The Other F Word

Last weekend there was a fashion spread in the weekend paper which showed pretty young things with blank looks lying on beds attempting seduction. Admittedly there is nothing new with being presented with this dull, soulless stereotype but it was more the fact that these models were wearing business attire that aroused the f word within me. The fact that male models in business suits are shown looking professional, busy, and important and women are displayed as nothing more than a bit of skirt in an office, a whore disguised in corporate clothing, makes my blood boil. The image of these women wouldn’t have even raised an eyebrow from most readers and certainly didn’t from the female editor of the magazine, but this in itself is the most heart breaking part of it all. The practice of showing women as less is so normalised in our society we barely even notice it, that is until the next young girl defines herself with all these undermined, sneaky messages that sets her up to be on that constant conveyor belt of expecting less than she deserves. Even when I was a kid I had the understanding that feminism was a dirty word and something that was best not to be associated with as I am born into a generation that suffered the afterthought of a feminist movement that went too far. Unfortunately change swings like a pendulum and must always swing as far from the left as it can in order to eventually swing back into some sort of right. However this never happened and perhaps true change never does in any form in must take. Perhaps all we can hope for is the pretence and the flimsy words on paper in law books that allows us to keep the appearance that change has happened. Magazine shoots like these are a tiny drop in a whole ocean of wrongs as is the collage of this constant confirmation that women are less that makes the belief so strong and unbreakable. Unfortunately it is so ingrained in the female species that it often begins and ends with us and is passed on like a poisoned seed into the belly and mind of each daughter we raise. It did not surprise me that it was a female editor of this magazine, as much as it didn’t surprise me that this editor often writes powerfully for the cause of women, as we are so blinded by the images fed to us we are unsure whether to slay or support the monster we in fact help create. No wonder young girls are confused when they are faced with media saturation of sex and servitude and news articles demonising female leaders like they have no business to be there. No wonder why no one even blinked an eye when those young models lay on beds wearing clothes that are meant to suggest professionalism. No wonder why women in the workplaces turn against and take advantage of women that choose the natural path of becoming mothers. No wonder why the birth rate is dropping when women who choose to have children are seen as displaying selfish acts of inconvenience that simply further soil the shaky reputation of a woman’s place in the workforce. We are turning against each other, we are drowning our fellow gender in the struggle to be taken seriously in a “man’s world”. We are opening the Q weekend and absorbing through our pores the very ideas that are destroying us. This may seem over the top and some may even say that we need to look at the treatment of women in the third and developing world to realise how far we have progressed. Some may even point at all the female heads of state we now have to show how far the feminist movement has moved us forward. It certainly looks like change has happened, it certainly appears that way. Then again it is 2013 and it was only last weekend that I saw pretty young things pouting on a bed modelling corporate clothing.