Judi Sutherland2013-05-20T10:35:00-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=judi-sutherlandCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Judi SutherlandGood old fashioned elbow grease.Margaret Thatcher and the True Scotsmantag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30447842013-04-09T10:51:36-04:002013-04-10T04:41:13-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/
We are often told that the UK lags behind other countries when it comes to the number of women in senior roles: as Members of Parliament, on company boards, or otherwise visible in public life. I have a feeling that at least some of this phenomenon is directly attributable to Mrs Thatcher herself. She was a certain kind of woman: strident, formal, unpersuadable, always right, dogmatic, self-important, pompous... in fact she exhibited many of the attributes common in unpopular male leaders. So much so, that a writer whom I very much like and respect wrote this on his twitter feed about Thatcher's death:
'General consensus this side of the fence. If only she had been a woman she'd have been OK.
As a woman her faults were all masculine. As a male she made the worst possible job of being female. Meanwhile the sky is still unfallen.'
Let's not dwell on the flippancy that comes from social media. I found these comments interesting, because the writer is obviously struggling with a cognitive dissonance, between what he remembers of Thatcher, and what he expects of women. The way to reconcile this in his mind is to jokingly label her a man, because we all know that a proper woman can't possibly act the way Thatcher did, don't we? Luck and Flaw agreed with him; their Spitting Image caricature of Thatcher usually showed her in a man's suit and a tie.
This regendering of Thatcher is an example of a rhetorical fallacy known as the 'No True Scotsman' argument, first noted by philosopher Anthony Flew, and described in Wikipedia as follows:
No True Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion. When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule.
To simplify, here's an example, again from Wikipedia:
Person A: 'No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.'
Person B: 'I am a Scotsman, and I put sugar on my porridge.'
Person A: 'Then you are not a true Scotsman.'
I hope that is a bit clearer! So we can reframe the fallacy as follows:
Person A: 'No woman is strident, formal, unpersuadable, always right, dogmatic... etc.'
Person B: 'But Mrs Thatcher is a woman and she is all of those things.'
Person A: 'Then Mrs Thatcher is not a proper woman, she must therefore be a man.'
And so, Person A maintains his (or her) stereotypes on what behaviours are possible from a 'proper' woman. And any woman who would find it insulting to be called a man, subliminally reminds herself never to be strident, formal, unpersuadable, always right, dogmatic... etc. for fear of the same negative comparison as Thatcher was subjected to.
I'm assuming that for this reason, many women who strive for positions of authority have backed down when they have been compared to Margaret Thatcher. It has happened to me, and for once I shut up very quickly. Thatcher is a great stick to beat us with. Even worse, many people who might have voted for, or promoted, an able and assertive woman, may not have done so, for fear they are encouraging a new Margaret Thatcher to emerge. Not only did Thatcher herself not promote the interests of women, but the public perception of her has probably tainted the careers of many able women. Because we know that women are all stereotypes, don't we, gentlemen?
It bothers me greatly, when well-meaning people, trying to be 'feminist', claim that we need more women at senior levels in organisations, because they bring a different skill-set to that of men. Skills like empathy, co-operation, nurturing, and non-aggression. It bothers me, because not only are they making vast assumptions about the characteristics that women are allowed to display, but they are asking women to play with only that poor set of cards in male-run environments. Some men I've spoken to about this admit that the women who are senior where they work are just as competitive, and just as astute at office politics, as any of the men. I guess those women have got where they are by natural selection.
Gender historian Elaine Chalus put it this way on @TheWomensRoomUK twitterfeed:
'too aggressive, combative, arrogant - not cooperative & consensual - based on stereotypes of femininity'
Since Thatcher's death was announced, social media has been full of women assuming (wrongly) they owe a debt to her, in comments like:
'Whatever you may think of her politics' (and there always seems to be some sort of preface of that sort) 'I grew up knowing women could be leaders.'
I'd suggest to them that Thatcher has actually made it harder for a generation of women to be taken seriously as potential leaders. If you seek her memorial, look around you.
I don't want to shock anybody, but women, like men, can and do exhibit a broad range of behaviours, from the traditionally feminine to the extreme case which was Margaret Thatcher. Our currently accepted gender construct for 'feminine' would tend to restrict us to a narrow range of ways to be in the world. For many of us, that construct feels oppressive. Give us some credit for being different individuals, just as men are. Some of us will become leaders. Most of us will not turn out to be the Second Maggie.
But above all, please be assured that women will not fit neatly into the box society has constructed for us - also known as The Kitchen. And we probably won't be making you a sandwich.]]>The Selfish Genius?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28678012013-03-13T12:57:11-04:002013-05-13T05:12:01-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/
Dawkins loves to tweet and does so copiously, but the impression we get of this great zoologist, geneticist and communicator of science, is of an irritable and combative eccentric. The elegant arguments he made in The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion (that given time, space and the laws of physics, there is no need for an old man in the sky to explain how we, and the universe, got here) are not reducible to 140 characters.
What we get from him instead are tweets of this quality:
Last September, on the Nadia Eweida case on wearing a crucifix at work (which Ms Eweida eventually won):
Such fun being a victim. Waaaah, I'm allowed to wear my crossywoss only INSIDE my BA uniform, where only God can see it.
Last month:
God wants to cure your cancer. But only if you pray lots and lots. Oh, and he's very sorry he gave it to you in the first place.
There was a post the other day about leprechauns and mushrooms, but I think it has been deleted. And this week:
With respect to those meanings of "human" that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig
Which he later explained by saying that the ability to feel pain is his only criterion for whether abortion is defensible:
Pig doesn't have human DNA, human potential or human IQ. It probably does have human capacity to feel pain. Aborted fetus probably doesn't
Dawkins generally uses faultless logic, although I'm not sure about the pig / foetus argument, because I don't remember anyone guaranteeing that a condition of human life is that we should always be free of physical pain. I profoundly agree with him on the rightness of atheism and the outrage that is creationist teaching. He's also extremely brave with his comments on Islam, a position which many commentators are frightened to take. But I do wonder who his Twitter feed and his adversarial attitudes are aimed at. As long as he maintains his embittered disgust with religion and its adherents, he will not convert many of the devout to atheism. Religious leaders learned centuries ago that the way to win people over to their way of thinking is to make them feel that they are valued and that they belong. The deployment of a scalpel-sharp logic and a childishly mocking tone of voice is never going to convince anyone to change their world view. There's a reason why we use the phrase 'hearts and minds' when we talk about convincing people. One needs to appeal to both.
