At times, women are actively disliked

It might be hard to believe, but I actually started this article before Stephen Smith’s excellent article on sexism at Imperial and the superb piece on feminism by Veronica Gouvea. Stephen explored particular issues at Imperial and Veronica explained why feminism is important. I feel this piece is now a synthesis of the two including a reminder of what women face in society at large.

Whilst we have made vast improvements over the last 100 years on legislated misogyny, it remains that the female is one of the last subsets of humanity against which it is possible to get away with real discrimination in our society.

Discrimination faced by women permeates all areas of our lives – from professional through recreational to social interactions. It appears in all forms and guises, some intentional, others accidental and, perhaps crucially, rarely as overt and declared misogyny.

Professionally, discrimination comes in two main forms – the ‘boys club’ which can be sometimes be found at the top of big institutions (14 of the 100 FTSE firms have no women on their boards) and the just as destructive, ever-present myth that women are somehow inferior to men at top jobs. Now you may feel that the second point is no longer believed by anyone with half a neuron; I disagree. It is still present and, it seems to me, often manifests itself in women themselves. The statistics would suggest that there is always a nagging doubt that, when things get tough, a woman is not suited to a career in something ‘important’ (e.g. politics, business, science). For example, there were only 861 female candidates at the last general election (3284 male) even though women were just as likely to be elected (15% chance overall, ~15% for men, ~16% for women).

Recreationally, women face not discrimination but a propagation of myths pertaining to a women’s role in society. This ranges across a broad spectrum, which I’ve crassly decided to group together: from magazines to advertisements through to poorly constructed female film characters (which itself is a separate crime against cinema) and images of ideal women. This can be anything from magazine articles asking women “should you be pregnant by now?” (Glamour) to advertisements for cleaning products that feature consistently women, and all the way to Bond girls. All of these clearly place the emphasis of women’s role in society on children, housekeeping and pleasuring men.

Whilst I am in no way insinuating that my female readers cannot critically interpret all of these, it seems, and my female friends have supported my view here, that there is a general cumulative effect. That is to say, it is easy to ignore individual instances, but with such a huge amount of ‘information’ depicting a certain role women must play in society it will inevitably result in self-doubt which can manifest itself at times of great importance in a person’s life (career choices, for example).

Socially, there seems to be a significant portion of the male population who do actively dislike women, either that or they are maddeningly unfunny comedians unable to make jokes about anything other than women. Add to that the sorts of daily incidents described by Stephen (rating of women etc) and you can see that 50% of the population has to wade through a lot of shit for no obvious reason. I have no problem in people observing that someone is physically attractive and to state their desire to mate, but there is a difference between that and reducing a person to physical attractiveness and a means for sex.

The ‘comedic defence’ often employed by the kind of people who commented on the recent UniLad apology is weak. I have no problem with humour being offensive (c.f. some of Frankie Boyle’s material). The problem arises when the jokes are so badly constructed as to be unfunny even without the offensive element – then the joke merely becomes a vessel for prejudices.

Before you all rush to comment and poke holes in my arguments, I am not suggesting any of the following: that there is a misogynist conspiracy, that all men hate women, that women hate themselves or that women shouldn’t ever clean.

Feminism shouldn’t be the dirty word it is now, it’s about equality and anyone who believes in an equal society is, by definition, a feminist. To dismiss a whole series of valid points about equality based on the fact that a few people who define themselves as feminist are man-hating is a crime against good debating.

Lastly, I’m not advocating some boring utopia where everyone is nice to one another and nothing offensive is ever said. All I’m saying is that, should you wish to be insulting, don’t make it about something someone has absolutely no control over – be a bastard indiscriminately.