Women still on a see-saw of inequality
Marie Claire magazine has revealed survey findings that show of 5500 readers only 12 per cent of women were happy with their body shape. Most women yo-yo diet throughout their lives. We are in denial that having kids, clocking up birthdays and gravity will impact on our once-nubile bodies. Recently, in a strange, hypocritical move, Marie Claire featured the glorious nude body of Miss Universe 2004, Jennifer Hawkins as cover girl for an issue devoted to promoting diversity in women. It epitomises how the cult of celebrity has gripped society like a juggernaut. How its by-product – the objectification of women and girls, has arisen like a new strain of a killer flu. Melinda Tankard Reist, author of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls, slated Marie Claire in The Australian for publishing Hawkins, the 26-year-old Australian model as nude cover chick, who then provides advice on how to “get a bikini body quickly’’. “Why would an editor and an organisation concerned about body image choose a Miss Universe title holder as the pin-up for the love-yourself-as-you-are campaign?,’’ asks Tankard Reist. “The images attract comparisons and judgment and provide more opportunity for objectification.’’
It’s hard not to sense a sad déjà vu for ordinary women and girls; that we are back where we started from – trying to raise the status of women so men respect us as equals. Instead, society is once more prevailing perfect media image remains as whimsical as Don Quixote tilting at Windmills. And pay inequity, the costs of child care, the lack of universal paid maternity leave and absolutely unfair division of home duties continue to impair women’s chances of building independent wealth once they have babies. Here Julia Gillard has let down the sisterhood. Women simply cannot juggle both their worlds – work and family responsibilities in an inflexible workplace – and our revised industrial relations laws have introduced more rigidity. Our chequered paid work history means when women are old, they have far less superannuation than men, and vast numbers live in poverty on paltry age pensions.
It all leads one to think overall ordinary women’s lives remain something of a see-saw ride where the word “feminism” is all but forgotten in a society flooded with the cult of celebrity. One wonder what Germaine Greer really thinks of it all.
Tags: domestic violence, leadership, political women
womens lives | nadine 09/05/2010
1 Comment to “Women still on a see-saw of inequality”
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By Felicity Collins, 12/05/2010 @ 9:30 am
I have been a scantily clad pin-up girl. I was abused by my father. I have been raped by strangers, and also molested when just a beautiful innocent child of nine. It’s hard not to walk around the streets and simply scream at any man who so much as casts me an admiring glance—and think how much I “hate man”. But then I remember… this is a disease. It isn’t something I can cure by shouting expletives at strangers. And it isn’t just explained in one word, ‘inequality’. Oh no, my friends, it is much more than that. It is a pattern of behaviour that we women encourage. And then we ineffectually rant, and rave. We march and cry out holding placards and giving the two finger salute, but nothing changes. For there is one fundamental problem in our thinking… we are trying to change the behaviour of others that we actually enable on so many levels… as Nadine points out.
What can we do? We can change the thoughts and behaviour patterns of ourselves. We can look at how we feel inside and we can make a conscious choice to stop the encouragement, but I warn you, that’s a deep rabbit hole to jump into—to stop all action on our own behalf that encourages this male behaviour. It is though, in the end, the only thing that will save us female and male. So women like Nadine Williams keep writing. Keep telling the story. Women like me will read it and hopefully, one day, we will make our own choice on a deeply conscious level, that we aren’t going to accept it anymore. And we will take our own small steps towards freedom. I won’t buy that magazine, and I won’t endorse that product, and I won’t turn a blind eye when my partner sneaks a peak at women young enough to be his daughter while he holds my hand when we are walking down the street. I’m 47, and I was a victim, until I changed my own thinking.