DRESSED TO IMPRESS
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- Category: COMMUNICATING GENDER
- Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 16:49
- Written by Jane HAILE
- Hits: 162
Each person’s face and body is the canvas on which they paint their identities, aspirations, memberships and non- memberships of different groups which are based on age, sex, gender, religion, economic status, class, ethnicity, culture etcetera.
The London street scene is perhaps one of the richest collections of canvases in the world? We have Chavs, WAGs(Wives & Girlfriends of Footballers), Goths, Hoodies, City Gents, City Bonus Boys (a dying breed), Boy Scouts, Barbour Wearers, Guardian Readers, Yummy Mummies, Sloanes, Saudis, Scots, Russians, Toffs and many other species all clearly wearing their badges on their sleeves.
Even those who try to resist dressing to type have to assume some kind of non-conformist uniform…. anonymous anoraks, non-designer jeans, and un-named trainers perhaps for both sexes?
Sometimes we get our badges wrong either accidentally or deliberately; ’Mutton dressed as lamb’…’She’s no spring chicken’….. are some of the derisive remarks reserved for a woman dressing younger than her actual age.
And the travel blogosphere is full of stories of innocent Western males being taken in by Thai or Indonesian ‘lady- boys’…. (’I thought she were a woman, mate, honest I did’).
In England we have a strong tradition of theatrical cross- dressing particularly at the Christmas pantomime season. Why is it that a man dressed as a woman (think Widow Twankey in the pantomime Aladdin; think Edna Everidge anytime) is inherently risible whereas a woman in men’s clothes (Marlene Dietrich, Vita Sackville-West, Annie Hall, the pantomime Principal Boy who is always a girl) has a louche kind of glamour?
Feminist scholars and commentators have written extensively about the ways in which ‘patriarchal’ Big Business with the Media as its hand-maiden have created what Betty Friedan has called the Feminine Mystique in her book of the same name. The Feminine Mystique instills in women the belief that their roles as wives and mothers, and the acquisition of consumer goods which support those roles represent the highest possible good. Those same male-dominated commercial forces are blamed for the pressures placed on women to look a certain way in order to be recognized as an acceptable female.
Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Mythand elsewhere has made the case that although improved education for women has made accessible some career rungs on various corporate ladders the continuing or renewed emphasis on female youth & beauty has meant that not only are women required to be intelligent, educated & competent in order to succeed in their chosen careers but they are also required to be thin, toned, and dressed to kill in tiny skirts and tall heels. The image of the sharp-suited Ms. Condoleezza Rice rising at 4.30 every morning to go to the gym inserts itself into my consciousness at this point.
Wolf has written ‘The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us…as women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground…..the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable……..
Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to culturally imposed physical standards, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves”.
She also demonstrates that this is a game that can never be won, in the sense that if women meet the beauty standard they will be accused of having obtained their jobs on the basis of their looks.
Wolf advocates that the only way that women can defeat this system is by stopping “reading each others’ appearances as if appearance were language, political allegiance ,worthiness, or aggression... let us start with a re-interpretation of beauty that is non-competitive, non- hierarchical and non-violent’.
Perhaps this is too ambitious? Or perhaps Wolf overstates the case for women’s exclusive oppression by the requirements of beauty. There is increasing evidence of male use of Botox treatments and tummy and buttock tucks.
Recently most of the public discussion on the topic of female dressing has been on the vexed topic of the hijab: to veil or not to veil that is the question. Hijab means in Arabic ‘to cover’ or ‘to veil’ & indicates the modest dress required of Muslim women, though the word hijab is popularly used in the West to indicate the Muslim headscarf.
Traditionally many Western Feminists have interpreted the wearing of the hijab as evidence of patriarchal oppression of women in societies where this is practised. The pale blue and all- enveloping burkhas of Afghan women under the Taliban are often cited as evidence of such oppression.
