In a display of reactionary misogyny as naked and fully exposed as their women, Nuts have responded to Gail Trimble's 15 minutes of fame (she's that Oxford student who gets lots of answers right on university challenge) by asking her to pose naked. It's a mind bogglingly visible attempt to undermine a women who seems superior in her intelligence and competitive in her attitude.
We're lucky in a way - attitudes such as these don't often reveal themselves quite this explicitly and in all of their hideous oozing glory. Continued comments about her attractiveness were nibbles, pawing, a murmur of the need to dominate powerful women from deep within the shadows of the collective unconcious, and so difficult to confront. The Nuts thing is a throat ripping all out attack. There needs to be something urgent and specific to startle these attitudes out the undergrowth, so we can see them, and shoot them down cleanly.
I think in this case it's a lot to do with that weird quiz show/pub quiz mentality. People watch stuff like this to test their own knowledge and make-believe contestanthood. No one watches quiz shows without trying to guess the answers. And obviously some people think of them as a genuine personal measure of themselves. Think of the pub quiz episode of The Office. So, as opposed to a situation where Gail is a famous scientist or businesswoman, both of which also threaten traditionally masculine spheres but would probably elicit a less extreme response from the average university challenge viewer on the street, there's a more direct threat present here - a direct and cutting comparison between Gail and viewer. In response to which, viewer demands to see Gail naked.
So, to formulate a more detailed accusation, she's not being attacked for the fact of her being an intelligent woman in the public eye, so much as the method of attack differs for the fact her being a woman and is more venomous for its ease and its well worn path of use.
And there exists a constant, constant stream of these kinds of attacks on publicly visible, authoritative or successful women - a war of attrition against them. Swiftly following her winning an Oscar, the Metro was chortling away about Hugh Hefner's comments that he'd like Kate Winslet become a playboy bunny. You think you're so big cause you won an Oscar, lets just see how big you are in a bunny outfit, is the sentiment. American feminist campaign site The Women's Media Centre, documents an endless catalogue of sexual put-downs aimed at female journalists and politicians, largely in response to political and ideological differences.
And who could forget the grotesque, heaving and unmissable Akira-monster of phallic rage against Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton during the US elections. Again grown in fertile greenhouse of public visibility and political heat, there was no hiding or suppressing the mindset that women are always at least a little bit instrumentally sexual by their very nature, and must be treated as such. Both women were either sexually worshipped or derided in view of their politics - one right wing commentator said he would vote for Sarah Palin because he could imagine her lying next to him in bed. Hilary Clinton was frequently derided for being 'ugly'. I must hastily disclaim, I realise that women play thier part in producing this kind of commentary as well, though I think that for all the forms this mindless appearance based critique can take, the pure source is a well spring of misogyny.
This is an interesting article, in Esquire no less. It's entitled 'Hilary Clinton has a sexy mouth', and though it begins by dissecting Clinton's physical features in terms of their sexual merits, it promisingly goes on to recognise the bizarre but universal nature of this attitude towards female politicians. He gently analyses his and others strange compulsion to instantly sexualise Clinton, and seems genuinely bemused, and curious.
And that, I think, is the first tentative step. Maybe these remarks are, as the Esquire article would suggest, parasitical upon legitimate opinions about public figures, rising up from the primal unconscious, unbidden but also unquestioned. A man opens his mouth to disagree with a woman's policies, and instead volunteers a remark about her tits. He knows not why. Its the clinging traces of a past system of structured interaction between the sexes which will not go quietly. The only way out is confrontation with this noisy atavism.
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3 comments:
Hmmm... I'm wondering if you've essentialised women's subordination. I think it's really important not to cast such misogyny as "primal", or as you suggest, as "the clinging traces of a past system of structured interaction between the sexes". What this threatens to do, or in fact does, is render instances of sexual inequality as instances where social relations are backward. Whilst this comment is threatening to ramble a little, I do feel there is a point to be made here about casting sexism as akin to being socially 'undeveloped', and i'll try to make it clearly...
The subordination of women is social, not arising from a primal, masculinised need to dominate located somewhere in the murky depths of unconscious thought. Firstly, gender here becomes essentialised as belonging to unconscious thought. Secondly, social relations are essentialised as belonging to unconscious thought. Neither womanhood nor manhood are social facts, but are continually contested, revised, and reinvented.
So, when an instance of sexism occurs, it is mourned in your piece as a slip into a primal, uncultured way of treating women. I think this is a dangerous way to view sexism, because when we consider social/cultural contexts where women are seen to endure a constant subordination and suffering due to their being female, we cast these contexts as 'uncultured' - backward, undeveloped, pre-feminist (a typecast of a woman in rural India, walking miles for water, married at 13, a sexual and domestic commodity to her male relatives etc etc..). We see women as belonging to a time before people had the ability or educational tools to choose to contest sexist social interaction, where a particular feminist, liberal thinking hasn't reached them yet.
This threatens to cast women within these contexts as socially and sexually immobile, in that their immersion within gendered social structures prevents them from fully realising or acting upon their gendered subordination. We strip them of their autonomy. Such women do have choice, and ways and means of contesting the social relations that are 'normal' to them, and act upon these. It is also of immense importance that attempts to resistance are not cast as illegitimate when they are hidden to eyes that are used to a very particular type of feminist contestation... but that's for another discussion.
feltenfen - thanks for comment, I think I'm going to try to meet you half way.
I don't think that to say that misogeny is in some way unconcious is to deny the social nature of masculinity. We are not born, after all, with an unconcious genetic memory. To this end, I do regret using the phrase 'primal', I got slightly carried away with the rhetoric - i understand that the word implies social rigidity and some kind of fixed ahistorical 'human nature', and thats not what i meant to imply. Rather, I wanted to stress the point that opinions such as those of the author of the article about Hilary Clintons lips are the knee-jerk imprints of a persons culture on themselves - reversible, but only through individual introspection. I think the destruction of the kind of attitude that subordinates women does require the taking to pieces of the typical psyche.
writing this entry, I was largely reacting to american feminist sources, so it might be better if it were read in that context. I do think that cultural conservativism is a massive drag factor on the progress of women, and when i talked about a 'past system of interaction', thats really what i was trying to communicate.
I think the point you're making about developing world feminism is really important, if I've understood you correctly - that cultures must find thier own way of combating social injustice, and not be seen as in need of 'rescuing' by the methods of the west, not least because of the imperfect situation of women in the west (this may or may not have been the point you were making). Really, I was talking about english and american feminism, where i do think that the feminism is held back by, firstly persons with an investment in traditional social structures and secondly generally decent men with attitudes towards women the implications and origins of which have been left totally unexamined. and i think its important to target the unconcious mind in discrediting these attitudes as having some basis in reason. I didn't mean to suggest that social relations existed *only* in such an impenatrable place, so I can step down a little on that.
Heh, well that was slightly meandering. I hope somewhere in there ive addressed your point....
Hey, I linked to your blog from here: http://shiola.blogspot.com/2009/04/paper-bag-princess.html
this is why I like feminist blogs. While I'm struggling to find a proper way to fully express "FAIL!" someone says it for me :)
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