Friday 14 May 2010

A Tory wet dream of women in politics: for Morning Star

Column out today! For the Morning Star! Which is a great paper that everyone should read!

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It's hard to decide what aspect of Britain's new centre-right government is more insulting to women. Is it the dramatic drop in the number of people with female bodies holding positions of power? Is it the Conservatives' notion that one can best support "families" by encouraging women to marry and leave the workplace? Or is it the sudden arrival of Theresa May MP as the most powerful woman in the country?

The appointment of the former Conservative chairwoman as Home Secretary was an 11th-hour decision taken by the men brokering the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, who this week promised the country a "new politics" - but there's nothing new about a Cabinet stuffed with rich, right-wing public schoolboys.

Media outlets have already been keen to stress that "shoe fan" May "is better known for wearing distinctive shoes than any pronouncements about crime," as the Telegraph put it on Wednesday.

The British press has long nursed a perverse fascination with the feet of Conservative women, with May's leopard-print kitten heels making headlines at the 2002 Tory conference and, this year, many column inches devoted to the perfect toes of Samantha Cameron. If this is how powerful women are supposed to look and behave it's rather galling that the £150 bribe offered by the Conservatives to "reward marriage" will barely be enough to keep any self-respecting Tory housewife in shoes for a month.

The focus on fashion rather than policy shores up an antiquated vision of a woman's place in politics.

"It's a shame that the Telegraph felt the need to comment on Theresa May's fondness for designer shoes," said feminist activist Laura M. "I suppose they felt they had to remind everyone that she was a woman.

"Female politicians' bodies and clothes are subject to pervasive scrutiny that men, who only have to decide what colour tie to wear, can barely imagine," she explained.

"Drawing attention to stereotypically 'female' personal interests - which May is perfectly entitled to pursue - works to make readers subconsciously associate her with shallowness and frivolity."

Tory MP Nadine Dorries, the expenses cheat and tub-thumping anti-choice activist of the Christian right, has made public statements about how much she loves her stilettos, dubbing herself the "Bridget Jones of Westminster." Unfortunately, Dorries - like May - is anything but an airhead. Both pursue a punishingly pro-market programme, both have actively supported motions to reduce the time limit on legal abortion and neither is a friend to the majority of women in Britain, however many lovely shoes they own.

May's new role as Minister for Women and Equality will no longer be a full-time job as it has been under Labour. This may be just as well, as May has voted against equality legislation 18 times since 1998, is an opponent of a woman's right to choose and has already been condemned by leading LGBT organisations for her shameful record on gay rights.

David Henry of OutRage! told Pink News that May was "the wrong person for the job," saying that "she's opposed almost every gay rights measure."

While May voted with the Conservative whip on civil partnerships, she absented herself for the votes that led to the Gender Recognition Act and has a worse record on votes protecting women and LGBT people from abuse than Chris Grayling, who was turned down for the post of Home Secretary after being perceived as "too homophobic."

This, then, is the underlying assumption of the Conservative approach to equality and women's rights, that tokenism will suffice, that the equalities agenda can be comprehensively shelved by handing it to a woman, any woman, no matter how bigoted, thuggish and illiberal. The mere fact of May's femaleness as relentlessly proven by her indulgence in a certain species of consumer femininity is seen to cover all bases.

This is why the role of women in politics will never be just a numbers game, shocking though it is that the Conservative party in parliament and the coalition Cabinet are both over four-fifths male. Merely putting female bodies and gorgeous shoes in places of liminal power will never automatically equate to empowering women and minorities within or beyond Westminster.

May is a tokenist Tory wet dream of women in politics, and not just because there's only one of her at the top table. Posh, spiky-heeled and stern with a staggeringly intolerant agenda, she bespeaks a type of kinky discipline that just longs to kick naughty little boys and girls into shape and make us behave. Media focus on the bad Thatcher drag and high-heel evangelism of the few women promoted by the new regime conceals a brutally intolerant moral agenda.

