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Good morning. I was surprised to hear on the news yesterday that two female members of the British Medical Association’s GP committee felt the need to resign in protest at a ‘culture of sexism’ at the BMA. One compared the antics of some senior male colleagues as being appropriate to a 1970s Monty Python sketch. I began work in the 1970s and I do indeed remember that culture. Young women couldn’t get into lifts with men without being eyed up and down, or brushed against. Stray male hands casually cupped female bottoms, male sniggers punctuated office conversations, with speculation about the colour of women’s underwear or their bra size. I am ashamed now to recognize how then we just thought it was part of life, most of us simply accepted that women were destined to be objects of the appraising male gaze. Some even found it flattering. It has taken a long time for us to really understand the contempt which lies behind such attitudes and to make our objections heard. I know what the response was then, and no doubt still is from men who see nothing wrong with such behaviour. They’ll say, oh it wasn’t serious. It was just banter. That banter word gets to me. It sounds so inoffensive, you know, boy’s stuff. Followed by some women just can’t take a joke. But of course it’s not just boy’s stuff. What we call banter is often a form of laughing at other people in such a way as to belittle them. It is a tendency that lies deep in the human psyche. It leads to active discrimination against others and potentially to violence. Which is why I think ancient cultures forbade it. The Bible and the classical tradition of philosophy both suggest that laughing at other people is inherently vulgar and demonstrates a culpable lack of self-control. ‘Only fools’ says the Book of Proverbs ‘raise their voices in laughter’, a text which is quoted in the Rule of St Benedict, the sixth century manual for monks which is still the basis of community life in Benedictine monasteries. There is a distinction to be made between laughing at other people and humour. The contemporary Benedictine writer Joan Chittister sees humour as essential. Humour helps us to get perspective, it makes it possible to bear tedium, frustration and a host of other ills. But laughing at other people is another matter. Joan Chittister writes, ‘Some things we laugh at are tragic…Ethnic jokes are not funny. Sexist jokes are not funny. Pornography and pomposity and shrieking mindless noise are not funny….sneers and snide remarks, no matter how witty…are not funny. They are cruel’. That cruelty can leaps into our life when we are challenged by difference, it is the unreflective way of dealing with discomfort. Perhaps the BMA should insist that doctors, male and female, should study the Rule of St Benedict before they are admitted to membership.