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Veiled Criticism

Wednesday 6th April, 2011 in gender, Politics by Melaszka | No comments

I’ve just been getting very hot under the collar in an online debate on the question of whether or not the niqab and burqa should be banned. I found myself pissing in the wind, arguing against the ban in the face of a deluge of heated opposition, with most posters adamant that the niqab and burqa are abhorrent affronts to women’s rights.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to their concerns. Yes, I loathe the attitude that women have a duty to cover themselves up, that merely by existing, by having breasts and legs and faces, they are a sinful temptation to men and responsible for men’s lust and actions. I cringe and want to punch the wall with anger when I hear some Muslim women justify the wearing of their particular form of “modest” dress on the grounds that “If you left a piece of meat unwrapped on the kitchen table, you wouldn’t blame the dog if he ate it, would you?” I don’t know how women can collude in their own objectification and excuse their own abuse in this way.

But I don’t believe you can ever emancipate women (or any other group) by dictating to them what they can or cannot do.

Nor, in a Western European context, do I buy the argument that a ban on the burqa and niqab is necessary to prevent women being coerced into wearing these garments against their will. Time and time again, I see people on messageboards and online debates blithely claiming that obviously no woman would ever choose to wear the niqab or the burqa and the vast majority must have been forced by their families. Actually, scores of studies have shown that the majority of burqa- and niqab-wearers in Western Europe voluntarily chose that form of dress and in many European countries the vast majority of women opting for the extreme forms of covering are converts, who don’t even have a Muslim extended family. It seems to me that the kneejerk circular argument that so many people resort to when this topic comes up – “I think the burqa is oppressive, therefore I can’t imagine that any woman would freely choose to wear it, therefore any woman who does wear it must have been forced to do so (regardless of what she says or the overwhelming evidence that most European burqa-wearing is voluntary), therefore it must be oppressive” – is insulting to both women and Muslims, patronisingly pigeonholing both groups as easily-brainwashed patsies who are incapable of making an informed, independent choice.

I’ve also met the argument that, while European burqa-wearers may choose the garment to make an extremist point, they are immature poseurs, irresponsibly promoting a garment which is mandatory in many Middle Eastern countries and thus making the oppression of women in those countries more culturally acceptable. But it seems to me that legally prohibiting the full veil on those grounds is equivalent to banning T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara or other communist iconography or slogans, on the grounds that it is legitimising the oppression and human rights abuses in undemocratic communist countries like Burma. I don’t see that the fact the people in one part of the world are forced to accept a practice against their will ever justifies curtailing the freedom of expression of people in another part of the world – even if they use that freedom of expression to show support for undemocratic or oppressive regimes.

I also refuse to accept that wearing the niqab or the burqa is always about accepting a view of women as the temptress that needs to be hidden for decency’s sake and to protect men from their uncontrollable urges. For some women, it is more a pragmatic choice – they don’t believe that in an ideal world they should have to cover themselves up, but while we live in a culture where many men still believe they have the right to vocally appraise any female stranger on the street and where many people, male or female, judge women on their looks in a way that they do not judge men, covering themselves is a way of preventing that and reframing social encounters in their own terms.

Then, of course, there are Muslim women who now choose to wear the full veil because they are fed up with the way that the Muslim world has been attacked and stigmatised since 9/11. Watching the west bomb the crap out of Muslim countries and seeing even the most moderate of their faith publicly branded as potential terrorists may have made them more willing to visibly assert their faith and stick two fingers up at mainstream British society in a way that they did not do before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I just do not accept that every women who wears a full veil is doing so because she sees herself as a sinful temptress or a piece of meat.

My main reason for opposing a ban on the full veil, though, is that, at gut level, the idea of any woman being forced to reveal a part of her body when she doesn’t want to – whatever her reasons – appals me. I see little difference between a law insisting that a woman must reveal her face and a law insisting that she must reveal her tits. For me, central to the notion of women’s rights is the idea of bodily autonomy. When I read men arguing that they have the “right” to see the faces of women they pass in the street I feel as offended as when I hear women comparing their bodies to a piece of meat that should not be left unwrapped on the kitchen table.

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Ageism, employment tribunals and autocuties

Sunday 23rd January, 2011 in Accepted Social Situations, gender, Media, Media Personality, News by Melaszka | No comments

The recent ruling of the employment tribunal in the case of former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly is a double cause for celebration: not only does it send out a welcome message that the law will support older women who feel they have been thrown on the scrap heap for no good reason, but, at first sight, it also seems to have been a landmark case in terms of wider social attitudes. It has been interesting and gratifying to note that many socially conservative media outlets which usually dismiss campaigns for women’s rights as “political correctness gone mad” have backed O’Reilly to the hilt on this.