France has seen the ‘headscarf’ as an offence to the secular essence of French society. Whereas in the UK which has a relatively good record in accepting different cultural dress codes much of the discussion has revolved around the question as to whether women teachers or other professionals who need to communicate in order to function can be allowed to wear niqab which also covers the face. For more information on and illustrations of sartorial hijab visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sartorial_ interesting news links. Increasingly the voices of the women concerned have brought more nuance to this discussion. The Koran requires that both women and men dress modestly though the requirement is left to personal interpretation. Islamic dress can be a badge not only of religious but also of political identity & many countries in the Middle East show that more and younger women are covering their heads since the start of the Iraq war and some other initiatives in that region now generally regarded as mistaken.
Although most Westerners regard hijab-wearing as not only oppressive but also anti-aesthetic many women wearers point out that there are also fashions in Islamic dress; there are many different ways to wrap and knot the scarf for example, and there is now even a bikini for Muslim women known as the ‘burkhini’ which covers all but face, hands and feet.
One Iranian scholar Valentine Moghadam has defended the veil as being a ‘liberation from preoccupation with beauty’ which gives ‘women physical mobility in public spaces, free from the gaze and harassment of men, and the disapproval of family members’. On more frivolous grounds the headscarf was defended by a young Muslim woman writing in the New Statesman as the ideal solution to a ‘bad hair day’.
Many Muslim women have pointed out that the pressure on many Western women to bare as much flesh as often as possible & remain forever young can be seen as equally or more oppressive and exploitative. And anyone who sees scantily clad young women out ‘clubbing’ in Europe in the dead of winter could concede that point.
Recently a new trend in women ‘baring it all’ has surfaced whereby some women who are not expected to undress in public have been doing so joyously & riotously to raise money for charity purposes. The middle-aged Yorkshire housewives immortalized as the Calendar Girls were the first & best example of this trend in ‘ironic nudity’. Would the author of the Beauty Myth approve of this transformational attitude to the naked female body by the naked females themselves?
CHIC LIT
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- Category: COMMUNICATING GENDER
- Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 16:09
- Written by Jane HAILE
- Hits: 143
Let us begin our Chick Lit page with a little puzzle:
Who are Messieurs Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell and what do they have in common with Jane Austen.
Acton, Ellis & Currer Bell are better known as Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte respectively ,and like Jane Austen sheltered behind pseudonyms for all or most of their writing lives. Charlotte Bronte emerged from behind her male persona only after her sisters had died. The title page of Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, identified her only as ‘A Lady’ and in her subsequent novels she was identified the ‘Author of……’ her previous works. Only in the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in one volume was her identity revealed.
These authors apparently felt that that revealing their real gender would prevent their work from being taken seriously, and at the same time thought that they could express themselves more freely about such un-lady-like topics as passion, anger, drunken-ness, money and sex if they wrote under a pseudonym.
Ironically enough, the Brontes and Jane Austen are all cited by the authors of Chick Lit as the founding forebears of the new genre. The novel which is generally recognized as the urtext of Chick Lit, namely Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary makes very specific links with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Helen Fielding’s hero is also called Darcy, and in the film versions of both books, in a nice casting pun, the same actor Colin Firth plays the two incarnations of Mr. Darcy.
It can be argued that in claiming such illustrious forebears as Austen and the Brontes the Chick authors (aka chickerati) are exaggerating their literary pedigree, and indeed the chickerati rarely reference each other. But that need not detain us here. The jury is still out on whether Chick Lit is also Chick Lite or whether the disdain for the genre demonstrated even by many women novelists (Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge) is just the traditional devaluation of anything, even literature, which is associated (almost) exclusively with women.
What we are going to try to do on this page is to determine what distinguishes Chick Lit from other kinds of contemporary novel writing. Chick Lit established itself as a commercial genre by the late 1990s. Put at its most basic Chick Lit is fiction by, for, and about the new post-feminist woman, and normally features single women in their twenties and thirties navigating the vicissitudes of their careers, and personal relationships. Chick Lit is fundamentally urban and indeed metropolitan. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine a Chick Lit novel set in Retford or Peoria or Liege or on a farm. A country house, however, might feature as the site of alcohol- and drug-fueled weekend raves.
Chick Lit key words are then ‘cosmopolitan’ ‘aspirational’ and ‘consumer culture’.
