"Snow Queen Palace" from the Early Learning Centre
The UK Telegraph recently ran an article about Pink Stinks, an organization founded by my friends Abi and Emma Moore, that “challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives.”
Pink Stinks just launched a campaign against Early Learning Centre, asking the toy retailer to stop pinkification and gender-stereotyping of children’s toys.
Some interesting quotes from the Telegraph article:
The campaign has been backed by Ed Mayo, the former government “consumer tsar” and author of Consumer Kids, How Big Business is Grooming our Children for Profit.
He said: “There may be worse things to worry about, but I feel this colour apartheid is one of the things that sets children on two separate railway tracks. One leads to higher pay, and higher status and one doesn’t.”
[...]
“Why on earth do girls need to have a globe in pink?” said Mr Mayo. “Does it ultimately lead to the 15 per cent pay gap suffered by women further down the line?. That’s far too simplistic, but I feel gender roles are becoming polarised far too early on.”
Some fascinating trivia about the color pink and child play:
[B]efore World War II pink was more usually associated with boys, while blue – traditionally the colour of the Virgin Mary – was linked with girls.
This past Saturday I had an anxiety attack: sudden sense of panic, difficulty breathing, head spinning, stone cold hands… the whole deal.
It happened during an afternoon of shopping in Paris. And I can attest with absolute certainty that it was provoked by the painful awareness of the power of patriarchy. I thought of it as my first feminist panic attack. Or, alternatively, my first sartorial panic attack. It was real. It was a bit scary. At first it filled me with a deep feeling of sadness and resignation, which quickly turned into outrage.
Rewind << My Armor
My ideal work “uniform”: crisp shirt, v-neck sweater or vest, scarf, and a classic Banana Republic blazer over jeans and flat shoes.
I have grown to love wearing blazers because of the sense of authority and seriousness they immediately confer. And I could really use that, especially in France, a country with rampant ageism and sexism. I experience condescending and patronizing attitudes from men – and some women – on a daily basis. I’m still getting used to it, since my experience in the U.S. and even Italy had always been quite different – the opposite, actually. But for a female, under the age of 40, this is standard fare in France. Even more so in the film business. Some aggravating elements: I tend to look younger than my age. I have long hair, and the exact body type of my grandmother: your typical Italian hourglass figure, with a large bust and wide hips. Not exactly the body of your token film director.
To compensate, I have always dressed in a modern Jane Austen fashion: classic, elegant, a bit preppy with a modern twist. But above all, Victorian (always proper and covered up, that is).
Working in a creative environment, I never had to don a real business suit. Still, the discovery of blazers was almost earth-shattering. Because whenever I wear them, most often paired with jeans, I feel like I’m wearing an armor, giving me strength and respect in the eyes of others: age and gender boundaries melt away a little. And in sexist/uber-feminine/ageist Paris, I have noticed a distinct change in the way I am treated whenever I wear my blazer uniform.
Since I’m currently having loads of important production meetings for The Illusionists, I thought it would be a good idea, with the weather getting warmer and all, to add a couple of vests to my wardrobe. (Because long sleeved sweaters under a blazer in the summertime indicate a propensity for masochism.)
So last week, on two different occasions, I ventured out looking for a very specific item of clothing: a cable-knit vest (preferably navy blue, crimson, or mauve).
Play > Me vs. French fashion designers
In my experience, after Tokyo the city of Paris is the one offering the richest experience in shopping for clothes. There is so much variety: all the world’s best known brands, along with obscure French designers. Galeries Lafayette and Printemps, on Boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement, are shopping Mecca with hundreds and hundreds of brands spread out over two entire blocks / seven stories up.
And there I went last Thursday evening. And then again on Saturday afternoon.
To cut the story short: after hours and hours of walking, scanning, browsing, and pulling clothes off of racks, I came up empty handed.
Everything was ULTRA-feminine, almost in a caricature sort of way: skirts, dresses, frilly tops with plunging necklines. Think: Hawaiian vacation more than a day at the office. EVERY SINGLE BRAND had a slight variation on this ultra feminine theme, but no one offered an alternative. There was simply no choice.
I stared in horror at linen (LINEN!) blazers at Galeries Lafayette.
A ray of hope came from the Italian brand Benetton, which offered one short black blazer and a few shirts (long and short sleeved). But no vests.
This came as a surprise because a month ago I was in Milan, Italy, and I visited the biggest Benetton store in the city center. Displayed prominently everywhere were business suits, shirts and pants (along with feminine items, of course, but the business attire was there and was abundant). Why didn’t I purchase anything then? (Because I’m an idiot. And because they didn’t have any vests. I’m obsessed with vests, if you couldn’t tell)
Back in Paris: Zara, Naf Naf, Kookai, Esprit, Benetton, Sisley, BCBG, H&M and GAP for women are all about flowing, wide cotton shirts most appropriate for sunny weekend afternoons. On the male side, on the other hand, there is always a vast choice of sharp business attire: shirts, sweaters, elegant shoes. I know because in the three years I’ve been living in France, I get envious whenever I go shopping for presents for my boyfriend. There is so much to choose from – and the fabric is comparatively better. Zara for Men looks almost upscale and preppy, with a vast selection of affordable cashmere sweaters. Zara for women has cheap looking Nylon sweaters scattered on the floor. Grrrr.
