Category Archives: Open Democracy

Turning the tide of media sexism

Written for and first published here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/kirsty-styles/turning-tide-of-media-sexism

Comedy and social media are targeting Britain’s Page 3 culture. With Lord Leveson’s inquiry lashing the tabloid press for ‘reckless prioritising’ of sensation, now is the time for activists is to reach out beyond the middle class Twittersphere says Kirsty Styles…

Peter Ustinov said that comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. So a comedy show put on by two young women who have created very modern campaigns to highlight and change the way women are seen and treated in Britain was the perfect setting to laugh, and look seriously, at 21st century Britain.

Lucy-Anne Holmes, who started the No More Page 3 petition, and Laura Bates, founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, presented the Stand Up to Sexism show with the tagline ‘get your gags out for the girls’ at a historic theatre in London’s West End. Comedians gave their time for free for the cause. A crowd of 600 raised £4,000 for the End Violence Against Women campaign and proved that two young women can think, do and lead.

For over four decades, Britain’s leading national daily newspaper, The Sun, has featured a large photograph of a semi-naked woman on page 3. ‘Page 3’ is now synonymous in British culture with a woman’s breasts. Holmes’s campaign aims to close that chapter in British newspaper history. But even in the midst of the biggest crisis to hit the British media sector this century, with a massive formal inquiry into press culture and ethics, the Sun’s editor, when giving evidence to Lord Leveson, felt quite able to justify his paper’s commitment to reporting the news of girls in their knickers. He said that he believed the daily photograph was ‘meant to represent the youth and freshness’ and ‘celebrate natural beauty’ and amounted to an ‘innocuous British institution’.

At the comedy show Viv Groskop, a writer, broadcaster and stand-up comedian, highlighted that Page 3 ‘celebrated’ its 42nd birthday the same weekend as the gig. “That’s more than 13,000 editions. 26,241 nipples. Why the one?” she asked. “Melinda Messenger had her hand over her tit on one picture. Was it a protest? Was it a cry for help? Or was she just a bit chilly? We are not saying ‘boo’ to nipples, but boo to the outing of nipples. When you’ve seen that many, it’s not really news anymore. Yes, we still have nipples.”

Lucy Porter, compere for the evening, has built a successful career as a female comic, in a media environment where even she wasn’t immune from the sexist culture. In the 90s, she worked as an assistant producer at the BBC. When she was groped by a well-known male DJ, her superior said ‘come on love, laugh it off’.

“But the people who were laughing loudest and longest were the men who were getting away with it. One tragedy of being a woman is that, when you can finally stand up for your tits, pervs don’t want to touch them anymore.” There are stereotypes of feminists as ‘man hating lesbians’. “But the women who really hate men tend to be heterosexual,” she said. “It seems there is nothing like sleeping with someone of that sex to lower your opinion of them,” she laughed.

She wasn’t surprised that the No More Page 3 campaign was taking off. “It’s creepy and weird… I’m hopeful for the future of feminism,” she said. “These campaigns have been created by young women with lots to say.”

She noted that what was once called ‘being a twat’ has been rebranded as ‘banter’. Her husband told her a joke, “watching your wife giving birth is like seeing your favourite pub burn down… Misogyny can sound quite funny at first. But ‘banter’ is actually men saying things that they know are unacceptable.”

It’s hard to underestimate the power that social media is giving to both campaigns, helping to build sufficient profile to fill a major London theatre for a fundraising night of comedy. ‘Humourless’ feminists have come a long way and the sound of tables being turned is getting louder. Holmes is collecting signatures for her petition, which already has more than 55,000, with lots of work put in on Twitter to get people to see and share her vision. She also arranged a protest outside the Sun’s HQ. When the police arrive, they signed her petition.

#Everydaysexism’s Bates is collecting 140-character examples of sexist incidents experienced by women. In little over six months, 10,000 women have lodged their complaints. But her campaign still exists in a virtual world where #boobs is also regularly used by the Sun to direct its frothing audience to their site.

