Emma Ward works for an addiction charity. She is a welcome guest writer for Progressive Women
At the Progressive Women event last year ‘Where are the women?’, female MPs’ negative portrayal in the media was cited repeatedly as one of the main barriers to women reaching the top levels in politics. I was struck at this event by the number of confident, articulate and capable women who said that they would not consider becoming an MP because of the scrutiny they would expect to experience about their appearance and lifestyle choices in the press. The ‘Women in Parliament’ All Party Parliamentary Group was recently formed to try and get more women into parliament and last week I optimistically attended their first event, ‘The media: a female politician’s worst enemy?’. It was a heated affair at times, with the main point of contention being whether we should care or not about female politicians’ treatment by the media. Not wanting to fall into cliché cat fighting comparisons, I have picked out what I felt were the strongest arguments.
Louise Mensch MP highlighted the findings of the recent study by Kira Cochrane, ‘Women’s representation in media: who’s running the show?. Louise argued that if women were not given exposure or value in the media as opinion holders this would result in women having less power and influence in politics generally. Sophy Ridge, political correspondent for Sky News agreed and pointed out that it seemed like more than a coincidence that both the average percentage of female reporters and politicians compared to their male counterparts were both 22%.
Emma Reynolds MP relayed a story about a female MP who was written about in a tabloid because they claimed she had revealed too much cleavage in the Commons, ignoring any of the contributions that she had made to the debate that day. Angela Bray MP and some of the media panel countered that both David Cameron and Nick Clegg also had their appearance written about in the press, but Emma insisted that this was not where their coverage ends, in comparison to many female MPs.
Janet Street Porter was clear that female politicians got the media they deserved. Janet was scathing about female MPs, like Louise Mensch MP, posing in GQ magazine, and she went on to argue that female MPs simply did not understand or use the media to their advantage. In Sophy’s experience as a journalist, male MPs approached the media with much more confidence compared to female MPs. She shared a particularly elucidating anecdote about a male politician who phoned into the producer of a political show on a weekly basis offering to appear. Sophy said that she had never heard of a female MP doing the same thing, and mores the pity.
I think one of the biggest mistakes that we can make in feminism is to make assumptions about what other women think and want. I made this mistake when I assumed that I would agree with all the female Labour MPs, disagree with all the female Conservative MPs, and that everyone would think that talking about female MPs’ breasts was wrong. None of these things transpired. Parts of the media reinforce this belief when it lumps all female MPs together as a homogenous group, regardless of their politics. Some MPs and feminists fall into this trap when they assume that all women hate Page 3 and pornography (we don’t). I personally think that we are all missing a trick if we don’t realise that everyone is human, and how we are spoken about has an effect on our behaviour. When the media focuses more on how female MPs look than what they say, it has political and social consequence for us all. Drawing attention to female MPs’ cleavages or ridiculing their dress sense isn’t making them human, it is belittling and bullying both them, and the idea that women deserve to have an equal say in how this country is run.
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Who is the enemy?”Woman is worst to her own”.Generally,we are our own worst enemy.The first thing to overcome is your self,or what you imagine to be your self.The next step is to examine your path,what you ought to do with your life,who and what you ought to be.If you want to be a feminist and fill in for yourself what that means,fine.Yet,you might be kidding yourself.The essence of feminism is directly contradicted by the essence of Patriarchy.Patriarchy is on the way out.’Feminists’ who ride the patriarchal gravy train are hitched to the old paradigm.Close your ears and your minds,that’s your choice,fine.It’s a free world.That may be your problem.