At the end of last year, I wrote a piece about the challenges feminism faced — and asked whether well-educated Western women really have anything to complain about, compared with those elsewhere in the world? It’s a topic that several writers have wrestled with recently, and it provoked the below response from Alan White, who has written in outlets ranging from the TLS to Private Eye.
– Helen
As forums for a feminist protest go, the ITV Saturday night dating show Take Me Out is somewhat unlikely. The format is simple: 30 girls are lined up behind buzzers, a man appears on stage, and over a series of rounds he is subjected to an appraisal of his looks, character and lifestyle with the help of various VTs featuring his friends and family. When a girl sees something she doesn’t like she buzzes out, and at the end the man chooses his date from the remainder.
It’s all pretty harmless. But in the current series the atmosphere recently turned rather edgy, thanks to “Damion from Weston-super-Mare”. It started well for the lad: he’s a model and his good looks ensured that hardly any of the girls pressed their buzzers upon his arrival on the stage. In the next round, there were a few jokey exchanges over his chest hair.
Then things changed. The next VT revealed Damion had previously been the lover of glamour model turned body builder Jodie Marsh (something the lady in question immediately denied via – where else – Twitter). A cacophony of buzzers met this revelation. From a wide array of possible dates, Damion was left with just a handful of women who’d be prepared to go on a free holiday with him, and even they didn’t look sure. He started to get defensive.
Things got worse. First he announced that he’d wanted to go on a date with Lucy (one of the girls who’d buzzed out) because she was the most attractive there; then he said he’d wanted a brunette because he “always attracted blondes”. The court was in uproar. “How can we compete with Lucy?” demanded one. More ringing buzzers, every “PEOW!” a loud slap round the immaculately-groomed chap’s chops.
Damion finished up with just a choice of two girls, one of whom he essentially went on to call ugly, to a rousing chorus of boos, after she announced she “didn’t like the lad”. Having finally ended up on a date with a deeply unimpressed (blonde) girl, he subsequently managed to get her name wrong in the post-debacle interview.
What lessons can we draw from this? Damion came across as a twat of colossal proportions, rightly held to account by a most unlikely collection of feminists – perma-tanned girls who were just looking for a nice bloke. These are not the kind of women who are prone to marking a strident defence of their sex, as Jenny Turner has argued in the London Review of Books:
Alison Wolf showed that the 16 per cent pay-gap masks a much harsher divide, between the younger professional women – around 13 per cent of the workforce – who have ‘careers’ and earn just as much as men, and the other 87 per cent who just have ‘jobs’, organised often around the needs of their families, and earn an awful lot less. Feminism overwhelmingly was and is a movement of that 13 per cent – mostly white, mostly middle-class, speaking from, of, to themselves within a reflecting bubble.
I was recently tired and stuck in the office on a Saturday when I saw Louise Mensch and Stella Creasy arguing about the “Top Totty” beer in the House of Commons bar. I was in a bad mood. Why weren’t these women helping the huge number of unemployed people – never mind women – in their constituencies?
When Stella Creasy and I were in our 20s she was busy being a wonk while I was walking round Waltham Forest with outreach teams trying to work out why some of her future constituents were shooting and stabbing each other, and now she’s in a position of power all she cares about is the name of a beer? Sulkily, I tweeted them both with exactly those thoughts. Shortly after, Creasy replied telling me that MPs can care about other things, and a couple of days later went on to write a moving call for action on youth crime. Did I feel like a pompous arse? I may well have done.
But this, as Helen Lewis has rightly pointed out, is feminism’s biggest challenge – in her words feminism doesn’t feel relevant enough: “Is it because first-world feminists don’t talk enough about the struggles of women elsewhere? Probably, but I can care about being allowed to use “Ms” and the withdrawal of abortion rights.”
Like other grand narratives, feminism has taken a pounding from the postmodernist wrecking ball. Misogyny isn’t a political problem any more – it’s a personal one. “Woman” is no longer a Marxist class. That world view has knocked down the boundaries between wider social questions and supposed fripperies. If you imply that annoyance at the BBC making one of its “Women of the Year” a panda is part of a nebulous problem that encompasses genital mutilation in the developing world and every injustice done to women in between, you can expect a backlash, and not just from the expected quarters.
This returns me to Jenny Turner’s article. She says:
“At the moment, the popular elements [of feminism] include ’empowerment’, ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ and, above all, ‘economic capacity’ – the basic no-frills neoliberal package…This young woman has been sold a deal, a ‘settlement’. So long as she works hard and doesn’t throw bricks or ask awkward questions, she can have as many qualifications and abortions and pairs of shoes as she likes.”
In the face of this, perhaps it’s time for feminism to become more, not less, theoretical: from that basis concrete causes can emerge. It needs to engage with what this deal actually means for society – and thereby women. Turner cites, as an example, the abstract deconstruction of the idea of the nuclear family – from those arguments emerged the growth of nurseries and shared parenting in 1970s North London, where attention was given to “children’s health requirements, play space, schooling, housing needs and…anything else we could think of.”
Feminists need to argue more strongly that the minutiae is only the start. Rape jokes, one could argue, are a product of neoliberalism – the Loaded culture that segues into UniLad – but this is one of the first pieces I’ve seen that articulates the wider social ill lurking behind them.
I call for one more thing. When Damion went out with Chelsea, his delightfully grouchy, nonplussed date, she gave him a tough time. But in Take Me Out: the Gossip (never let it be said I don’t research thoroughly), she gave a measured interview. She said: “I think he’s insecure: I’m trying to help him.” When feminists see sexism, outrage isn’t always the right response. Engagement and empathy are somewhat under-deployed concepts in these times of Twitterstorms and online comments.
The Internet is often a cesspool, bringing the very worst out of people. Not so long ago a female gamer criticised the sexism in Batman: Arkham City. She was inundated with disgusting responses. Her reply, I thought, was beautiful. She asked for more comments, more discussion – because, after all, This Is Water. If feminism wants to start anywhere, there’s no better place than with compassion.
Update: Stella Creasy points out that she has done outreach work in Waltham Forest for the last 12 years. I’m happy to correct this.
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