Kate Smurthwaite, said that Page 3 makes her feel ‘embarrassed’, especially when friends around the world happened upon this Great British institution.

The Sun is not the only culprit in the race for depravity, Kate noted. The latest issue of the satirical magazine Private Eye highlights this article: “Teenager Elle Fanning shows off her womanly curves… The 14-year-old took to Instagram to share a photograph of her Hallowe’en outfit and wasn’t afraid to flaunt her curves for the camera.” Not a paedophile website, no. But the Daily Mail, the world’s number one online site. Even in a media world rocked by the revelations of child abuse by the late entertainer Jimmy Savile, once one of the UK’s biggest TV stars, this is somehow considered ok.

Joe Wellspicked out Front magazine, where they proclaim a ‘no fake boobs’ policy. “Yes we objectify women like pieces of meat, but they are 100 per cent organic.” He said that when writer Laurie Penny said that there were not enough women on BBC television’s Newsnight, Katie Price, glamour model and reality TV and tabloid regular, was invited to talk about the ethics of breast implants. “By far the worst editorial decision of Newsnight to date. Like getting a pig to debate EU farming regulation.”

Tiffany Stevenson came out and told the audience about her ‘muffin top’. “But I’ve come out here and slagged myself off – why do that when I have magazines to do that for me?” She said it’s weird that as you grow older you almost ‘miss sexism’. “Would you mind not talking to my face, they’re right here,” she said pointing to her chest. “But that’s what I was told I was worth my whole life. Your whole self-worth is tied up in how you look.”

“People now get botox in their late 20s as a ‘preventative measure’. Let’s stop carving our faces up. It never looks better, you should own your face, own your years. It’s the same with technology. You can’t judge a Kindle by its cover. Soon kids will be saying ‘Do you remember books??’ ‘Hey, remember old people?’ STOP IRONING THE WORLD!”

Poet Sabrina Mahfouz performed her No More Page 3 poem, one of the first overtly political pieces she had written, but something she felt compelled to do when she saw the campaign. “Even though I’d gone to grammar school. Not glamour school. And I was at university. It seemed to me that the only way I could see to the top was through desirability – ‘cos that’s what I’d seen non-stop in the papers, magazines, films and on TV.”

“Now fast forward 10 years and I hear of this thing – No More Page 3 – and it makes me so happy to think that finally, 84 years after women won the right to vote through protest and death, newspapers might actually start to fill pages with the sagest and most outrageous words of powerful women.”

Bates closed the event by saying: “Page 3 is everyday sexism. For 42 years, the largest female image in the biggest selling newspaper has been a woman with her breasts on show. Women should be represented with more respect. A mum sent me a message on Twitter saying that her young daughter wished she could turn into a boy so she could go to space. A quarter of seven-year-olds have tried to lose weight. 80 per cent of 10 year olds have done the same. Against odds like those, no wonder she’s thinking she has to change who she is to be what she wants to be.”

The timing of these campaigns is significant. The crisis sweeping journalism has also implicated British politics and the government. Despite the soft pedalling in Lord Justice Leveson’s report on figures like Prime Minister Cameron and former Media Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt, the political fallout has plunged the coalition government and Parliament into splits and conflict. Leveson’s inquiryinto the British media was prompted by phone hacking at The News of the World, the Sun’s former Sunday ‘sister’ paper.

Even in the eye of a major political storm, leading British newspapers continue to publish sexist content with impunity with no detriment to their sales figures. Lucy Porter also noted that the Stand Up audience was a very middle-class show for a very middle-class audience. The next task then for No More Page 3 and Everydaysexism, at this moment of opportunity in the wake of the Leveson report, must be to take their campaigns beyond the Twittering classes, to the people who read the Sun and the people who don’t read much at all. So women everywhere can be sure that finally in the 21st century, they will know that assets means more than just breasts.