Maybe Dawkins suffers from empathy failure, and some unresolved issues which he externalises as verbal aggression, in which case he probably doesn't understand the effect his derision has on the poor faithful; or he does understand, but he just doesn't care how he makes people feel. Either way, he's not winning converts to his admirable cause by a level of debate that even Glasgow University Union would be ashamed of. The other possibility is that he doesn't mind if nobody joins him to fight under the banner of enlightenment, he just likes to pontificate for his own aggrandisement, and too bad if he makes anyone angry, or miserable, or even more entrenched in their peculiar beliefs than before.
I must have been out of the country when we awarded Richard Dawkins the Atheist Papacy. I certainly didn't get my ballot paper. I'm convinced that this man does the cause of rationalist progress at least as much harm as good, because of the way he goes about his evangelical activities. The scorn and contempt he pours out on believers in his twitter feed is not going to win hearts and minds, but I'm not sure that Dawkins cares too much about that, as long as he gets a pulpit to preach from.
In case he does care about the effect of his tweets of the faithful, here's some advice for Dawkins, from the Gospel According to Bananarama:
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it / that's what gets results.
]]>Engineering a Conversationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28109492013-03-05T09:25:23-05:002013-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE). So far, so exciting, right? But the guest speaker, and winner of the John Collier medal 'in recognition of services to science and engineering communication' was Professor Brian Cox, Physics Lecturer, CERN Researcher, and darling of the BBC Science documentary.
Watching people file into the central London lecture theatre, I was impressed by how many young people, and specifically, how many young women, were attending. Never in the history of Engineering has an event contained more oestrogen. And so we settled down for the evening's erudition. We were welcomed to the lecture and advised of the Twitter feed hashtag (#collier2013), so we logged in via the rather well-engineered free wi-fi system, and listened.
First up, an inevitable quota of elderly white males in suits. Four of them, in rapid and vacuous succession. All of them making glib statements about how wonderful it was to see so many 'young people' at the lecture, who, it was to be hoped, would choose to study engineering at university. Much was said about how important it was to encourage these young people to study engineering, but no actual encouragement was given, except to say that the number of students studying Chemical Engineering had doubled in a decade. This 'meta-encouragement' was all very well, but the tweeters soon realised that no specific examples were going to be forthcoming to get those future undergraduates all revved up, and, notably, no female engineers were going to speak or even be mentioned during the course of the evening. 'Science, fascinating subject , so awe inspiring in fact that everyone here uses dull monotone normally reserved for funerals' tweeted Howard Walmsley (@9moons).
Even the men in the lecture theatre noticed that the femaleness of the audience was not matched by the speakers. Imran Khan (@imrankhan) noted: 'On 4th pre-Cox speaker - all male engineers so far' which was followed by Vanessa H (@HPS_Vanessa): ' BAH! Who lets that happen? Infuriating.'
@9moons was getting exasperated: 'The introduction at #collier2013 reinforces the importance of voices like @ProfBrianCox. The old guard monologues-self promoting & tedious.'
The last of the Coxless Four to appear was Vincent de Rivaz, the Chief Executive of EDF Energy, who, granted, was speaking in his second language, but whose twenty-five minutes of bland mumblings and lack of eye contact seemed to be a satirical skit on the Collier medal citation. @9moons put it bluntly: 'ironically he is speaking about energising young people, while boring them to death' and @imrankhan remarked on the suitability of the subject matter: 'pre-Cox speaker from EDF energy talking at length about industrial stamina and supply chains to inspire school audience'. The only part of de Rivaz's interminable speech I recall was a bit about nuclear power plants, where I hoped to hear some assurance that EDF were confident in the way nuclear waste should be handled in their brave new world, but no such assurance was forthcoming.
Was there not one woman engineer the I Chem E could have trundled out to say a few words? I note that as many as one out of seventeen of its Council members is a woman, and a smattering of women have recently won a couple of the other medals in the I Chem E's gift. And no doubt they have a few women scattered about their membership. But no; if I had been a young woman thinking of studying engineering, I might have abandoned the idea at this point and taken up the violin.
Thankfully, Professor Cox then appeared on the platform, unusually attired in a suit, to deliver his lecture on 'The Value of Scientific Exploration', which was indeed suitably visionary, beginning with references to the founding of the Royal Institution, the work of Faraday and Davy, quotes from Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' ('if we don't promote our ideas, science will trickle away and civilisation with it') and references to poetry. He went on to talk about his work at CERN and how far particle physics had come in the course of his career to date. Cox was engaging, self-deprecating, non-pompous and funny. He didn't tentatively express the hope that some of the audience would become scientists and engineers, he confidently assumed that they all would, at one point gesturing at the gallery and saying: 'That problem is one for you lot to solve in a few years' time, when you've got your PhDs.' He closed his talk by calling for the government to return the funding of science and engineering to 1970s levels, saying that doubling what the government currently spends on university education would pay for itself in innovations by British researchers.
It's unsurprising that Cox has been able to corner the market as a science presenter, if the other candidates are anything like the besuited worthies of the I Chem E. As well as being a physicist, Cox seems to have become an honorary biochemist and zoologist after his series 'The Wonders of Life', but with the aid of a good scriptwriter, and an ability to learn and explain, he gets away with it. Cox does a great job in furthering the public understanding of science. If only the people giving out the medals for communication in science could actually master the communication they claim to value.]]>Let's Start Again and Call It Reality Feminismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27797302013-02-28T05:13:19-05:002013-04-30T05:12:01-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/last piece I wrote for the Huffington Post had a mixed reception. I posted a link to it on The Everyday Sexism Project's (TESP) Facebook group, and the subsequent comments included, as I remember; 'disgusting' and 'victim-blaming'. However, when I linked the same article to my own Facebook page and blog, I got some very different reactions:
'Stands, Applauds!'
'What she said!'
'I quite agree'
'I think you took the right tone there'
'I can't argue with any of this - good article!'
It's not a statistically valid sample, but my online friends are an interesting mix. They are mostly over 40, and they are single, married, in partnerships; childless, mothers, grandmothers; atheists, Christians, Pagans and Jews; straight, gay, poly and asexual; British and American. Their comments were overwhelmingly positive, so, I'm sorry, TESP ladies, it's not just me, there is an alternative feminist view that you may not even have heard before, except from me and Joanna Lumley. My article talked about the way some young women tend to dress and behave, and whether that contributes in any way to the unpleasant experiences they report to the TESP website.