O’Reilly is, of course, not the first older female presenter to gain public sympathy and support after being ditched or passed over for promotion by the BBC: the dropping of Arlene Phillips as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, the end of Moira Stewart’s career as a television newsreader and the decision to hire Toby Buckland as the main presenter of Gardener’s World rather than promote Carol Klein after Monty Don’s decision to take time out after

 a stroke all caused widespread public disquiet. In the case of Gardener’s World, viewing figures dropped alarmingly after the BBC’s decision to “refresh” the show by marginalising its older female presenter, so if the BBC really does believe that the public wants its factual programming to be anchored exclusively by young, sexy presenters, then it seems to be mistaken. Nonetheless, the media kerfuffle over the Countryfile case seems to have taken the public indignation at the treatment of older women on screen to a new level.

I’m not sure, though, that the widespread public goodwill to O’Reilly necessarily indicates a new dawn of woman-friendly attitudes in society. Many of the normally reactionary, normally anti-feminist voices who have spoken out in O’Reilly’s favour are doing so because they perceive this primarily as an issue of ageism, not one of sexism (a view apparently shared by the employment tribunal itself, which, while upholding her claim for age discrimination, rejected her accusations of sex discrimination – rather puzzlingly, since they themselves acknowledged that women are more vulnerable to this kind of age discrimination than men). I suspect that, in many cases, the powerful tugs of middle-class and middle-age tribalism have merely temporarily overcome a deeper distrust of the feminist agenda.

Moreover, in many of these cases of age discrimination which have captured the public imagination, it is younger women in the media industry who have been cast as the villain. In the Strictly Come Dancing row, for instance, Alesha Dixon bore the brunt of the public backlash, not the TV executives who chose to hire her or her male co-presenters. It seemed that both her supporters and Phillips’s accepted unquestioningly that there was room for only one token woman on a panel of four judges – they merely disgreed on what type of woman it should be. That perhaps there was a place for both Phillips and Dixon on the judging panel didn’t seem to cross anybody’s mind.

It seems that, increasingly, any woman in factual programming or TV journalism who happens to be under 45 and passably attractive is dismissed as an “autocutie” who can’t possibly have a brain or any relevant experience for the job she is doing. Fiona Bruce, Emily Maitlis and Katie Derham all have Oxbridge degrees, but you wouldn’t know it, from the constant sniping about “sexing up and dumbing down” that female newsreaders face.

The Madonna/Whore dichotomy appears to be alive and well in broadcasting, with audiences apparently believing that a woman can be a young hottie or an authoritative expert, but not both. While the BBC management seems to think that women exist only as eye candy and should be banished from the screen as soon as they fail to set heterosexual men’s pulses racing (and even then they fail to recognise that older women can be “hot”, too), that a woman who is not young and sexy has no right to be on TV, large sections of the audience and media who oppose the BBC’s attitude seem to fall into the opposite error, of believing that a woman who is young and sexy has no right to be on TV.

Why can’t women be treated as people, as subjects, whose sexiness or lack of is purely an incidental factor, as it is for men, rather than a defining feature of their worth?

Nonetheless, I still feel that, as a society, we are making progress, slow though it may be. I remember when Angela Rippon and Anna Ford began their careers as newsreaders in the 70s there was much comment in the press to the effect that no woman could ever have enough “gravitas” to be an appropriate person to present the national news. I don’t think many people would seriously argue that today. And voices like those of Nick Ross (who has commented that O’Reilly’s sacking was justified, because it is “natural” for people to be attracted to older men but younger women) and Cristina Odone (who has brought up that old chestnut about this legal ruling harming women’s employment chances, as it will make media employers more wary of hiring female presenters in the first place if they know they won’t be able to sack them on a whim) seem to be being treated with the ridicule that they deserve.

I know that it is true that the media is a rarefied world and that O’Reilly’s victory does not necessarily improve the lot of ordinary women outside that charmed circle, but O’Reilly winning this verdict is still, in my view, a lot better than O’Reilly not winning that verdict.

Miss Scarlet in the Billiard Room with the Patronising Media

Wednesday 5th January, 2011 in Media, Violence Against Women by Melaszka | No comments

I live in the Bristol area, where the local media has been abuzz lately with the brutal murder of Joanna Yeates. Before that, the murder in South Africa of Anni Dewani, whose husband is a Bristol businessman, also garnered several column inches in the local press. Several things about the coverage of these two women’s deaths in both the national and the local media have disturbed me.

Firstly, the salacious reporting of both cases seems to have been tailored to cater for the armchair Poirots amongst us. It is easy to forget, when surrounded by news reports which focus in lingering detail on clues and suspects and gossipy details of the dramatis personae’s lives, that the women who died and their family members and/or acquaintances who are now falling under both police and public suspicion are real people, not characters in a novel or a TV series. These women’s violent deaths seem to be being heartlessly plundered to provide the nation with a series of dramatic watercooler moments. I must admit, as a whodunnit junkie myself, I have found myself getting caught up in the lurid speculation, too, and am instantly repelled by my own crassness. It’s hard, though, when every news report seems to frame these women’s deaths in terms more suited to the Reverend Green in the Library with the Lead Piping.

