The Trouble with Women

I can see that it's time for me to have another feminist rant. I've been avoiding it for a while so forgive me if I don't manage to rant in a calm, reasoned, succinct way.

The press is all over it.
 Now.
Only now.

They are claiming a sexist row has erupted in the Labour Party because Jeremy Corbyn has failed to put any women in the top power four positions in the cabinet. He is quoted in the Independent as saying that those roles were, "defined in the 19th century to reflect an era before women or workers even had the vote". This makes him look like a complete dinosaur, which is probably unfair. The other side of the press are rejoicing the new Shadow Cabinet, which has more women than men by number; a situation that has never occurred before. This is being used as a, "Shut up women. What are you complaining about?" story.

People are a bit confused about this. They are sure they've seen lots of women in politics. They are almost certain that there were more women than men. There were women everywhere. This is due to a particularly interesting psychological phenomena that I like to call, 'women shine brighter,' but the psychology world calls The Gender Perception Gap. There have been studies where people are put in a room full of people and asked to say how many there are of each sex. The men always over estimate the numbers of women. In fact if a room is 17% women , men believe it to be a 50:50 balance and it only takes 33% of women in a room for men to feel outnumbered. I'm not sure how women rate the balance but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's not a similar result. 

And this is the point of my rant. Gender equality will never happen if we keep pitching men against women.  

Men and women are not separate species. We do not need to compete for the same space. We are designed to live together.

It is important to note inequalities and ask questions about why they happened. If we are unaware of them we can never change them. Unfortunately, anyone who does this gets drawn into a battle: men vs women. If a woman notices it she is a harridan. A good example of this was an article by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/12/jeremy-corbyn-not-one-female-voice, where she observed that in the hall where the leadership vote was announced no one heard a single woman's voice. The comments on the article and the abuse she received on Twitter were predictable. She wasn't wrong to observe that all the excellent female candidates lost to duller, less competent men and that there seems to be a natural bias to vote for a man, which is something society needs to address if we are ever going to get equality.   However, if you read the comments you would think she had just recommended androcide. Men threatened all sorts of violence and women were cross that she had the temerity to question their right to vote for a man. 

I was concerned about the way the female candidates were being viewed from a very early stage in the Labour leadership campaign. Not only were they assessed on their partner but they were also lumped together and referred to as the girls. When Tessa Jowell was beaten in the election to run for London Mayor by Sadiq Khan (who The Daily Mail has described as lacklustre) I started to worry about whether the brilliant Stella Creasy or Angela Eagle could hold the deputy vote. I had no idea who their male opponents were but I didn't think that was going to matter.  Although, now he has been elected I do remember Tom Watson as the man who called Gove a pipsqueak in the commons, which was very funny.

Jeremy Corbyn isn't to blame for any of this. People voted for him because they were excited by a Labour Party that cared about equality more than an individual's right to accumulate wealth.  Many people who might have voted for a woman switched to him because of what he was saying (or rather what people said he was saying because Corbyn doesn't talk to the press). However, if Jeremy had never been on the ballot paper I suspect that Andy Burnham would be the leader of the party now. 

I have been ranting on this topic all weekend. As we drove back from, yet another, university open day the Long Suffering Husband was listening to a sports radio channel. The presenter introduced his female co-presenter as a 'bench-wench.' She laughed, so he said it again and again and again. I exploded, "See! This is why women can never be elected to positions of power. Even she's not taking herself seriously. This is disgusting."

My son, who had rejected this University because there were no ovens in the student accommodation and he couldn't go anywhere were he couldn't make cake, agreed with me but tried to calm me down by saying that it was only a football programme. 

The Long Suffering Husband, who was still chuckling at the rhyme of bench-wench, decided to live life on the edge. 

"You know what the problem with women is?" he asked rhetorically.

I bit my lip.

"Margaret Thatcher."

He looked smug. There was silence in the car, as my son mouthed WTF in slow motion. I could feel the pressure building. 
My son was thinking, "She's gonna blow. I've always wanted to see a volcano erupt but I didn't want to be stuck in a car with it when it happened."
The LSH was oblivious. "You know what I mean?" He persisted. "We've had a woman Prime Minister and..."

I was quite calm.

"You know the trouble with men?" I interrupted "Hitler! No wonder no one has ever let a man lead them ever again. Oh, wait, they have. How silly of me. It must be my stupid woman's brain that stopped me making that connection. Maybe I need to get back to the kitchen."

It's very quiet after a volcano erupts.

Please don't tell him but the LSH might have a point.  Women seem to need other women to be perfect and please all people.  Helen Mirren made an observation that she gets angry when she sees men with their arm draped over the shoulder of their partner because to her it implies ownership. How dare she?  She can't say that.  There might be some people who like having an arm draped across their shoulder.  There might be men who are genuinely unable to hold themselves up in a pub without the aid of their shorter woman, who have no intention of owning her.   Female voices from Twitter, the Daily Mail and Loose Women exploded.  Finally, they had something serious to discuss; a woman who had said something that not everyone would agree with. This surely has to be more important that poverty, pay inequality, child care, sex trafficking, female genital mutilation and certainly more important than having a government that represents all sections of society.