One friend considered why the TESP feminists objected to my article:
'Do you think it's part of the whole abdication of responsibility thing? If you can't get a job it's the economy, if you fail your GCSEs it's the exam board, if you rack up credit it's the bank's fault - nothing to do with your behaviour and choices?'
And one Lesbian friend commented:
'I don't wear clothes that make me vulnerable. In fact, I wear men's clothes, which are designed, btw, to make men NOT VULNERABLE. I have no idea what the purpose would be of me wearing "skimpy shit" as that one woman put it. Who would I be trying to impress? It certainly wouldn't make me feel empowered.'
While emphasising that it is important not to be a 'victim-blamer' (we all know that rapists are to blame, and they cannot be absolved of any responsibility) my friends tended to agree with me that what the American feminist Ariel Levy calls 'Raunch Culture' is a harmful concept. Writer Liz Funk considered its effects:
'This raunch culture has the greatest effect on young women. The most visible consequence is the narrowing of standards of beauty for young women. Rates of eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, and body image issues are on the rise among young women, given that the glitzy sexual images projected by the mainstream media depict very uniform images of women as thin, large-breasted, and 'perfect'.
The presence of this raunch is also making it very difficult for women to forge equality-based relationships with men. Some young women report that they are experiencing difficulty finding a boyfriend who respects them.'
Recently Ellie Mae O'Hagen, in the Guardian, also criticised the type of feminism that is currently prevalent for being compliant with stereotypes, rather than angry:
'For every campaign against objectification, we have the Sex and the City brand of feminism, as personified by a burgeoning movement in America calling itself 'sexy feminists', which reassures us that one can believe in gender equality and still pay hefty sums of money to have pubic hair ripped out at the root.'
Putting aside the data on what women are actually wearing when they are attacked, which I am assured is not a factor, let's consider clothing as an indicator of identity and intention. Clothes send out a powerful social signal. To deny that is to assert that men and women alike are indifferent to the way people dress. If that were true there would be no interview suits, no bridal gowns, no fashion industry. 'Third wave' feminists may claim that women dress to please themselves, but how come that so often seems to involve highly sexualised clothing? As Australian feminist Linda Jaivin says:
'If such women want to claim that embracing their Inner Bunny makes them feel empowered, they certainly won't get any argument from the sort of men who are relieved that they no longer have to hide their copy of Jugs when a date comes round.'
A much-quoted study by Miranda Horvath, Peter Hegarty, and colleagues, reveals the shocking things that rapists have said to their psychologists to try to justify their crimes. Very often they wrongly interpret what women wear as encouraging their sexual advances:
'There's a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex . . . The way they dress, they
flaunt themselves.'
'Some girls walk around in short-shorts . . . showing their body off . . . It just starts a man
thinking that if he gets something like that, what can he do with it? . . .'
'Girls ask for it by wearing these mini-skirts and hotpants . . . they're just displaying their
body . . . Whether they realise it or not they're saying, 'Hey, I've got a beautiful body, and it's
yours if you want it.'
'I think if a law is passed, there should be a dress code . . . When girls dress in those short skirts
and things like that, they're just asking for it.'
Whether we like it or not, certain clothing attracts attention. Women may indeed be signalling that they are interested in sex, but only with the men they choose. The problem is that clothing is not a directional signal - it sends out its messages to all men, who form their views of women accordingly. Yes, the major work that feminism needs to do is to overturn these grossly misplaced assumptions, but until that work is completed, the 'rape culture' we live in encourages men to misinterpret what women are trying to assert with their appearance.
Raunch Culture has played into the hands of our oppressors. It has contributed to the pornification of society, to the premature sexualisation of young girls (both Primark and Debenhams stock padded bras in size 30AA - that's the size of a flat-chested ten year old) and has ensured that while women are often taken, they are not taken seriously. And the sex lives that women achieve by embracing Raunch Culture, in club car-parks and toilets - who gets the pleasure from that? Lucy-Anne Holmes, in her blog How to Start a Sexual Revolution' puts it like this:
'If someone had said, 'here you go, human race, here's this thing, it's called sex, it's an amazing, loving union between two people, where you celebrate and pleasure each other, it ends in waves of bliss. Take it, human race, and just for a laugh, see just how far you can debase it', I don't think we could have done a better job than we have.'
The empowerment delivered by Raunch Culture is the power to look stupid on the internet, the power to be used by unscrupulous men, and the power to be regarded as a brainless aggregation of body parts. Meanwhile women are struggling to make it into the board room, being thwarted by sexual predators in political parties, and being denigrated and trivialised by mainstream media and online sites like UniLad. The situation for women has got worse, not better, over the last thirty years.
Young women who don't remember any other type of feminism find it distasteful to hear that they are colluding in their own objectification. They complain bitterly on the TESP website about clubs in University towns holding 'Pimps and Hoes' nights, but forget that women happily go along to them, dressed as 'hoes'. They complain about being objectified by page three of The Sun, but defend their right to wear tiny tops and shorts, and they really do not see the disconnect. A group of these women complained about my trying to engage them in debate on the TESP Facebook page (an Open Group) and had me blocked from it. A friend of mine said: 'You do get the impression that there's a lot of "la la la, we can't hear you" going on in such places.' So I can't accurately quote their comments, and I can't follow the link to the blog post one of them wrote in response, presumably to correct my corrupt thoughts.
I respect Laura Bates for setting up the Everyday Sexism Project, which gives women experiencing sexism a voice, but when someone tries to start an honest debate about important feminist concerns, she silences them. Oh, the irony.
If women don't act with dignity and self-respect they can't expect anyone to treat them with dignity and return that respect. Part of this means reclaiming our sexuality as a positive expression of pleasure and trust in another human being, and not mistaking quantity for quality.
Let's stop pretending that we live in a world where we can do what we like without consequences for either our safety or our status in society. Let's engage with the world as it is, with its misogyny and 'rape culture', and ask what we can do to further the cause of women. Let's admit that as an experiment in empowerment, Raunch Culture has failed us. Let's start again, and call it Reality Feminism.]]>What Not To Weartag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26526542013-02-09T11:00:00-05:002013-04-11T05:12:01-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/Grease. Remember the plot? Shy girl, Sandy, in her Peter-Pan collared dress and home-cut fringe, is persuaded that the way to get her bad boy, Danny, is to undergo a drastic makeover. By the end of the film, Sandy is in leather trousers, high heels and an off the shoulder top, with crimson lippy, and that ultimate accessory, the cigarette. She's reinvented herself as a vamp and a siren, because that's the way to find love.
