by Laura Bates
‘Next to no programmes portray lesbians as just one of the double-discrimination characters, without being a story feature and portrayed to meet (hetero male?) viewer expectations. I’d note that we are a diverse bunch and don’t have a “look” so much!’
‘The media’s complete failure to be able to cover trans folk in any way that considers them as people first and trans second – instead, it is always made to be their entire identity, whether in the rare television shows when a trans person features or in the papers, where they insist on referring to people like Chelsea Manning as “Bradley” and “he” irrespective of her own wishes.’
‘Working-class women are rarely portrayed in a good light in the media, and equality of opportunity rather than focusing on women at the top is something feminism needs more of.’
The battle can feel endless – because it is a far more complex issue than just achieving representation in itself. Before trans people can even begin to fight for equality, for instance, they first have to overcome enormous ignorance and lack of understanding about their experience.
‘A close friend of mine is a trans man and has been told many times by people who knew him before his transition (which began towards the end of his time at high school) or have seen pictures of him as a child that “it’s a shame such a pretty girl wants to look like a guy”, implying that his gender identity is a choice and deliberately neglecting the duty of anyone born with female organs to look feminine.’
One of the reasons why it is so important to let members of oppressed groups tell their own stories in their own ways is that it’s so easy to think you’re getting it when you’re not. In much the same way as many of the men writing to the project said they thought they knew about sexism when they imagined a catcall or a wolf whistle but had no concept of how it actually impacted on women’s lives, living it every day, influencing every choice and thought. Because it isn’t just about the individual incidents; it’s about the collective impact on everything else – the way you think about yourself, the way you approach public spaces and human interaction, the limits you place on your own aspirations and the things you stop yourself from doing before you even try because of bitter learned experience.
As the writer John Scalzi brilliantly and simply put it on his blog, Whatever: ‘In the role-playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.’ Of course, this is not to discount the difficulties faced by, for example, heterosexual white men from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds but it’s a ballpark starting point that helps us get the general idea.
This sense of instantly being judged and condemned purely as a result of others’ preconceptions also comes across painfully clearly in the entries we have received from disabled women.
‘Strangers saying: “You’re hot . . . for a girl in a wheelchair.” ’
‘I was once assaulted by an older man twice my size getting onto a bus because he thought I looked too young to be using a walking stick so I had to be a “scrounging lazy little bitch”.’
Feminists need to include these varied priorities and experiences within the movement for equality. As blogger Dee Emm Elms, who writes Four-Color Princesses, says: ‘That person on the bus being harassed is still being harassed whether he’s being harassed for being religious or for being an atheist or being black or being a woman or because of her clothing or because of her body language or because of her appearance or because of her handbag or because of her accent. That’s all the same problem. It’s not recognizing the basic humanity of a person.’
Originally published 31 March 2014
OUR BODIES, OUR BATTLEGROUNDS
If I had to choose the most upsetting statistic I’ve ever come across, this one would come close to the top of the list: research shows that 80 per cent of 10-year-old American girls have dieted to lose weight.
Perhaps more than at any other time in history, women’s bodies are burdened to breaking point with the weight of societal shame, pressure, judgement and exploitation. Girls are pushed to share Photoshopped photographs on social media, where images of celebrity ribcages, thigh gaps and cleavage abound. Young men are socialized to demand nude photographs to prove their ‘lad’ credentials, resulting in enormous pressure on girls to provide them, followed swiftly by censure and judgement, whether they comply (slut) or not (prude). Airbrushed adverts and magazine articles force endless unrealistic images of emaciated models upon us, without acknowledgement of the vast majority of women whose bodies don’t look like those in the media spotlight. Those with bodies whose size, shape or skin colour aren’t deemed ‘beautiful’ are variously shamed and mocked, or patronizingly praised as inspirational tokens, as if their mere existence is a form of bravery.