The heroines of chick lit are intended to be ‘just like us’… flawed, funny, fallible and great emphasis is placed on the gritty reality of their everyday material and materialistic lives. These are not the glitzy and glamorous beauties of the Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins variety who have instantaneous and devastating effects on all kinds of Alpha Males. Although Chick Lit novels are aspirational, they are not escapist, and the level of brand-name advertizing links them more with James Bond than with Jackie Collins. The Chick-lit heroine is unlikely to be involved with only the One Man who is her Soul-mate. Chick-lit life is messier than that and there is a distinct absence of concern over ‘virtue’.
Chick lit heroines expect to have a career or at least a job in the outside world, as well as – eventually - romance and a family.
The new women’s fiction arguably pays more attention to characterization than to action when compared with the traditional type of Harlequin romances. Chick-lit novels are short on bodice-ripping, swooning, and ecstatic surrender.
Many Chick-lit novels rely upon first person narration through diaries, journals, e-mails with a consequent emphasis on self-criticism and self-deprecation. This ‘warts- and-all’ approach does indeed link these novels back to the Brontes or Jane Austen rather than more recent women’s fiction in the Barbara Cartland mode.
A variety of subgenres have proliferated from the Chick Lit base; hen lit/matron lit/ lady lit for the over forties; bride lit…for and about brides; Ethnik lit with further subgenres of Sistah Lit & Chica lit; and Christian chick lit or ‘church lit’ which comes with its own special varieties of heroine angst.
Some Chick Lit focuses primarily on the world of work. Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada or The Nanny Diaries of Emma McClaughlin and Nicola Kraus fall into this category.
Almost all chick-lit novels focus on the heady pleasures of conspicuous consumption be it of Chardonnay or shoes, but Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Trilogy scales new heights of shopping, fashion and consumerism, followed closely by Candace Bushnell’s Sex & the City.
Can you tell a Chick –lit book by its cover? Yes, indeed. Most chick lit novels have a distinct visual identity with covers featuring various shades of pink enhanced by drawings or photos of assorted erogenous zones, and possibly martini glasses, stilettos and other accessories.
Whither Chick Lit? Both critics and fans of the genre have noted that despite their heroines’ free-wheeling ways the ultimate aim of securing your man is usually achieved, after a number of embarrassing gaffes and misunderstandings. Chick Lit heroines do not spurn marriage to pursue exciting opportunities in writing or marketing or media at home or abroad, so the classic dilemmas of post feminism are neatly avoided in favour of Mr. Darcy.
Fans of the genre have their own Web sites in both Britain www.chicklit.co.uk and the United States www.chicklit.us & www.chicklitbooks.com
And for Chicks who don’t like to read there is always the movie of the book!
MEDIATING GENDER
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- Category: COMMUNICATING GENDER
- Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 11:47
- Written by Jane HAILE
- Hits: 116
Do mainstream mass media affect or reflect society? Or a bit of both? It could be argued that a medium is a medium is a medium and can be used to transport a diversity of content to a wide variety of audiences who may react in very different ways.
Most popular discussions of the effects of that most ubiquitous of mass media, television have focused on programme ‘content’, have tended to accentuate the negative, and to assume that audiences are totally passive & will imitate obediently what they see on the screen. As concerns gender issues television is popularly blamed for commodifying women through using them in advertizing, and for making sexual promiscuity and violence banal. The Economist reports an interesting and slightly more positive development from studies carried out by the Inter-American Development Bank in Brazil of the effects of telenovelas (soap operas) on reproductive behaviour and divorce. Researchers found that the arrival of TV Globo, the leading network, in any previously untouched area was associated with a rise in ‘aspirational behaviour’ indicated by women wanting fewer children and feeling empowered enough to go and have more fun in the big city without their husbands.
Students of media are familiar with the arguments about the ways in which the advent of a new technology can re- arrange social relations and flatten social hierarchies. The invention of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century, and the spread of literacy, took the monopoly of information and learning away from the clergy and academics. Men and boys were the first to benefit from the democracy of information, but eventually, even girls became literate.
And as we saw from Afghanistan and elsewhere, literacy and education for women can be the first casualties of oppressive régimes who do not want to see women in public spaces.