Or maybe it was Madonna on her 1990 Blond Ambition tour, in that Jean-Paul Gaultier pointy-breasted corset and a Croydon facelift, that really started it. Here was a woman in charge of her own destiny, miming masturbation on stage in a display which Rolling Stone magazine called an 'elaborately choreographed, sexually provocative extravaganza'. A role model, and no mistake.
Wherever it began, it is now embedded in our sexualised culture. If you want to be in control of your life and get the cute guy you deserve, you've got to look pretty raunchy. And I believe this message, which seems to have been fully internalised by young 'third-wave' feminists, is mostly negative for the progress of women in society. I got involved in a discussion on this on The Everyday Sexism Project's (TESP) Facebook site, after someone posted an article quoting Joanna Lumley's recent comments:
' - but don't be sick in the gutter at midnight in a silly dress with no money to get a taxi home, because somebody will take advantage of you, either they'll rape you, or they'll knock you on the head or they'll rob you.
Don't look like trash, don't get drunk, don't be sick down your front, don't break your heels and stagger about in the wrong clothes at midnight. This is bad.'
Lumley, sex icon for a generation, has gone in for slut-shaming, and I really don't blame her, for two main reasons:
First of all, Lumley, like me, is old enough to remember a time when female empowerment wasn't about wearing as little as possible. If you don't believe me, watch a couple of episodes of Top of the Pops 2 from the 70s or 80s, and take a look at the audience. Here you will see young women dressing their best to be on TV, and hey - they were wearing clothes! Tops with sleeves, skirts that went almost to their knees. Who knew? The tendency for girls to go out on a Saturday night in 'skimpy shit' as one woman on the TESP Facebook page called it, is really rather recent.
Secondly, although my correspondents on TESP assure me that the likelihood of being raped is not in any way correlated with what the victim is wearing, by doing what my correspondents called the 'skimpy shit' thing and getting legless, there's no doubt women make themselves vulnerable. Twice on the TESP website I've seen complaints from women who 'felt a finger being inserted' by an unknown man while they were on the dancefloor, and I'm afraid my reaction really was: what on earth was she wearing? Are you actually saying you are not making yourself vulnerable to sexual assault by going clubbing in an outfit that allows immediate and public access to your genitals?
The third-wave young feminists on the TESP FB page were absolutely insistent that they should be able to go out wearing whatever they like, and they are right. In an ideal world, where all men are perfect gentlemen and wouldn't dream of doing anything disrespectful to a woman, it would be true. But that is not the world we live in. Thanks to internet porn, lads' mags, websites like Uni Lad, and some pretty distastefully misogynistic Facebook pages (that Facebook says do not contravene its guidelines), young men are encouraged to see women as nothing more than an accumulation of pleasantly arranged body parts. Yes, we need to change that, but it isn't going to happen overnight. And meanwhile, Joanna Lumley, various MPs and public figures, and the local police force, tell women to take care, be responsible, look after themselves, because in the short-term, the only behaviour you have any control over is your own.
I'm absolutely not saying that any woman who is subjected to a rape or other sexual assault is 'asking for it'. What you wear should not be an issue when a man has acted in such a hideously criminal way. In fact there are other considerations than sexual assault at play here. Jacqui Hunt, from Equality Now, in a Huffington Post article of her own, asks the question:
"Do people not sexualise themselves - is there not a problem in the way people promote themselves in a sexual way?"
and then answers her own question:
"We are all products of our own environment, which has become increasingly sexualised over time. The cumulative demeaning of women has created a situation where women are treated as interchangeable body parts in some parts of the press..."
A vicious circle is in play, in which the more society wants us sexualised, the more we feel that is the right thing to do, and collude with it. Hunt wants the media to break that cycle, but I think it might be easier if women themselves make a start on that, because if women look like bimbos and act like bimbos, they are going to find themselves being treated like bimbos.
The women on the TESP Facebook page are adamant that when they wear 'skimpy shit' they are dressing for nobody but themselves. We should ask ourselves, honestly, why it is that the clothes that make us feel most empowered, most independent, and most like ourselves, are the ones that make us look like the sexually-available objects that men want us to be.
Are Joanna Lumley and I really the only people who can see the astonishing contradiction here? If you go out on a Saturday night in a micro-mini or tiny shorts, plus a skimpy top over a highly padded plunge bra, you are not actually empowering yourselves as women, you are conforming to a demeaning stereotype that society (which is still largely run by men) demands of us. You can't complain about the rampant objectification carried out by TV, the internet and the national press, if you do, in fact, insist on objectifying yourselves.]]>Dangerous Occurrencestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25893042013-01-31T08:15:10-05:002013-04-02T05:12:01-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/
When I was working in a pharmaceutical facility, we followed the recommendations of RIDDOR, the 'Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations' (bear with, this will become relevant). The concept of RIDDOR is that all dangerous occurrences should be reported, no matter how small. If someone is working up a ladder and they fall a couple of feet, but aren't hurt, the reporting system kicks in. The idea is that by collecting evidence of possibly dangerous situations, management can act before a serious accident occurs. Those much-maligned Health and Safety Officers would check the forms filled in and, from the number of Dangerous Occurrences they were seeing, could detect a pyramid of incidents and intervene before a situation goes critical. There was even an expected ratio between the number of Dangerous Occurrences and Lost-Time Accidents. (I think I was the only manager in that facility who had to sign RIDDOR forms when a technician, who reported to me, had one of those old-fashioned high-level toilet cisterns fall on his head. I'm not sure that could have been predicted from the data, but I digress.)
I feel the same way now about 'rape culture'. Many of the sexually aggressive things said, and done, fall short of rape, but when they occur they are symptomatic of a situation that could turn dangerous. For every rape, maybe there is a pyramid of, say, ten serious sexual assaults, fifty gropes, two hundred catcalls, and a thousand misogynistic comments on the internet. I don't go looking for internet rape culture, but when I see it, I challenge it. I am, in a small way, acting as a Health and Safety Officer, and I think we all should.
I've just seen a tweet (what it is about Twitter that strips the thin veneer of civilisation from so many people?) from a well-known journalist who wished to bring to our attention a piece where Toby Young demolished, point by point, an article by the infamous Suzanne Moore on the state of education. This commentator described Young's riposte in these terms:
@toadmeister gives Suzanne Moore such a seeing-to she'll be walking bow-legged for months
After a few outraged replies, including one from me, the tweet was deleted and an apology given. So maybe half a dozen of us have made one media luvvie think again about the language he uses. To be fair on him, he probably forgot that some women can actually use the internet these days. I know, it's freakish, but he might have to get used to it.