Is it just my imagination or is it particularly the violent murder of young women that gets this voyeuristic treatment? I don’t recall the deaths of young men or older people being reported in this way. It seems part of a general public perception that the abduction, torture and/or murder of young women is somehow exciting, glamorous and sexy, a perception which is fuelled by crime fiction which seems to increasingly focus on the “sexy” female torture victim or dead body with unnecessarily titillating detail.

This fetishisation of female victims of violence is not only objectifying and insulting to women, it can also have negative effects on male victims of crime, whose suffering is often ignored by the media and the public – they’re apparently just not sexy enough. For example, thousands of children go missing every year, but it’s usually only photogenic white girls whose absence triggers a media frenzy, with not only the seedy, quasi-paedophiliac voyeurism that brings, but also the publicity that could potentially be helpful in finding them.

Also, I’ve noticed that, in both media descriptions of Dewani and Yeates and tributes from friends and families, the women’s beauty has been stressed above all else. Why is it that people persist in thinking that the most valuable asset a woman has, the most important thing to stress about her, the most tragic waste if her life is violently cut short, is her beauty? When a young man is tragically killed, it is rarely said about him “It’s such a waste – he was so handsome!” “He had his whole life ahead of him” – yes. “He was so talented, doing so well in his studies or career” – yes. “He planned to marry and have children” – yes, sometimes. All these things are said about female murder victims, too, and yet the kneejerk response when a woman under the age of 35 meets an untimely end is to stress the loss of her good looks first, as if it’s somehow disrespectful to the dead woman to think that any of her talents or achievements are more important than that.

Finally, I find the Avon and Somerset Police’s suggestion that local women should avoid going out alone at night until Yeates’s killer is caught staggering. Statistically, young men are far more likely to die as a result of violent crime than women, and yet I have never heard the police issue a statement suggesting that men submit themselves to a voluntary curfew. It seems unthinkable to subject men to any curtailment of their freedom to travel and socialise as much as they want, no matter how much danger they may be in. And yet if a woman is killed, especially a young, attractive woman, even if there is no evidence whatsoever that she was killed because she was a woman, the motive is immediately assumed to be sexual and all women in the area are held to be at risk and expected to make themselves prisoners in their own homes, or it will somehow be considered to be their fault if they are subsequently attacked.

Rape and the Left-Wing Media

Thursday 9th December, 2010 in Civil Liberties, Media, Popular Culture, Sexual Violence by Melaszka | No comments

I’ve just come away from a Guardian website discussion about Julian Assange feeling disgusted and baffled by the general assumption that seems to prevail on the left that liberal men who are seen to be doing a good job for the cause of free speech, civil rights, socialism, political correctness, whatever, somehow deserve a Get Out Of Jail Free card on charges of rape and sexual assault.

I don’t deny that Wikileaks has made public a lot of information that was in the public interest and Assange deserves commendation for that. I don’t deny that I’m appalled by the US’s sledgehammer-to-crush-a-nut tactics in attempting to shut down Wikileaks and arraign Assange on espionage charges. I would oppose any attempt to extradite him to the States on those, quite frankly, preposterous charges. And I must admit that the timing of Sweden’s issuing of an arrest warrant for him on rape and sexual molestation charges is suspicious, as is the fact that they are acting now after previously ruling he had no case to answer, and it may be that they are, as his supporters claim, plotting an extradition deal with the US once they’ve got him off British soil, which would be quite wrong.

But the idea that the charges on which he is wanted in Sweden are “trivial” and “trumped up” is a misogynist fallacy that I cannot believe is going unchallenged time and time again on left-wing messageboards.

I can’t believe that comments like “This shows the danger of going down the Swedish route of making it easier to convict in rape cases” and “This is another example of why women who make rape accusations shouldn’t have a right to anonymity” are getting more than 700 recommendations in the Guardian’s comment section on the Assange case.

I have no idea whether he really committed the crimes of which he is accused. It may be, as some media outlets allege, that the story of the complainants does not add up. But the way to find out is by having him face those charges in court. No woman who accuses a powerful, charismatic or brilliant man of sexual assault should be denied justice simply because he is so “important” or “doing such a great job”. No accusation of rape is a “small matter” that doesn’t really need to be pursued.

And nor do I buy the arguments that what he is accused of in Sweden “wouldn’t be considered rape in any civilised country”. I think Sweden’s feminist rape laws are a cause for celebration, not denigration.

It’s not that I believe that any man accused of rape must automatically be guilty. Nor do I believe that, even if he is guilty, that necessarily obliterates every good deed he has ever done in his life or that proper legal processes don’t need to be followed or that extenuating circumstances that would be considered in any other crime should be ignored when it comes to rape. When Polanski found himself under house arrest last year, while I agreed he should be extradited to face charges, I found myself almost as irritated by those who, seemingly slipping straight into Daily Mail-reader hanging and flogging mode, didn’t think whether the correct procedures were followed or not in his original trial mattered and by those who felt his real-life actions automatically made his films “misogynist” works that any “real” feminist would boycott as I was by those who argued that he shouldn’t face trial because “He’s such a great artist!”

