A good column from Dec 2014. This column is great for me to blog on the popular topic of "equal pay", as Patricia Arquette has again put the spotlight on it in her Oscars' award acceptance speech, but that one saved for another time (actually, this one also mentions this hot topic).
Very hard to choose excerpts from this column to put it here:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Has there ever been a more depressing year for feminism than 2014?
... it seemed the world’s most famous women - whose every move is avidly followed by millions of impressionable girls on social media - were busy throwing buckets of ice over themselves or posting ‘brave’ pictures without any make-up on.
Ostensibly, this was for charity, but it was really to show off how much better they look in a wet T-shirt or without cosmetics than the rest of us.
It was also the year when every B-list celebrity, from Kelly Osbourne to Kelly Brook, started taking risqué pictures of their cleavage or bottoms & posting them on Instagram & Twitter, with legions of fans inevitably following suit.
Meanwhile, a cartload of over-paid, under-fed & perma-tanned supermodels rolled into town, courtesy of lingerie store Victoria’s Secret, & proceeded to prance around semi-naked... .
Not since the slave markets of Ancient Rome have women been judged so blatantly by their appearance, analysed so openly as little more than a collection of body parts. And the worst part is this: the sisters are doing it to themselves.
For women - & women alone - are responsible for this rampant self-objectification. This time, we really cannot blame the patriarchy.
No one is forcing young women to have their breasts enhanced (one of the most popular plastic surgery procedures of 2014) or to leave the house trussed up like living, breathing blow-up dolls.
From the preoccupation with ‘thigh gaps’ (that faintly obscene obsession of super-skinny models) to a seeming inability to pose for a photo without pouting like a demented trout, all too many women seemed to engage in ever more vacuous vanities. Eyelashes were so over-the-top that girls were straining to see past the end of their noses & cleavages had more suspension than the Severn Bridge.
So there you have it. Decades of feminism & it seems the best use we can find for equal pay is to spend it on buying ourselves a body like Barbie’s & a wardrobe like Katie Price’s. Was it really for this that Emily Davison fell under the King’s horse?
And if all of this is confusing for a woman like me, who thought the whole point of equality was that I could at last be judged on my ability to converse fluently on foreign policy, not how I look in a bikini, imagine how unfathomable it must be for the poor male of the species.
If I could wish for anything in 2015, it’s for this insanity to stop. For women to stop making such fools of themselves, to rediscover some dignity. Above all to stop frittering away the freedoms so hard won by our predecessors & that, let’s not forget, are still denied to many.
Very hard to choose excerpts from this column to put it here:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Has there ever been a more depressing year for feminism than 2014?
... it seemed the world’s most famous women - whose every move is avidly followed by millions of impressionable girls on social media - were busy throwing buckets of ice over themselves or posting ‘brave’ pictures without any make-up on.
Ostensibly, this was for charity, but it was really to show off how much better they look in a wet T-shirt or without cosmetics than the rest of us.
It was also the year when every B-list celebrity, from Kelly Osbourne to Kelly Brook, started taking risqué pictures of their cleavage or bottoms & posting them on Instagram & Twitter, with legions of fans inevitably following suit.
Meanwhile, a cartload of over-paid, under-fed & perma-tanned supermodels rolled into town, courtesy of lingerie store Victoria’s Secret, & proceeded to prance around semi-naked... .
Not since the slave markets of Ancient Rome have women been judged so blatantly by their appearance, analysed so openly as little more than a collection of body parts. And the worst part is this: the sisters are doing it to themselves.
For women - & women alone - are responsible for this rampant self-objectification. This time, we really cannot blame the patriarchy.
No one is forcing young women to have their breasts enhanced (one of the most popular plastic surgery procedures of 2014) or to leave the house trussed up like living, breathing blow-up dolls.
From the preoccupation with ‘thigh gaps’ (that faintly obscene obsession of super-skinny models) to a seeming inability to pose for a photo without pouting like a demented trout, all too many women seemed to engage in ever more vacuous vanities. Eyelashes were so over-the-top that girls were straining to see past the end of their noses & cleavages had more suspension than the Severn Bridge.
So there you have it. Decades of feminism & it seems the best use we can find for equal pay is to spend it on buying ourselves a body like Barbie’s & a wardrobe like Katie Price’s. Was it really for this that Emily Davison fell under the King’s horse?
And if all of this is confusing for a woman like me, who thought the whole point of equality was that I could at last be judged on my ability to converse fluently on foreign policy, not how I look in a bikini, imagine how unfathomable it must be for the poor male of the species.
If I could wish for anything in 2015, it’s for this insanity to stop. For women to stop making such fools of themselves, to rediscover some dignity. Above all to stop frittering away the freedoms so hard won by our predecessors & that, let’s not forget, are still denied to many.
No comments:
Post a Comment