It does make me sad to see so many mentions of sex in these combative terms. This lad culture / rape culture seems to think of sex as something a man does to a woman, against her will, and as an assertion of power, not pleasure. It's a video-game style win/lose transaction, with no concept of mutual benefit. At the risk of sounding like Mary Whitehouse's grandma, I'd like to add, wistfully, that 'in my day' (i.e. twenty-something years ago, when I was single) that's not the way it seemed to me. I could try and describe what I mean, but instead I'd like to quote the elegant words of poet John Siddique, who in a recent poem 'Love and the Body' described sex like this:
and all there has ever been is you and I
so easily lost in the feelings, the reaching,
and all there is, is love and the body.
It's a brilliant poem, please go take a look at it here. Is it hopelessly romantic to expect that sex might be like that, rather than a point-scoring exercise in which they win, and we lose?
I've heard it said recently that the flip side of women being afraid of physical and sexual violence from men is that men are afraid of being manipulated and trapped by women. Maybe that's what rape culture is all about. We're too smart, too feisty, we're running rings round men these days, they are afraid, they're taking it out on us. That is so sad. It doesn't have to be like that; we could be living in mutual respect. Interestingly, our rogue tweeter, in his apology, said;
I'm sorry, Suzanne, my Tweet was over the top. I've used it on with ref to men before, but I realise with women it's wrong.
So images of anal rape are ok then. What's the matter with men? They are afraid of us and afraid of each other too? Well, not all men. Poets obviously see sexual relationships more positively, whereas some tweeps just don't get it at all. Which is maybe the problem.]]>What Can You Say?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24902542013-01-16T16:35:03-05:002013-03-18T05:12:01-04:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/
This week there has been a particularly peculiar issue where the feminist commentator Suzanne Moore made an unfortunate reference to 'Brazilian Transexuals' in a Guardian article, which caused a Twitter storm from the trans community, causing Ms Moore to leave Twitter. Yes, she said something thoughtless, but the offence taken was vastly out of proportion with the original wording. Apparently there was then a very rude tirade on Twitter, but it seems to have faded, with Ms Moore, into the ether, so I don't know what was said.
Not to be outdone, the polemical journalist Julie Burchill then weighed in with a vile piece in the Observer, both on paper and online, which called transsexual people 'bedwetters in bad wigs', 'screaming mimis' and 'dicks in chicks clothing'. I hope I've quoted that correctly, I can't be sure because the Observer has taken her article down from their website.
Apart from the obvious comment to Ms Burchill, 'who asked you?' it is obvious that her column had no journalistic merit, it was a total ad hominem - or maybe ad feminam - attack; a violent spasm of upsetting hate speech for no good reason. So, good, it's gone.
Except - wait a minute - on BBC Radio 4's The Media Show on Wednesday, Toby Young came up with the argument that Burchill's piece should stand. He made this argument on the traditional grounds that it is not an offence to give offence. The discussion begins at 14 minutes 15 seconds.
Young's opinion is flawed for two reasons. Firstly, as far as the actual newspapers are concerned, the Observer should be covered by the Editors' Code of the Press Complaints Committee. Take a look at it. This is the set of guidelines that is supposed to govern how the press behaves, but it can't be working, or there would never have been a Leveson enquiry. It says quite clearly in Clause 12, which covers Discrimination, that:
i) The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual's race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.
During the Media Show, neither Young, nor transgender activist Ros Kaveny, focused on the code. Peter Preston and Laurie Penny didn't mention it either. They seem to have forgotten it exists, and they concentrated on arguing whether Burchill's article caused 'harm' - a subjective question if ever there was one. Apart from Ros Kaveny, it seems that they didn't ask any transgender people before they came to their views. The code clearly shows that offence is not the issue, discrimination is the issue.
Of course, much of the discussion wasn't in newspaper, it was on line. Does the press code even apply to articles on line? Or should we be looking at the Malicious Communications Act? This is the statute that was used, only two months ago, to arrest a 19 year old man for posting on Twitter a photograph of a burning Remembrance Day poppy. Kent Police obviously took the view that it is not ok to offend somebody on line, and banged up the lad in a police cell overnight. I have not been able to find out from the internet whether a prosecution is being pursued in this case. The Act states:
The Malicious Communications Act 1988 section 1... deals with the sending to another of any article which is indecent or grossly offensive, or which conveys a threat, or which is false, provided there is an intent to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient. The offence covers letters, writing of all descriptions, electronic communications, photographs and other images in a material form, tape recordings, films and video recordings. Poison-pen letters are usually covered...
...The offence is one of sending, delivering or transmitting, so there is no requirement for the article to reach the intended recipient.
Transgender people might be one of the last oppressed minorities. If Ms Burchill's rant had been directed against black or Asian people, homosexual people, Jews, or Muslims, I am pretty sure it would have been met with the full force of the law. Because it was about hatred towards transgender people, all the media pundits could come up with was this bland platitude that nobody has the right not to be offended.
There is one other group in our society who get offended over and over again and there seems to be no redress, and that is women, whether transgender, or the regular cisgender sort. It seems that anyone on line can pour hatred at women with impunity, and we are not even a minority. The number of websites and Facebook pages dedicated to normalising and joking about rape, inciting violence, and reducing women to a collection of sexualised body parts in pornographic photos, is huge. Ask Facebook to take one of these sites down and they will generally say that it does not fall under their policy. In the actual print press, pictures of mostly naked women are legal, and newspaper editors would have us believe that it is normal and healthy for us to see women objectified in that way, every single day. It is not.
And yet, under the PCC's Editors' Code and the Malicious Communications Act, it would seem that there is a prima facie case for much of the misogynistic hatred that permeates our media to be removed. Feminist groups such as Object gave powerful testimony to that effect during the Leveson Enquiry.
We will see whether Leveson makes a difference. For now, it's a pity that a poppy will get you on to the wrong side of the law, but a vile ad feminam attack is just... normal.]]>The Good Club Guidetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23689232012-12-27T05:51:20-05:002013-02-26T05:12:01-05:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/
The last time I went clubbing, though, something had changed. A group of thirty-something women from work went to Brighton one Easter weekend. We'd hardly been in the club in West Street five minutes when a group of young men surrounded us, slid up behind us, grabbed our shoulders and started grinding their crotches into our backsides. This was weird. I watched all my friends putting up with it, then I extricated myself from the situation. I was old, married, and there for the dancing. I didn't want that kind of interest, but it didn't seem possible to deflect the men in that club from forcing their... attentions... on us.
