Paul Thomas: How poor dress sense became global shirtstorm

CNN described the reaction to Taylor's shirt as "a firestorm". The web magazine The Federalist was amazed that "feminists across the globe" could be up in arms about it.

Clothes may no longer make the man, but it seems they can still break him.

Rosetta project astrophysicist Dr Matt Taylor and his colleagues at the European Space Agency have just pulled off the remarkable feat of landing a probe on a 4km chunk of icy rock hurtling through deep space. But Taylor's moment in the spotlight was soured by the reaction to the shirt he wore during live streaming of the Philae probe landing on comet 67P.

It was one of those lurid Hawaiian shirts that look like the opening panels of a graphic novella. It's hard to say exactly what's going on but it involves guns, explosions and scantily clad women.

Taylor's defenders described it as "a magnificent Big Lebowski-style bowling shirt". To those having a bob each way, it was "a mosaic of intricate tackiness ... horrible and amazing at the same time". To those who took offence, the shirt was "inappropriate ... appalling ... misogynistic".

After the complaints came the inevitable tearful apology. There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and zero likelihood of Dr Taylor wearing that shirt in public ever again.

After the inevitable apology came the inevitable backlash. British journalist turned celebrity/politician Boris Johnson compared Taylor's televised apology to the grovelling mea culpas squeezed out of dissidents and intellectuals at the show trials that punctuated Stalin's purges and Mao's Cultural Revolution.

He also fumed at the hypocrisy of a society that can vilify Taylor over his shirt while being entranced by the spectacle of Kim Kardashian attempting to break the internet with her arse which, seeing she's been kind enough to show it to us, certainly looks up to the job.

But there's inevitability and there's hyper-inevitability: in this sort of socio-cultural controversy, it's hyper-inevitable that someone will intone "this is political correctness gone mad". One commentator insisted that the day the shirtstorm broke was the day political correctness "officially" went mad, but that milestone disappeared from the rear vision mirror some time ago.

I'm not sure this is about political correctness or, for that matter, feminism. A pair of Taylor tormentors claimed "it's this sort of casual misogyny that stops women entering certain scientific fields" but the feminist commentariat seemed to think that was a bit of a stretch. Not surprisingly: one can only wonder what those who fought feminism's big battles would make of women who abandoned their dreams of being astrophysicists because one male astrophysicist wore a tacky shirt.

We need to go back to Taylor's apology to see what's going on here: "I made a big mistake," he said. "I offended many people."

Both these short sentences contain a monumental misconception. If Taylor did make a mistake, it was, in the grand scheme of things, a trivial one. And he didn't offend many people; he offended a few who quite possibly are hard-wired to be outraged by things that aren't outrageous.

But social media and the media's preoccupation with it transformed this storm in a thimble into a major issue and persuaded the poor bugger that he'd committed a crime against basic human decency, as opposed to wearing a shirt that those who still give a continental about such things might regard as bordering on inappropriate.

I've written before about the media's tendency to inflate a few tweets into a significant expression of public opinion. CNN described the reaction to Taylor's shirt as "a firestorm". The web magazine The Federalist was amazed that "feminists across the globe" could be up in arms about it. In fact, all the articles and commentary I read quoted the same three tweets from the same three sources.

The Independent recently took this pernicious tendency to what must surely be its illogical conclusion with a story headlined "President Obama angers whole of China by chewing gum".

I scanned the article for evidence that the world's most populous country (1.35 billion and counting - rapidly) was united in its abhorrence of Obama's gum-chewing. There wasn't any. The justification for the preposterous assertion that Obama "has incurred the wrath of a whole nation" was that two of those 1.35 billion posted negatively on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Social media has enabled anyone with a Twitter account to be spiteful towards people they don't know for the simple reason that they can. The media shouldn't encourage them by treating their nastiness as noteworthy.