The new Equality Act is being discussed on TV and Radio with vigour at the moment, and although it seems the act is to address a whole range of 'inequalities in the workplace', I am hearing an awful lot about the still unfair gap between the wages of men and women.
In my almost 50-year lifetime the role of women in society, and consequently that of men, has changed enormously, and the trajectory has not been a straight one. There is a whole book, perhaps a library of books, in the changes in gender relations and roles over the last 50 years - too, too much for a blog, so please let me stick with generalisation, nostalgia, anecdote and opinion.
For me there was a golden era. I remember a magical time when it suddenly seemed peace in the world, and most certainly between the genders was a possibility, even an inevitability. James Taylor and Carole King were singing the same songs, expressing the same emotions and it was alright. Alright, at least in our circles, for men and women to wear more or less the same clothes, to grow their hair long and to address each other as 'man' regardless of the gender of the addressee. This is the mid 70s, late era hippy.
At that time we sometimes heard middle-aged guys say as we passed by 'you can't tell if it's a bloke or a woman from behind' and I think, far from being offended, we were not so secretly pleased. Woodstock had already passed into legend, the Vietnam war had spawned unprecedented levels of anti-war sentiment, and the easy availability of the contraceptive pill (and with AIDS 10 years in the future) had led to a sudden and startling sexual liberation. Within the protective circle of my friends to be a sexual young woman, or indeed young man, was a thing of beauty. We were making love not war and the sexual frisson came not from indulging in an illicit, sordid act but from the sheer 'rightness' of being young, beautiful (everyone is beautiful in their own way, don't you know?) and willing to express this physically.
Those lovely boy/men stirred lentils, wore jewellery, grew the ubiquitous long hair and were more than happy to 'get in touch with their feminine sides', even before the phrase had been coined. We talked endlessly about the coming world, how it should be, how bright and free of aggression, and quite often about how men and women were only different because they had been brought up that way. Passing round a spliff and listening to prog rock on the record player we 'knew' we were right. Give boys dolls, give girls toy cars and mini tool sets and soon only our bodies would differ.
As our generation grew up, into the 1980s, New Men appeared - Cosmopolitan Magazine was full of it. Gender roles, at least for the chattering classes, had been re-defined. The images that had been presented in the reading books of my early school-days - Mother, always in a dress, at the kitchen sink, Father in a chair, smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper after a long day 'bread earning', little boys fiddling with catapults and building blocks, little girls cooing over her dollies and, oh so cute, following mummy with her own miniature sweeping brush -were images that quite suddenly seemed obsolete, irrelevant and darkly funny.
Feminists had been invited in to the mainstream, and of course, issues were discussed including that of equal pay for equal work. Amongst the many bones of contention was the issue of the 'objectified' woman. It seemed, to me at least, that the era of woman as simply a sexual play-thing was all but over. And so to the 90s.
Can you imagine my dismay when I first saw 'lads mags', first heard hip hop/gangsta rap, and watched music videos with lyrics that referred to women as either bitches or 'hos'. I really felt as if we, as a society, were slipping down a muddy bank, just about to fall with a splash back into the noisome swamp of sexism. The message seemed to be loud and clear - perhaps even louder and clearer than ever before, given the unprecedented, and still growing access to 'the media' we now enjoy - A woman's value lies in her pulsating, joggling, openly inviting bottom and certainly not in her brain. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
The only conclusion that I can reach is that we were wrong. Yes, we were wrong. Perhaps that soft, idealistic cloud of mild 70s weed obscured the evidence. We wanted it to be true and so it was. But, men and women are not the same. Indeed, boys and girls are not the same - and possibly, although I have no evidence to support this, male and female foetuses are NOT the same. Having watched my own wonderful children grow up and having observed the children of my peers too, it seems all evidence points to the fact that boys and girls are just born different. Of course, there seems to be a spectrum which goes from very male to very female, one might say very blue to very pink with a lovely shade of lilac in the middle. But as with most things the majority of men, and the majority of women too, fall somewhere in the body of the bell curve.
Given that social change often seems to occur, not in a straight line but, in a series of swings of the pendulum, we can only hope that soon things will settle somewhere in the comfortable middle. Looking back I can now see that the radical feminism, at it's peak in the late 70s and 80s - at a time when large numbers of women regarded the use of the term 'Chairman' as a serious crime (Chairperson, please) and that apparently "a women without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" - may have led to women feeling more empowered but it most certainly alienated a large number of men.
Lots of men tried very hard to adjust to the new balance of power but I have to admit that my more radical 'sisters' seemed that they would only be happy when men were subjugated in the way that women had been for so long. Personally, I've always been an 'Equalist'. Feminism had a dark face for me, confirmed once and for all by the appearance in the late 70s of rad fems sporting tee-shirts stating that 'all men are rapists'. I recognised then that alienating 50% of the population was no way to reach harmony. You can't attain mutual respect by name calling.
And now the question. I really don't know the answer. Did the feminists with their extreme views and antagonistic attitude to men only precipitate a back-lash? Can the rise of the lads mag and the 'bitch/ho' culture be traced back to those feminists whose attitude was just as sexist as any 'unreconstructed' man before them. I fear this is so. And as for equal pay.... I think this will only come to pass when men and women really respect each other for what they are, and the old enmities are dropped so that people can be paid for the work they do according to their ability and the contribution they make.
We understand team games in our society. We understand that in a team some are the fast ones, some are the strong ones and some are the strategists. Isn't this the same in the workplace and of course, in the home? Can't we just be what we are - pink, blue or lilac - and be paid (and respected) for that?
I may shed a little tear for that lost golden era, but I live in hope that the painful shifts and changes that have occurred between the sexes over my lifetime are simply growing pains, and that the pendulum is due to swing back into the middle, where it belongs.
No comments:
Post a Comment