Let’s separate the alleged rapist from the man’s professional role. If a “great man” is accused of a sexual crime, I don’t believe that means we should ignore or dismiss any great work he has achieved in other areas of his life. But nor, obviously, does it mean that the crimes of which he is accused aren’t serious and shouldn’t be investigated.

And if it’s true, as Assange’s supporters claim, that the Swedish authorities would never have bothered applying for extradition on something as “trivial” as sex crime charges if he hadn’t upset the US government, then in my opinion that’s a sad indictment of how trivially the international justice system treats rape.

Patriarchy By Numbers

Tuesday 2nd November, 2010 in Education, Media, News, Politics, Popular Culture by Melaszka | No comments

I’ve been interested recently to read some media reports by a local branch of the Fawcett Society on the representation of women in the media. They can be found here and here.

By counting the numbers of pictures/mentions of men and women in various media genres and analysing whether they are included because of what they look like or because of their achievements, they provide a snapshot of the very different ways in which the two genders are represented in books, magazines, newspapers and on TV.

Their findings on children’s TV and literature make particularly stark reading, because the culture children are exposed to will help shape their attitudes to themselves and to others as they grow up. The researchers found that, on the sample day, on the CBeebies channel, 100% of story narrators were male, as were a whopping 70% of characters shown. What message does that send out to girls about their importance in society and their right to have their voices heard?

The ratio of female to male characters in both adults’ and children’s TV and literature is something I tend to get very hot under the collar about, particularly the ratio between male and female central or authoritative characters.

I very often get into debates with people about this and am accused of “playing a futile numbers game”. The usual arguments I hear (and I’m sure many of you will be used to hearing these same cracked records, too) are:

(a) Shouldn’t we be focusing on serious problems, like genital mutilation, forced marriage, domestic violence, female infanticide? Isn’t how many female characters there are in a children’s book too trivial to worry about?

To which I would respond, well, no, actually. Men who feel they have the right to subject women to violence and coercion do so because they believe that merely having a Y chromosome makes them intrinsically more valuable and powerful than people without one. They weren’t born with this world view. I’m not suggesting that reading children’s books with a male: female character ration of 3:1 is, on its own, going to make someone abusive to women. But it’s one of the many things that cumulatively teach children to believe that men are “naturally” more important than women.

(b) Surely having one powerful or strong female character in a book is enough? It gives girls a role model and shows that women can achieve?

If it were the 1950s, when real-life female leaders were thin on the ground and school careers advisers counseled girls not to aim for any job more authoritative than a secretary, I might be able to buy that argument. But we are no longer in a position where girls are starved of any role models and anything is better than nothing.

Indeed, literature and TV often lags woefully behind real life in its portrayal of authority figures. For example, one of the clichés of detective stories, in novels and on TV, that most does my head in is the male-female authority sandwich. The female second-in-command, the female sergeant seems to be everywhere in detective series these days, from DS Reid in Taggart, through DS Havers in Inspector Lynley, to DS Clarke in Rebus (and, although they’re not police officers and none of them has a formal rank, arguably Harry-Hermione-Ron in Harry Potter is the ultimate example of the male-female authority sandwich). And what a depressing example of faux feminism that is! I always feel that the female sergeant is being held up as an example of how right-on the author is and how far on society has moved, that we are supposed to be grateful that’s she’s made it to the dizzy heights of the rank of sergeant and isn’t still languishing as a lowly Constable. Shock! Horror! She even has male constables working under her!

But, of course, none of this mitigates the fact that the woman is always stuck in second-in-command, that the inspector whose name is the title of the series is male, that he is the one whose maverick but flawed genius is central to the franchise and that, while she might be allowed to be bright and resourceful and sometimes even hand him the crucial clue without which the case wouldn’t be cracked, his is the central consciousness with which we are invited to identify, to the extent that even his failings and weaknesses are fetishised.

Where fictional female police officers are allowed to reach the rank of inspector or higher (e.g. in the Prime Suspect and The Commander series), the focus is usually on how hard it is being a woman in a man’s world, with her gender being presented as a rarity and a problem.

The fact is, though, that in real life it is nowadays far from unusual to see a woman in the higher echelons of the police service. There are female superintendents, commanders, commissioners and chief constables. Why can’t we see more police inspectors in fiction, as in real life, who just happen to be women?

So, no, I don’t think having one female character in a position of authority or a position of importance in the plot is enough: while it might demonstrate that women can be important, the fact that they are in a minority still reinforces the sense that it is far more likely and normal for men to be leaders, often suggesting that this is less likely and normal than is actually the case in real life.

However, I don’t think it’s always wise to get too hung up on rank and positions of authority. It is not, in my opinion, a good idea to start criticising female characters for “only” being a stay-at-home housewife or for “not being strong enough”. That would reinforce patriarchal notions about paid work outside the home being the only work of importance and set standards of “feistiness” and “strength” that female characters are expected to meet that are higher than those expected of males. Male heroes aren’t always expected to be “strong” – indeed, when they show vulnerability, we often love them even more.

