Base Instincts
The more I think about what happened to Angela Rayner this week, the more livid I get. In case you missed it, the Mail on Sunday published a story about the Deputy of the Opposition, claiming that Tory MPs believe she tries to distract the Prime Minister during debates by crossing her legs. This is apparently one of their favourite little jokes.
This story has stirred up a lot of things for me, as I know it has for many women who have been on the end of crap like this. It took me back to a time many years ago, when I was Marketing Director of the P&G Beauty Care in the UK. It was our big annual Sales Meeting and, which was a fancy black tie do in a lovely location and so we were all in our best party outfits. Over welcome cocktails I was talking with one of the Sales Directors and he chose to tell me that ‘I always wondered how you had got to such a senior level so quickly, but now I have seen you in that dress I understand.’
With one sentence, he made me feel entirely diminished. I was a Marketing Director in one of the best companies in the world. I was one of the fastest people there to have reached that level. I was running a billion dollar business. But in this man’s mind (and who knows who else’s), this was nothing to do with my intelligence, my Cambridge University degree, my hard work, my leadership, my Brand-Building expertise. It was because I looked good in a black dress.
What makes a man say these things about women? Is it, as some believe, a deliberate attempt to diminish our achievements and make us smaller because they and their masculinity is threatened by a woman who is competing with, or even outdoing them? Or is it simply that, at a very base level, men still instinctively see women as sex objects above all things and are unable to see beyond this one dimensional stereotype of us? It is hardly surprising if they do, given how much more likely we still are to see women in the bedroom (or kitchen) than in leadership roles - in the media and in the real world.
What I do know is that if you ask every successful woman you know, most will be able to tell you a story like Angela Rayner’s. And they will tell you how upsetting it was, that it made them question themselves and their legitimacy and even made them change how they behaved, or what they wore in the presence of men at work. That it succeeded, at least for a while, in making them ‘less’ than they were.
But for me there is one good thing about this story. This stuff is happening to women every day, uncommented on and unnoticed - but thanks to the Mail on Sunday and a misogynistic politician we have a real live example of it that has very much been noticed and commented on. It has created a new level of awareness and all the good, decent men out there are conscious of and appalled by the invisible forces of sexism in a way they were not before. And, ultimately, we need good men to be aware and engaged if we are ever going to change the role women play in this world.
I’m just sorry that Angela had to pay the price in this example. Every woman who has had her success attributed to her body not her brain knows how she feels and stands with her.