When will male politicians take women’s rights seriously?

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Written for and first published here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/kirsty-styles/when-will-male-politicians-take-womens-rights-seriously

Feminism appears to be back with a vengeance in the UK. Kirsty Styles reports from the UK Feminista lobby of Parliament, and asks how long it will take before the f-word that really rings true in our society is ‘fairness’

Perhaps one of the most surprising outcomes of the 2012 Olympics was that the women who played Suffragettes during the opening ceremony were inspired to seek out the modern women’s movement. Some even took part in a feminist lobby of Parliament on October 24. They were joined by Emmeline Pankhurst’s great-granddaughter – Dr Helen – her surname synonymous with the votes for women campaign in the early 20th century. She was one of more than 400 men and women who marched through central London with the campaign group UK Feminista to meet and lobby their MPs on gender equality.

Caroline Lucas MP, former leader of the Green Party, told the marchers it was thought by many that the ‘job’s done, it’s all been sorted’. But this cannot be the case, she argued, when 60,000 women a year are raped in the UK, two women every week die at the hands of a partner or ex, and sexual harassment in schools and the workplace is routine. This also coincides with a 25 year high in female unemployment, and with women making up just 22 % of MPs, 12.5 per cent of directors of FTSE 100 companies and 9.5 per cent of national newspaper editors.

Just a day earlier, the UK was found to have slipped down the league table of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap report – moving from a pretty poor 16th to a worse still 18th– prompted by the decrease in women in ministerial positions following the recent government reshuffle from 23 % to 17 %. But on the day of the lobby, a landmark case was won in the UK’s Supreme Court, giving women from Birmingham Council back-dated payments for unequal wages.

In the two and a half years since UK Feminista was founded, another serious debate about what women want, have and need has begun. Even Cosmopolitan magazine has launched its own campaign to ‘reclaim the word “feminism”’. Although Cosmo’s airbrushed pages can be seen as a contributor to the negative way women view their bodies, its UK editor, Louise Court, told the Metro newspaper: “Young women at the moment, because of the economic situation, feel that they’re in a worse position than the women who went before them. They’ve come out of university, they’ve got pretty big debts, they have not got the world that they were promised so they’re finding it really hard to get on the career ladder.”

A survey by NetMums, the UK’s biggest parenting website, found that one in seven of its users identifies themselves as a feminist even though its founder, Siobhan Freegard, said that feminism is “aggressive, divisive and no longer works for women”, adding that the battle of the sexes no longer exists. UK Feminista wants to put feminism at the heart of politics. They brought together a broad coalition, including representatives from each of the major parties, to join the discussion before the march, all of whom outed themselves as long-standing feminists.

Unlike the recent Occupy protest, which has been lambasted for having no leaders or concrete motivations, UK Feminista is organised, it wants equality and it wants it now. The speakers who took to the stage before the march covered everything from women asylum seekersto sex education, and hearing all the statistics in the cold October light was pretty harrowing. According to Caroline Lucas, 43 % of young people in UK schools think it is acceptable for a boyfriend to be aggressive to a female partner. One in two think it is alright to hit a woman, and one in three think it is alright to force her to have sex. 20,000 women in the UK are at risk of female genital mutilation. From the Rochdale and Jimmy Savile paedophilia scandals, to the No More Page 3 campaign against naked women in the UK’s top selling daily newspaper, the oppression and exploitation of women are exposed in our society on a daily basis. So why aren’t we confronting things head on?

An unnamed MP was mentioned by the New Statesman as saying that the student constituent who had come to talk about women’s rights wasn’t entitled to a view on refugee women or abortion because she didn’t pay taxes and hadn’t had a baby. Not knowing the gender or party of this MP is unhelpful. But it is likely they were a man and therefore hadn’t had a baby either. If MPs believe that people, and therefore even legislators, cannot contribute to discussions or make laws on issues that they do not have direct experience of – how can our largely male parliament be expected to take women’s rights seriously?

