That is, the first of many feminist rants. I hope not, but I’m all too certain that this won’t be the last time I have a bitch and a moan about women in society today in the Western world, to say nothing of the lot that is being a woman elsewhere in the world. I wouldn’t say I was a feminist per se, more that I’m in favour of equality and this is something we don’t yet have.
I’m not watching the Olympics, but I’m obviously aware (vaguely) of what’s going on. And it’s struck me, as it does every Olympics, that this is the one real event where sportswomen get as much attention as sportsmen. Attention, that is, for their achievements. Someone here is clearly going to object: what about Wimbledon? I don’t watch that either, but what filters through to me is that everyone pays close attention to how the men are playing, and they pay equally close attention to…what the women are wearing. Or, worse, how ‘manly’ the women are on court — who grunts or shouts with every shot, and who plays a more feminine game. Otherwise the only women to regularly appear on Sports pages are the WAGs. The Olympics are the only real place where attention is paid to women for what they can achieve (other than, of course, Paula Radcliffe — has she cried/thrown up/fainted/committed suicide yet? I have no idea).
Women who get to high places in other arenas fare little better: One of the few things I know about, say, Angela Merkel, the German president, is that she is known for wearing tops that show more cleavage than most people wish to see on a woman her age. Hilary Clinton was once vociferously derided for wearing a yellow suit. Carla Bruni and Michele Obama are as well-known as their husbands (Nicholas Sarkozy, French President and Barack Obama, US presidential candidate, respectively) because they dress well. The dress-sense of male politicians gets nothing like the same number of column inches: we’re just not expected to care that such-and-such a president wears Armani, but so-and-so is channeling JFK by wearing blah. And the sheer number of celebrity women who are only known for their drunken antics and bikini-related slip-ups rather than for whatever originally made them famous — their acting or singing, say. Off the top of my head I could list ten such women, and I can think of only one male celebrity who is better known for his bad behaviour than his musical talent — namely Pete Doherty (who I met once in a pub in my home town – a very surreal moment. One suspects he’d just escaped from the Priory, a branch of which isn’t far away). I don’t object to stories of Wino warbling out of time and key to one of her songs at huge festivals and so on, or any of those things: yes, they amuse me. But where are the men who make similarly bad ‘role models’? (Celebrities as role models? What, being a famous singer automatically means you have a moral duty to your audience? Don’t be silly!) Surely it’s not only the A-list women, songstresses and WAGs that make this much of a fool of themselves?
Basically my point is this: it’s so easy to think we’ve made it, but if the media still have this kind of a bias, and if I can still walk into my newsagent and pick out articles that talk about being a strong woman by changing your physical image and wearing more heel-inches and makeup, then it’s fair to say that the same bias runs throughout. As is proven by so many other recent news stories I could point to. We still have some way to go.
And the sad thing is, even the Olympics isn’t bias-free. I believe that there are something like 165 medals available in men’s sports but only 127 in women’s?
(Yes!)
I want to write a response to this, but I fear that I’m not in a frame of mind which is conducive to eloquent responses. So, all I shall say is this:
Feminism
I’m glad I’ve provoked some kind of thought, then, Dickie! Come back to me if your response ever finds words
I didn’t know that, Lucy. That is sad – but at least the Olympics is far nearer to equality than anything else in the sporting world. Maybe in a few years time they’ll get there; maybe women’s sports outside of the games will also start to get more coverage. I think I’m probably hoping for too much though!
I’ll try – it’s something I was talking to my Mum about the other day, as it happens. As I’ve mentioned before, work takes it out of me as far as intelligent blogging is concerned…
“the Olympics is far nearer to equality than anything else in the sporting world”
Eh? Wimbledon – The Female winner gets more prize money than the Male winner, considering the amount of tennis they play. By the way, not everyone just pays attention to what the women wear at Wimbledon (they’re all too manly :p). Also, Motorsport is fairly equal, to bring in a fairly obvious example. If you’re quick, people don’t care who the hell you are. In fact, it can be argued that being womanly is advantageous in some ways as far as racing is concerned.
To pre-empt a question, “how come there are no women in top-line motorsport then? (Danica Patrick excepted, if we count IRL as top-line)”. Yeah, because not many choose to get involved. And I’d guess its the same with lots of sports. How many female boxers are there? And is that part of the reason why theres no competition for female boxing at the Olympics (to address Lucy’s point)? If there are only, say, 5 women who would enter the Olympics for a certain sport, does that warrant them staging that event? I’d say not (of course for sports where women do compete and it’s not represented in the Olympics because of “historic” reasons or whatever, that’s not really on)
I get fed up of women going on about how things are “biased” towards us. They’re not; you just have to accept that men and women are different, and as such society will treat them differently. That doesn’t mean that one is (generally) presented with any less opportunity than the other, or whatever.
Hmm. I didn’t mean to write this much. Oops.
