Tag: sexism

The Snake Eats Its Tail

Noises Off Day 6

My week of audiofasting has led to a lot of thinking and reading and thinking about reading and reading about thinking.  Sometimes these things fall into line with events in the real world, in my world, which open up a new line of thought, or in this case a new resolve.    Although not strictly following in the spirit of previous posts, I have no doubt that my thoughts wouldn’t be as clear had I not had this week of withdrawal from all extraneous noise.  Enough elucidating, let me begin ….

 

Reading Susan Sontag’s essay on style in bed this morning and feeling a range of emotions as I plough and ponder the words.  I fluctuate between envy and admiration, because she is an incredibly vigorous thinker and writer and engaging with her discourse is it’s own challenge and reward.  The envy is because she is so damn succinct and brilliant and better than me and I allow myself this bitter comparison for a second before I get over myself.

 

So I’m enjoying my read,shifting between tiny eurekas and huh? moments, when a phrase hits me with its relevance.  In her essay Against Interpretation, she describes pornography as a “substitute for life”.  My initial reading of this phrase is that of a snark, that men who use porn are losers who evidently can’t get a girlfriend.  This is a party line that I have held for such a long time that it has calcified, my long rehearsed ‘rant’ against Page 3 forming a strong part of my teaching repertoire for dealing with year 11 boys.  And this has been a momentous week for the brilliant-but-I-can’t-believe-this-is-still-prescient-in-the-21st Century Campaign against print-based porn, No More Page 3.

 

The campaign, which is petitioning to have Page 3 removed from The Sun and associated newspapers as well as pressurising supposedly family friendly companies against advertising in their pages, received a timely spike of publicity.  Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton, lanced a big parliamentary boil during a debate on media sexism.  In a brave and lucid speech against Page 3 culture and portrayals of women in the media, she wore a No More Page 3 T-shirt – and was promptly rebuked for inappropriate dress!  Here’s a better summary of events,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jun/12/caroline-lucas-page-3-t-shirt

This, and the Sontag, and my week of contemplation has made me re-think my position.  And it goes a little something like this…

My traditional standpoint of vilifying men who enjoy Page 3 has been missing the point enitrely.  Sorry.   Page 3 and its counterparts mayin fact provide a convenient barrier for otherwise sound adult men against the reality of forging strong personal relationships with women, whether erotic, romantic, platonic or all three.  Obviously, there are men who may use these images as a springboard for abuse or denigration, but I believe that there are more who have had their images of women so screwed up by concomitant 1D stereotypes in the press and on film, that confronting a real lady is a hair-raising experience.  So what happens?  A whole load of men stay in their shells and, along with a whole load of women, miss out on truly generous, loving relationships, which means a whole load of miserable where it could be a whole load of happy.

So am I beginning to feel pity for Page 3 readers?  Maybe yes, because my attention has been misdirected for some time.  So what of the women? In this spirit, I changed my focus to my year 10 girls and shared with them the debate and footage of  Lucas’ speech.  They feature spotted brilliantly (we’ve been looking at persuasive language techniques) but didn’t really engage with the matter at hand.  When I showed them some recent copies of the Sun, however, the response was electric.  The majority were quick to label the models as ‘whores’ and ‘not even that fit’, but when I probed them about who made the decisions and controlled this women’s image, they disengaged again.  Before this week I would have faceplanted onto my planner in frustration, but I think my audio fast is making me empathetic….

15 year old girls are hormonal, vulnerable and desperate to find stereotypes and images of women to identify either against or with.  I would say that the former is more prevalent than the latter; I would put the ratio at 3:1.  It seems easier to confess to hating goths or thinking Katy Perry gross, than it is to love Beyonce or pronounce oneself a skater.

 

As such, the Page 3 girl is not providing an aspirant model for teenage girls; more often it is an image for them to kick against; whether because they think its a model of beauty that genuinely appeals to men, but one that they can never achieve; or because they are conditioned to think of these women as cheap, worthless and “easy to define themselves against”?  Either reason is equally toxic, as both involve women-hating and self-loathing in equal measure, feeding the monster of poor self esteem that most of us, as women, have had to live with as teenagers.  And who is responsible for fostering poor self esteem?  I don’t really need to answer that question; the snake eats its tail.