Amber Rudd, Conservative MP for Hastings and Rye, rather bravely took to the stage to say that her party had a commitment to women’s rights. She urged us to think about self-employment and highlighted how many women had benefited from the government’s decision to raise the pay level at which people start paying tax – those women who are low-paid, having to work part-time and are feeling the cuts the hardest because of changes to working tax credit and Sure Start services. But her audience wasn’t convinced. Perhaps this is because the Conservative Party is dominated by upper class males – Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and London Mayor Boris Johnson to name but a few.

Too few men take women’s rights seriously. A male national newspaper journalist told me he didn’t want to get involved with the feminist discussion. His highly privileged position, as he saw it, meant that people like him dominate so much of the public debate already that he wouldn’t want to be seen to be trying to ‘get on our thing’. But if we don’t get people, men, talking about it, and agreeing with it, publicly, then can we really say that we are winning the argument? What affects women affects men. Thankfully some men do think through how to relate to feminism actively, starting with the promotion of women’s voices and the spaces where those voices can be heard.

Women also need to put themselves forward to get into Parliament to change the practices that mean that public policy doesn’t offer women fairness and equality. Noted political organiser Saul Alinskysaid in his 1970s book, Rules for Radicals: “If you aren’t satisfied, you be the delegates”. He continued: “Men don’t like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience. A revolutionary organiser must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives – agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate.”

The revival of feminism has hit the mainstream, where writer Caitlin Moran’s book How to be a woman has become a bestseller. There was a lot of media coverage of the UK Feminista lobby. A photographer from one of the major news agencies told me it would give him a good picture to accompany that day’s Supreme Court ruling on equal pay. But many organisations were there to cover the lobby in its own right.

The more there are rulings like that made for council workers in Birmingham, the more normal men and women take to the streets to fight for equal rights, and the more women push against the tide for top city, political and media jobs, the more it may mean that it won’t take another generation of Pankhursts to ensure that the f-word that really rings true in our society is ‘fairness’.

The rise of the Erotocracy

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Written for and first published here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/kirsty-styles/rise-of-erotocracy

Is the 21st century woman someone who doesn’t have to choose between a career and kids, but is doomed to spend hours in the gym so she can climb that ladder? While the UN celebrated the first International Day of the Girl, Kirsty Styles heard Catherine Hakim on the power of erotic capital

We all know that capitalism isn’t fair, but who knew that there is a hidden economic truth in lines like Kate Moss’s ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’? We aren’t all going to be supermodels, but it turns out that being slim and attractive can actually be good for your bank balance, whatever your profession.

Traditionally, we heard at a New Turn event held at University of London Union, your chances of success come from three sources: your economic capital, your human capital – what you know – and social capital – who you know. The speaker was Dr Catherine Hakim, who believes she has identified the missing fourth factor – erotic capital – a combination of physical and social attractiveness. The theory is that beautiful people naturally develop good presentation skills, and those who are warm and turn themselves out well are perceived as being more attractive than they otherwise would be.

Research by economist Daniel Hamermesh, Beauty Pays, found that using erotic capital can add 10 to 20 per cent more to your annual salary. “And you spend a lot of time in the labour market,” Hakim added. The bad news, as she sees it, is that even here there is a gender gap. Men make on average 17 per cent more from erotic capital, whereas women’s beauty premium gives them just 12 per cent extra. This, she feels, is the new area in sex discrimination.

Fortunately, unlike IQ, which is far the highest determinant of success and is 50 per cent inherited and 50 per cent learnt, Dr Hakim believes that only 25 per cent of your erotic capital depends on what you are born with. The rest is what you do with yourself.

While I was half reeling and half assuming these people must have shares in a beauty products company, I couldn’t help thinking that Hakim had a bit of a point. There is evidence, she said, that people react to those who are attractive in a more positive way. It is subliminal – people can’t stop themselves from doing it. Attractive people, Hakim believes, receive more support and cooperation, are given the benefit of the doubt, and are thought to be more honest.

