Big Brother has gone full Orwell

Sitting hunched with her hands over her face, Caroline Monk looked less like a contestant on a reality show and more like the victim of a struggle session in Maoist China. Last night, the disembodied voice of Big Brother scolded the 56-year-old for using ‘unacceptable’ and ‘offensive’ language.

‘Sorry’, she sniffled. ‘It was a horrible thing I said. I don’t know where it came from. I can’t excuse myself.’ At first, she was so filled with shame she couldn’t even look at the camera. ‘I will make sure I apologise profusely to everyone because I can see the disappointment in everyone’s eyes.’

This cringing show of contrition on prime-time ITV might have been warranted had Caroline embarked on a racist tirade or tried to whip up an insurrection. But her supposed transgressions were far more mundane. One was to have asked a fellow contestant who identified as pansexual whether she ‘likes pans’. Another was pointing out that Zelah, a female contestant who identifies as male, doesn’t ‘have a willy’. The only offence that could be squeezed from either remark is that they’re a bit bloody predictable.

Yet Caroline has now found herself the target of the daily Two Minutes Hate. A petition is already circulating demanding her expulsion from the Big Brother house, while commentators feverishly speculate about her suspiciously right-wing leanings. On ITV2’s Big Brother: Late and Live, David Potts and Jack Remmington nodded sagely to one another as they suggested she could be ‘best friends with Nigel Farage’.

It’s hard to think of a more perfect, or circular, case of life imitating art. A woman on a TV show named after a novel about a totalitarian surveillance state has been publicly humiliated for committing thoughtcrime. And it was beamed straight into homes across Britain via our telescreens.

What makes this all the more galling is that Caroline’s views are no more abnormal than they are offensive. Earlier this year, five UK Supreme Court judges agreed that women don’t have willies. This truth is now enshrined in law. As a female, Zelah is legally obliged to use facilities for women. Polls show most people agree with keeping single-sex facilities single sex.

The idea that a woman who takes testosterone and has had her tits lopped off is, in any meaningful sense, a man is – put bluntly – a lie. Instinctively, we all know this, no matter how insistently Big Brother tries to enforce the trans Newspeak. Caroline’s mewling submission wasn’t born of personal guilt but of social shame. And as Orwell observed, in an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. So Caroline did what frightened people do under tyranny, indeed what most politicians and public figures do today, she complied.

It’s worth asking, beyond her insistence on being viewed as such, what makes Zelah ‘male’? Is it because she fancies women? Because she wears trousers? Because she’s into physical fitness? Once, the idea that these reductive stereotypes are what ‘make a man’ would have been recognised as profoundly offensive. Today, it’s considered progress.

Referencing Orwell when discussing freedom of speech is as hackneyed as a Gustav Klimt poster on a student’s wall. But his predictions were so eerily on the money, it seems rude not to. The mass delusion of transgenderism, with its thought-constricting language, is the perfect example of how words shape our ideas, and those words define the parameters of what is acceptable. Since when has reminding a woman that she hasn’t got a willy been offensive? When it comes to transgenderism, the future isn’t so much a boot stamping on a human face forever as a stiletto heel.

Caroline’s humiliation on Big Brother wasn’t entertainment, it was an attempt at indoctrination. The message is clear: truth is dangerous, compliance is safe, and shame is the price of staying in the game. Reality television – indeed, reality itself – has rarely looked so dystopian.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here.