For me, the most important thing is to have more female characters in central roles, more female characters who are presented as the subjects of the stories. I’d love the female sergeant if it were her name in the show title, if the stories were about her problems and concerns and her role in the investigation. She doesn’t have to have a promotion – she just needs to be shown to be important.

(c) But the author didn’t intend the text to say anything about gender or to imply that one sex is superior to the other! That’s just how the characters happened to appear in their head. It would be unjustifiably interfering with their creative control of their work and lead to political correctness gone mad if we insisted that all books/TV shows had to have exactly 50% male and exactly 50% female characters.

I will concede that, in practical terms, it would be impossible to insist, for example, legally, that books and series had to have an even gender split of characters and might make plots and characters seem formulaic and sterile.

The trouble is that it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: while male characters being in the majority is the predominant practice, most authors will subconsciously follow this practice when characters “just happen to appear in their head”, because they are heavily influenced by prior literature. Until we start seeing more books and TV series with as many or more female characters than male in the centre of the action, authors and screenwriters are far more likely to see a male face in their head when they think of the words “hero” and “villain” and a female face when they think of “assistant” or “love interest”. In my opinion, it would be good if writers voluntarily started operating positive discrimination and didn’t just go with the clichéd idea that first pops into their head. And if publishers and commissioning editors didn’t lean on them to follow the status quo.

Not Holding Out For A Hero

Saturday 9th October, 2010 in Accepted Social Situations, feminism, Media Personality by Melaszka | 3 comments

I’m going to marry Benedict Cumberbatch.

Admittedly, the star of the BBC’s Sherlock series may not yet be aware of this fact. In fact, strictly speaking, he hasn’t actually ever met me. But that hasn’t stopped me publicising my matrimonial aspirations on Facebook, Twitter and in numerous text messages to my friends this week.

However, don’t worry, you don’t need to buy your hat just yet. And in the unlikely event of Olivia Poulet reading this, she can breathe a sigh of relief. Because, obviously, I am not really going to marry Le Cumberbatch (he’s not really my type and I don’t even believe in the concept of marriage), it’s just one of those metaphors which women of my age find so easy to trot out about any male actor/musician/writer/sportsperson whose work they admire: “I want to have his babies”, “I love him” etc. It’s a throwback to the days when we used to doodle our favourite pop stars’ names on our pencil cases during the boring bits of Double Maths.

It annoys and embarrasses me that, after years of identifying as a feminist, I still thoughtlessly do this (although I don’t think I’m alone – many of my friends, including those who are already happily married and even some who are lesbians, are equally guilty). Because I’m acutely aware that the romantic ideal of “The Hero I’m Going To Marry” is one of the things that often holds women back, both from aiming to achieve themselves, and from fully appreciating the achievements of other women. While boys of my generation spent their Maths lessons dreaming about being a guitarist/actor/footballer, we girls wasted too much time dreaming about marrying a guitarist/actor/footballer, and that may be one of the reasons why so few of us got round to actually picking up a guitar or kicking a ball around the park. It may also be one of the reasons why so few female pop stars achieved the popularity or financial success of e.g. Duran Duran, Kajagoogoo, Bros, East 17, or even U2, The Police or The Smiths – we might have quite liked Michelle Shocked or Tracy Chapman’s music, but as we couldn’t process down the aisle with them with the sound of Mendelssohn blaring in the background, they were never really going to become an all-consuming passion.

But have things moved on for today’s teenaged and tweenaged girls? Since the rise of the Spice Girls and All Saints in the 90s, it does seem to me that young girls have been far more likely than previous generations to look to female role models as their heroes. I am ambivalent about whether this is a better attitude than that of my generation. There is no doubt that the word “career” has become firmly embedded in girls’ vocabularies in a way it wasn’t when I was eleven, twelve. There’s a pragmatic openness about the capitalist way in which the entertainment industry works, which I don’t remember being the case in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when I was growing up, and female stars seem to be at the forefront of that. In a sense, when I see eleven-year-olds idolising Cheryl Cole or Katie Price or Lady Gaga and I know that they know full well that these are hard-nosed business women who have consciously launched themselves as global brands, carefully charted and controlled their ascent to fame and riches, it does seem that girls today are more attuned to taking control of their lives and having ambitions of their own, shallow and materialistic as those ambitions so often are.

But, quite aside from the narrowly materialistic nature of the “success” and “empowerment” to which these girls aspire, there is, of course, also the body image issues that so often go with it. Girls seem to learn in the cradle that the route to a successful career is being “sexy”, moulding yourself to please the male gaze – primary school children now identify “sexy” as the attribute they most want to have and pre-pubescents dream of having boob jobs. Is there much difference between aspiring to marry a footballer and aspiring to be an independently wealthy pop star or supermodel who marries a footballer? Frankly, I’d almost rather we were back in the days when every female twelve-year-old’s dream was eloping to the Las Vegas Wedding chapel with Adam Ant. At least they were expressing an appreciation for either his art, for what he could do, or for his body and the fact that it pleased their female gaze.