A billion-dollar industry works to undermine women’s body confidence in order to sell them everything from spiralizers to cellulite zappers for invented problems they never knew they had. Vulvas and vaginas remain stigmatized, and the discussion of female sexual pleasure, and of conditions like endometriosis, period pain and thrush, is contained to hushed, shameful tones, while the international porn industry profits endlessly from the exposure and exploitation of those very same body parts.
Online porn teaches female viewers that their pubic hair is strange and unnatural and their ordinary labia ugly or lopsided, to the extent that leading gynaecologists have warned that enquiries about plastic surgery from girls as young as nine are fast increasing. In 2015–16, more than 200 girls under eighteen had labiaplasty on the NHS. It is the world’s fastest-growing cosmetic procedure, with 45 per cent more operations carried out in 2016 than the preceding year. Pregnancy renders women’s bodies automatic public property as they are subjected to a thousand high-pressure instructions about how to be pregnant, to birth, to breastfeed a baby, but simultaneously shamed for doing it the ‘wrong’ way or failing to instantly shed their ‘baby weight’. Trans women face enormous pressure to conform to the bodily demands and curiosity of others, who see only genitalia and not humanity.
My friend and hero Emer O’Toole was invited on to a major breakfast television programme to ‘debate’ the fact that she’d chosen not to shave her armpits for a year, as if her personal bodily choices were a matter for public record and challenge. Which, of course, is exactly how women’s bodies continue to be viewed – just ask our sisters who continue to battle for abortion rights after an Irish minor was placed in a psychiatric clinic against her will for requesting a termination and a Northern Irish woman who was forced to carry her baby for another fifteen weeks of pregnancy and go through a delivery despite having discovered at her twenty-week scan that the pregnancy was not viable.
From the ongoing scourge of female genital mutilation to the shaming of women with different body sizes and shapes, the hyper-sexualization of black women’s bodies and the commodification of disembodied breasts and stomachs by advertising moguls, women’s bodies remain tightly policed, debated and embattled. We are still dreaming of a world in which our bodies are our own business and nobody else’s.
WHY IS WOMEN’S BODY IMAGE ANXIETY AT SUCH DEVASTATING LEVELS?
We need to talk about body image. New findings from the 2014 British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey reveal that only 63 per cent of women aged 18–34 and 57 per cent of women aged 35–49 are satisfied with their appearance.
In a world obsessed with women’s bodies, we are bombarded with images of them, usually undressed, often dehumanized and reduced to parts and pieces, at every turn. But though we see women’s bodies everywhere, it’s only really one body that we’re seeing, over and over again. Usually a young, thin, white, toned, large-breasted, long-legged, non-disabled body.
Funnily enough, that’s not what most women’s bodies look like. But the airbrushed media ideal is so powerful and so omnipresent that women find themselves comparing their own bodies to it anyway, and finding themselves wanting. The results are devastating. A recent report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on B
ody Image found that girls as young as five are worrying about their size and appearance, and that one in four 7-year-old girls has tried to lose weight at least once. And, as the BSA survey results show, a preoccupation with body image affects women throughout their lives, not just in their youth. It holds women back by eroding their confidence both at work and socially. New research coinciding with Body Confidence Week found that almost 10 million women in the UK ‘feel depressed’ because of the way they look and 36 per cent avoid exercise because of insecurity about their looks.
Unrealistic media ideals of female beauty have spawned a multitude of ‘body confidence’ campaigns, but many, like The Sun’s recently launched No More Skinny, only seem to want to shift us from coveting one ideal to another. Supported by male celebrities including singer Olly Murs and rapper Professor Green, an article about the campaign in the paper’s Bizarre column quoted Murs lamenting, ‘Gone are the days of Marilyn Monroe . . .’ and later continuing, ‘Sometimes skinny women can look attractive – but it is too dangerous.’ By referencing Monroe, famously a sex symbol, and foregrounding the issue in women’s attractiveness, the message once again seems to be about women adjusting their body shape to appeal to men’s desire. Not to mention the fact that a curvaceous shape like Monroe’s is just as unattainable for many women as a very thin physique. It misses the point entirely.
