Teasing out the ponytail affair

John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand,  liked to tease Amanda Bailey, a waitress at the Cafe Rosie in Parnell, by pulling her ponytail. He did so repeatedly over a reasonably lengthy period, despite being asked by the waitress on more than one occasion to stop.

His initial response was that he was, with his wife Bronagh, a regular customer at the cafe where, despite his being the prime minister, the atmosphere when he was there was always jovial and jokey. He didn’t think he had been doing anything wrong. It was just a bit of fun, a bit of “horseplay.” He has since apologised publicly to the waitress, essentially saying that he’d misread the situation and got it wrong. He won’t, we can be reasonably certain, ever pull a waitress’s ponytail again.

So what we’re talking about here is teasing. The school playground is probably the most common place to encounter teasing. If ponytails are allowed in New Zealand schools, I have little doubt that girls (and quite possibly boys) with ponytails will have had them pulled on numerous occasions and will be thoroughly fed up with it. They will no doubt have asked their tormentors on numerous occasions to ‘cut it out’. Their pleas will almost certainly have been ignored.   

‘Almost certainly’ because the whole point of teasing is to annoy. The perpetrator’s ‘payoff,’ his or her ‘reward’ from teasing, is precisely the victim’s annoyance. If a girl doesn’t mind having her ponytail pulled, perhaps enjoying the attention or regarding it as a form of flattery, then it’s no fun at all. Teasing can also be a ham-fisted way of telling someone of the opposite (or same) sex that you fancy them.

There is commonly a power differential between the person doing the teasing and the person being teased. The teaser will be in a more powerful position, that power derived from status, physical superiority or support from a group. When you take the power differential into account, it becomes clear that teasing is simply just another word for bullying. At the extreme, regularly teased schoolchildren may become depressed, start to engage in self-harm or even take their own lives. Being teased is rarely fun for the recipient. It is at best annoying, at worst humiliating and distressful. That, as I say, is the point.

This will rarely have been the teaser’s express intention. The teasing for him or her was ‘just a bit of fun,' a way of getting attention or simple showing off.

It’s remarkable how closely the prime minister’s treatment of Amanda Bailey reflects the schoolyard teasing prototype. His pulling of her ponytail clearly annoyed her, providing Mr Key with the emotional payback or reward that all teasers/bullies seek. Though her annoyance was evident and eventually overtly expressed to him, he continued to pull her hair and surreptitiously tap her on the shoulder, laying the blame on his wife. Many of us will have done this sort of thing with our own children. It’s ‘fun’ providing it doesn’t go on too long.

The prime minister was not of course in a parental relationship with Amanda Bailey. He was the prime minister and she was a waitress. The difference in power and status between the two is crystal clear, again fitting the schoolyard analogy.

So John, as Amanda herself observed in her anonymous blog,  essentially behaved like a boy teasing a girl at school. And, for a time, she put up with it, until it went too far and she decided to tell the teacher.

Why on earth did he do it? Well, I’m not his psychotherapist and I have absolutely no idea what the answer to that question is. Other perhaps than the bleeding obvious, that it was, as he has claimed,  just “horseplay,” a bit of fun. And for most of the time, being prime minister isn’t that much fun. And he was among friends at the cafe, where he was accepted as that ‘ordinary bloke’ that he so likes to see himself as. And they all often kidded around. And his wife was with him, for goodness sake. And who could possibly misread his intentions.

And suddenly the bloody sky is falling in.

What happened here was that teasing crossed the wafer-thin line that distinguishes it from bullying and the prime minister failed to notice.

If Key had responded immediately to Bailey’s first request to stop, there would not in my view have been a serious issue here. But he didn’t. And that is an incomprehensible failure of judgement for a man of his intellect, a man of his experience and a man in his position. And as such it has undoubtedly wounded him. The wound may well prove politically fatal.

As with Helen Clark, it’s easy to confuse a prime minister’s personal popularity ratings with their chances of winning an election. We live in the age of MMP where margins between coalition groupings are extremely fine. Could a prime minister lose an election just for pulling a waitress’s ponytail? In this environment – you betcha!

Media trainer and commentator Dr Brian Edwards posts at Brian Edwards Media.