Everyday Sexism

Laura Bates

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781471131585
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

'If Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Womanis the fun-filled manual for female survival in the 21st century, everyday sexism is its more politicised sister' (Independent on Sunday).After experiencing a series of escalating sexist incidents, Laura Bates started theeveryday sexism projectand has gone on to write 'a pioneering analysis of modern day misogyny' (Telegraph).After an astounding response from the wide range of stories that came pouring in from all over the world, the project quickly became one of the biggest social media success stories of the internet. From being harassed and wolf-whistled at on the street, to discrimination in the workplace and serious sexual assault, it is clear that sexism had become normalised. But Bates inspires women to lead a real change and writes this 'extremely powerful book that could, and should, win hearts and minds right across the spectrum' (Financial Times). Often shocking, sometimes amusing and always poignant, everyday sexism is a protest against inequality and a manifesto for change. It's 'a game-changing book, a must-read for every woman' (Cosmopolitan).'Admirable and culturally transferable. "A storm is coming, " writes Bates. After reading this book you'll hope so' (Independent).Welcome to the fourth wave of feminism.

Vital Statistics

After experiencing workplace sexual harassment only 27 per cent of women reported it to someone senior
Slater & Gordon, 2013

Of women seriously sexually assaulted during their time at university, only 4 per cent reported it to their higher-education institution and only 10 per cent to the police
National Union of Students (NUS), Hidden Marks survey, 2010

50 per cent of those students seriously sexually assaulted who didn’t report it said it was because they felt ashamed or embarrassed
NUS, Hidden Marks survey, 2010

90 per cent of victims of the most serious sexual offences know the perpetrator
Ministry of Justice, Home Office & Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2013

Only 15 per cent of female victims of the most serious sexual offences reported it to the police
Ministry of Justice, Home Office & ONS, 2013

28 per cent of women who are the victims of the most serious sexual offences never tell anybody about it
Ministry of Justice, Home Office & ONS, 2013

It’s something I just always accepted as a reality since I was young. No one told me that it wasn’t my fault or that I could/should speak up. I was told to be passive and not to stir things up.

Being told I have no sense of humour when comments are made about my breasts, vagina or behind.

I joined a dating site. Got one message instantly. ‘I’d pay to ram you up the ass.’ And guess what his excuse was when I argued with him? ‘Chill out love, it’s just banter.’ It really isn’t.

Dismissal of arguments or thoughts because ‘she’s just pms-ing’ or hormonal.

I was raped by 2 men at the age of 14 and my family normalized it by ignoring it … I was confused … I was sure it was wrong.

Called a prude for objecting to Porn Fridays where female colleagues’ faces were photo-shopped onto porn pics.

Sexism is an invisible problem. This is partly because it’s so often manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator. When you’re shouted at in a deserted street late at night. When a senior colleague with wandering hands corners you in the empty copy room. When a man presses his erection into your back on a tube so crowded nobody could possibly see what’s going on. When a car slows down as you walk home from school and the driver asks you for a blowjob then pulls away up the road as smoothly and silently as he arrived. When your boss casually mentions as she passes you on the stairs that you need to arrive with a lower-cut top and more make-up on tomorrow if you want to keep your job. When a pair of hands moves you aside in the queue for the bar and slides down to grope and feel your bottom. Moments that slip like beads onto an endless string to form a necklace that only you can feel the weight of. It can drag you down without another person ever witnessing a single thing.

It’s not easy to take something invisible and make people start to talk about it. There’s a lot of wariness and caution at first – people sneakily giving each other the side-eye because they don’t want to be the one to admit they see it if everyone else is going to carry on pretending not to. Nobody wants to be that guy. So at best the person who’s experienced the sexism is left jumping up and down with their arms in the air pointing out the patently obvious, while everybody else scratches their chins and gazes earnestly into the middle distance.

At worst the victim doesn’t say anything either.

