Over on Telegraph Blogs today, Jenny McCartney is attacking a report on ‘Benevolent Sexism’, which basically entails very minor acts of goodwill that could still be construed as sexist.
McCartney’s problem is specifically centred around the following examples:
[C]alling women “girls” but not men “boys”; believing that women should be cherished and protected by men; helping a woman choose a laptop computer in the belief that it’s not the sort of task for which her gender is suited; and complimenting a woman on cooking or looking after children well because that is behaviour especially suited to a woman.
This is because some women do indeed enjoy feeling protected by male partners, need advice when it comes to technology, love cooking and particularly appreciate praise when they put effort into it. The tension comes when those difficult women who are perfectly happy and secure without ‘protection’, are technology lovers, and who barely know how to operate a spoon are thrown into the mix. For keen feminist observers of social mores, it’s a contentious area.
Gender associations over cooking, for example, are declining as more men take on domestic duties and enjoy creating dishes for their partners, fuelled in part by the images of male celebrity chefs whipping up complex meals with precision, skill, and lots of big macho knives so they don’t get mistaken for Nigella. Stay-at-home-Dads are challenging notions that children “need” a mother at home in order to grow up to be a functional human being, and these fathers would probably appreciate having their child-rearing skills admired too.
The problem with trying to make rules in identity politics is that these preferences are absolutely individual, even if they can be influenced by class, education, race, and nationality. If 60% of British women like having the door held open for them by men, do you knowingly annoy the other 40% in an effort to please the majority?
The way I draw the line personally is if someone feels it is appropriate to comment on my own body or behaviour as a complete stranger, and expects me to agree with them without knowing my own views on these topics. A man patted me on the shoulder yesterday and said “you should eat more, love”, soon after he had said I had probably “planned “ a marriage to my boyfriend because women are always waiting to “trap” men.
As he chuckled away, I wondered what he would have thought if I had seen it fit to comment on his obscene paunch, clearly miserable wife, and generally hideous attitude. In his mind it was a joke, and he was abstractly concerned (why?) about my weight. He shouldn’t have said anything, even if he had these thoughts, but he had no way of envisaging me as reacting to them negatively. This was a form of benevolent sexism, and it made me furious.
However, if a male friend, out of concern, asked me if I was eating enough, I would have had no problem engaging in that conversation (and vice versa with him), as long as it wasn’t an order of some kind to stuff myself.
Benevolent sexism is therefore as unavoidable as the offence taken to it. So what can we do about it? Don’t make comments on another’s gender/race/class until you know how comfortable they are discussing those issues? Or is that exactly the kind of PC rule that stifles freedom of expression and humour? I think so-called ‘benevolent sexism’ is corrosive to public discourse (“calm down, dear”) but beyond a strong programme of sensitivity to these issues taught in schools, it is less obvious how to manage a comment or action that one woman could find funny while another greets it with outrage.
At least there are some aspects of sexism on which we can (almost) all agree. To contrast with these bourgeois preoccupations of detail, McCartney lists some extreme examples of practices and crimes that most in Britain believe to be degrading, misogynistic, or at the very least problematic.
[T]he prevalence of female circumcision and its attendant health miseries; child marriage; the enforced wearing of the burqa; the trafficking and use of women for prostitution; the prevalence of rape as a weapon of war; and the proliferation of images of extreme sexual violence in films and on the Internet.
There is a point at which relativity in the form of tolerance must end, and the ‘absolute’ rights of each person take precedent, usually referred to as ‘human’ rights. Offence to doors held open and cakes left uncomplimented are a little more difficult to police.
