Be Excellent To Each Other

Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian yesterday kicked off a predictably point-missing tedious debate on Comment is Free about the portrayal of women in the media, and how it's all so terrible that there are pictures of semi-naked women everywhere and isn't it all ever-so degrading to women and while we're at it porn is *awful* and should be banned. And so on.

I do struggle with the idea that we should somehow be ashamed of finding attractive women attractive, though. And that anything to do with sex is automatically degrading to women. That latter approach in and of itself seems somewhat sexist to me (not to mention evidence of almost Victorian levels of prudishness in the speaker), as it automatically casts women as servile underdogs, fit only to fulfil some 50s ideal of a woman tied to the bedroom and the kitchen by her apron strings.

Having said that, I find myself annoyed by the portrayal of men in the media as either useless, sexually inadequate nerds to be laughed at by women or big buff meatheads.

Pfft.

Discuss.

As a University lecturer once pointed out to me, men may be portrayed in a negative light in the media in order to entice women to buy products etc. but men own most of the big businesses, so ultimately, we still win.

This is something that slightly irks me too. Feminism has many good points, but the "but men control everything" aspect of it is absolute bollocks. They don't. A tiny fraction of a percent of men, massively over-privileged men who went to private schools, run everything. Most men are as down-trodden, disenfranchised and powerless as our fair sisters.

Men have bigger muscles. We win.

I like boobs. If ladies want to show their boobs, how does this degrate them if it's their conscious choice? Confused.

Because sex is a male construct used to degrade women and exert control over them, or something. In the world of the feminists writing in the Guardian all women should hate sex, it seems, or they're betraying their sisters. This little beauty made my blood boil, for example.

That reminds me of the guardian article that indirectly attacked me for using the word 'pimp', as, obviously, it degrades us all*.




* verbatim quote.

I like the cut of your jib, shin, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

A friend of mine bought me an FHM magazine*. I hadn't seen one before. There are more pictures of topless men pratting around in aftershave adverts than there are women in the entire mag, sexily dressed or not.

*no, really. He bought me a mango as well.

On a vaguely related note, has anyone noticed how BRAVE CANCER SUFFERER Jade Goody is having her 'struggle' fully televised into documentary?

Gosh. I, like, so did not see that coming.

FHM/Nuts/Zoo seem to me to be more offensive to men than to women, given how they belittle one's intellect and assume a homogenistic football/booze/cars/phwooooar-based monosyllabic grunting view of the world in the reader.

The Gradiuan is going to have a somewhat feminist agenda though isn't it?

Nuts / Zoo annoy me. Dammit, if I want boobs, I'll just buy porn. Make me laugh, or tell me interesting stuff!

Penny-pinching FTFY.

Being someone who used to work for some of those similar titles about six or seven years ago (I'll recount the story of why I stopped, but it's largely to do with the morons who worked on the mags as WELL as the fact that nudity and near nudity isn't sexy IMO) I once heard them described as porn for boys either too young or too short to reach the top shelf.

Heh. But in that case, just buy a Fast Bikes mag and you get tits and excellent bikeness. And no bizarrely homo-erotic aftershave ads.

Honestly, advertising people! If you want to sell aftershave to a bloke, a picture of a naked male model who lives in the gym isn't going to make me want to buy your product. Really and truly it isn't. At all. What it *will* do is make me feel uncomfortable, and that ain't going to make me want to smell like the manboy in your ad.

You can get porn on the internets now? Truly, it's work is done.

I'm sure I remember in the mid-nineties that Loaded and FHM actually had interesting articles and were worth reading. Especially Loaded, which went through a phase of being a really good read. But FHM had some good stuff in, too.

They were good for a few years, right? I'm not just looking back with rose-tinted spectacles?

So she got into writing after the Wonder Years.

Men don't buy aftershave, women buy it for them. And they buy it hoping it will make their men appear like the men in the ad.

It's a house elf.

Cras - I've almost always bought my own.

Typical feminist, hates men because she's minging.

This amused me, fucking magazines.

I think she's a lesbytarian house elf, comical.

And: Humungo-heh at that magazine.

To be fair, it does say "back to her old body"... more true than the reader could have known!

In fact, so true it becomes deceitful... that's the strange part that my brain is struggling with.