In this, sexism is a bit like climate change. Human beings tend to cling to convenient obliviousness – ‘I haven’t seen it, so it can’t really exist!’ – in spite of embarrassing, burgeoning bodies of evidence to the contrary. In order for this comfortable bliss of ignorance to be maintained, it follows that any flagging up of the problem will be met with denial: so naturally you get accusations of lying, or exaggeration. These aren’t always intentionally unkind – I think they’re as often motivated by a horrified inability to accept the severity of the problem as by a deliberate attempt at dismissal.

But, whatever the motive, such reactions come as a secondary blow on top of the initial injurious experience. As girls grow up, these responses start to impact on their own judgement of situations – they learn not to trust themselves and not to make a fuss. Society teaches them that they don’t have the right to complain. One way or another, women are silenced.

One girl who wrote to the Everyday Sexism Project described just such a ‘learning experience’:

▶ When walking to a friend’s house on Saturday at about 6.30pm, two drunk men started following me. One grabbed my hair and said ‘you are too pretty to be out alone’ – they had been shouting at me for the last 100m. I felt violated and arrived shaking. I told my boyfriend the next day; he said my ‘story’ was unlikely as I was just being attention seeking. I began to feel like I myself was exaggerating and should just remain quiet. We are both 15.

Disbelief is the first great silencer.

The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, an unacknowledged problem we don’t discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.

The past year alone has given us some stonking high-profile examples. During this time the Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko helpfully announced that in his profession men will always be superior because orchestras are distracted by a ‘cute girl on a podium’ and German artist Georg Baselitz declared that ‘Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.’ Meanwhile London Mayor Boris Johnson ‘joked’ that women only go to university because ‘they’ve got to find men to marry’ (hilarious, no?) and the Canadian literature professor and author David Gilmour blithely revealed that he’s simply ‘not interested in teaching books by women’. (I expect Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood could set him straight on their relevance, were they not so busy winning more awards than Gilmour has ever managed to scrape nominations for.)

In November 2012 Labour MP Austin Mitchell directed a sexist tirade at his former colleague Louise Mensch after she disagreed in an interview with something her husband had said. In a message that appeared on his Facebook and Twitter pages as well as his official website, Mitchell wrote: ‘Shut up Menschkin. A good wife doesn’t disagree with her master in public and a good little girl doesn’t lie about why she quit politics.’ He later showed his great amusement at the ensuing public anger, first telling those who protested to ‘Calm down, dears’, and later asking: ‘Has the all-clear siren gone? Has the Menschivick bombardment stopped?’

Clearly none of these men feared repercussions. In fact Mitchell’s ‘Calm down, dears’ just couched his ‘prejudiced and proud’ stance firmly within the political context of a prime minister who publicly silenced a female MP with the same words the previous year.

Against such a backdrop it’s little wonder other politicians feel so confident wearing their bigotry like a badge of honour.

From highbrow to lowbrow these attitudes are rife across the board of celebrity. In the same week as Mitchell’s outburst, and with the earnest air of a Radio 4 consumer phone-in about synthetic versus feather duvets, BBC Radio Cumbria produced a segment that cleverly managed to combine both sexism and racism, asking: ‘If you could have a Filipino woman, why would you want a Cumbrian one?’

In 2012 US radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh managed to keep his job and his show despite launching a misogynistic barrage of abuse at law student Sandra Fluke, whose only ‘crime’ was to be invited to testify to Congress on the importance of including contraceptive coverage in health-insurance plans. Limbaugh attacked her repeatedly on air, labelling her a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute’, suggesting that her parents should be ashamed of her and saying she was ‘having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk’. With all the unimaginative persistence of a dog with a chew toy, he seemed unable to drop the subject – later adding: ‘If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.’

Over in Hollywood actor Seth MacFarlane decided that the best possible way to celebrate the combined talents of actresses attending the 2013 Oscars ceremony was to sing a song entitled ‘We Saw Your Boobs’. (No prizes for guessing what it was about.) Apparently the fact that several of the breast-baring scenes he gleefully referenced explored rape or abuse passed MacFarlane by. (As did, it seems, the abilities and, you know, humanity of the women themselves.) That this was presented as a hilarious piece of entertainment at one of the most widely watched media events of the year speaks volumes.