Sometimes social hierarchies are literally flattened by new media. Barely a week passes without a full mainstream media coverage of a scandal in high political and business places by indiscreet use of e-mail, either intentional or naïve, which causes heads to roll. April 2009 has been the e-mail nightmare of British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, whose ‘close advisor’ e-mailed a proposal for a smear campaign against the Leader of the Opposition and other colleagues(bbc.co.uk & elsewhere). A suggestion which would once have passed by word –of- mouth over a quiet lunch or drink has now been flashed around the world, enshrined in print, and endlessly hashed and re-hashed in television ‘chat’ shows.
Media gurus such as Neil Postman and Joshua Meyrowitz have focused on the intrinsic characteristics of the medium and have blamed or credited television with breaking down essential barriers between children & adults as all information is now available to everyone. Unlike books and printed materials television requires no painfully acquired skills, such as literacy, to gain access. Not even physical mobility is required beyond a nimble hand on the remote control. Television in sharing everything with everybody is said to have created an audience of ‘adultified children & childified adults’. Are the Harry Potter books responding to and feeding this trend in another medium, I wonder? As concerns gender equality Joshua Meyrowitz has made a case for the egalitarian influence of television in that now women are exposed to ‘male topics’ in a way that is accessible (unlike print!) and does not require ‘special prior training or knowledge’. In homage to Betty Friedan , author of the Feminine Mystique, he also proposes that television has enhanced feminist consciousness and women’s solidarity by enabling all women previously isolated in their homes with their vacuum cleaners, to learn about male topics, and to see how they themselves were depicted. And perhaps this is borne out by the research from Brazil cited earlier.
Meyrowitz sees such shows as ‘Sex & the City’ as having a major role in re-structuring gender relations as for the first time men are shown the way women talk about them when they are not there. Men are allowed to see ‘behind the scenes’ in a way which he considers innovative and transformational.
Though one could probably construct an equally convincing argument that Sex & the City is about product placement for designers such as Manolo Blahnik , and that ultimately it is still about ‘getting your man’? However there have been breakthroughs in terms of what is now being depicted as a range of possible gender performances.
On film and television we have seen more independent, empowered women and more men caring for babies; all of them, to be sure, exceptionally sexually attractive as well, to ensure that defiance of stereotypes does not get out of hand. We see more lesbian and gay characters for example in soaps and films though very often their sexuality is the central point of their characters. The gay character is often still defined in terms of their ‘problem’ and the way in which the heterosexual characters respond and accept or otherwise. The box-office success (& short story) Brokeback Mountain is a case in point. We are still short on heroes (cowboy, detective, policeman, millionaire, CEO) who are, just by the way and very incidentally, gay.
One of the few television programmes consciously designed to ‘push the envelope’ in terms of defying stereotypes was Richard Curtis’s long running BBC television drama ‘The Vicar of Dibley’ which first appeared in 1994, which was precisely intended to support the acceptance of female clergy by the Church of England and most of the rest of the country. And is indeed reported to have been influential in that regard.
In the performing arts ‘gender benders’ tend to be comedians such as Julian Clary, or Edna Everage whose humour takes the sting out of the unconventionality. A recurring issue is the prevailing gender-based occupational segregation in the mainstream media on horizontal as well as vertical lines. There are still relatively few women in positions of influence and decision-making when it comes to programming; and still a preponderance of women presenting news and weather though we do see them making some breakthroughs in business and sports commentating.
A frequently asked question is why it is still unacceptable for seriously competent and even popular and famous women to grow old gracefully on television and perhaps to a lesser extent on film. Rarely a week passes without a woman newscaster being pushed out by a younger (female) model, or a female actor approaching 40 complaining that the roles are drying up. This seems to be the effect of the Professional Beauty Qualification (PBQ) noted by Naomi Woolf in her book The Beauty Myth and still seems to apply less frequently to men.
Political discussions are often dominated by male panelists, and studies have shown that in news coverage women are overwhelmingly portrayed as victims rather than opinion- givers.
