This week, the Telegraph has unveiled its new women’s pages, entitled (CRINGE ALERT) “Wonder Woman”; a section offering “irreverent and intelligent writing about politics, business, family, life and sex.” An introductory blog explains:
All too often ‘women’s content’ is either lipsticks and handbags or BMW – bitching, moaning and whining about the ‘plight of being a woman’ – a tone of coverage this generation of women rarely identify with or enjoy reading.
Wonder Women, with its raft of brilliant writers defined by their reactive, witty and honest style, aims to articulate views which will get both women and men fired up, shine a light on individuals, issues and stories people will want to discuss with their mates down the pub and crucially, make readers laugh too.
Definitely a laudable goal, and one which those of us sick of “lifestyle” pieces about dieting and manicures can certainly identify with. But is there still a place for so-called women’s pages, and isn’t there something a little regressive about the entire concept?
The argument most often raised against women’s pages (along with women’s television programmes, and women’s radio shows) is that they are necessarily divisive, bringing with them an implication that women aren’t welcome amongst the other pages of the paper, and must be relegated into their own glossy pull-out harem. Not for us ladyfolk the stern black & white logic of the business pages! Not for us the brain-taxing Sudoku, with its spiky numbers and glaring empty boxes! No, the women need their own special place, full of pretty pictures of shoes (ALL WOMEN LOVE SHOES) and tearful confessions about lost love (ALL WOMEN LOVE TEARS).
As Wonder Women rightfully points out, the view of womanhood espoused by these pages is all-too often a patronising and outmoded one. We’re still dealing with a 50s housewife hangover, where every article is built around how to please a man, or make a good pavlova. Pavlovas have no place in modern-day society. I mean, what even IS a pavlova?
In an ideal world, of course, the media (and, indeed, society at large) would have embraced diversity enough for us not to need segregated content. Unfortunately, that’s a long way off – and if we said goodbye to the women’s page, many important topics simply wouldn’t be covered at all. And with current policies disproportionately affecting women and threatening to erode female bodily autonomy, drawing attention to women’s issues remains as important as ever – which includes covering the superficial as well as the serious.
The difficulty lies in changing the editorial view of what a “women’s page” is; whilst the Telegraph’s manifesto for Wonder Women hits all of the right notes, we’re only two days into publication and they’re already making missteps and lapsing into old bad habits. Take the “Board Babe” series, for example; a weekly column penned by an anonymous high-powered business woman, which raised eyebrows and prodded gag reflexes in the Twitter-sphere today on the publication of their very first article: Secret Diary: Our Board Babe on Naked Ambition. Go ahead and read it; I’ll wait.
Pieces like this are misogyny masquerading as empowerment: the “Board Babe” is set up as a challenger to the patriarchal status quo of the business world, whilst simultaneously being patronised and belittled (in this case, mostly by the sub-editor who chose the headline, although the article is fairly problematic in itself). Despite our writer having ascended to the top levels of the boardroom, she’s still referred as a “babe”, a term that both sexualises and infantilises at once. Her ambition is “naked”; as is she, underneath that trouser suit – because just in case you’d forgotten, women are there to be looked at. And (despite the fact that she presumably has a high degree of expertise and business savvy within her field), the piece is marketed as a titillating “confessional”, as though she’s moonlighting as a high-class hooker in her lunchbreak.
But it doesn’t have to be like this – and there are some real rumblings of change. With the growing popularity of blogs such as Vagenda, Jezebel, The F Word and Bad Reputation, we’re seeing a real desire for writing that deals with the issues of being a woman in a way that’s genuinely funny, fierce, intelligent and empowering (let’s call it the Caitlin Moran school of feminism, for now). From the Vagenda team’s six-figure book deal, to the success of Lena Dunham’s smash HBO hit Girls, to Moran’s own How to Be a Woman, all signs point to the fact that the more mainstream press is sitting up and taking notice of what we’ve known for a very long time: that women are hungry to read things that matter to them, written by people that they identify with.
So, is there still a place for women’s pages? For me, the answer is an unequivocal “YES” – but they need to be progressive, not regressive. Let’s see more women’s pages focusing on what we are, and what we want to be, instead of on what we used to be made to be. Ladies of the world take note: the time for pavlova is over.
The photo is from Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence. You can view the original here.
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