That was 10 years ago and things have got worse since then. I have this love/hate relationship with The Everyday Sexism Project; it's wonderful that it is giving a voice to women who have experienced sexual aggression of various kinds, but it is also incredibly depressing, reading post after post about the shocking treatment women are subjected to all the time. Complaints about clubs and clubbing are high on their list. Here are some of examples:
'Last night, my friend and I had just paid to get into a nightclub and were walking up the stairs to go to the main dance floor, when some guy behind me grabbed my shoulder and started thrusting/rubbing himself into me.'
'...when you're on a dancefloor for 10 mins with your friends before your arse is grabbed.'
'Was walking through a club - a boy about my age (20) proceeded to grab my bum. I grabbed his hand and pulled it off of me then started shouting at him. He gripped my hand and restrained my arm up into the air. The club was full of people, no one said anything despite my loud shouting.'
Other examples are written by women whose breasts were grabbed, or who found that hands had crept up their skirts to fondle their genitals. Let's be clear. Groping of this sort is not normal behaviour. It is the criminal act of sexual assault.
1. Intentionally touches another person (B),
2. the touching is sexual,
3. B does not consent to the touching, and
4. A does not reasonably believe that B consents.
The women who post these stories generally report that they get no support from their friends, other clubbers, from bar staff or security staff. If they speak up for themselves, they are often told to calm down and stop making a fuss. I wonder why women subject themselves to this kind of treatment. I wonder why they keep going to clubs where sexual assault appears to be the norm. Surely it would be best to avoid those clubs in future and take your custom somewhere else?
In times when the internet provides us all with a voice, where Starbucks can be scared into paying more tax by the threat of a customer boycott and attendant protests, where Amazon can be shown up for packing off all their profits to Luxembourg, women who want to go dancing can use the same remedy. It would not be beyond the wit of some IT-savvy woman to produce a website that names and shames clubs where sexual assault goes on, unchallenged, where club owners and management are catering to rather dubious men, and the women are there to provide groping opportunities. Couldn't we have a kind of Trip Advisor for nightlife?
Women who go clubbing - please make your New Year's Resolution Zero Tolerance to assault in clubs. If women stay away from these places, the management will have to change their policies. You don't have to put up with this when you are trying to have a good time. You are customers, not part of the entertainment.]]>What Would Jed Bartlet Do?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23208172012-12-18T05:37:36-05:002013-02-17T05:12:01-05:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/
Everything changed again last Friday, when the news started to come through about the shootings at Sandy Hook. Don't get me wrong when I say I was immediately bored by the whole thing. What I mean is, I resolved to avoid this whole thing on the news, because what had happened was so like what happened at Columbine/Virginia Tech/Denver over the last few years. There would be the same media frenzy, the same outrage and grief, the same shrine with flowers and teddy bears, the same protestations from the gun lobby that 'guns don't kill people - people do'. There was nothing new to see here, and nothing would ever change. After all, the American 'gun lobby' is a powerful force. It's got a lot of votes, and by definition, it's got a lot of guns.
I haven't been able to avoid it all. The meta-news this time has gone beyond parody. I haven't seen the interviews with six-year-old survivors, but I've heard other people's critique of them. I read an article on the BBC website by their Washington Correspondent, Jonny Dymond, which was less about the shooting than about the ghoulish media choking up this small town with their vans and cameras. Very sensibly, none of the townspeople were willing to talk to Dymond, so his article carried a distinct sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped as he, presumably, searched for an angle down there. (I realise that I am indulging in meta-meta-news. I'll stop now.)
Americans are more strange to us than their music, films and TV programmes might lead one to believe. Their values and behaviours are very different. They accept compulsory car insurance, but think a decent health service for the majority of their citizens would be 'socialist'. They drain the word 'liberal' of all its connotations of freedom and tolerance, and make it mean 'Marxist'. They have this unswerving devotion to weapons that is unfathomable to us.
The gun lobby is, indeed, spouting about its 'freedom' and its 'rights'. I seem to remember that the American Declaration of Independence states, fairly early on, that the founders intended American citizens to enjoy 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. If we are playing rights top trumps, I would have thought that those 'unalienable rights' beat the right to bear arms every time. The right of each child and each teacher to complete a school day and go home in peace. The right of each parent to greet his or her kids coming out of school and take them home alive. The right to a future. Compared to those, the right to borrow one's mother's Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle, (advertising strapline: 'CONSIDER YOUR MAN CARD REISSUED') and take out one's personal grudges against twenty six innocent people and their bereaved families, seems somewhat secondary.
I'm not an expert on the American Constitution. I know the Second Amendment was made in 1791, long before the semi-automatic assault rifle was conceived of. I don't know whether there has ever been an amendment to an amendment, but maybe now is the time. Barack Obama finds himself in his second term of office, with no possibility of a third. If he wants to be remembered for anything more than being the first black man in the White House, this could be his Abraham Lincoln moment. Now, when there are almost four more years left for him to operate. Now, while the hideous Tea Party has been recently humbled, and there is some chance of moderate Republicans having a voice. Now, while this latest atrocity is fresh in everyone's minds. I don't know what can be done about the plethora of horrific armaments that is already out there, but let's be clear. Nobody needs this type of gun to shoot deer, or defend their farmstead against intruders. If American politics is anything like the noble and principled business that Aaron Sorkin envisaged in The West Wing, Barack Obama will try to do something. Any American who really believes in the Declaration of Independence will want to help him.]]>On Being a Spiritual Atheisttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23008042012-12-16T19:00:00-05:002013-02-15T05:12:01-05:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/
A mistake that many people make is to imagine that atheists are shallow materialists, because, logically, if you don't believe that an old man in the sky sees your every misdemeanour and punishes you accordingly, then why would you adhere to any moral code all? St Paul said, quoting Ecclesiastes: 'If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."' In fact, many of the atheists I've met are thoughtful, moral and even spiritual people; a real force for good.
I've heard spirituality defined as 'the need to connect with something greater than ourselves'. For some people, that greater thing is nature, for others, community, and for a third group, it is personified as a deity. Jedi Knights (390,000 in the 2001 census there were; data for 2011, find I cannot) would presumably call it the Force.
It seems to me that every religion has two major strands: a pile of aggregated mythology that is cult-specific and reaches from creation myths to the ultimate fate of the 'soul'; and a core of compassionate altruism and self-knowledge that helps us live with each other and with ourselves. The second strand I count as spirituality and I am all for it. I've learnt a little bit of it from other people, from my own reading, from management courses and psychometric tests, from reading Buddhist texts and books by Karen Armstrong... all sorts of sources, and I am still a beginner. I'm not saying that I apply compassion and self-knowledge easily or well.
