Yes, I know it's from the Daily Fail...

... but this article pisses me off.

I've ranted before about the inequalities caused by women having to pay for things like childcare (because God forbid they have a househusband to deal with that...) thus decreasing their effective earning potential compared to men, who often have wives who are prepared to support them at home. Now I get another chance to rant at how even when women find innovative solutions to this problem, they're penalized by a government completely unsympathetic to their needs (because parliament's full of men) who, by upholding the letter rather than the spirit of the law, are attempting to be politically correct, and end up offending more people than if they'd let it go. Not to mention destroying the working lives of the two women involved.


However, because this is the Daily Fail, I also have to point out the amusing irony (not sure if it's really irony, but it's in that general ballpark) of the comment by one Canadian reader:
All I can say is, "wow"! It's beyond belief some of the stories I read in this newspaper. People of the UK - you really need to rise up against this kind of fanatical governmental interference in everyday life. Absolutely ridiculous!
It is absolutely beyond belief... but not for the reasons you think!

Why so young?

There's not much more I can add to this...

Round Up

I Actually started this post about half-way down, but then I read this link and decided it should have Prominence.

This Should Be Our Manifesto.
"Let us name the problem for what it is, without insisting that we acknowledge you."

It is one of the most insulting and patronising things, for me, as a feminist, when I try and tell men about the kind of atrocities committed by men on a daily basis, and they respond "But we're not all like that".
I know. Otherwise I wouldn't be talking to you - I'd be out there with a gun destroying every Y chromosome on the face of the planet. If I didn't genuinely believe that there were good men out there, that men are not irredeemable scum one and all, then honest to God I would be trying to rid the world of them, not convince them to stand up with me and help me do something about the ones who give all the others a bad name.

Don't blame me for bringing the problem elements of your gender to your attention - blame those members of your gender who have made the problem in the first place.

I can get it that you might be feeling a bit insecure - you have, after all, just had a large, intelligent feminist vehemently and accurately degrading a large portion of your gender in front of you for five minutes - but please don't try and dismiss the problem because you aren't part of it. By doing so, you make yourself part of it.

Please realise that I'm not stupid. I'm not lumping you in with the problem elements. If I was, like I said, my reaction would be different. I'm asking you to help me, to get angry with me. I'm not yelling at you. I'm inviting you to yell with me.

Remember: ALL IT TAKES FOR EVIL TO TRIUMPH IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING.

***

And here's another collection of things that are bugging me at the minute:

Man shoots women at gym because he couldn't get a girlfriend

Article showing how our misogynist culture implicitly condones him

***

Two Articles about "pick-up artists" and the kind of culture that believes
a) women are stupid and can be tricked into having sex with you, if you know the right moves, and
b) it's ok to "blame all of womankind for viewing our bodies and lives as for ourselves, instead of for the pleasure of men."

One wonderful comment on the first article says:

"Having sex with ANYONE is not my, nor any other person’s, “price” for staying alive, for being female, for being attractive, for going to the gym, for wearing “slutty” clothing and/or high heels, for ANYTHING. Furthermore, I am not a sex worker, but if I were, I would have the right of any businessperson to refuse service (in compliance with applicable nondiscrimination laws, etc.)

Seriously, do we have to print up T-shirts with the above statement? I hear NoSweat’s got a sale going on."

***

Moving from that to discussions of "the game" and PUAs in general; specifically the idea of "the neg" (criticizing a woman you're interested in, in order to get her to sleep with you; sounds counter intuitive, I know)

One person on there (also called Alex, sadly) mentions that:
"isn't the idea that the "neg" is some sort of device that exploits natural female vulnerability kind of sexist in itself? That most women are so insecure and dependent on the opinions of strangers that a passing mild insult from a stranger in a bar is enough to drive them into said strangers bed?"

Well, yes it is. But the problem isn't that it's a woman's "natural female vulnerability" which is being exploited - it isn't natural at all. It's the product of a culture which is based on "negging"
women, making them feel incomplete without a man, and suggests that their self-worth should be based on their ability to attract the opposite sex.

And talking of Alexes (kind of)
A beautiful comment on the first neg-article by another "Alessandra"

"Degrading a woman and breaking down her confidence is an easy way to gain power and influence over her. This has been done for centuries, albeit with a bit more rape and violence. Old habits never die.

If the object of the “Dating Game” is to screw as many women as possible, then yes, his technique works well. If it’s a matter of “conquering” women, like you do enemies or rogue countries, then anything you can do to break them is a win.

People who think with anything other than their genitals find other things to hope for"

***

A beautiful, if short, article, spoiled by the last two lines. And something that I promise to talk about later. The interaction of religion and feminism is something that's been building up for me as a while, and I think it's going to all come out soon.

