This week I’ve been getting in some much needed R’n’R on the Cornish coast. Given the long train journey, I decided to grab a stack of women’s glossies, but it wasn’t until I started reading that I realised I was under siege – an attack of the ”Are you a feminist” and “sexism is alive” columns. Did I miss something? Is it world feminism day, week or month? Why is it the latest hot topic?
On the one hand, it’s great that I can read about more than what to wear this week and how to make a man fall in love with me, but inherent in all of these articles was a very similar rhetoric. A piece in ES Magazine pitched two women against each other. The “Hot Feminist” wears a dress, with plenty of skin on show. The “be like a man… sort of” feminist wears a trouser suit.
Both columnists’ reference ways to get men to do what you wantat work: leather trousers, swearing and flirting. Is this work, or an article about a date? At least the articles in the glossies referenced equal pay as an actual issue. This is what we should be highlighting if we’re going to talk about feminism and presenting the term as something that women should aspire to be.
I do think how you choose to present yourself and the freedom to wear what you want in the workplace without prejudice is an important conversation, but I do not believe it should play a defining and central role in the debate about feminism. Friends who sent me pictures of Suffragettes being dragged away as they tried to vote – as a nudge for me to vote in our recent election – gave me a sharp reminder about what feminism was all about: access, change, equality, achievement and rights.
Unless I’ve missed something, feminism is a movement and a belief that stems from a theory of change, an idea about how the world should be and how we get there. Somehow we’ve managed to boil it down to being able to flirt in the office, have our tits out or learn to say no. Is this how we mainstream feminism? By dumbing it down to the level of a Disney princess cartoon circa 1937?
I am a feminist and humanist because I believe all women have the right to social, political and economic freedom and equal access to opportunities without gender prejudice. As an aside: I believe everyone should have this right, you can replace gender with ethnic, socio-economic, age (and so on).
I accept that this means different things depending on where you are in the world and for middle-class women in the UK this might mean fighting for the right to say no when someone asks you to do something you don’t want to. I know in other countries it’s being able to access basic education; not being married off at the age of 13 or being able to drive, a car, by yourself. For the actress in one article I read, it was being able to demand £6.5m to appear a movie, as her male counterpart had done. Like hindsight, context is a wonderful thing.
To stay true to the activist roots of feminism, given that the world has such a way to go, we shouldn’t mix up the term with workplace culture and dynamics. It cheapens the work of those before us and the meaningful work being done to challenge real inequality. Sure, the conversations in each magazine are valid and entertaining, but let’s not banner everything to do with “What women want” as feminism and a very middle-class perspective of the feminist ideal.