So, what kind of adjectives can best describe the woman of French fashion boutiques?
Breezy.
Carefree.
Young.
Extremely feminine.
Sweet.
Sexy.
Non-threatening.
You see where I’m going?
I don’t want breezy and sweet. I want professional and serious. A quasi-unisex uniform. And I couldn’t find any of that after surveying more than a hundred different brands. I wanted a simple vest! GAP was the only store that carried one, but it was pale pink and thus too feminine for my taste.
Golfing equipment came close, but not quite. Sleeveless cotton shirts with the swoosh logo were not really my thing. Plus, if I’m in a meeting asking for film funding, I want to look like Allison Janney/C.J. Cregg from The West Wing, not like Michelle Wie.
The sportswear section of Printemps offered a few options: Ralph Lauren cable-knit sweaters, but they were long sleeved, came in hot pink or orange, and at 170 Euros a pop, they were waaaay out of my range.
The panic attack gradually set in about 5 hours later, after wandering aimlessly from a uber-feminine boutique to another. I shivered at the idea that French society would push me to adhere to this caricatural model of femininity. And so my head went spinning. And my hands turned stone cold.
Backlash
The recurring thought of the panic attack was that the pinkification of young girls has spread to older women. Society wants us to look like non-treatening child-women. And it’s starting with clothes.
While walking down rue St. Antoine, after a quick visit to the GAP (where I had seen the only vest of the day, pale pink, which screamed “Barbie girl”) I suddenly remembered a chapter about fashion in Susan Faludi’s wonderful book “Backlash.” To make a long story short, in the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, business suits for women became extremely popular. There were loads of stories in women’s magazines about “Dressing for Success.”
A book about this issue – a survey of hundreds of women working in the corporate world – revealed that:
[Women] who wore business suits were one and a half times more likely to feel they were being treated as executives – and a third less likely to have their authority challenged by men. Clothing that called attention to sexuality, on the other hand – women’s or men’s – lowered one’s status at the office. “Dressing to succeed in business and dressing to be sexually attractive are almost mutually exclusive.”
Fashion houses started to promote in an enthusiastic way business suits for women. Open any woman’s magazine from the late 1970s–early 1980s and you will see for yourself.
Faludi then noted:
But in their enthusiasm, fashion merchants overlooked the bottom line: dress for success could save women money and liberate them from fashion-victim status. Business suits weren’t subject to wild swings in fashion and women could get away (as men always have) with wearing the same suit for several days and just varying the blouse and accessories – more economical than buying a dress for every day of the week.
Clothing sales plummeted in the 1980s. The fashion industry faced the worst crisis since World War II. And so, in the late 1980s, merchants, with the help of mass media, literally set out to kill the “dress-for-success” loudly proclaiming a return to femininity. Mademoiselle had a story about “The Death of Dress for Success” – and other obituaries in Vogue, Elle, Cosmo and other major publications followed suit.
So, it makes economic sense to keep women away from business suits. That realization managed to dampen my panic attack. It was rational. Awful, but rational, and driven by the economy, just like the beauty myth. I took the bus home and called it a day.
12-14 Year Old American Boy
I eventually found my cable-knit vest. Courtesy of Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren Junior, that is. The boys’ collection. I had to effectively cross gender and age lines to find something suitable.
The girls’ collection – just like the women’s – was full of dresses and frilly, sweet things. But the boys’ was Mecca to me. Lots of elegant sweaters, polo shirts, and, above all, cable-knit vests in navy blue, black, red and mustard yellow. My size corresponds to a boy, age 12-14. In the eyes of Ralph Lauren, it’s a boy full of promise: an active boy, future Ivy League graduate, on the road to becoming a brilliant doctor. I like that. I like that far better than the clothing for a submissive, dressing-to-seduce woman clinging desperately to her youth.
So, underneath a Ralph Lauren vest made for a 12-14 year old American boy is a bra, and underneath that bra is a heart, still yearning for the big dreams and aspirations of a young girl, now a grown woman. She was never told by her parents that, because of the genitals she was born with, she had to settle for less. And she won’t.
Slate magazine recently launched Double X, a blog devoted to women’s issues, which feels like an hybrid of Jezebel (for its sass) and Feministing (for its feminist consciousness); The New York Times wrote an insightful article about the blog launch here.