9 comments:

  1. "Minister for Women and Equality" frankly as a Tory voter and party member I'm disgusted they're even bothering to keep this position. It's exactly the kind of enforced (in)equality, neo-Socialist Commissar trash that typifed the "Nu" Labour regime. All attempts at enforced equality are by their very nature unequal and discriminatory. Heaven forbid white, heterosexual Christian men and women should have any say in anything, we only make up the majority of the population (just about these days unfortunatly).

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  2. Good article - especially for pointing out that 'It's the ideology, stupid'. Labour have five years to get their house in order regarding policies as well as numbers. On the other hand, 'right-wing women' does not equal 'kinky dominatrix' - I thought we'd killed off that lazy cliché with Sarah Palin, let alone Thatcher.

    [redpesto]

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  3. Nice work Laurie. What more can be said? The only hope is that Lynne Featherstone and Sarah Teather are also in May's department. It's possible that the new Home Secretary will become so taken up with deporting asylum seekers and so on that the equality agenda might actually move more into the hands of people better able to understand it. We can hope anyway.

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  4. This is a complicated one. May is certainly an unfortunate choice for Home Secretary - but she's hardly the devil incarnate. Is she as reactionary as, say, David Blunkett was? No. Is she on the same planet as the worst Home Secretary in living memory, Michael Howard? Not in my view. May, after all, was the figure who first branded the Tories as the "nasty party".

    Turning to the lack of women in the Cabinet: categorically, this is the worst thing about the coalition by some distance. But then, surely a large part of the reason for the lack of women - and especially, brilliant women - on any of the frontbenches during the campaign is that British politics has been so adversarial and so macho for so long. The coalition has a real chance of changing that, maybe even for good; and if that happens, surely many more women will rise to the top as a result.

    Then there's the question of whether you want women in Cabinet for their own sake, or because they're good enough. Had Julia Goldsworthy held onto her seat, she would've been; but she lost it by a fraction. Sarah Teather may be able to expect promotion into the Cabinet by the middle of the Parliament: I certainly hope so, anyway. But Jo mentions Lynne Featherstone: and the thing is, while the Lib Dems frequently wheeled her out during the campaign, what comes out of her mouth is incoherent and deeply underwhelming. Given the electorate will naturally have been looking for evidence of a strong team supporting Clegg and Cable, I regard this as a serious misjudgement of the campaign: Featherstone's heart is very much in the right place, but she simply isn't up to it.

    Everyone in politics has to do far more to develop a House of Commons, political parties and government fully representative of the society we live in. But promoting women for its own sake isn't the answer - and will actually undermine the cause altogether. Politics needs to change; more women need to want to become involved. But that will all take time: and the emphasis must always be on meritocracy, not reverse discrimination.

    One last thing. I always recoil when Tories talk about the 'family'; because as we all know, there are many, many causes behind family breakdown in this country, a good deal of them consequences of Thatcher. But the left doesn't have all the answers on this either. Strong, loving, nurturing families are CRUCIAL in any society; and much of the West should be ashamed by how hard it makes both parents work, how oblivious it is to work/life balance, how much pressure it puts children under, how disgracefully it treats its old. Many people from my generation come from troubled, dysfunctional backgrounds in which their families broke apart; and we all need to look at why this is, and come up with real, deep rooted substantive policies to ensure it's less likely to happen in the future.

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  5. Hang on...why is 'Women and Equality' in the Home Office and not, say, Justice?

    Shaun...I hear what you're saying about 'macho and adversarial politics', but I no longer buy into the 'feminisation of Parliament' argument, especially as The Nick and Dave Show is desperately trying to prove that coalition politics is The New Black. With enough female politicians, there'll plenty who want an adversarial barney as want to collaborate: the trouble is getting enough in there to make that happen.

    [redpesto]

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  6. I have been accused of all sorts of nonsense by Mr Divine, you were right about him all along.

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  7. I call Poe's law on Mr Moran above, seems like a blatant troll but the comment is sufficiently batshit that it just might be sincere.

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