There are however an increasing number of internetworks and newsletters dedicated to redressing the various gender imbalances in the media. The IPS Genderwire aims to address the problem that only 22% of voices in the news are women’s voices. The Women’s Media Center (communication@womensmediacenter) is a non- profit organization dedicated to making women visible and powerful in the media by ensuring that they are represented accurately as ‘powerful newsmakers, informed experts, and sought-after media professionals’. And the Association for Women in Development is an ‘international multi-generational, feminist, creative, future oriented, membership organization dedicated to achieving gender equality’.
Additionally there are many networks dedicated to specific issues such as women in politics (I Know Politics) or gender-based violence or (primarily) women in business just to name a few.
The answer to our first question… do media affect or reflect society is ….a bit of both. Increasingly the audience not only listens but talks back. With the blogging and i-phoning increasing daily the numbers of citizen journalists and photographers world-wide, the mainstream media have – perforce - entered into a more fruitful dialogue with their clients who can now actively contribute to the content and presentation style of programmes. The growth of interactivity between media and audience can only be a good thing & audiences now have responsibility to be literate about media representations of gender issues…as well as everything else!
Further Reading:
The Disappearance of Childhood
by Neil Postman
Vintage Books (1994)
No Sense of Place: the Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
by Joshua Meyrowitz
Oxford University Press (1985)
Men, Masculinity and the Media
(ed) Steve Craig SAGE publications (1992)
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
by Ted Allen,Thom Felicia,Carson Kressley,Jai Rodriguez, Kyan Douglas
Clarkson Potter/publishers (2004)
The Beauty Myth
by Naomi Wolf
Chatto Windus Ltd (1990)
SOME GEEKS ARE GIRLS
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- Category: COMMUNICATING GENDER
- Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 12:00
- Written by Jane HAILE
- Hits: 103
From the outset Information Technology (IT) has been freighted with hopes and dreams for leveling hierarchies and reducing inequalities both within & between the West and the Rest of the World.
This page reviews some of the issues relating to the actual or potential role of IT in changing the traditional imbalance of power between men & women, & the “powerful” and “powerless” communication styles associated with that gap.
We shall also discuss the extent to which this new and ‘neutral’ field has become despite all predictions to the contrary en- gendered? And whether male/female interaction with IT provides ammunition for those who suppose gender differences to be hard-wired? Should the focus of our hopes & dreams be solely on Internet and computers or should we be looking more broadly at a range of new information technologies, including mobile phones, and their possible effects when used in combination with both new and old information technologies.
First let’s see whether the expectations for the Internet have been realized in the so-called developing world in for example enabling women, usually envisaged as being isolated in their families and homes, to contact each other, to organize in groups for political or economic purposes, to access information on agriculture, marketing, health care which would otherwise not be available to them? Whilst there has been a lot of investment and some gains there still remain some formidable obstacles to the successful popular use of the Internet in this way. With a few exceptions still heavily underwritten by donors or by philanthropic institutions Internet use has not taken root at the grass-roots.
Some of the obstacles to the internet being integrated are connectivity, literacy, language, and costs. These features ensure that its use is still largely confined to the educated, better-off and younger age-groups in those countries where internet access is good. And in a surprisingly large number of countries…. even for example in the high middle income countries of the Middle East….internet access cannot be taken for granted.
However there are some success stories in this field. The Kothmale Internet Community Radio project in Sri Lanka uses community radio as an interface between the Internet and rural communities and has been of particular benefit to women in the community http://www.unesco.org/webworld/hughlights/internet_ radio_130599.html And the Virtual Souk Website http://www.southbazaar. com/english/mainbazaar.htm which gives artisans in several Arab countries direct contact to tourists and international customers has spawned a host of similar efforts usually NGO-based.
The New Information Technology which has taken off in a big way and has amazing power to transform people’s lives by keep them in touch with each other and by accessing information normally monopolized by governments, institutions or corporations is mobile phone technology. This is cheap, and requires little skill beyond than the power of speech to employ it fully.