Addressing a room of students, many of whom were rocking laid-back fashions of the 80s and 90s, mid-austerity throwbacks in high-waisted trousers, denim and not-quite-done hair, she said that erotic capital is equally as important as qualifications. “Not the sort of thing that universities tell you.” A lot of young people strive to be the best they can be on paper, why not try to radiate that in person? The reality is that if you look after yourself, are active and lively, and dress to impress, then you are more likely to feel good. And it shows.

An audience member asked, where does this leave meritocracy? “Meritocracy is terribly unjust and unfair, people get ahead purely because they’re clever, and have a few qualifications” she replied.
Hakim says her views have been misconstrued as ‘women should make more effort to look attractive’. “Dump the idea that beauty is superficial and skin deep,” she said. “That attitude has lead women to be more embarrassed, anxious or nervous about exploiting their erotic capital.”

Recruitment consultants could probably make a princely sum, according to Hakim’s research, if they vetted all of the CVs they receive via the medium of Google images. As it is increasingly difficult to distinguish by qualifications alone, and IQ tests are unlikely to become part of many recruitment processes, this could already be used as a way to select interviewees.

Hakim cited Christine Lagarde, the first female EU economic minister and first female head of the IMF, as someone with lots of erotic capital. A former labour lawyer, Lagarde is not the economist-type usually chosen to lead the supranational organisation. Could the way she dresses, her slim physique and glamorous jewellery have tipped the scales towards her selection when she might not quite have fit the bill? Oxfam criticised her appointment for its lack of transparency.

I was reminded of a conversation with a friend who leads a team of mobile developers. He had to sack a new recruit because he swore at a client. He told me that techies get away with looking and acting a bit odd because people think they have ‘unknowable knowledge’ behind unkempt locks. They can get paid up to £80,000 per year. So perhaps there is a similar unbeauty premium at work in some industries?

What I was surprised to learn from Dr Catherine Hakim’s talk about her books and her newest release, The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs, and Erotic Power, was that all sociological studies use wealth as the key measure of success. She said: “I don’t think money will ever go out of fashion”. Am I the only one who feels like it already has?

If the financial benefits of being attractive outlined by Hamermesh and Hakim are to be believed, then surgery might seem like a good way to get richer, even though we know that beyond a certain level, money doesn’t make you any happier. Plastic surgeons and make-up peddlers play on our insecurities and people feel miserable that they can’t live up to the ideal. Tellingly, Hakim’s talk coincided with the UN’s first ever International Day of the Girl as well as the publication of a study that revealed that hospital admissions for eating disorders in the UK were up 16 per cent year on year. 91 per cent of the people affected are women, and one in 10 is a 15-year-old girl.

The new labour market realities are actually that no amount of lipgloss or a good personality could see you easily make the leap from low to high earner. The pay ratio between bosses and their average employees has ballooned from 10:1 in the 1960s, to 200:1 today while graduate starting salaries are down 13 per cent over the past year. Young people are being priced out of jobs, education and the housing market.

There is a crisis of trust now in traditional political and economic institutions. People across the western world are increasingly turning, through belief or necessity, to alternative forms of interaction. Manuel Castells, renowned sociologist from the University of Southern California, sees the aftermath of the financial crisis playing out through fluid, even disorganized, networks. What is to come, he believes, could be the most drastic change since the feudal system collapsed. And if there is no profit motive, what then for erotic capital? Castells even notes that internet dating, the subject of Dr Hakim’s latest book, is a symptom of a world where we don’t have time to pursue the thing that will really make us happy – love.

At the individual level, it could pay to be a good person, get your 5-a-day and exercise, heck, even rock a dress if the situation calls for it. So the message I took away was, sure, keep an eye on your capital assets for now – but be prepared for something better.