I have been thoroughly enjoying this new site – so imagine my surprise when, this morning, I stumbled upon this ad from Sprint (the U.S. telecommunications company) on an article about Suprime Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (notice the top banner):
It reads: “Plastic surgeries happening in the U.S.: 31″ … “Videos uploaded on sprint phones: 459″
A page reload yielded a similar ad about the # of “spray tans sold in the U.S.”
Plastic surgery? Spray tans? I understand the importance of niche marketing, but why is it that I have to witness obnoxious, stereotypical ads on a progressive site with a feminist slant? Am I the only one to notice a disconnect? Bah.
While skimming through the Washington Post on the web, my eyes were drawn to a photo on the main page: that of a smiling woman. The caption next to her name piqued my curiosity: “Mona Sutphen, perhaps the least well known of Obama’s advisers, takes a new approach to policy.” Now, what is so interesting about this, you may ask? Yes, I am a big admirer of President Obama and I follow American politics closely from France. And I was a big big fan of the TV show The West Wing – something that makes me naturally curious about the real people working in the West Wing. But what caught my attention today was something else entirely. Namely, the category under which the article was filed: STYLE.
Puzzled, I clicked on the article and went about reading the 3 page feature story on Ms. Sutphen, who I may add, is an extremely bright woman who has had a brilliant career so far. In my eyes, she is an authentic role model for women of all ages – as opposed to the cheap, plastic quality of the Paris Hiltons of this world. The article states,
Sutphen passed the foreign service exam right out of college, but ended up in Chicago working for the advertising agency Leo Burnett. After a few years, she decided that “if I’m going to be staying up until 3 a.m. it should be for world peace and not shampoo sales.”
She went on to work for the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, where she “managed the human rights portfolio for Burma, then on to an assignment helping implement the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. After a hiatus to study at the London School of Economics, she went to work for then-U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, whom she met during her work on Burma.”
And now, she finds herself working in the West Wing, as Deputy Chief of Staff, coordinating policy. A BIG deal. So, why is this matter of fact article, this profile, filed under “Style”? Had the Deputy Chief of Staff been a man, would the article have appeared in Style or Politics? I’m guessing the latter. This reminds me of an article that appeared last year in the International Herald Tribune, about Fadela Amara, France’s secretary of state for urban policy. The male journalist wrote,
Amara, a practicing Muslim who rarely bothers with makeup, never went to college and never married, retains the strong accent of an Arab immigrant and sometimes uses slang.
(Emphasis mine)
Can anybody tell me why on earth this article about Mona Sutphen is filed under “Style”? And why is it, that when a woman has a brilliant career in a field like politics, the public has to be constantly reminded about her gender and the stereotypes attached to it?
The Media Education Foundation is one of my favorite organizations: they produce and distribute “documentary films and other educational resources to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media.”
Generation M, a documentary about misogyny in media and culture, touches a lot of my film’s themes.
Check out the film’s trailer on the official Generation M page at MEF. Highly highly recommended.
Before you go any further, please just stop for a second and contemplate the fact that these ads, like any ads, were produced after a series of meetings in between the ad agency and the client. These ads passed the normal stages of strategic planning (what to do), creative development (how to do it), production (casting call, photo/film shoot, editing), media planning (where to show the ads: street billboards, TV shows, magazines, newspapers, online), media buying (purchasing billboard space / TV commercial slots / pages in magazines). These ads didn’t simply come out of the blue. Everything was deliberate and at no stage did anyone raise an objection strong enough to stop the ads. Because sexism and objectification are fun, right? Had the ads discriminated against a racial minority, with racist stereotypes, the people at the ad agency would have likely been crucified. But women are a whole other target. Misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our culture that some of the most prestigious car manufacturers can get away with this:
Mercedes Benz… and you thought it was a classy brand. Think again.
And another class act by BMW – an underage girl in an overtly sexual pose, mouth open, sultry look, and the ad copy: “You know you’re not the first.” Bravo BMW!
BMW – “The Ultimate Attraction”:
Nissan:
(hilarious, right?)
WARNING: EXPLICIT AD ahead (sort of)
N.B. This ad is actually for an optometrist (it asks, “Do you need glasses”). But it still belongs to the Hall of Fame of offensive ads for so many reasons…
As for advertisements that portray men as bumbling idiots AND sexual objects? They simply do not exist. I dare you find an example…
The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization.
[...]
In the movie business we have had an industry dedicated for the most part to reinforcing the lie. As the propaganda arm of the American Dream machine, Hollywood promoted a romantic fantasy of marital roles and conjugal euphoria and chronically ignored the facts and fears arising from an awareness of The End – the winding down of love, change, divorce, depression, mutation, death itself.
[...]