Excuse me for butting in, butt, like. But aren't we all rather missing the point here?

I mean the argument "if you don't like porn, you don't have to watch it" is well established. So by extension, if you don't like the Guardian, don't read it!

The whole point of the national press is, and always has been, so the rich owner can hire those with a similar viewpoint and then exert their political/economic/social influence and opinion on the nation. Without looking, I should imagine that for every confused Guardian article droning on about social and political correctness there is a Telegraph article espousing the virtue of Empire and capital punishment, and 200 lowest common denominator Sun articles about a hard done by single mum fighting "red tape" and/or "fat cat bosses".

Everyone is allowed to spout as much frothing liquid shit, masquerading as opinion, as they like and if you are fortunate enough to have a newspaper column on which to stand and spout it so that it splashes across the whole country well then so much the better.

However, given that only 45% of the adult population read a newspaper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/21/pressandpublishing, and that 45% reads one of ten newspapers, that's a pretty slim slice of the nation overall who read the Guardian (4.5% is being generous I reckon, since I should imagine that Sun and Mirror have the lion's share). So if Guardian readers want to sit around on Fair Trade, Organic wicker furniture in their cardigans and sock-sandal combinations feeling smugly satisfied holding their wrong opinions then that's fine by me.

They are entitled to say whatever they want and be wrong. As are you, and as am I.

Hello Myfinger, your post is great.

Please post more often.

Thankyou

What did the Guardian do wrong exactly?
I believe the comments you're talking about are made by people typing shit in to the internet after they've decided to be outraged at something. Just like on any BBC News article about anything, ever.

http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougoliv ... at-o-tron/





I think you may have missed the point then..

I'm not having a go at the Guardian, mind. The OP was in relation to people commenting on CiF. Well, and then I strayed into the horrible little world of the house elf woman.

But there does seem to be an overwhelming prurience about sex and nudity. It's evident not just in the Guardian, but in confused, hypocritical papers like the Mail and the Sun. It's either "sick filf" or "sexist filf" depending on the demographic of the paper.

I have a couple of problems with the two comments Shin has made....

Firstly, a woman showing her boobies off in a magazine may not be degrading for her, in so much as she is fully excepting what is coming next (tits out, page 3, wahay!) but some men have difficulty distinguishing between girl in paper and girl walking down road. Not all boobies, no matter how lovely they may be, are there for staring at and not all women are comfortable with the attention that boobies do get. When a complete moron leers "nice tits" it isn't complimentary, it doesn't make you feel good and you feel generally degraded, you question yourself, are you dressed like a slut today? What could draw such comments from a complete stranger? Yes, they are easily ignored but when did it become acceptable?

Also, as I've mentioned before, I work for a building contractor and I am site based for 2 days. That's building site based....a lovely environment! It is a hard environment for a women, some blokes come in with the attitude that you can't possibly know anything about what they want and treat you like a stupid, young tea-girl. Others think that you're fair game because you're on a building site...I get all kinds of comments, a lot of sexist things and a few that are just obscene. They would never dream of speaking to my male colleagues in the same kind of way so why is it ok for them to speak to/about me like that? Senior management are the same, they're not so obvious with their sexism but it's still there, I get asked to do things because I'm female, assumptions are made and comments are passed. It can be even harder because I expect it from 'the lads' because they're on a building site and every thing is crude and horrible but it's even more degrading when it comes dressed up slightly from a 50 year old professional who will never see you as an equal because you are a woman.

And there's a product of the site chaps' and the management's respective educations and backgrounds, I think.

That's all horrible.

Surely you've grounds for all kinds of sue-able sexual harassment, no? I'd never put up with it if I were a woman, and similarly I'd never allow the gf to put up with it in any circumstance. In fact, at the first hint of anything inappropriate I can see myself going quite mental.

Excellent post, Flis.

Men completely anonymous to me have leered and commented about my breasts in the street since I was about 16. They'd never do it when I was around Craig (comment, I mean - he'd agree that they sometimes still have the brass neck to leer at me), but it makes me feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, sometimes scared, depending on the context of where I am and what I am doing.