When you visit the latest column about ‘No More Skinny’ on The Sun’s website, the sidebar alongside the piece includes links to the following articles: ‘Enter our Sun Lurves Curves comp to win £1K prize and modelling contract’; ‘Lose 7 lb in seven days with The Sun’s new Back to School diet’; ‘I shed 1 st 9 lb on Sun Slimmers diet . . . and you can too’; ‘Bianca Gascoigne: “I lost a stone in six weeks on the No-Diet Diet” ’.
Confused? I am. It’s hardly ‘empowering’ to encourage women to eschew thinness in a media outlet presenting reams of methods offering to help them lose weight. (Nor, for that matter, one that publishes a regular picture of a young, slim woman topless on page 3). But the deeper point here is that trying to shift the ideal body shape shouldn’t be the ultimate aim anyway – we need to stop judging people by their looks in the first place.
Worries about body image impact on both men and women – the BSA survey found that only three-quarters of men are satisfied with their appearance. But while it is true that we are all bombarded with idealistic images of bodies to aspire to, there is a marked difference in the scale and context of the problem. When the Times Magazine ran a picture of David Gandy in his underwear on the front cover last month, many people tweeted it to the Everyday Sexism Twitter account, presumably to point out that objectification is an issue that affects men, too. But the incident was the perfect example of the sort of context in which we tend to see these images of men’s bodies – on an underwear model, in an article specifically about his new underwear range. Compare it to the multitude of front pages showing women, who are generally not models, partially or fully nude – in articles not related to underwear – while their male colleagues remain fully clothed. Or the coverage of female politicians’ legs and fashion choices compared to men’s voting records and credentials. Or a recent advert showing female founders and CEOs of tech companies in their underwear. Male equivalents? Not so much. To give another example, while men are portrayed as rounded, full characters in Hollywood films, women are often reduced to inconsequential sex objects. Research found that 32 per cent of female parts and over 50 per cent of teenage girl parts were sexualized in hit US films in 2012.
This insistence on valuing and judging women’s bodies first and their careers or personalities second is insidious and powerful. In a world that holds up ridiculous and unrealistic standards as ideal, it means they are always doomed to fall short.
Telling us curvy is better, or patronizing us by suggesting we are our own worst body critics and should magically ‘snap out of it’, isn’t going to help. Women will stop worrying about their looks when society stops telling us that they’re all we’re worth. Let’s focus on that first.
Originally published 14 October 2014
IT’S TIME TO STOP BLAMING WOMEN FOR HAVING BREASTS
Breasts are having a moment. Boobs, tits, baps, funbags – and all the other terms we come up with for a part of the anatomy society finds a little too dangerous to be comfortably called by its own name. (See also, vagina.) Whatever you want to call them, breasts have been firmly in the spotlight in recent weeks.
At a baptism ceremony this month, the pope proved himself more progressive than Nigel Farage when he encouraged women – not for the first time – to go ahead and breastfeed their children in the Sistine Chapel. Farage and others think women who might offend public sentiment by breastfeeding publicly should sit in a corner or perhaps cover themselves up with a massive napkin. Incidentally, women who think Farage offends public sentiment might suggest the same penalty for him. The pope’s statement is a welcome step forward, though the need for such a proclamation is somewhat ironic when you consider that the Sistine Chapel itself is already copiously adorned with nudity, courtesy of Michelangelo.
Next, breasts once again threatened to eclipse women’s achievements at the Golden Globe Awards, which spawned online headlines including ‘Battle of the boobs!’ and ‘Whose boobs are hotter?’ Perhaps inspired by the sheer intelligence of Seth MacFarlane’s 2013 Oscars song ‘We Saw Your Boobs’, actor Jeremy Renner made a tired quip about Jennifer Lopez’s ‘globes’ as he presented an award with her.