But better, by far, to jettison both the belief that you need a high-octane career that brings you fame and money in order to prove your self-worth and the belief that your self-worth depends on bagging yourself an alpha male. Best to aspire to do things for their intrinsic value and for the pleasure of developing your own skills, the way that the boys in my class did when they tried to play guitar like Johnny Marr or kick a football like Kevin Keegan.

So, actually, no, I don’t want to marry Benedict Cumberbatch, I just really wish I could act like Benedict Cumberbatch. Or even better – act like Josette Simon or Fiona Shaw.

Why Political Wives Make Me Nervous

Monday 7th June, 2010 in Politics by Melaszka | No comments

As the election campaign gather pace, I am feeling increasingly disturbed by the role party leaders’ wives seem expected to play and find the “Campaigning? Me? I’ve got my own job to do!” approach of Miriam Gonzalez Durantez extremely refreshing.

One reason why the emphasis placed on Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron in Labour’s and Conservative’s campaigns respectively worries me is that it strikes me as undermining the hard-fought idea of married women as autonomous individuals with financial independence and an agenda of their own. Sometimes I feel we’ve all entered a time warp back to the 1950s, when it was normal for married women to be expected to act as unpaid employees of their husbands’ firm, the standard of corporate entertaining which they supplied, free of charge, reflecting on their husband. And don’t get me started on the swathes of column inches given over to dissecting Michelle Obama’s and Carla Bruni’s fashion choices, as if the First Lady opting for a cardigan instead of a jacket is somehow going to have a major impact on an entire nation’s fortunes.

Another reason why the politicians’ WAGs phenomenon does my head in, though, is that I feel the move we have witnessed in the past couple of decades away from the grey-suited, impersonal, eminence grises who seemed to take the top political jobs in yesteryear towards “family man” party leaders is a manifestation of a faux feminism, which seems to make the concerns of women central to politics, while actually marginalising female politicians still further. All the major parties at the moment seem desperate to have at their helm a youngish married man with a feisty (but not too feisty!) wife and young family, the thinking seeming to be that this will appeal to the female voter – a man with an outspoken wife and hands-on experience of bringing up young children will understand women’s needs and concerns. “No need to have women politicians, then”, though, seems to me to be the unspoken, sinister subtext to all this. We’re supposed to think that by voting for Gordon or David, we’re actually voting for the Gordon/Sarah or David/Samantha team, so we don’t need to worry about having female representatives in Parliament – our man at the top, so in touch with his feminine side, so adept at changing nappies, can speak for us girls, as well as for the blokes. It seems to me that, if parties continue to focus on the Young Family Man as the only credible model of leader, women will soon stand even less chance of being chosen for the top job than they did in the 1970s.

And it’s not just female politicians who could be discriminated against if the Young Family Man becomes the de rigueur model party leader. While I, obviously, applaud the fact that the impact on families seems to have become more of a concern when politicians address economic and social policies and recognise that getting and keeping the needs of mothers and children on the political agenda is a vital part of the feminist struggle, the fact still remains that not everybody in society is a parent of school-age children. Older people, gay people, single people, childless people all potentially face exclusion from senior political posts if the 40-Something Family Guy becomes the default position. We only have to look at the political fate of Sir Menzies Campbell to see how older politicians already face discrimination. And, while it’s clearly much easier for openly gay men and women to be selected as parliamentary candidates and for ministerial positions than it was thirty years ago, I do wonder if we’ve in some respects regressed from the position we were in back in the 1970s, when Edward Heath, a middle-aged, unmarried, childless man, was elected party leader and Prime Minister.

Stranger Danger, People-Pleasing and Neurosis

Tuesday 9th March, 2010 in Accepted Social Situations, feminism, Politics, Violence Against Women by Melaszka | No comments

I recently advertised for a language exchange partner on the internet. You probably know the kind of set-up I mean – they are native speakers of the foreign language I’m trying to learn who live in my town and want to improve their English, and the idea is that we meet up on a regular basis to practise our conversational skills in each other’s language. I soon received a number of replies to my ad, including one from a couple in their 20s who seemed very friendly, lived close to me, and it didn’t take us long to set up a date to meet.

The thing is, I’m well-versed in internet safety etiquette. I know all the rules backwards: don’t give away too much personal information about yourself online, never give out your home address, never take what strangers say about themselves online at face value and, above all, never meet up with someone you’ve met online in real life in a private home. Always set up the first meeting in a public space, like a pub or café. And yet, when my new online pals suggested we have our first meeting at their flat, I immediately agreed, even though the idea made me feel anxious and uncomfortable.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t insist on meeting on neutral ground is that I do tend to be a tad on the neurotic side – I’m the kind of person who goes through a nightly ritual of checking the inside of the wardrobe and under the bed for intruders and regularly exits an Underground carriage the minute a young man carrying a rucksack gets on, just in case he happens to have a bomb in it. It’s a side of myself I’m trying to battle with, so I didn’t want to indulge my paranoia here.