I do think that the casual representation of women as sex objects, and the breasts being the focus of the 'phwoar' factor in the tabloids ('x many days until it's legal for blah-di-blah to show us her tits!' or whatever it was) has given some people the idea that it is OK to leer at women. When some men do this I truly wonder if they think that I find it flattering, or if they know it is unwelcome but don't have the decency to hold back from making me feel uncomfortable.

Men have been doing that forever though, meems. Mr Darcy was copping a leer when Elizabeth Bennet wasn't looking.

Fact is - men like boobies. This is why corsets existed.

It isn't right, and it's not always pleasant for you members of the fairer sex, but it's nothing new.

But when you are alone and some man leans out of a door way and says 'ere, nice rack, cooorrrr' it can be quite frightening.

Oh, absolutely - and men that do that are pigs. I just don't think FHM is necessarily to blame.

Big old can of worms that one! It's very easy to say you'd never put up with it and obviously, one should not have to, in a faceless corporation I most likely would have a good case to bring to court but I live on a small island and there are probably 4 companies I could work for doing what I do, the directors know each other, play golf together and are members of the same clubs and organisations.

Don't think for one moment that I take it, humbly bowing down as I back out of the door to make the tea while the men talk about import things I wouldn't understand. I deal with 'the lads' how their attitudes demand they be dealt with, they are now (mostly) civil and keep their comments to themselves. They are easy to deal with, imply they have bigger boobs than I do and embarrass them a bit in front of their peers, they are mostly dim-witted and a bit slow so it's quite easy.

The point is, why do they think it's ok to act the way they do? By not suing their asses am I saying it's ok? It isn't acceptable and there is no easy way round it, over all it means that the respect my male colleagues get automatically, I have to earn. There are times when I am annoyed at certain attitudes or the way I get spoken to but I think that the best way to overcome it, is to do my job well, not create a fuss and while resulting in moral victory would do nothing for my career or reputation.

Oh, I see the point you were making now, Mr Chris. No, I don't know where this facet of culture came from, and why some people think it is acceptable to objectify women that way, but it does upset me sometimes. it's one of the reasons I enjoy winter so much - big warm jackets and snuggly scarves and hats, mmmmmm lovely!

Witless tossers in "not nice" shame shock !

I think we all objectify each other to an extent - it's part of our biology and quite normal. We wouldn't reproduce without it. And from someone we like or fancy it can be a nice thing.

But people being overly and aggressively overt about it, inappropriately, and having that be the sole or main part of your interactions with the opposite sex, is wrong, and rather sad.

I know they are not flattering me, what I meant was, I wonder if they think that women find it flattering - do they think that saying 'cor, nice rack' is understood by women to be nothing more than an appreciation of beauty.

I never understand why some, not content with staring in the first place, feel the need to shout to you and point out that you have breasts? Are they doing it because they think you enjoy hearing it, or because they know that each time they shout it at you it embarrasses and sometimes upsets you.

Being molested in public is another thing altogether, as it's illegal and you have the right by law to have them arrested for it, and there is no question that it is 'wrong', and though sexual harassment laws do exists in this country their usefulness seems mostly limited to people acting inappropriately in a professional environment, rather than people just going about their daily lives and being harassed in the street.

We may be animals is physiology, but we are thinking, sentient beings that should have a sense of how to behave in public. We are (supposed to be) cultured and civilised, and an understanding of what is right and what is wrong should be able to put the basic needs of 'Eat, Fuck, Create and Sleep' into some form of civilised structure so that we have respect beyond the basic 'must eat to live, must pass on sperm to procreate', etc of the rest of the animal kingdom.

Like tourettes? No - that's a terrible condition - these men just don't give a damn about the people that they offend. I don't think it's anything like the same thing. If the people that did this kind of thing wanted to stop shouting 'get your tits out' then they could, it's not a triggered instinct, just bad manners and disrespect.

Looking at a man and thinking 'he's handsome' or appreciating a beautiful girl is one thing. Staring at someone's breasts like the long dead Elvis had just appeared in your cleavage and is singing Jailhouse Rock surrounded by a choir of bespectacled goldfish is quite another.

If you go around leering at the outline of mens penises, which I can't imagine you do, or at least hope you don't, then it's really not the same thing.

More "peering" then.

/coat.