***

And Finally, a little gallows-humour light relief.

How is this Liberation?

Too. Damn. Angry. To. Speak.

Couldn't have put it better Myself.

Seriously, criticize Harriet Harman for the mess that is the NHS, but don't knock her on this one. Honestly, the one thing that would ever EVER tempt me back to voting Labour would be if she was heading the party.

Sorry it's been a while, but...

Oh my sweet God in Heaven, this is bloody marvelous.

God Bless Robert Peston for having the brains to work it out, and the guts to say it despite his Y Chromosome.

I won't go into it further at the moment, because I don't want to spoil the big grin running all over my face right now...

:D

Reading between the lines

Ok, just a brief one (at least intentionally, but these things tend to grow...) to point out a particular piece of reportage

Now, just to clarify, I don't want to comment on the whole Labour CTD* issue. I' just commenting on this particular article.

Firstly I'm concerned about an accusation that women in the Cabinet are "Window dressing" (Flint's words not mine) which, considering she herself has recently been involved in a photo shoot for some glossy fashion magazine (unspecified), plus the official reason for her resignation was that she didn't feel she was trusted by Brown, does seem to have a scary ring of truth about it. Are our female ministers just vote-winning "window dressing"? hmm.... Now you can accuse me of having watched too much Yes Minister recently, but it would be worrying if absolutely nothing has actually changed in politics, whilst at the same time the illusion has been created that some things have moved on...

Secondly, I'm concerned at this section:

"The week had also seen the resignations of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, Communities Secretary Hazel Blears and some other ministers before Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell walked out on Thursday evening with an open call for Mr Brown to quit.

This was widely seen as part of coordinated attempt to challenge Mr Brown's position as Labour leader, but Ms Flint said she was not part of any plotting.

She said "negative briefings" from Downing Street had wrongly attempted to suggest she was part of a group of senior Labour women ministers wanting to unseat Mr Brown."

I'm sorry, a conspiracy of women? Who form considerably less than 20% of the government? Being able to de-stabilize the PM? Surely not.

I've been looking, and can't at the minute find a comprehensive list of all the people who've resigned from Labour over the past few weeks, but looking at the quote above, I'm starting to worry that it's not disproportionately the women who have been leaving. If it is actually them making a decision to leave, then fine, it almost suggests that they have principles, but if it's them being forced out, made into a convenient scapegoat (and isn't it telling that both Blears and Smith are out - the two most prominent (powerful?) female politicians that we had...) and quietly got rid of in order to preserve this lovely little boys-club that is parliament...

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but it's at least as likely as saying there's a plot against the PM coming from "senior women ministers". I'm not going to draw any firm conclusions at the minute, but as the facts stand, we have a lot of senior women in government "resigning", one amid an acusation that women in parliament are merely "window dressing" and that the PM doesn't trust them. Is it too much of a leap to suggest that maybe women in government aren't particulalrly welcomed by their male collegues?

*Old doctor-slang.

Yay! I'm not alone!

There are other people out there blogging about the same kind of thing.

On livejournal, but let's not hold it against them...

Charm/Offensive

And the Post that Spawned it

And another one. My favourite quote from which is from the comment at the bottom:
"The best option available [to prevent rape] is to teach everyone from a young age that female bodies aren't public property, to hold rapists responsible for raping people, and to stop holding girls and women responsible for not getting themselves raped."

This is almost a post for my own sake, rather than for anyone reading (helooo... Is there anyone out there....?) but still, they make good/angry reading.

Follow Up

BBC Documentary asking "Why can't women succeed in the workplace?"


Solution, from my point of view:

6 months mandatory paternity leave.


Wont go down easy with bosses and chiefs of industry, but it's absolutely, 100% the easiest/best/only option. The others being:

Women stop having children. (downsides would include destruction of human race)
Women go back to the home. (About as fun an option as above)
Being able to control the female "biological clock". (we don't yet have the science)

We need to get more men in the home. Simple as. Men find it easier to succeed because they don't have the pressures of family - they have a wife to take care of that for them. Women find it immeasurably harder to do the same as men if they don't have the support network that men do (ie a wife/unpaid domestic labour*). In order to get more women into careers, you have to get more men into the home. Once it's seen as "normal" for men to stay at home if they want to (or if their wife needs them to) then it should follow** that it will be seen as "normal" for women to be bosses. We need to dissociate gender-roles from biological sex.

Interesting point raised about half-way through, is that women in investment banking are eminently desirable, because it would probably stabilize economic trends. High levels of testosterone are responsible for the boom-and-bust phenomenon, as men take more risks. Women as women (not women behaving like men - see previous post) are better at assessing those risks, and while they wouldn't "boom" quite as often, they'd be far less likely to go bust.