Back in the UK, television critic (and noted Adonis) A. A. Gill was busy veering into wildly irrelevant sexism in his review of Meet the Romans, a series presented by Cambridge Classics professor Mary Beard. Rather than critiquing Beard’s credentials or presenting skills he chose to condemn her looks and style, branding her ‘too ugly for TV’ and suggesting that she ‘should be kept away from cameras altogether’. In a column for the Daily Mail Beard responded with the dry observation that Gill had ‘mistaken prejudice for being witty’ – which excellent riposte frustratingly gave rise to the common excuse that sexism isn’t a problem because ‘women can handle it’. Yes, some can, but the point is that they shouldn’t have to! (In this instance who knows what incisive historical revelations would have occupied that week’s column had Beard not been forced to waste her time responding to Gill’s puerile snot-flicking?)

During the London Olympics the Telegraph’s Andrew Brown pronounced a breathtakingly patronizing and pompous censure on the female athletes daring to represent their country in the martial arts. ‘I realize this will probably sound appallingly sexist,’ he wrote, and then carried on regardless. ‘It’s disturbing to watch these girls beat each other up…’ – his condescension was spectacularly misplaced when you consider how easily the ‘soft limbs’ he was wringing his hands over could have taught him a swift lesson about respect for equal rights had he strayed into the Olympic arena.

In each of these situations – which together represent just a tiny sample from an extensive daily stream – we have women being openly lambasted, dismissed or objectified on the simple basis of their gender. Nothing more. From our politicians to our national broadcasting corporation, from the biggest media event in the world to the most famous sporting contest. If one were to substitute another form of prejudice, on the grounds of race, sexuality, or class, many of these situations would have become absolutely outrageous, or never would have been allowed to happen in the first place. (Except on Radio Cumbria, of course, where it seems anything goes.) Had Gill suggested that somebody should be kept away from television screens on the grounds of homophobic prejudice, for example, it’s difficult to imagine the paper allowing his article to go to print. Had MacFarlane written a song in which the contribution of black actors was reduced to the colour of their skin, would the Academy have allowed him to perform it? It’s difficult to imagine.

This is not to suggest for even a moment that such other forms of discrimination aren’t still an enormous problem, or that sexism is in any way worse or more important. But sexism does seem to occupy a uniquely acceptable position when it comes to public discourse, with a general willingness to laugh and ignore it rather than define it as the prejudice it is. And this makes it particularly difficult to fight, allowing objectors to be ridiculed and dismissed as ‘overreacting’ while perpetrators like Mitchell can take up cowardly defences behind the poor shield of ‘humour’ or ‘irony’. Consider, as a case in point, the fate of his contemporary and namesake Andrew Mitchell, who was forced to resign from his position as Chief Whip at around the same time amidst allegations (denied by him) that he called policemen ‘plebs’, voicing offensive class prejudice.

One woman really said it all:

▶ It’s amazing that many of us feel so resigned to something which if directed at any other group of people would be considered very offensive.

So, women are silenced both by the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem. And perhaps the most powerful evidence of all for the public acceptance of sexism is the ever-growing number of major daytime television programmes taking issues around women’s safety and assault as topics for ‘debate’.

The very fact that it is necessary in 2013 to explain why it’s not OK to publicly debate whether or not women are ‘asking’ for sexual assault is mindboggling. Yet the refrain has become so common that it seems difficult to open a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing the issue being discussed, as if it is a perfectly valid question with interesting points to be made both for and against.

In February 2013 the ITV morning show Daybreak, with an average of 800,000 viewers, ran a segment asking ‘Are women who get drunk and flirt to blame if they get attacked?’ The discussion was introduced with: ‘Some of you think so … others vehemently disagree…’ Then: ‘Keep your thoughts coming in – it’s really interesting to hear what you think.’

The words ‘horrifying’, ‘depressing’ or ‘painful’ would have better described what it was actually like to hear what some of the Daybreak viewers thought. Comments were aired from interviewees on both sides of the debate, including one young man who said that ‘if you want to be treated with respect, you’ve got to dress wit...