I make mistakes, although nobody punishes me but myself. But I have seen many committed Christians whose morals, attitudes, words and actions are so far from their avowed ideals that they have made me disbelieve in their God, who obviously is not helping them to live any kind of good life. I suspect many other people in this country feel the same, which is a partial explanation for a quarter of us having no religion.
If I had to clothe that spirituality in my own mumbo-jumbo, I could say that there is some sense in a Pagan world view. There really isn't anything much more deserving of our reverence than the sun, the stars, the moon, the earth - they give us our life and a sense of awe. I am pretty sure they weren't created by a god or goddess, but there they are, sustaining us, and its wonderful even if it isn't purposeful. It's no use praying to them though, as I don't think they have the capacity to listen or act on our behalf.
It stops you in your tracks, sometimes, being an atheist. You realise that there is no higher power for good, or evil, in this world, and that, excepting natural disasters, that it is down to us humans to do all the nice or nasty things that are ever going to happen. The fact that so many people do choose to do some good in the world, even though they have no religion, or only a nominal one, is thrilling. I expect we do it because it actually makes us feel good. Maybe because we are a successful tribe of social monkeys, our brains are wired that way.
The implication of St Paul's letter to the Christians at Corinth, quoted above, is that if we don't believe in God, an afterlife, and a reward in heaven or an eternity in hell, then we can do what we like, with impunity. For religious people, it's best to keep the rules just in case. It's a belief system underpinned by the ultimate threat. But when an atheist does a good thing, he or she does so for its own sake, not for any harp lessons in heaven. That's why I think atheists are some of the most spiritual people I know.]]>Why I Won't Cheer Uptag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22402722012-12-04T17:33:21-05:002013-02-03T05:12:01-05:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/Everyday Sexism Project. Variants include 'Give us a smile, then' and 'Smile, love, your face won't break'. Why do these inanities upset women so much? These are just silly remarks, shouldn't we 'calm down, dear' and ignore them?
But if you deconstruct what these comments mean, the reason they are so irritating becomes apparent. What men are actually saying is this:
Hello. I'm male, and you are lucky that I've chosen to favour you with my attention. But you do not appeal to me; you are not trying to look attractive, complaisant, or interested in me, and that is unreasonable of you.
In effect, men who make these comments are being perfectly clear that the purpose of women, in their opinion, is to be delightfully decorative, and preferably sexually available, to men.
On that day in Beeston in 1985, the phrase 'Cheer up, love, it might never happen' was wildly inappropriate, because 'it' had already happened. I was a postgraduate student at Nottingham University, and my father was in intensive care fifty miles away. I had been trying to reach my mother by payphone to get some news from the hospital. I had to decide whether to dash home by train, which is what I wanted to do, and let my week's carefully set-up experiments go to waste, or to stay in the lab, which is what my mother wanted me to do, and face the possibility that I might never see my father again. But the young man who accosted me in the street couldn't possibly have known that, because, as far as he was concerned, I had no concerns or worries, and indeed, no independent existence outside his field of vision. Or if I had, well none of them could possibly be important enough to deflect me from my life's task of looking pleasant to men.
We women already do so much. We take care how we dress, we choose jewellery, spend money on make-up, have expensive haircuts, all to look more pleasing to others in a way a man would never countenance. These days we glue nylon extensions into our hair, pad our breasts with silicone gel, squeeze botox into our faces. If we don't shave off all of our pubic hair, young men, with their delicate Ruskin-like libidos, find it 'off-putting' when they want to have sex. Nevertheless, all this dollification will never be enough. They want our expressions as well. They want us to put up with all the indignities and inequalities that the world puts on us as women, and never let on for a moment that we are worried, scared, tired, ill. We should show no sadness, no anger, because men don't want to deal with that sort of hysteria from women, thanks very much, when they have so many important things to think about. That's the logical conclusion of those silly little comments.
You might have got the idea that I'm quite angry now, at the casual belittling of women that goes on every time some vacuous man exhorts us to give him a smile. Yes I am. But you wouldn't know it to look at my face.]]>Pressing Issuestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22185762012-11-30T11:40:23-05:002013-01-30T05:12:01-05:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/on line, free. I've read the fifty page summary, and that is probably enough for me. It quite clearly states that Lord Leveson is recommending 'a genuinely independent and effective system of self-regulation' for our press. You would think, to hear some of the editorial squealing that has been going on, that he wants to introduce a secret police force to lock up and torture all journalists who disagree with the government.
Many journalists are very exercised about press freedom. Their concern is that press regulation might damage newspapers' remit to be a 'voice for the voiceless' and they maintain that legislating against journalists is what weak, corrupt states do.
Yes, it is very important that the media in general is able to report, without fear or favour, on any newsworthy topic. I think of John McCarthy, held hostage in the Lebanon for more than five years, and Veronica Guerin, the Irish journalist murdered by the drug gang she was working to expose. The reporters who unveiled the MPs' expenses scandal and the phone hacking practices themselves were doing society a huge favour. That is one end of journalism. At its best it is selfless, heroic, incisive, single-minded, and honest.
But that end of the reporting spectrum is not the problem here. What has been going on in the tabloid press is a sickening and persistent destruction of people's lives and reputations. The press has an Editors' Code of Practice which is short, simple and clear, and is violated on a daily basis. For example, under clause 3 iii) it is 'unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent' which law is flouted by long-lens paparazzi the world over, not least in the case of the Duchess of Cambridge's topless sunbathing photos. According to clause 6 v), 'Editors must not use the fame, notoriety or position of a parent or guardian as sole justification for publishing details of a child's private life.' If you have seen the wonderful lecture by Martin Robbins called 'Why The Daily Mail Is Evil' you will know that Tom Cruise's daughter, Suri, who is six and a half years old, has been the subject of no fewer than 824 'stories' in the Daily Mail during her short lifetime to date. There have probably been a few dozen more since the talk was recorded. I would be interested to know if her parents consented to the endless photos and commentary about her. To publish a story about her two or three times a week, the Mail must be employing a dedicated (and I use the word loosely here) photographer. And yet, despite the prohibitions in the Editors' Code, there seems to be nobody requesting or requiring the Daily Mail to desist from this intrusive practice.
According to the Editors' Code, the only time the Press can deviate, and use somewhat underhand practices, like paying criminals, for example, is in cases of 'Public Interest'. The Code is very clear what 'Public Interest' means. It generally comprises these issues:
i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety.
ii) Protecting public health and safety.