The most often cited example of the developmental power of the mobile phone is perhaps the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat where women have successfully linked themselves into the market economy thanks to their mobile phones. Read all about them at www.sewa.org
How does the gender and IT debate look in a country context where a pc is a fairly routine piece of domestic furniture and Internet is readily accessible? Margolis and Fisher in “Unlocking the Clubhouse Door” note that “whilst women surf the Web in equal numbers, and make the majority of online purchases, few are involved in the design and creation of new technology. It is mostly men whose perspectives and priorities inform the development of computing innovations and who reap the lion’s share of financial rewards”.
They attribute this to the different ways in which boys and girls are socialized into computer use in the family (inter alia through father-son “internships”) and at school, a pattern of relationships which carries over into the higher education field. Male dominance of this scene inevitably means that curricula at all levels are shaped by and towards male interests and concerns, which results in women often feeling alienated by the courses they take. They feel that they do not/and do not want to fit into the “Geek” mythology and culture.
One of the assertions of this book is that male and female orientations to their computing courses are very different.
“Student’s motivation to study computer science varies by gender. For most women students, the technical aspects of computing are interesting, but the study of computer science is made meaningful by its connection to other fields (medicine, social work etc). Men are more likely to view their decision to study computer as a ‘no- brainer’, an extension of their hobby and lifelong passion for computing”. Margolis and Fisher review a series of measures to broaden curricula and make computer science more attractive to women, in view of their perceived motivation towards the course, and their different types of life and life-style aspirations.
This can be expected to change as technology becomes cheaper and more widespread permeating more effectively the social fabric though it remains to be seen whether the gender differences in use and in expertise will remain. Internet is increasingly being used for distance learning and offers obvious advantages in terms of its ability to collapse time and geographic zones so that students from many different countries and regions can participate in the same class or seminar, going “into class” at a time which is convenient for them. This time-flexibility also makes online learning attractive and accessible to the time-poor notably ….in the context of this discussion…. to women who still take on most of the family responsibilities & may have dropped out of education or career to look after children or an aged relative.
Online training can be an excellent way for women to continue their education through Life Long Learning and still “cope” with family responsibilities (though of course it would be preferable that they were not the only ones “coping”) ,or to re-train to re-enter the workforce. In fact in an online MA course I taught for the New School of Social Research in New York several students were women in their forties who were planning to take up their careers again.
Online courses give time-flexibility but also anonymity which some appreciate. In an online class one can be free from judgements about one’s age, gender, economic class, ethnicity, religion or appearance.
To quote the New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs in conversation about IT use – ‘On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog’.
There is of course a down-side to anonymity. The online environment frees people both to reveal and hide more about themselves than might be possible face-to-face. Many people invent an Internet persona of the opposite sex. Internet-sex like telephone-sex can allow for a fantasy sex-life without risk, although that fantasy sex-life may cross over into a dangerous reality. Many women are harassed in chat rooms for example or are groomed for dubious sexual encounters.
The anonymity provided by online communication is in fact one of the features cited by lawyers for the increase in the incidence of divorce. Absence of real eye contact encourages initial dissembling about one’s current civil status, quickly giving rise to a cavalier approach to existing commitments….and a conviction that elsewhere the grass is definitely greener.
After a slow start women as individuals and in groups are however increasingly claiming their internet space, and using internet to organize.
One of the most interesting groups founded in the UK in 2005 can be found at http://girlgeeks.com. This is an online community for women and girls who defy supposed stereotypes by being interested in technology and computing and not just in online shopping. ‘Blogging’ has of course that alternative slightly subversive ring that is dear to many women’s hearts, and indeed as reported by Kira Cochrane in the Guardian newspaper (31/03/06) feminist blogs are booming and have a no-holds- barred approach to any topic. Some of the most popular are Bitch PhD, the F-word, Panadagon, AngryBlackBitch, MindtheGapCardiff and Gendergeek.
Even the successful ‘over-forties’ as the Sunday Times rather coyly calls them (06/04/2008) are getting in on the act at Women on the Web.
www.wowowow.com and should be added to other grown- up women’s favourites such as www.huffingtonpost.com and www.net-a-porter.com
WXHY MEN ARE FUNNIER
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- Category: COMMUNICATING GENDER
- Published on Friday, 27 January 2012 12:24
- Written by Jane HAILE
- Hits: 134
In a Vanity Fair article (January 2007) ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ the journalist Christopher Hitchens explains that women are not funny because they don’t need to be. Why? because men are helplessly attracted to them anyway.
