Ros Coward
Body Language
Have you heard the one about why husbands are like lawn mowers? “Difficult to get started, emit foul smells and don’t work half the time.”
It would be surprising if you hadn’t. In a culture where a man cracking similar jokes about women is instantly suspected of being a stalker, such jokes about men abound, the staple fare of cartoons and the modern novel.
Reversing sexist stereotypes like this had a point 20 years ago, but in these 20 years everything has changed. There is no longer an overarching system of male oppression. Indeed, globalisation and recessions have dealt men many blows. Combined with changed family status, this has made them especially vulnerable to unemployment, homelessness and depression. So girls and boys are growing up in a different world where they take female equality for granted.
Few women, however, have used the downfall of masculine prestige as an opportunity to rethink old sexual stereotypes. Instead, as men have lost moral authority, women have claimed it as their own, indulging in a triumphalism about women and female values.
“Womanism” has become commonplace, a philosophy where men are the problem, women the answer. Summarising recent findings, a report in the science journal Focus concluded: “Women will take over the world. Females are both psychologically and physically stronger.” The Daily Mail pounced on these findings, announcing that women “are smarter, more sociable and kinder to themselves than boys – and when they grow up, they get further along the career ladder, earn more and manage their families better. The world could soon be under the control of some remarkably superior beings.”
Womanism came out of feminism’s attack on male pomposities, but now has a much wider constituency. Womanism is feminism’s vulgate, found everywhere. It unites unlikely allies.
The New Age philosophies promote the idea of women as in touch with healing forces; while men are men, responsible for destructive technology. At the other end of the political spectrum, The Daily Telegraph’s Janet Daley wrote, in the wake of Jamie Bulger’s killing: “Young boys will degenerate quite naturally into barbarism without adult supervision. Had half of the lost children in William Golding’s novel been female, the terrible denouement of Lord of the Flies would not have been credible.”
In popular media, womanism has unleashed a tide of clichs – 90s adverts are full of “girls on top”, glamorous women who humiliate dim or uncouth men. A Lee jeans advert showing a woman’s stilletoed foot resting on a man’s naked bottom took this further, introducing a theme of sexual humiliation which would have been condemned if applied to women.
It would be easy to dismiss womanism as harmless fun, correcting centuries of calumny against women. But there are ways in which this Nineties version of Animal Farm – two legs good, three legs bad – has had real and harmful effects. Anti-male rhetoric is sharpest around the most vulnerable members of society – poor, unemployed, young men. The media and politicians often describe disenfranchised young men in quasi-bestial terms – yobs, louts and scum. For the past decade their anti-social activities have been the focus of our darkest fears about social disintegration and disorder.
Yet rather than understand the conditions in which such men act, both left and right blame masculinity. Charles Murray, the British underclass theorist, accused single mothers of leaving men to degenerate into barbarism. Sue Slipman, former director of the British National Council for One Parent Families, retaliated: “He still cannot explain why any woman in her right mind should want to take one of his `new rabble’ home with her.”
Both take for granted that men alone have no impulse for community values or decency. What is portrayed in ads and by social theorists is experienced in real life.
In 1992, a survey revealed a preference in families for girls. This preference is confirmed by the experience of adoption agencies in the United Kingdom. There is widespread agreement that girls are less difficult, less repugnant, less dangerous, much nicer than boys. Could boys fail to pick up on all this? Clearly not. Even the least sympathetic commentators have noticed how the self-confidence of boys and girls have been moving in diametrically opposite directions. Girls feel enhanced by continuous social affirmation, while boys feel diminished. They have become scapegoats in a society no longer comfortable with masculinity.
Womanism is especially pernicious when it comes to issues of women’s rights, reducing these to a matter of supporting anything women do because they are right. Tony Blair’s babes were meant to automatically mean “better” values in Parliament, although evidence suggests we may have a long wait. Likewise, we disregard “girls on top” rhetoric as a necessary corrective for all the centuries of oppression. Such rhetoric attracts unlikely supporters.
The rhetoric of girl power is another good instance. The Spice Girls coined the phrase as promotional fun, but it passed quickly into the wider culture as a label for anything involving girls asserting themselves in new “unfeminine” ways. “Challenging the stereotypes” can cover a multitude of sins. Some challenges might still be useful, but it can lead to double standards.
Girls’ assertive sexuality is taken as bravado, whereas boys’ is still seen as potentially threatening. As another of those “womanist” jokes asks: “Why is it better to be a woman?” “Because we can get off with teenagers without being called dirty old perverts and because we can be groupies. Male groupies are stalkers.”
Gender is no longer a clear divider. Indeed, sometimes where gender is significant, it is men who are disadvantaged. In ascribing all aggression to men and all constructive, community values to women, womanism reinforces an almost Victorian polarity between the sexes and overlooks both what is negative in women’s behaviour and their role in constructing the objectionable aspects of masculinity. It also ducks out of the more difficult questions of how you define what is right in more ambiguous times.
Womanism takes root when the complexities of feminism are allowed to wither. It is a simplistic reduction of reality, providing easy answers to difficult questions.