The anomaly that women are the majority of the human race, half of its brains, half of its procreative power, most of its nurturing power, and yet are its servants and romantic slaves was brought home with peculiar force in the Hollywood film. Through the myths of subjection and sacrifice that were its fictional currency and the machinations of its moguls in the front offices, the film industry maneuvered to keep women in their place; and yet these very myths and this machinery catapulted women into spheres of power beyond the wildest dreams of most of their sex.
In January 2003, the Financial Times published an article by Tobias Jones about the state of Italian television. Jones, a British writer married to an Italian woman and living in Parma, documented his reactions to Italian TV shows in a way that was refreshing and throurougly enjoyable. Enjoyable for anyone who is NOT Italian. Because the picture he painted was clearly depressing:
The following evening, about 7pm, I flick to Channel 5 again. This is the prime-time quiz show, Passaparola. To understand this kind of show, there are more key words to learn. Letterine “the little letters”, Veline “quick news flash”, schedine “the little statistics”: all are diminutive “me” descriptions of the bikini-clad women who start dancing erotically at random intervals. Passaparola is a quiz show based on the alphabet, hence the “little letters”. As I’m watching, Gerry Scotti – the anodyne host – is flirting with one of them and winking at the 8m viewers. Italy, don’t be in any doubt, is the land that feminism forgot.
A clip from Striscia la Notizia – one of the most watched TV programs in Italy (satirical news on primetime TV, on weekdays). These are the “Veline” Tobias Jones talks about:
Passaparola & the Letterine:
From Buona Domenica – Italy’s most watched Sunday afternoon program:
(The male tv presenter jokingly says the two women should keep doing this “until one of them dies”)
The article made a big impression on me back then. As an Italian, who has studied mass communication and film in the United States, who has lived abroad for many years, an activist and a feminist, this subject was very close to me. While in college, every time I went to Italy to visit my parents, I was positively shocked by the representation of women in mass media. Especially when making a comparison with the U.S. or the U.K. I would protest, and tell friends and relatives that I found this overt objectification of women offensive. My blood would literally boil at the sight of young women, about the same age as me, dancing around in bikinis and smiling to creepy 60-something anchormen. Yet all my Italian friends and relatives were relatively non-plussed by this. They found it normal. And it is still the same now, years later. If anything, the number of women scantly clad, offering their bodies for visual consumption has multiplied. Now they are everywhere.
The Financial Times doesn’t carry the article anymore, but I found a blog that reproduced it in its entirety. You can read it at this link.
What fascinated me the most, re-reading it just yesterday, was media consolidation. Because we have all heard the arguments that sex sells and men love looking at pretty women. But very few people go below the surface, to discuss the system that permits this.
It often seems that, in Italy, there aren’t advertisement breaks; there are short programme breaks. Fifty seven per cent of all Italian advertising budgets is spent on television (compared with 23 per cent in Germany, and 33.5 per cent in the UK). Even RAI, the state-owned television network – to whom I pay an annual licence fee of euro 97 – runs adverts. All of which means that audience chasing is crucial, and programmes are designed for quantity not quality. “It’s become a kind of psychological dictatorship”, says Gad Lerner, the most intelligent anchorman on Italian TV. “The figures from Auditel (which measures audience share) scare people into only producing these vulgar, crowd pulling programmes.” Berlusconi, of course, owns Publitalia, the company responsible for selling 60 per cent of advertising space on Italian television. Within a few days of starting my TV induction I can feel my brain turning to custard.
I had forgotten about this fact. Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, in addition to owning a media empire made up of 50% of the main TV channels, Mondadori – the largest Italian publishing house, countless magazines, newspapers, home video distribution firms, film production houses, a soccer club and insurance companies, also owns the “company responsible for selling 60 percent of advertising space on Italian television.”
When writing “Citizen Kane” Orson Welles would have thought this was too much for his character. And yet it is possible in Italy (watch Sabina Guzzanti’s awesome documentary ‘Viva Zapatero’ if you are insterested in the subject)
When having discussions with friends, I often compare Italy to Russia – it definitely feels like a media dictatorship. And, when asked where I’m originally from, I would jokingly reply “the Banana Republic” – because it feels so surreal. Women have a really hard time being taken seriously. My “golden ticket” is my international background: the fact I have lived for so long abroad and speak English and French fluently. So, my competence is not questioned when I am in Italy. But scores and scores of Italian women, who live and work there, have a difficult time in the corporate world. A few stats, culled from another article (“Naked Ambition”)
“In the largest Italian companies, women represent about two per cent of board directors.”
“In 1976, she says, 11 per cent of members of parliament were women, the same as today.”
Italian women need to break into the boys’ club – in academia, politics, the corporate world, and in mass media. But first they need to be aware of Italy’s pervasive mysoginy. And most of them aren’t.
A book about this issue – a survey of hundreds of women working in the corporate world – revealed that:
The Media Education Foundation is one of my favorite organizations: they produce and distribute “documentary films and other educational resources to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media.”
