Tagged: sexism

Bad Company

A couple of days ago I received a text from a fashion blogger I’d recently met an event. “There’s a column about male fashion bloggers in Company this month,” it read. I was silently pleased at this recognition of diversity, until I read the rest of the message. “It says blogging is a women’s thing.” I was taken aback – surely my friend must have gotten the wrong idea. Company couldn’t endorse such a shallow and restrictive belief…could they? When I read the article for myself I came to find that, actually, yes they could.

The article, written by Pandora Sykes, briefly mentions a few male ‘big guns’ in the world of fashion blogging, only to brush them aside and assert that female bloggers have ‘a higher profile’ than their male counterparts. ‘For years, men have been the ones closing financial deals and creating billion dollar ad campaigns, but now it’s our turn,’ she says. ‘It cannot be denied that from a feminist angle, this is a triumph of sorts.’ I disagree. Feminism is about equality and treating a person the same way, regardless of their gender. To belittle the efforts of men in the blogosphere and boast that women are ‘winning’ is no triumph.

I’d like to briefly quote Martin Luther King – ‘I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.’ King understood that the past should be left in the past as, while it will always inform it, it should not and must not define the present. To capitalise the first letters of the words men and women defies this notion and is, in my opinion, absurd. While ‘Men’ may have been creating billion dollar ad campaigns for years I, a man, have not. For the same reason, I am disturbed by Ellie Mae O’Hagan’s assertion this week that men cannot be the victim of institutionalised sexism. Here’s why.

It would be foolish not to recognise that, as a straight white middle class male, I enjoy certain privileges – strangers don’t comment on my choice of partner, I am rarely (though it does happen sometimes, and no, it isn’t flattering) subjected to ‘compliments’ from people on the street and I’m not aware of the police ever regarding me suspiciously, even when I am wearing a hoodie. However, I am an ‘outsider’ in at least three out of four of the social groups I consider myself as belonging to. While the majority people at screamo gigs may look just like me, most fashion bloggers don’t. Nor do most basketball players. Nor do most hip hop fans. Every time I go to a fashion event, a basketball court or a hip hop gig, I risk sexual or racial discrimination. I fail to see how anyone who claims to be a campaigner for equality can’t realise that.

To return to the article, one blogger is quoted as saying for a man ‘to overtly celebrate and share his image? That just wouldn’t be, well, manly, would it?’ This is almost offensive as the article’s opening statement, which states that ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged that women like to talk about fashion.’ How, in 2012, people can still think it’s acceptable to make such sweeping statements about gender, I don’t know. However, there are still plenty of examples of it going around at the moment – take, for example, the ASDA Christmas advert that states that ‘behind every great Christmas, there’s mum.’ This slogan manages to simultaneously insult all mothers, single fathers and families that divide the Christmas workload equally.

The other day I was embarrassed and encouraged in equals measures when Maria, of Miss Drifted Snow White, told me about how I’ve inspired her boyfriend, who blogs as The Blogging Bloke. ‘You’ve shown him that it’s ok to be vocal with his opinions and that you can still do that and make it, whether you’re a guy or girl.’ It’s with that sentence ringing in my ears that I write this blog post – I wish I knew a better way to soothe all the bitterness around race and gender that still exists, but writing some words about it is the best I can do.

The article ends with the following musing – ‘You could argue that makes us no better than the sexist male controllers of Mad Men-era advertising, but surely it’s our turn to gloat.’ First of all, congratulations for acknowledging that rather than working to end sexism, you’re choosing to perpetuate it. Secondly, goodbye. I’ve long been a fan of Company, and I thought that they understood the evolving role of bloggers in the fashion world. Clearly that doesn’t apply to me, so I won’t be buying any more issues.

A Tale of Loose Women and Man-Haters

Note: This post originally appeared as a guest post on Caitlin Moran’s website.

bill bailey feminism

‘Don’t much like the look of this,’ says a woman at work, reading the back cover of How to be a Woman. ‘Really? Why not?’ I inquire innocently. ‘She sounds like one of those man-haters. Mind you, I never find women funny. All that lot on Loose Women? I’d shoot them.’ ‘Oh,’ I say. And that’s pretty much all I say, because truthfully? This woman scares me a little bit. She almost always wears pantsuits, used to be in the military (no-one dares ask doing what exactly) and would definitely look at you cock-eyed if you used the phrase ‘mumpreneur’ within a five mile radius of her.

The incident got me thinking about how much stock we, as a species, place in stereotypes and conventions. Although we’ve moved a long way towards unpicking the ideology of racism (except for the odd grandparent remarking that ‘there are a lot of coloured people on the telly’ at Christmas dinner), we don’t seem to be doing anywhere near as well when it comes to gender – the fact that I used to know someone at University whose two favourite tops were his ‘kick racism out of football’ jersey and a t-shirt that bore some humourless slogan about women needing to make him a sandwich attests to this. Trust me, he didn’t need anyone else making him sandwiches.

When I tell people about my interest in women’s issues the responses I get tend to vary from ‘lol, good one’ to ‘you a puff then?’ I’ve even had one person think it was all a Barney Stinson-esque scheme to get into women’s pants. As if I’m wily enough to uphold such a pretence. There are those who insist that the way to put an end to racism and sexism is to stop talking about it, but I simply can’t agree. I’ve been reading and talking a lot about street harassment recently, and discovered the sobering statistic that over 80% of women worldwide face it at some point. Having suffered street harassment from both men and women (clearly my good looks have appeal to those of every sexuality…*ahem*) in the past, I know that it’s not fun or flattering. Which leads me to the next problem…

On several of the occasions I’ve tried to speak about these instances, I’ve had people (both male and female) try to brush it off with remarks like ‘oh, you bloody loved it!’ Clearly they haven’t had anything similar happen to them. For me, the issue of treating the sexes as fundamentally different is the crux of the problem – we don’t need a women’s rights movement and a men’s rights movement pitching frantically to everyone in the middle. We need a unified, reasonable and strong equal rights movement that recognises that both Andy Gray and Richard Key’s sexist comments about female linesmen (err, lineswomen) AND Sharon Osbourne giggling on national TV about a woman drugging her husband, chopping off his penis and putting it in a garbage disposal are not only unacceptable, but utterly abhorrent.

Do I see that happening any time soon? Probably not. Because we’re back to stereotypes again – minorities in both the men’s rights (the ‘women are just going too far now’ crew) and women’s rights (the ‘man-haters’) movements give the majority a bad name, so a team-up in the near future is probably unlikely. I’ll be first to sign up if it happens, but until then I’ll just continue to sigh loudly when people think I’m gay, self hating or crazy just because I’m a ‘feminist’.