“The mayor is unable to grasp the simple idea of appropriateness in context”

Those following ‘Shirtgate’ may have seen this image being shared on Reddit and Twitter. The Mayor of London certainly has, as this week he incorporated its idiotic message into a piece for the Telegraph, joining the keyboard warriors who have defeated feminism, showing it to be a mess of double standards and hypocrisy.

To recap: Imperial alumnus Dr Matt Taylor wore a shirt covered in scantily-clad women while discussing the Rosetta mission on television. After a torrent of abuse on Twitter, he has made a heartfelt apology. Clearly, Dr Taylor is no frothing misogynist – he just made the mistake of wearing a shirt that was not appropriate for television, and arguably not appropriate for work.

My beef is not with him, but his defenders – at least, those who believe there’s a hypocrisy in deriding his shirt choice while at the same time being okay with Kim Kardashian-West getting naked for Paper. Boris Johnson goes further, and asks if feminists are “a bunch of Islamist maniacs who think any representation of the human form is an offence against God” and wonders if we want to tear down all sexual imagery from museums.

Being Mayor of London is hard, I know. Still, a couple of examples from Boris’s career could help him understand this situation. Let’s review: “Kim gets naked and everyone loves her for it. Why don’t I do it when opening new free schools?” he asks. Because there’s a time and a place for sexual imagery, Boris, and it’s not when making important announcements about completely unrelated things.

“We don’t like people brandishing knives on the streets,” he says, “but it’s okay when Jamie Oliver does it on TV every day?” That’s right, Boris. You don’t like knife crime, but you don’t want to ban knives from all people in all situations, do you? No one’s suggesting we do the same for nudity.

And here’s the crux of it, Boris: context. Kim Kardashian West chooses to show sexualised images of herself in a magazine, where they’re accepted and the audience know what to expect. It’s a woman presenting herself – not all women – as a sexual object, with her own consent. When someone wears a shirt with scantily clad women on television, it’s using women as background imagery, reducing them to sexual objects.

I hope Boris has learnt something here, and I hope you have too, lest a future Imperial alumnus decides it’s fine to announce the cure to malaria wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with that photo of a vulture watching a starving African child.