A long view of women’s progress
WOMEN DON’T do enough to help themselves challenge for top positions in the media, the veteran writer and broadcaster Katharine Whitehorn said in a BBC Radio 4 Point of View talk “Women on Top” in March.
A week earlier Katharine Whitehorn had been at the NUJ’s annual women’s conference in London — not as an invited speaker; she just turned up. And in her broadcast she talked about the conference and applauded the spirit of the new generation of women activists.
But she also had harsh words for the way women collaborate with men determining the nature of images of women in the media. She said:
Inevitably, much of the discussion revolved around the presence, or sad lack of it, of female journalists, photographers, producers and editors, who control it all. We cling to this hope, springing eternal, that if there were far more women at the top, women’s interests would be better served. Just the way we thought a woman Prime Minister would be less aggressive and a woman Home Secretary less likely to muddle her expenses.
There are now a few women editors, though there’s been no noticeable outbreak of sober feminism in the Sun since Rebekah Wade took over.
You might say it doesn’t matter that much who’s actually in charge, if women can have decent jobs and a good time doing them. But when the bosses are always men, you have to come up with what they want.
Apart from our numbers in big jobs, though, what most concerned the conference was the near-pornographic portrayal of women in what were supposed to be mainstream magazines, the lads’ mags. It’s not so much the lads, though, as the lasses that these women were really worried about.
Young girls so often see being able to behave badly as a right to be fought for; that being as sexy and outrageous as the boys is “empowering”. They don’t have any sense of being bamboozled or exploited. And if anyone doubts it, look at the fact that girls think it’s simply hilarious to “sext” their boyfriends — send a photo of themselves naked on their mobiles.
They don’t know much about the darker side of sexploitation — tyrannical pimps, the near-slavery of the girls trafficked into this country for sex — let alone what lap dancing outings for businessmen do to any idea of a level playing field for females.
It would be easy to be too depressed by raucous magazines and repellent pictures and the lack of women running the various bits of the media. But as far as newspapers are concerned, it would be daft to forget that things are so incomparably better for women than they were 50 or 60 years ago. At that point there was a women’s page that concerned itself with clothes, a spot of cooking, an occasional nod towards a bit of undemanding culture.
And there were a few specialist women writers, but otherwise newspapers were about hard news, sport, politics, foreign news and business — things worthy of the attention of busy men.