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation.
It has been pointed out many times that 'public interest' is a very different matter from 'what interests the public'. In the reportage of children like Suri Cruise, in the use of 'upskirt' and 'nip slip' photos of female celebrities, in most of the armpit sweat, messy hair, no-make up photos of almost-famous women in those detestable 'celebrity' magazines, there can be no possible public interest defence.
The Press Complaints Commission is the regulatory body which has been overseeing the slide of our national press into squalor. The PCC itself admits that it has not been fit for purpose. Leveson recommends that the majority of the members of the new regulatory board be independent of the Press; that it should deal with complaints, warn newspapers about bad behaviour, and where necessary, refer criminal matters to the appropriate authorities. Leveson also calls for Press legislation, not least because our current laws do not enshrine any legal duty on behalf of Government to protect the freedom of the Press.
Our broadcast media is regulated by Ofcom, which deals with issues of both standards and fairness, including taste and decency, privacy breaches and intrusion, under its Broadcasting Code. Ofcom is accountable to Parliament, and publishes an annual report. It can impose sizeable financial penalties on companies which break the rules. Its 'Content Board' is 'charged with understanding, analysing and championing the voices and interest of the viewer, the listener and citizen'. It seems to work reasonably well. It issues licences to broadcasters, which it can revoke; no doubt the Press would not respond well to that idea. But, in general, can't the print media be regulated in a similar way? If it's good enough for Auntie, shouldn't it work for Fleet Street?]]>Brandedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21987842012-11-27T12:55:31-05:002013-01-27T05:12:01-05:00Judi Sutherlandhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/judi-sutherland/'Thank you for taking the time to post your views on our wall.
This is entirely a matter for the Sun - it is not for us to comment on editorial decisions.'
So said Tesco's 'Customer Care' when a No More Page Three supporter asked why it continues to shovel advertising spend into the Sun.
To be fair, other retailers (Sainsbury's, ASDA, Morrisons, Argos and DFS), also target customers in the Sun. Alarmingly, LEGO ran a voucher promotion in the paper during half-term, boosting circulation among parents, in a drive to sell toys. Are these companies failing to understand the power of brand association?
We've seen some telling examples. After some corporate dithering, Nike withdrew sponsorship from Lance Armstrong when drug-taking evidence became overwhelming. The trustees of two charities bearing Jimmy Savile's name considered rebranding, but ultimately decided to fold. Remember how Accenture quickly dug a big fat bunker between themselves and Tiger Woods, when his personal behaviour no longer reflected brand values, and tainted their sponsorship?
Any company using celebrities risks their protégé 'going rogue' and poisoning their brand. The case of The Sun is subtly different. This organ of the Murdoch press remains unchanged. The Page Three topless girl has been on newsstands, her modesty covered with a flimsy front page, for forty years. But the culture in which it operates is changing, and its editor and major advertisers are failing to respond. A useful parallel is the Robertson's marmalade golliwog. A 'British Institution' and 'harmless fun', just like Page Three claims to be, it objectified and ridiculed black people, and was mercifully discontinued in 2001.
Recently, Marketing ran a cover feature on cultural shift. They warned managers:
'When brands lose contact with the shifting demands of their customers, they are on the road to ruin... A time comes in the life of every company when refreshing its brand position and changing its corporate culture is essential for survival.'
After the nauseating happenings in Rochdale, and Jimmy Savile's alleged decades of abuse, the public is belatedly reacting against hyper-sexualisation. The Everyday Sexism Project allows women to voice, online, the abuse, disrespect and sexual aggression they experience daily. One in three schoolgirls reports inappropriate touching at school. Girls walking and cycling in the street are grabbed by men demanding sex acts. Women at work find that even their managers make unwarranted comments about their breasts, their clothes, and their intellectual ability. Our culture still turns women into objects.
But why single out the Sun? It's simply this. The Sun, a daily newspaper, sells 2.5 million copies, and claims 7.5 million readers, every day. It peddles soft porn alongside the TV guide and the footie reports, for 40p. Page Three can't be shown on TV, but the paper is not even on the top shelf. It's a pervasive reminder that women's achievements go unreported, and only their boobs are news. Newsworks reports over a million Sun readers aged 15-24; they don't report on under 15s. Topless models do not feature at weekends, to protect children. I do wonder how children are made miraculously blind to it on weekdays.
Even worse, since Rebekah Brooks' editorship, the models have been ventriloquized. Captions used to say something like: 'Brenda, 19, from Wellingborough, works in a florist's. I know you'll agree she looks blooming marvellous'. Brooks replaced this biography-lite with the nasty 'News In Briefs' speech bubble, in which the model is made to spout Murdoch propaganda such as:
'ZOE is certain Tony Blair was right to take Britain into the war with Iraq. 'You don't need to be an international diplomat to realise the world is better off without Saddam. We should be proud of what has been achieved.'
The post-modern joke is that Zoe will never be an international diplomat, nor anything else, because, with those tits, boys, she couldn't possibly possess a brain.
This is where we learn society's views of women. If you are a woman, it is the standard by which you judge your own appearance. If you are a man, it is where you see passive women, stripped to their knickers, available as an object for random sexual gratification. And, because of its presence in workplaces and public spaces, The Sun itself is a tool of abuse. Here's evidence from the Everyday Sexism Project:
'A male colleague of mine buys the Sun every day on his lunch break. He then usually picks up Page 3 and shows it to everyone else in the room asking "would you do that?" I am then made to feel bad if I comment because apparently he's a "lovely bloke".'
'Was on the train this morning and overhead two men discussing how awful the story was about the girl shot by the Taliban for wanting education for women, over a copy of the Sun. A minute later - in front of a carriage full of men, women and children, they were leering over Page 3 and how 'stupid' the model was based on the (completely made up in reality) news in briefs.'
I don't understand why so many women appear to read The Sun. I wonder how many of us buy it. I do know from my own observations, that it is mostly women who do the weekly shop. No More Page Three, which has over 58,000 petition signatories, is advising supporters to boycott these retailers this week. Sadly, there are relatively few untainted supermarkets around. It would only take one major supermarket to break ranks and stop advertising in the Sun, to earn our gratitude; to give us a choice as to whether our hard-earned household expenditure goes to subsidise pornography.
If this were racism, anti-Semitism, or homophobia, the big advertisers would find The Sun's editorial decisions suddenly relevant. As it is, spending money with The Sun is not morally neutral. In an environment where brands are even more attractive assets than a model's breasts, advertisers could avoid guilt by association. I wonder if any of them will.]]>