Monthly Archives: March 2010

Gagging on WAGS 1

 in Culture / Gender by

So, this morning’s news is ‘it’s Samantha (Cameron) versus Sarah (Brown)’: the new election strategy is to involve the party leaders’ wives.

This whole ‘first lady’ thing is hideous, like a throwback to some age we’d hoped was over when women were automatically just men’s appendages, helpmeets and decorative trophies. Though in other ways it’s very modern: a symptom of the celebrity culture which politics now inhabits just as much as football or pop music. 

Possibly the reason the campaign managers are encouraging it is partly because they think female voters are turned off by all the men in suits and would appreciate some kind of female presence in the campaign. And maybe that’s true. But who says that what women voters really want to hear is the WAGS of male politicians telling us how great their husbands are? Is this what the suffragettes chained themselves to the railings for–so we could vote for the man with the most adoring, most personable wife?

Then again, when a woman does get some press because she is herself a political candidate, it’s quite likely she will be newsworthy for the wrong reasons–perhaps she will be someone of the ilk of Anna Arrowsmith, the Lib Dem candidate who used to be a porn director. Cue saucy innuendos from the tabloids and a thundering sermon from Ann Widdecombe.

Anyone else out there thinking of taking to their bed and hiding under the covers until this celebrified, testosterone-driven electoral contest is over?

Libbers 8

 in Culture / History by

I’m not quite sure what to make of tonight’s Libbers episode of the BBC Four programme Women.

I’m trying to figure out who the target audience is intended to be. For women familiar with the women’s liberation movement, there is potentially some interesting history and archive footage, but I can’t imagine what women unfamiliar with the politics and history of the movement might make of it.

As a history of the origins of the movement, it didn’t quite hit the mark, as it focussed on a few (famous, white, middle class) (mostly) writers: Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, Marilyn French, Germaine Greer, Sheila Rowbotham, Ann Oakley, Susan Brownmiller, and Lynn Alderson.

As an exploration of early influential feminist writings, it also didn’t quite work. For example, the programme gave varying amounts of background to Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, Greer’s The Female Eunuch and French’s The Women’s Room, but didn’t mention any of Rowbotham’s writings and gave short shrift to Millett’s Sexual Politics.

The writer/director Vanessa Engle seemed to have a checklist of things to question her subjects about, regardless of whether it arose naturally within the context of the interview — most bizarrely asking each of them if they had vaginal or clitoral orgasms. WTF?