I take your point: there can’t be that many female boxers, and so on. And I wrote that entry fully knowing that I don’t pay much attention to sports coverage. Of course men and women are different, but not as different as we are presented to be. It is still the case that while women are despised or looked down upon for slutty behaviour, men are not – at least, not to the same extent. Womens magazines are an absolute tidal wave of clothes, shoes, diets, and celebrity gossip, as if that’s all we care about. Mens magazine are all about what the women are not wearing. Both of these things objectify women in a way that men are never objectified. And women honestly don’t get the same opportunities. There are still, say, far more women nurses than male nurses: indeed, no-one ever says ‘female nurse’ but they’ll always qualify nurse with ‘male’ when it’s a man doing the nursing. There is still a salary gap. Women in media scrutiny are not taken seriously.
It’s not much, sure, but from where I stand, it is noticeable that there is a bias. Maybe, for us in the UK, it’s a matter of time. Maybe in fifty years, or a century, women will be regarded as sportsmen the equal of men in their own (less strength-based) way; magazines will not focus on getting the perfect bikini body, will not instruct 12-year-old girls to diet and do fifty sit-ups every night. Maybe, decades down the line, affairs will not be blamed largely on the whore who led the ‘perfect husband’ astray, but on the bastard who thought he could get away with promising the world to two women. It’s about more than accepting that women can work as well as men, are as intelligent, and all the rest of it. It’s about more than equality of opportunity. Certain patterns of thought – ethics and morals – are still so ingrained with us that we judge people subconsciously and don’t even realise we do it. I’m as guilty as anyone else – my new driving instructor has to be a man, I don’t know why (though it might partly be because my old instructor, a woman, was diminutive and made me feel like a clumsy giant).
Maybe I’ve made out that I think we’re still in the Dark Ages. I know we’re not, I know women and men are given, a lot of the time, near as damn-it the same opportunities. But there is still a difference, and enough of a difference that it annoys me. And what else is a blog for?
I realise I may have just written more than you…
To respond to Dickie…
Yes, men and women are different. Yes, equality of opportunity should be more to the point than equality for the sake of it. Yes, there are reasons why a male-dominated culture has arisen as it has – it is women who bear children and it is men who are perhaps naturally more assertive. As this article remarks, there is still nothing essentially wrong with women baking cupcakes and, erm, taking up dressmaking! But like it or not, we have not yet reached the stage where women don’t have to push that bit harder to be taken seriously in a hell of a lot of fields. And a lot of it is not misogyny on a deliberate level per se – it is the result of ignorance (as in not knowing, not deliberate obtusity!) and a tendency towards the status quo. I quote our school as a prime example on a smaller scale.*
To return to Jenny’s main point, men feeling lazy can grow beards. Women feeling lazy have to cover up every inch of leg/armpit/eyebrows or be labelled bra-burning, manly hippies. Is that not unfair?
*I am quite happy to provide examples/ explain the context to Jenny if so desired
The pay gap is largely a myth. Or, rather, there’s a good reason for it. I was reading something about it the other day (cant remember where, sorry. Probably the BBC or one of the newspapers) that said that up until a certain age, theres no significant difference between average levels of income for guys and gals. The certain age happens to be that at which most women take time off work to go have kids, so have maternity leave and whatnot. Which explains the pay gap – it’s hardly fair to pay someone for not doing a job, is it?
Which women under media scrutiny arent taken seriously? How don’t women get the same opportunities? Im sorry but I don’t beleive that can be true.
The magazine thing is a good point. Men’s magazines are about more than just women, by the way. They cover stuff like cars and footballery (apparently. I only read two magazines, which although probably have more male readers, arent specifically aimed at blokes cos they’re about specific interests). But the important thing is that mens and womens magazines have a certain content because thats what sells. So women’s mags have stuff on celebs, shoes, clothes, blah blah blah because thats women (or at least the ones the thing is marketed at) want to read about. If you don’t want to read about that, do what I do with the men’s mags and don’t get them…
I take the point that theres probably some subconscious bias amongst some people, but thats because society is still adjusting to womens’ changing roles. Think of it as inertia. I dont think our generation will suffer with it as much as the previous one (if at all); it’ll just disappear, if we ignore it. By drawing attention to some things which may be perceived as biased towards men, all you do (imo) is prolong the amount of time before it’s not an issue, if you get what I’m trying to say?
Of course, the important thing to remember is that I’m male. I’m not likely to see much bias because it won’t really effect me. That said, any bias I’ve heard about from other people has generally been about other things, rather than just sexism. I can’t think what Lucy’s referring to about school, except for certain – relatively old – members of staff who can hardly be taken as representative of society as a whole.
My point is that be reinforcing the gender divide – as you are – you’re only making things worse. I have the same gripes towards “multiculturalism”. If people got on with living their life and judged people on who they are rather than their gender/religion/race etc, we’d be much better off. Sigh.