* The "unpaid" being the important part. Most women find there's no point in earning a top salary if most of it has to go on hiring the nanny, chef and cleaner. If they could get that for free, they'd most likely keep working instead of staying at home.
**I say should, but there's a bit more to it than that.

Entitlement

A couple of things in the news at the minute that caught my attention.

Women, even in the same job as men, still earn less.

It's not going to get better for another 180-odd years.

Apparently they don't earn as much because they have less of a sense of entitlement than men do.

Though I see an interesting correspondence with this, and wonder whether or not the women claimed as much as the men... interesting

And an interesting article about how even other people view men with more of a sense of entitlement than women. (ok, it's not quite about that, but I wanted to make it all fit nicely.)
Seriously though, if anyone has any doubt that women are still treated like second class citizens in this world, take a look at some of those comments under the article. Plenty of straight-up woman-bashing like:

"What exactly stops women forming their own corporations and filling their boards with women? Oh no that's too hard, easier to legislate yourself onto boards that don't want you"

"Half the cabinet wouldn't be there but for all women quotas."

Commenter1 : "the woman filling the post has to have at least the same skills as a male applicant."
Commenter 2: "I disagree. Rather, the same or better!"

"If a man is currently filling a post, then a woman replacing (displacing) him must be at least as competent and qualified as the person she is replacing, if not more so." (my italics)

Lovely. A woman has to be better than a man to get exactly the same job. This is, and has been the status quo for decades. My Mum had to get better grades at A-level than her male peers just to get an offer at a university, and that was thirty years ago, give or take. You'd never see that today, and yet as soon as it gets beyond education and into the actual jobs market, that's suddenly fair? Hmm...

Oh, and of course the whole bell-curve IQ argument gets dragged up again. In summary, for those of you who don't know, there has been research done to suggest that the spectrum of IQs runs like this:
Women: Very pointed bell curve; Lots of women in the middle range of IQ, not a lot at either end (so not many really stupid women, but not many exceptionally smart ones either)
Men: Flatter bell curve; generally wider distribution of IQs with both ends higher than the female line. (So the bulk of very high IQs are male, but also the bulk of really low ones)
Never mind that the standard IQ test is a highly artificial way of measuring intelligence, people keep trying to suggest that this is a good thing for men; that because most of the high IQs are male, that men in general have a higher IQ than women. Wrong. Firstly, the average IQ (taking either the mode or mean average) is higher for women (using the medium, it's exactly the same). Secondly, that top section where men do better is only the very top end of the spectrum. In general, people being hired for board management are somewhere below that, so actually, women are still going to have better IQs at that level. And thirdly, statistics can be manipulated and presented in a way to show anything you damn well like, so really, I wish people would stop using this argument to try and suggest something it doesn't.

When it comes down to it, I'm actually in favour of this kind of quota as a temporary solution. Because the only other way, it seems, for women to get into top jobs is to act more like men. Once you have a good percentage of women at the top (rather than one or two token females), the criteria are going to change - You're going to have people at the top who can recognise the positives in typically female traits, and how they can be an asset to your business, people who can understand that soft-spoken is not the same as lacking confidence, that there is not just one set (male) way of doing things. And this is the clincher: they can hire women who are as good as men, but not, as the case is now, exactly the same as men. People have got this confused. They judge success by a purely male yardstick, and so in order for women to succeed in companies where men get to set the standards of merit, they have to behave like men.

It wouldn't surprise me that some people will think, with a quota system in place, that women at the top got there purely because of the quota. Yes, people are going to think that. But just because some people take a prejudiced view isn't a reason not to impliment a measure that could be immesurably beneficial.
People are going to see what they believe to be less-qualified women promoted above more-qualified men, but what they don't realise is that these women may actually be more qualified than the men but their positive qualities are not being recognised and, in fact, that at the minute being a woman in itself is a positive quality. The unpalatable thing to accept is that a woman in a top position is (at present) intrinsicly better than an equally qualified male candidate simply because she is a woman, and because she can start re-setting the yardstick to include the typically feminine merits that are currently being overlooked by men in charge.

I don't see quota having to be in force for long. A generation at maximum. Just enough to make people see that women can be successful and can promote success in their orgnaisations without having to behave like men. The thing is that if we don't, at the pace change is coming, we aren't going to see equal gender representation until 2225. And I don't even see that. Because unless we do something radical now, even the women at the top in 2225 are all going to act like men, because that's what they had to do to get the job.

We need quotas, no matter how unpalatable they may seem. Unless there is another measure we could take that allows women to succeed without having to compromise their identity and integrity, but at the minute I can't see one.