Additionally, women are preoccupied with the deeper mysteries of life.
‘Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire’.
Men on the other hand need to be funny in order to impress women and to break down their defences. Apparently, women are most vulnerable to seduction when provoked into an irresistible belly laugh. Though whether this is the preferred strategy of the conventionally attractive male, or only of those more challenged is not clear. On the evidence of his photographs, Hitchens is challenged.
Humour is also a sign of intelligence: a dangerous thing in a woman.
Women, who have been trained from infancy to avoid revealing that they are brainy, are not going to risk all by being funny.
Serious students of humour agree that what is defined as funny is determined by ‘the dominant group’… also known as ‘men’. What men laugh at is regarded as normal. If women laugh at different things then they clearly have no sense of humour.
Research has shown that women are funnier in all-female company and jokes targeting men contribute greatly to sisterly solidarity. Of course the content of all ‘against-the- opposite-sex’ jokes is essentially the same. Women describe men as arrogant sexual animals, and men describe women as stupid cows with only one thing on their minds.
Men however do not hold back from telling anti-women jokes in mixed company, whereas women tend to reserve their ‘zingers’ for when they are all together. Women often have to decide in mixed company whether or not to laugh along with a sexist joke against women, or to demonstrate their obvious stupidity by refusing to find it funny.
Joke-telling also reflects the powerful/powerless styles associated with men and women respectively. Clubbable men tend to relate well-rehearsed narratives. One man holds the floor regaling the audience (same or mixed-sex) with a story that ends in a punch line. The audience obligingly falls about, until the next male competitor takes the floor. For men humour is a form of preening and display that presents them in their best light.
Non-professional funny women rarely have a repertoire of set-piece jokes. Women’s humour tends to be more opportunistic and context-based and often takes the form of the deadly one-liner. A common mode is self- deprecation; the speaker’s failure of some social or sexual test.
What do these gender differences in styles of humour mean for the increasingly numerous female stand-up comedians? According to Hitchens this increase in numbers does not affect his basic thesis that (real) women are not funny since most female comedians ‘ are hefty, or dykey or Jewish or some combo of the three’ i.e. not attractive to males such as Hitchens and therefore not real women.
Many women comics have spoken of the hostility they have faced from both women and men in the audience. Men want women as audience, not as rivals in the humour stakes. Women may not respond well to another woman being the centre of attention. Neither men nor women want a woman in charge of the mike and making them laugh.
“Making a joke is like making a pass – you take control, you take a risk & try to bring the house down. Good girls wait” Rebecca Barecca<
Female comedians also felt that they were always judged on their appearance…. Are they too good-looking or not good-looking enough?
It is hard to imagine this criterion being applied to some of our famous funny men. Ricky Gervais? Jay Leno?
Female comedians have reacted in various ways to this challenge….some have become drop-dead botoxed glamorous…like Joan Rivers.....and others deliberately emphasize the wacky and unconventional aspects of their appearance…..Roseanne Barr, Dawn French, Jo Brand…
I start off by saying – “I’m an anorexic. I must be anorexic because I look in the mirror and see a fat person” Jo Brand (large funny woman) Dressing in an androgynous way can result in the label ‘lesbian’ which is perceived as a distraction to the main business of telling jokes. However, being ‘queer’ ‘gay’ or ‘camp’ does not seem to be a disadvantage to male comedians like Julian Clary, or Eddie Izzard.
It is to be hoped that as more and more women are ‘in charge’ of different aspects of daily life audiences will also find it more and more normal to see female comics in charge of making them laugh, and that self-deprecation or putting themselves down will become less of a staple.
Shazia Mirza a young British Muslim woman of Pakistani origin who sometimes appears in the hijab challenges all stereotypes at once, and may be a bright sign of things to come.
Shortly after September 11, 2001 she opened her stand-up routine with the following statement:
“My name is Shazia Mirza. At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s license”. This is not powerless humour.