“I can’t think what Lucy’s referring to about school”
That, Dickie, is precisely my point. The guys in the school, including anyone who could have sorted it, didn’t know that up until we were in Y11 there were a grand total of three sanitary boxes in the entire school and that the girls’ loos at break became ridiculous, with cubicles empty but still a queue for the one – it just wouldn’t have occurred to them that there could be a problem but we couldn’t exactly bring it up at class council. Male P.E. teachers didn’t know that yelling at four or five girls in a class [out of thirteen] because they all couldn’t swim on the same day was completely inappropriate and ridiculous and even the well-intentioned male teachers probably didn’t know why girls could be sat in agony in lessons but not see the point of going home as a result. I’m sure that Wheeldon didn’t know that black tights (as opposed to ‘nearly black’) were hot and itchy and hard to find in the shops in spring, or that the regulation school skirt was simply impossible to wear if you were silly enough to grow hips before the age of 16.
And for every male-dominated organisation, and many do exist due to maternity leave or whatever, there are probably a load more things that men simply don’t know which are hindering women’s progress on a much bigger scale than anything we faced at school.
At the risk of sounding like an arse, how are people meant to know that if you don’t tell them? Is it the school’s fault for not acting on a problem they didn’t know existed because no-one told them?
Well who would you have told?
That reply is also woefully missing the point, and I suspect that you know it
I would’ve thought the female members of staff wouldve been sympathetic. Or tell the head, if you wanted some entertainment… That said I appreciate that for someone in year 7/8/9 to go to someone and explain those problems existed, wouldve been a big ask.
How does it miss the point? You said the School was “biased” against girls. They werent, the school just needed to sort certain things out. If someone pointed the things out to them and they said “so what?”, you’d have a point. I’m assuming that didnt happen though.
The point is the same as my original point that in a lot of fields/ organisations women have to push that bit harder. To sort out the issues outlined above would have required, and in some of the cases continues to require, quite forceful pushing with a male-dominated, traditional-leaning body of staff. Not insurmountable issues, not deliberate misogyny, and I very deliberately did not use the word ‘biased’ about the school because that would imply some sort of conscious prejudice – but pushing required nonetheless.
Thing is, a lack of sanitary boxes is a very easily solved problem. Flexible working hours in organisations because childcare issues are such that a lot of mothers feel they need to be available at 8:55am and 3:25pm is less obvious – and I don’t care that childcare has become a shared parenting issue in a lot of households, in practice it often still is the mothers – and the same lack of understanding or ignorance of childcare grants can be where the so-called glass ceiling comes into play. I went to a careers fair at one point last year. I asked two questions of everybody: “What are your opportunities for mathematicians?” and “What are maternity policies?”. Women may have come a long way since 1950, but some of those companies haven’t.
And Jenny’s post (sorry, Jenny, we’ve gone slightly off tangent!) talks about how much value is placed on a woman’s appearance. Do you think that a woman in a high-potential company job would get away with her hair tied back, no make-up on, and slightly baggy trousers because she had problems finding fitted ones? But it’s fine for men to shave in the morning, put on a tie and go, no questions asked.
The ringing conclusion is not “Men are all bastards!” (or not in this particular case, anyway
). There is not a clear black-and-white divide in large numbers of cases, we have come a long way since the days off being married off or sewing for life. But to reiterate Jenny’s final line, we do still have a long way to go.
Well then your example doesnt back up your original point, because the issues you outlined werent exactly insurmountable, or ones which wouldve even required a lot of pushing had they been pointed out. But then I’m possibly in the minority in thinking that the staff weren’t/arent always completely unreasonable.
I can see what you’re saying about flexible working hours, but a) from an employer’s point of view I can see why it’d be extremely unreasonable, and b) how is that just an issue for women, anyway?
Value is placed on everyone’s appearance. Do you think a man in a similar situation could get away with looking scruffy? Of course not.
I know the conclusion isn’t “all men are bastards”. But my point is that whilst I agree there may be some differences at the moment, it’s only a matter of time before they sort of settle down. By no means is there a “long way to go”, because by and large men and women have the same opportunities. In any case, it’s to be expected that theres some unconscious thing that makes people perceive men and women in different ways (and yes, to create bias – both ways). Because the two sexes are different. We perceive the world in different ways and that’ll undoubtedly taint the way we deal with each other. To pretend otherwise is simply wrong.
It has to be said, though, that the other day I read in the RadioTimes, of all really cutting-edge journalistic publications, that womens rights and feminism etc are all really backsliding. This was in a review of a reality program in which women rule an island and every now and again a man is introduced to the island and then beaten and downtrodden by the women, not so much ruled as tyrannised. The point the reviewer was making was that this wasn’t rulership, there wasn’t a shred of respect there, and it degraded men and women in a country where once again women are becoming ever more ornamental. Think about fashion in, say, the eighties, where arguably women had more equal rights and opportunities than they do now – it was all about power dressing, sharp-cut skirt-suits that meant business. Women were go-getting and powerful and now – the more I think about it the more I think this writer was right – we are losing that power we had for a short while. We’re still maybe near the peak of that curve, but we’re teetering on the brink a bit…?
[...] and on ad infinitum… but as a self-declared assertive woman (who still agrees with Jenny here**), I just find the whole thing pretty damn scary. Is it just [...]