Entrekin

Yesterday’s post concerning the Orange prize was just the start, and the nice thing is that a couple of comments segue directly into what I’d planned to address next.

Lisa said:

they shout: “Hey ladies, if you wear my perfume or eat my yogurt you’ll look like me; a size one beauty queen with airbrushed skin and perky breasts.”

concerning half-naked (or fully naked) women on billboards.

Alma noted:

What kills me, though, is how women try to demonize men for things that women do. Don’t get me wrong…sexism *is* alive and well–just like racism. And, yes, women *have* been oppressed. But, I wonder, how much of that oppression–both then and now–has come from women themselves.

I think both are very apt, and I’m also very glad that two spectacular women made the point before I did, because I think part of the problem with discussion about feminism is that demonization of men, when a lot of men don’t really deserve it. Though some say that one can’t draw analogs between sexism and racism, there is, I think, some connection there. Black people cannot simply blame white people for millennia of oppression, because you can’t blame people for something it’s impossible for them to have had anything to do with. We all, together, as a society can try to ameliorate past injustice, but trying to place blame is not the way to do it. Slavery sucked, but fuck, I didn’t have anything to do with it, and I don’t think any of my ancestors did, either; why blame me for something other people’s great-great-grandfathers did? Oppression of women sucks, and is awful, but why blame me for something previous generations created when I’m actively trying to help further equality in the world?

The thing those two comments bears out, though, is that men sometimes have little to do with it. The demographic of half-naked women billboards is not men–it’s women. I’ll admit, I think this is a troublesome spot, mainly because I think that marketing is a completely different question all together, but I do think they cater to women’s perceived needs, as women perceive them. Walking down the aisles in my mental Target–how many different kinds of shampoo/conditioner/hair styling products can really be necessary?

Does makeup make a difference to a man, or do women wear it because they fear judgement from other women? Because I’ll be honest, I’ve seen lots of ads for mascara but have never, even once, looked at a woman and thought, “Wow, now those’re some eyelashes” (that’s what mascara’s for, right?), and most of my friends will tell you I’m just the sort of aesthetics-driven man that would notice something like that. Concerning heels: I was talking, last week, to someone going on interviews who was lamenting the idea of wearing heels. When I suggested she not, she called it “unprofessional” not to. Mind you, this is a girl who firmly believes in separating herself from others based on her talents and qualifications; that she worried her shoes might make her unprofessional was a revelation. My thought was: to whom? If I were a guy conducting an interview (and the old argument is still that men run corporate America and have all the power positions, except the fact that I’ve only ever been interviewed by women, ever [and I've worked in advertising, education, personal training, and publishing]), I’d never hire-or-not an applicant based on her shoes.

In fact, when I worked at a publishing company, I worked in a department as the only man among 12 women, all of whom were the executive or managing editors of their publications. Or editorial director was a woman. And the VP positions in the company were split pretty evenly male/female.

I’m not saying biases don’t still exist. I’m not trying to make the argument that we live in shiny happy utopia with no racism or sexism. I’m just asking questions about that gender bias, and wondering, who’s really against women?

I read a post the other week on Book Addiction, in which the blogger posted a review of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminsim. Now, I was interested in the book, at first; I studied gender when I was in college, even took a Women & Literature course in which I did a term paper on insanity as an escape in Victorian women’s literatures, and made the argument that insanity was actually sane considering the ‘normal’ conventions the female protagonists were rejecting. However, I clicked through to Valenti’s book, and read the first two pages, and found lots of weirdo stuff.

Her opening sentence is “What’s the worst thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back now.” She enumerates several possibilities, among them ‘skank,’ ‘whore,’ and ‘cunt.’ Then she asks about men, and enumerates again: “Fag, girl, bitch, pussy,” because her argument is that the worst thing you can call a girl is a girl, and the worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Which strikes me as a little inane, mainly because I’ve heard a lot of guys called assholes, and those are pretty gender non-specific. I’ve also heard men and women alike call guys ‘dicks,’ ‘cocks,’ and ‘pricks,’ and not just as metonymy.

The paragraph I really hated, though? Here:

Do you think it’s fair that a guy will make more money doing the same job as you? Does it piss you off and scare you when you find out about your friends getting raped? Do you ever feel like shit about your body? Do you ever feel like something is wrong with you because you don’t fit into this bizarre ideal of what girls are supposed to look like?

To answer all her questions: it’s not fair, of course it pisses me off, of course I’ve felt lie shit about my body, and I do sometimes feel like something is wrong with me because I sometimes don’t fit into this bizarre ideal of what [men are supposed to be like].

Of course, I question her: does she think only women get raped? (They don’t. Men get raped to. And sometimes not even by other men. Women can coerce men into sex they don’t want to have every bit so much as men can. Not all men are the sexually-starved slavering drool-fools we are made out to be.) Don’t we all have days when we dislike our body, or our hair? Aren’t men driven to some ideal to billboards and magazine advertisements? Just because the ideal is to play golf and have great hair and watch NFL on Sundays from the La-Z Boy doesn’t mean it’s not an ideal. We are inundated with airbrushed models in Calvin Kleins every bit as much as women are. What man ever had Marky Mark’s abs? Not even Marky Mark has Marky Mark’s abs anymore.

Valenti’s new book, out next month, is called He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Women Need to Know, but she’s wrong, of course. Because men who indulge in casual sexual promiscuity are no longer held up to some ‘bizarre ideal’; that idea is as quaint and rooted to the 50s as the whole ‘slut’ thing; the men who grease their hair and permatan and use the tactics in The Game are “players,” and are called assholes or douchebags by pretty much everyone who knows better.