My thoughts may be simplistic, silly, hardly revelatory, but my personal realisation that Page 3 makes no-one happier, male or female, makes me more determined to contribute to its removal. No More Page 3 is not a feminist campaign, it’s humanist.

 

Exercising my rights

Hands up if you love the gym! Yeah, gym!  Other people’s sweat on handlebars!  Bum wobbles! Mysterious pubes on the floor! Orcs bearing dumb bells!  Euro house!  Yeah!  The gym!

 

In fairness, I don’t really mind the place.  But that’s because I live in an apartment block with its own gym so I am duty bound to drag my ass up there as often as possible.  And it genuinely helps me switch off my mind, with its snarky affectations and deep unfathomable pools of bitterness.  Running on a circular belt with my mouth open really shows my shitty synapses who’s boss.  In truth, I am now on nodding terms with a few people, which is as close to neighbourly love as it gets in my building.  And I can block out most sounds thanks to a well placed podcast on a well inserted earphone (I lodged the bud in so hard yesterday that it was only when I took it out that I found the earring back which was attached to it.  I tried to pretend in my head that it was a metallic depth charger, sent in to to locate tiny spies in my ear canal, but I think I’ve been watching too many terrible films recently.)

 

So I can block it out and that’s good, but here’s the thing.  Very often I’m the only woman up there.  Now I believe that the gym is as much the natural home of a man as the tupperware party is for a woman, (i.e they are not), but more times than not I am distinctly outnumbered.  And it doesn’t worry me.  Either there are an inordinate number of gay musclemen in my block or I am even less attractive than I think i am, but I don’t get hit on, or feel remotely perved at.  Which is great, right?  So I shouldn’t complain, no?  It’s just … no it’s petty of me to say anything …it’s just, well it’s the music.  It offends me.  It doesn’t aesthetically displease me.  It’s just wrong.

 

There’s a sound system in the corner, tuned to either banal local radio or one a little portfolio of CDs.  Mostly rave type stuff which is okay to run to.  But today it was just me and some guy and gym etiquette dictates that whoever is first in is the DJ.  Which in this case meant him.  He puts a disc on.  At first it’s just a nice beat and I’m like, okay, fine and then there’s some rapping.  It’s that heavy low stuff where it sounds like they’re on anti depressants, so I put my ipod on and get on the treadmill.  I can see in the mirror the guy (who hasn’t exactly done much gym-ing to warrant being DJ in my opinion), nod his head, sidle over to the CD player and turn up the volume.  This is roughly what I hear:

‘split the bitch in half’.  I wince.

‘fuck the ho in the ass like she do it for cash’.  I roll my eyes at my gym ‘buddy’ in an astounding act of British passive aggression.

There was more, but I really don’t want to write it down.  Eventually the troglodyte went to examine his button mushroom in the gents, so I yanked the wires out of the back of the stereo (not sure why) and left the gym.  That sort of music really does inspire violence; what I really wanted to do was jam a 4kg handweight up his urethra, but hey, that’s not how I roll, dawg.

 

Obviously this was an extreme situation, because Notorious P. I. G had chosen to turn the music up, showing a blatant disregard for the sensory welfare of his neighbours, but even so, who the hell writes that stuff?  I don’t wish to be all Tipper Gore about this, but how is it okay to write lyrics like that?  Not just okay, but lauded in some circles?  If I wrote a song about anally penetrating a man causing him physical pain and ultimately bisecting him, I would expect approbation.  I certainly wouldn’t expect it to be such a mainstream choice as to be played out loud and with gusto in a unisex gym.

 

This isn’t a new issue,  I know.  What next, will I be complaining about those pesky Beastie Boys and the theft of VW badges?  That I once saw, with horror,  Ellen Terry’s ankle on stage? But sometimes, when you least expect it,  things like today happen and the inequality gap seems as wide and accepted as ever.  Now, where’s that 4kg weight?

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