Meanwhile, contestant Jeremy Jackson was ejected from the Celebrity Big Brother house after grabbing at model Chloe Goodman’s dressing gown and exposing her breast. But despite the fact that police cautioned him for assault, other contestants were quick to criticize Goodman instead, with one, Ken Morley, accusing her of being ‘naïve’ and telling her: ‘You’re a single girl, you’re twenty-one, you go into a room with a person you only know slightly, wearing only a robe. I think that’s dodgy.’ Another housemate, Alexander O’Neal, told her: ‘I have to give it to you because I care. Living in an environment like this, with a group of men around you, there’s no sneaky way to get dressed . . . You don’t give no man a chance, I say it because I care but it was too much exposure.’
This all comes just days after the news that Rita Ora’s choice of outfit (a jacket without a top underneath) for an interview on the BBC’s The One Show sparked 400 complaints from affronted (pun intended) viewers. The One Show published an apology that sounded more like a ticking-off on its Facebook page, writing: ‘We’re sorry to those of you who were offended by Rita Ora’s choice of outfit on yesterday’s show. If we had been consulted on it we would have requested she wore something more suitable for 7pm.’
The Daily Mail website quickly produced an article about the resulting outrage, illustrated with eleven images and a video, as well as a further six photos of her in another low-cut dress, just for added context, of course. On the same day, the website reported another important story: ‘Cheeky! Bikini-clad Rita Ora leaves VERY little to the imagination as she parties in next-to-nothing on luxury yacht.’ To clear up any confusion, this was followed up with an article entitled: ‘Little Miss look at me! How Rita Ora, the risqué new star of BBC’s The Voice – daughter of an Albanian pub landlord – has built a career out of outrageous attention-seeking.’
Not to be outdone, the Daily Star this week published an entire page of cleavage shots, minus their owners’ faces, cunningly disguised as a quiz.
So, to recap, breasts imagined through a man’s eyes and painted by his brush are high art, but women choosing to use these parts of their own bodies to feed their children are potentially offensive and must be policed by men. Women in show business are enormously pressured to reveal their bodies (which must conform to narrow media-dictated ideals) and to use sex appeal as a selling point. But those who choose to wear clothes they feel confident and happy in may be subject to anger and outrage, or be accused of being attention-seekers. The media is
disgusted by such showing off, but will, nonetheless, heroically document each bikini moment with astonishing diligence. And though society repeatedly reminds us women’s breasts are there primarily for men’s pleasure and use, if women are assaulted they should realize it’s their own fault for having breasts in the first place and wearing the wrong sort of clothes on them.
Glad we cleared that up.
Originally published 16 January 2015
‘ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO EAT THAT?’ YES, AND IT’S NOBODY ELSE’S BUSINESS
It all started with a single tweet:
@emma_maier: was picking out chips at the store and a man told me ‘Don’t do it! You’re so beautiful.’ Let me buy my food in peace, dude.
After I retweeted the story, sent to the Everyday Sexism Twitter handle, I received reply after reply from other women, all detailing the same strange encounter. In each instance, a woman, about to consume some item of food, was suddenly and inexplicably confronted with unsolicited advice, usually from a male stranger, about the impact said morsel might have on her looks.
@auntysarah: Getting breakfast at a hotel, a man I don’t know sees me getting bacon and says, ‘going for the diet option are we?’
@SCSilk: Strangers telling me ‘Don’t eat that, you’ll get fat’. Fries, ice cream.
@jonanamary: sitting & eating outside a restaurant in Rouen, loitering man made continual comments eg ‘look at her stuffing herself’ :(
@jonanamary: He said nothing to my male dinner companion, of course! But every mouthful of bread – ‘regarde comme elle bouffe du pain’ :(
@Safetyfox: bought chocolate from station vending machine, bloke said ‘moment on the lips, lifetime on the hips’.