Media Slag
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the music business with its rabidly sycophantic ally, the music media. This month Garry Mulholland on the girl-powered death throes of feminism
The British media is full of shit. Hell, its our raison d’etre. But, every now and again, an outstanding piece of shit happens along that stinks so bad, it redefines the entire arena of shitness.
Some of you may have seen The Observer Magazine, dated July 2nd 2006. If so, you may well have been bemused, amazed and downright disgusted by their cover ‘story’. Subtitled ‘An extraordinary and moving story of one woman’s longing to start a family’, it featured an anonymous Sloane bemoaning her failure to ‘have it all’. She had money, top career, tastefully expensive home, health, her own teeth, floppy blonde hair, and the means to spend years in endless therapy and what the navel-gazing bourgeois like to call ‘self-actualisation’. Yes, this woman had been to paradise, but she’d never been to her. Because life had not given her a likkle baybee of her own. She wanted a bloke to agree upfront to impregnate her and be her partner, because she wants to, because she wants to. And our biggest-selling left-liberal Sunday broadsheet gave her a magazine cover and a six-page feature – including a styled lingerie shot that may as well have included a neon sign pointing to her bits – to advertise herself to prospective (wealthy, professional) baby fathers, right down to her email address at the end of the piece.
I’m still stunned by the existence of this low-point in broadsheet ‘journalism’. At first, the horror was obvious. 1) Surely there must be some actual news to print. 2) The woman was so shallow and self-obsessed it could have been a Chris Morris parody. 3) Getting pregnant is easy. The working-class do it all the time. Occasionally, they even keep their partners. All she had to do is go round to the local council estate and explain her awful problem to one of those happy-go-lucky teen ladies desperately trying to bring up children and survive a country that spends half the time ignoring their existence and the other half making anti-chav documentaries about them, and I’m sure they would have told her exactly where to go.
But after a bit of sinking-in, it was the subtext that began to appal. The piece was, of course, written by a woman. The majority of editorial staff on the mag are female. Yet this piece was one of the most foul pieces of misogyny I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. Not only did it smack its female readers repeatedly round the head with the Victorian notion that unless a woman has had a child she is essentially worthless; not only did it make the woman herself seem utterly pathetic and powerless, because she couldn‘t get a man; not only did it ooze a contempt for single mothers and any woman who couldn’t afford a dream home in West London. Because all that was before you get to her class, colour and body-shape, and realise that, of all the thousands of women who are in a similar situation, they’ve chosen a woman who is thin, white and middle-class, overtly suggesting that this is the kind of woman who deserves to have it all. In short, any woman reading this would be made to feel inadequate. If you’re one of the few women who could relate to her, the piece was telling you that time was running out, that failure was imminent, that your only worth lay in catching a man to breed with. If you were one of the vast majority who couldn’t relate to her, then the piece was telling you that your looks, income, sexuality, and decisions to have your children already (and risk an interrupted career and those saggy breasts and stretch-marks!) or not have children at all (you can’t be a real woman at all!) were second-rate, unfeminine, or – God help you! – uncool.
Times have changed. We used to know where we stood in the gender war. Men, guarding their social and economic superiority, wrote thundering pieces about hairy-arsed lesbians or ugly women or ball-busters or hysterical female weaklings. But women ignored them, discovered feminism, fought for freedoms women now take for granted. Now, in the never-ending post-feminist backlash, its women who do their masters’ dirty work; obsessing about women’s body shapes; criticising each other for having kids too early or not at all; taking an almost sadistic pleasure in the imagined eating disorders of famous women; queuing up to justify cosmetic surgery, the ultimate symbol of stupefied woman surrendering to the male woman-hater’s desire to literally cut her to pieces.
The reasons? Class conformity and fear of career failure overwhelm loyalty to the sisterhood. Women may have become editors (middle-managers) and star columnists (freelancers with no workers’ rights) but the means of media production is owned and controlled by men. If women want to keep their jobs and their status, then refusing to throw an endless stream of anti-female propaganda about parenting, fat, fashion and conventional sexual attractiveness and availability ain’t no way to curry favour with Daddy.
The results? Women’s docile acceptance of hardcore porn in the corner shop. The ladette, which is what happens when women take on the male hard-sell that feminist women don’t have a sense of humour, and decide that joining ‘em’s easier than beating ‘em. A stream of terrifying surveys which show that young women would rather sell their bodies in the modern job market than study for a career where they know they’ll never be allowed to earn as much or shine as hard as a man, and the latest, conducted by pensions firm Scottish Widows, which found that 39% of women aspire – that’s aspire – to being financially dependent on a male partner. Young British women have eaten the media’s misogynist spinnage, and believe that prostitution, in various forms, is an easier way to make it through life than… ahem… self-actualisation.
So – what’s this got to do with music? People… it has everything to do with everything. Non-conformist female musicians still struggle for media exposure, just as they did way back before punk supposedly changed everything. Women journalists who sell-out on a daily basis do not want to be reminded of their lack of fight by women like Kathryn Williams, Patti Smith, Sleater-Kinney, Le Tigre, Peaches et al. So of course they chase around after various pneumatic barbettes, floaty folky totty, and stick thin corporate wannabes. The success of the soul-less and vapid makes them feel justified in their surrender to misogyny.
Women who are reading this… I hope you don’t fell patronised by a male writer who thinks feminism was one of the single greatest achievements of the 20th century, and who is increasingly horrified by its absence in the 21st. But if you do, no problem. Let me finish my rant by paraphrasing the Patron Saint of women who hate women. As Margaret Thatcher once put it – she was talking about workers who fought for their jobs and their pride, if I recall – there is an enemy within. Nowadays, that applies beautifully to the deluge of female media professionals who would sell their own sisters to conform to the male agenda.
What are you going to do about it?
thanks for the great post
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