And maybe I was being overcautious – after all, while my love life is solidly vanilla, my more sexually adventurous friends seem to spend half their time in the bedrooms of people they’ve only just met and no-one’s taken an axe to them yet.

But deep down, I suspect that the real reasons I completely ignored the ground rules I’d decided to set were because:

(a) like – I’m guessing – a lot of women, I have a horror of seeming rude, of putting people to any inconvenience. They preferred to meet at their home – who was I to say different?

(b) I am also reluctant to be viewed as the local nutter. I know through personal experience that women who insist on taking taxis short distances at night instead of walking, refuse to open the door to strangers or demand to see IDs from tradesmen, tend to get treated like they have acute psychiatric problems, even those are all things which we are officially advised to do.

On my way over to my language partners’ place, my anxiety grew. As I walked the couple of miles to their address, I mentally replayed what I knew about this couple and all sorts of innocent things they’d mentioned in their e-mails suddenly seemed to take on a sinister significance. They’d seemed very eager – suspiciously eager? – to set up a meeting as soon as possible. They’d made a big deal about the fact that they were a couple and had attached a photo, but that’s exactly the kind of thing a solitary rapist or people-trafficker would say to try and put his potential victim at ease and the photo could have been of anybody – any idiot with a search engine could find a picture of A Random Couple and pass it off as himself and his non-existent wife. After my first e-mail, they’d Googled me and found my Facebook page, which hadn’t seemed odd at the time, but now started to appear macabrely stalkerish. And, come to think of it, all their e-mails had been in English, so I had no proof that they even spoke a word of the language which they claimed was their native tongue. Before long, I could hear Kirsty Young’s voice in my head, appealing to the public to help solve my murder on Crimewatch.

Well, I eventually reached their block of flats and, as you’ve probably gathered from the fact that I’m here writing this blog, they weren’t axe murderers: fortunately, they were exactly who they said they were. They were, in fact, utterly charming, I spent a highly enjoyable couple of hours with them and I’m hopeful that the language exchange partnership will go swimmingly.

But this experience has, yet again, underlined for me how, despite talking the feminist talk and knowing the theory, in actuality I’m incredibly easily swayed by media crime scaremongering, yet equally easily convinced that, as a woman, my right to set boundaries which make feel safe and comfortable is negligible and that I am obliged at all times and in all places to accommodate others.

I wonder how many other women feel continually torn between two totally unreasonable and utterly conflicting societal dictats – on the one hand, we’re taught to be people-pleasers who shouldn’t inconvenience others with “selfish”, “neurotic”, “rude” demands, on the other we’re bombarded with victim-blaming propaganda that suggests that if we fail to observe a 24-hour curfew and apply for a full CRB check on anyone we speak to, should something untoward happen to us, it is somehow entirely our fault.

I’ve ad enough

Tuesday 9th March, 2010 in Accepted Social Situations, Media by Melaszka | No comments

As an avid Spotify user, I am currently being subjected to the Dell Mini 10 Notebook advert several times a day and with every listen I am increasingly awestruck by how many crass stereotypes they manage to conflate into one short audio ad.

For those of you fortunate enough not to have heard it, it’s promoting a new mini-computer (I think) which comes in a range of pretty colours. And that’s the main angle they’re putting on it – the colour choice. So far, so inoffensive. Doesn’t seem much of a USP for a piece of technical kit, but that’s up to them. To demonstrate the different colours, they play the same song in various styles. Black is a male singer fronting a metal band. Blue is a laidback, male blues singer. Pink is…and I’m sure you guessed this… synthetic-sounding girl-fronted bubble-gum pop.

To give them their credit, it is a resourceful attempt to solve the difficult problem of how to convey colours in an audio ad.

BUT, they’ve confronted us with a whole ganglion of simplistic equations. Pink = female = in the minority = cheesy bubblegum pop = fluffy = not serious…

Maybe I read too much into this. After all, it’s just one tiny drop in the ocean of patronising gender stereotypes that constitutes modern advertising. And, in any case, I almost prefer totally blatantly sexist ads to the kind of faux feminism of adverts like that one they had on before Christmas (I completely forget what was being advertised, but I’ve a feeling it could have been a supermarket? or perhaps a stock cube?), where the man was left flummoxed, faced with the arduous task of serving dinner to his children one evening, while his partner went out to a party/evening class/some other social event, calling “You’re babysitting!” with a cheeky wink as she sashayed out of the front door. Fortunately, help was at hand, as here’s one she had prepared earlier – said partner had put a shepherd’s pie/casserole/whatsoever in the oven before she went. But the hapless chap’s troubles with assertive women aren’t over, as, when he tries to pass the dinner off as the work of his own fair hands, his primary-age daughter rolls her eyes and looks at him patronisingly. “Wow!” We’re obviously supposed to think. “Girl power! Feisty mother and kick-ass daughter shoved it to him good and proper!”

