Fausterella

There’s your basic sexism, the “women are just not as good as men” type. And then there are the two very slightly less obvious sexism types, which often don’t even sound that bad: the “men and women are different but equal” type, and the “women used to be oppressed but they aren’t any more” type. (Confusingly, even though these three variations contradict each other, many sexists still cheerfully use whichever version suits their argument best at the time.)

This isn’t a long in-depth article about sexism: it’s too dauntingly huge a subject, and there’s already loads written about it. It’s just that a couple of news items, about women and work, struck me over the last few weeks.

Firstly, the one about the dress code at Harrods. A woman has claimed she was forced out of her job because she wouldn’t wear make up. That may sound unlikely, but in fact Harrods apparently has a two-page long dress code for its female employees which includes a directive to wear “Full makeup at all time: base, blusher, full eyes (not too heavy), lipstick, lip liner and gloss are worn at all time and maintained discreetly.”

This isn’t a trivial thing to demand. It’s expensive to afford that level of daily make up, it takes a while to apply it, and you need a level of skill. I for one would turn down a job that made me wear three different types of stuff on my lips, and I’ve never even been certain what base is (is it the same as foundation?). Moreover, as I saw mentioned in a discussion on this story, it’s far from being a fashionable look. And of course it doesn’t apply to the male employees. In fact, if they tried to wear something similar they’d probably find themselves dismissed too.

The second story is that Walmart has successfully avoided allegations of “a companywide discriminatory pay and promotion policy” against women because women were not seen as a suitably coherent group to bring the claim. The Guardian quotes some of Walmart’s practices: holding managers’ meetings in Hooters, referring to women workers as “Janie Qs”, paying women less than male workers in every job classification in every region. And one plaintiff was told that Walmart pays men more because “they have families to support”.

Which brings us neatly to the third story: an Italian engineering firm has recently been forced to make redundancies, and has selected only women for redundancy. Why? Well, a union official quoted the company as saying: “We are firing the women so they can stay at home and look after the children. In any case, what they bring in is a second income.”

Now this is your first and most obvious type of sexism, but the comments on the story fall more into the “different but equal” camp, and illustrate why “different but equal” strongly tends to turn into “different and not really equal at all”. (Do I even need to mention the many racism-based examples of this? No? Good.)

Two comments from the Guardian story about the Italian firm:

- Don’t get me wrong of course men and women are equal, but the idea of the man bringing home the bacon and the women taking care of the kids and the home seems natural to me.

- I believe in equal pay for equal work, but the mother is the ONLY person able to rear the child properly.

So there we go. We can have blatant sexism or we can have pretend equality that isn’t. Still, at least if anyone tries Sexism Trope No 3 – denial – they can be pointed at these stories and it might keep them quiet for a minute or two.

On the way to work today I got shouted at by a man leaning out of a van. 

Now, this was a tiny and brief incident and I’m not particularly bothered by it as such – that is, I’m offended but I’m not upset. I find it interesting, though, because it’s an example of both bad behaviour and misogyny in its purest form. Here’s why:

- I didn’t catch most of what was shouted but from what I did catch, it was insulting, and there is no way that the guy in the van would have shouted it to a male stranger. 

- Men, when asked about the habit of addressing female strangers with comments about their appearance, will often claim that the women ought to be flattered. This is stupid, but in this case it clearly doesn’t apply anyway. I wasn’t meant to be flattered; I was being insulted. 

- The phrase ‘asking for it’ is often used in these situations or more serious ones. Just to be clear, the only time you should interpret anyone as asking for anything is when you literally hear them making a request. But even apart from that, I am currently wearing very boring clothes with no skin revealed, and I’m average-looking and don’t have any make-up on. Even if the man had been complimenting me, you really couldn’t say I’d invited it even in the most wild of sexist dreams. 

- At the time it happened I was walking down a street – the street next to the one I live in – at 8am, on the way to the train station to go to work. I was paying no attention to the van. The men in it were probably also on their way to work, and not drunk. The decision to briefly harass me was presumably taken, therefore, in a spirit of rationality. The man who shouted saw me walking along and decided on the spur of the moment that insulting a woman he had never met would be funny. Or perhaps that I needed to be informed that I wasn’t attractive to him, just in case I was wondering. Is the sight of a woman you don’t fancy perhaps threatening in some way, or offensive? I find it hard to empathise, as I encounter people I don’t fancy all the time and never feel the urge to inform them of the fact unless they utter the phrase “Do you fancy me?”

- Women are judged by their appearance all the time and taught that how they look is what really matters. So clearly this insult was intended to hurt. It was intended to devalue me, consciously or not. The assumption behind it was that any other attributes I might have were irrelevant in the face of, well, my face. 

So mostly I’d like to know what the man himself would say if asked why he shouts insults at women. (I’d bet large amounts of money I’m not the only one.) I genuinely can’t think what his considered answer would be.