The premise of the ‘Not just a pretty face’ event was to answer the question: ‘If women were running things, would the world be different?’ Not the easiest of proposals to get your head around and certainly not one that could be quickly settled during a tea break, so two hours were set aside to discuss this mammoth topic. As you can imagine, that amount of time could only really skim the surface – questions have a habit of begetting more questions and my mind is still wrestling with the wealth of information, revelations and ideas that poured forth from the evening and all the ‘hows’ and ‘whats’ that subsequently followed.
The very premise itself veered on the slightly regressive side, in some delegates’ opinion. Should we be returning to such divisive questions in a time where we feel we’ve come too far to see one sex as more ‘powerful’ or ‘better’ than the other? Perhaps it’s not a helpful discussion any more, rather than polarise the issue, it’s more beneficial to collaborate in celebrating our differences (whatever these are, again, worth another few hours of consideration) and focus on how the two can inter-relate to create a future founded on synergetic harmony. Aaaw, nice, fluffy, female pipe-dream eh?
I for one, found the question stretched my imagination. I tried to omit the figures of Hitler and Stalin from the annals of history and wondered how different things could have been – or would a crazed, hell-bent Helga have emerged instead, unable to repress the urge to exercise all her neuroses with the wonderful new power she had in her hands? Or am I so deeply entrenched in the pillars of patriarchy myself, that even the idea of attempting to dismantle them (or at least, tap them gently) has become an insurmountable and unimaginable task?
What we could all agree on is that society has a problem. Many problems. And a lot of these are impacting on women and young people. These are evident in the ever-growing numbers of 8 year-old girls with anorexia and bulimia that Dr Linda Papadopoulos works with on a daily basis (not to mention the increasing number of women in their 30s and 40s suffering from these diseases) to the more traditional examples of misogyny, so deeply entrenched they happen almost flippantly, such as the executive who asked Linda to make the tea before realising she was a doctor – I imagine that was a meeting he squirmed through.
And, on a more macro level, there is a problem. A disturbing statistic from Skillset recently revealed that from 2006-2009, 750 men compared to 4,900 women lost their jobs in television. I am going to hazard a guess that many of these jobs were administrative, therefore seen as more ‘expendable’ but that beggars another question, why are so many women in TV still only in clerical or junior positions. I’m also going to hazard another guess that some of the women over 30 were let go because it was assumed they’d be off to start families some time soon. There may be some validity in the reasoning here but this raised another important issue of the inter-connectedness between social policy and media. We need not only a social policy that supports women and men who require a flexible working lifestyle but must ensure this is endorsed throughout the media who act as though they operate in another realm, refusing for example, to implement the Gender Equality Duty Act of 2007. Davina James-Hanman, director of the Greater London Domestic Violence Project, also stressed the importance of supporting men in bonding with their children, suggesting that this could be implemented through a social policy that makes it mandatory for men to take ‘parenthood’ leave. And of course, we need a media that portrays these policies in a positive light.
So, how can we, as women, implement change? The importance of women supporting each other was frequently raised. As television programme creator and developer Dianne Nelmes said: “Never be a woman who doesn’t like other women.” Interestingly, Linda cited another incident earlier she had been criticised for her looks by, yes, a female writer. My friend who holds a high-powered managerial position within the music business, leaves the office bang on five now in order to collect her children from after-school club, and unfortunately she knows it is the women who berate her for this, behind her back. We need change from the top but attitudes must be challenged from below. However, as Linda pointed out, this behaviour can in part be attributed to an early conditioning process – boys are encouraged to compete overtly, whereas girls, frustrated they have no other outlet in which to express this, turn in on each other, thus sowing the seeds for a lifetime of fiercely comparing and regulating each other’s ‘hotness’ factor.
I do think a lack of empathy, or the inability to place yourself in another’s shoes is somewhere at the core of this rotten state of affairs, and this operates throughout the spheres of the home, politics and the workplace, across both genders. I was left thinking, why are we all so horrible to each other? What atavistic desires does buying Heat, for example, sate or feed? And whether it be dissecting the ‘moral values’ of Jordan or the daughter we admonish for not fitting into her swimsuit properly, thus propagating a generation of anorexics and bulimics by stoking doubts within themselves, we need more empathy. I’m not laying the blame entirely at mothers’ doors here, images in the press of airbrushed stick insect-thin girls, (which Linda argues in her ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ Home Office report should carry health warnings) certainly have a detrimental effect, but we also have a responsibility not to be brainwashed and consequently passing on the neuroses we absorb from the media and our peers.
To take the example of Jordan, yes, she clearly displays traits of an emotionally disturbed person, and for that she deserves our understanding, not our derision. Whatever we think about her now, she was once, like we all were (boys and girls), navigating the hazardous crossroads of sexuality, probably with all the agility and precision of Bambi’s first faltering steps. As some of us understand, acting sexually confident and mature and actually being sexually confident and mature are two very different things, “the acting” demonstrates yet another effect of the ‘sexualisaton’ of young people, that Linda describes. It never surprised me to learn that Jordan was sexually assaulted in her early teens but I was pretty horrified (followed by flippin’ furious) to read some of the subsequent evaluations concerning this in the public arena – “how could you rape Jordan? It’s not as though she’d be difficult to bed.”
This might sound very idealistic and possibly prosaic, I’m not necessarily saying anything new here, but we do need to foster more kindness and understanding. As semiotician Dr Malcolm Evans said, towards the end of the event, we need to start listening to each other more, and this is a skill that must be encouraged in early education. If we can begin to recognise the validity of these traditionally perceived ‘female values’, also often indicative of a ‘good mother’ (a role that many women see as undermined and undervalued) perhaps then, we, as women and men, can begin to set an example and bring about change.
http://www.newplayerstheatre.com/london/events/seeyounexttuesday.asp
zara
5 months, 3 weeks ago
i think this is really interesting point and this is a great, well written article. an interesting musing on something so significant.