Except, hang on a minute…since when has LOOKING AFTER YOUR OWN CHILDREN constituted “babysitting”? The advert seems to posit as some kind of glorious, amusing victory for womankind the fact that they can cajole/manipulate/order their menfolk into taking on domestic responsibilities once in every blue moon. And once again, in an apparent compliment to women’s capabilities, male uselessness at domestic tasks is constructed as a basic fact of biology – flattering women into believing that unpaid domestic work will inevitably always be their job, because they possess a shepherd’s pie gene which men sadly lack.

Still, for me, the nadir of bone-headed advertising has to be the Christmas 2008 campaign for an allegedly low-calorie (=small) chocolate bar under the charming tagline “Goodwill to all women”. Right, Because ALL women are always permanently on a diet and NO men ever are? And ALL women adore chocolate? Tossers.

Sex, Lies and Misogyny

Monday 11th January, 2010 in Uncategorized by Melaszka | No comments

I feel a bit like I’m stating the bleeding obvious here, but I think there are some quite misogynist elements about the way that the recent controversy surrounding Iris Robinson has been reported in the media.

Obviously, there are legitimate legal and political questions to be raised about Ms Robinson’s conduct in failing to disclose her financial dealings in the Members’ Register of Interests. Coverage of this aspect of the case is clearly in the public interest.

Many liberals will also feel that a hardline Christian fundamentalist, who has in the past issued the most intrusive and offensive attacks on other people’s sexuality, deserves to be publicly pilloried for having an extra-marital relationship, because she has broken the rules by which she has herself harshly judged others. I happen to disagree with this view – to misquote a phrase from an Ian McEwan novel, if it’s OK to have an extra-marital relationship, it’s OK for a homophobe to have an extra-marital relationship. What’s not OK is to be a homophobe – but I can understand the reasoning behind the alternate view.

But what flabbergasts me is that, to read many of the media reports on the subject, you’d think that the most morally questionable thing about Robinson’s conduct was the age of her lover. The words “her lover” rarely appear in reports on the case without being separated by “teenage” or “toyboy”, as if that were the most salient point about the controversy.

The media usually accepts men dating women decades their junior as natural and normal. These men are often depicted as objects of envy. Where they are viewed more critically, it is often in the “There’s no fool like an old fool” tradition, with the man viewed as a vain and credulous sap and the female lover cast in the role of manipulative golddigger.

Yet when a woman dates a much younger man, she is frequently accused of something morally reprehensible. The Daily Mail’s headline when artist and film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood began dating a 19-year-old actor was “A bit late for the school run, Sam?” Now that she has announced that she is pregnant by said 19-year-old, the tabloids and celebrity blogs are full of implications that she has done something weird and twisted, or that she has trapped a barely pubescent child into life-changing adult responsibilities for which he is patently not ready (despite the fact that the man concerned is a sentient adult who appears delighted with their joint decision to start a family).  And yet when Ms Taylor-Wood’s former husband recently dated a celebrity 22 years his junior (almost identical to the age gap between Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson), there was barely an eye batted in the media.  And when middle-aged male celebrities impregnate teenagers, there is rarely any moral indignation. There is certainly no sense that he has “stolen her youth”, although having a child is likely to have a far heavier impact on the woman’s life than on the man’s.

Admittedly, in cases of real child abuse, the double standard often operates in the opposite direction, with abuse committed by a woman portrayed in the media in a trivial, salacious way, as either comic or erotic or both, as long as the children involved are over the age of about eleven. But, nonetheless, sexual stories about women are treated very differently in the media from those about men.

The other thing which concerns me about the Robinson media coverage is the way that Iris Robinson’s behaviour is perceived to reflect on her husband. Again, I accept that the question of whether he knew about her financial dealings and failed to report them is salient (although I do find the assumption that a husband must have total knowledge of his wife’s business affairs somewhat archaic). But I am deeply disturbed by implications from some commentators that he should have had better control over his wife’s behaviour (as if she were some kind of unruly pet, rather than a autonomous human being with the right to make decisions on her own) or that her sexuality is some kind of conduit for the family honour and that he is thus somehow “tainted” by her having had an affair.

This puts me in mind of the Sachsgate controversy last year, when neither Russell Brand’s critics nor his supporters seemed to question that, by publicly bragging about having had sex with Sachs’s granddaughter, he was insulting and humiliating Sachs (rather than breaching the trust and privacy of the young woman concerned). One side seemed to think that Brand’s behaviour was vulgar and wrong, the other found it justifiable because it was “edgy” and amusing, but neither seemed to take issue with the basic premise that it was all about Sachs. Both sides seemed to take it for granted that Georgina Baillie had no importance as an autonomous human being – merely as some kind of Sachs family property, whose sexuality could be used to shame her menfolk.

Remind me what century we’re in again…

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