel Man the pay equity changes

I’ve talked about this idea before - that opinion columnists (and especially online commentators) tend to decide what their view is going to be on an issue then proceed to make the opposing view look as ridiculous as possible. It’s a seductive way to make your own opinion look like the only sane perspective but I think it’s ultimately ineffective.

To portray a group of female cabinet ministers as hating women, motivated only by self-interest and other dark forces is to miss an opportunity. A stronger argument to debunk is that this group is pro-women, that they have their own brand of feminism that simply believes there’s a different path to gender equity.

And even if you don’t agree with this view - even if you think that Nicola Willis is working 18 hour days with the primary goal of trying to thwart female progress - you’ll still convince more people to join your side if you show why the most noble version of her argument is wrong. It leaves her supporters nowhere to go.

Desperate times call for desperate measures

If Andrea Vance sees that hundreds of thousands of poor women are about to have their rights of redress taken away from them (with no democratic opportunity to argue against this because the whole thing was done under parliamentary urgency), it is understandable she would pull every journalistic lever she could to raise the alarm bells. In the same way, if you believe that Donald Trump is systematically dismantling the US government in order to turn the country into an authoritarian kleptocracy, should our primary concern be that people are printing swear words in the newspaper?

“Girl Maths” is an ironic term

“I bought a $400 top on sale for $100,” goes the logic, “so I just made $300”

Girl Maths was a brilliant radio bit by Hayley Sproull, which went around the world. By using it, Haley wasn’t saying “girls can’t do maths”. She was saying that the brain can be a powerful thing in helping you justify something you were going to do anyway. It was self-deprecating, and perceptive, and funny, but I think it’s harder to argue that its use is anti-feminist. I think that Andrea Vance used it to reference a pop culture moment as well as hint that the finance minister was deluding herself to try and make the sums work.

Does using it in this context do damage to women? I can’t decide. It depends whether you think the net effect is that we’re encouraged to think less of Nicola Willis’s abilities as a finance minister because she is a woman, or whether we think less of her because she’s being foolish/disingenuous in a manner unrelated to her gender. As with so much of this stuff, the side you come down on probably depends on how you felt to begin with.

Cabinet ministers and journalists are human

Audrey Young wrote about Vance in her weekly politics newsletter:

Her use of c*** and phrases such as "girl-maths" have hijacked the debate about pay equity to one about language and allowed the powerful women in Government to look like victims.

Willis and her colleagues undoubtedly have a lot of power to allocate Government resources and create the laws that affect the lives of New Zealanders (in particular lower income NZers who inevitably have more interaction with government apparatus than their richer, luckier neighbours).

But there are aspects in which even these women don’t have much power. Putting aside all the things women have to worry about that men don’t have to worry about, famous women (especially those in politics) don’t have much power of protection on social media, where it is total open season. They are mums, wives and daughters too and if we expect them to develop skin so thick that being called c-words in a national newspaper and then over and over again online doesn’t affect them, personally and psychologically, I think that’s wrong.

Likewise Andrea Vance. She made a decision to do something different in her column last week and it’s tempting to think of everything that’s happened since as foreseeable or even desired. But of course it wasn’t - the whole thing snowballed in unexpected and catastrophic ways. I can’t imagine the brutal sort of week she’s had.

I worry that when we villainise public figures, and when we celebrate people attacking them online in the most vicious terms, that we are missing an opportunity to show empathy.

I think my hot take is that we are all just trying our best.