A recent issue of Newsweek posed the question of what women want. On the cover. Cleverly written in red lipstick, with the tube of lipstick standing at the bottom of the page.
So…first thing? We don’t want to have a valid and pressing issue articulated for us in the form of cosmetics. That’s first. Oh, did it sell copies of the magazine? Maybe. Maybe someone thought it was a special section on garter belts and the new black. But mostly, I found it to be silly.
Recently, though, most of what the mass media is reporting about what women want seems silly to me. We go round and round about the same issues over and over, whether it is sexist to question a vice presidential candidate about her family priorities when we don’t ask the male candidates the same thing, whether the mommy gap is the cause for pay inequity when men don’t take maternity leave and ask for time away to breastfeed.
I haven’t noticed anyone asking whether or not those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling mean anything more than an interesting new visual diversion for the people who still need to crane their necks and use binoculars to see anything different because that ceiling is so damned far above our heads.
The point is this: we keep hearing “What do women want” and not “What do women need?” and it is as though we’re saying those two are the same thing. Women want different things. But what women NEED is something I don’t think is open to equivocation. We need to be paid fairly for work we do that is being compensated differently for men. We need to be able to support our families. We need to be able to live in a safe society, and we need to be taken seriously.
What do we want? I don’t know–shoes? Nobel prizes? Three days off with no phones ringing and the ability to pee without a toddler watching? Chocolate? The wants–the wants are the list of items, the minutiae that generalize and trivialize our gender to the point that our needs become jokes. “Oh, she’s just having her period, that’s why she’s so grouchy. Get her some Dove bars and Midol and let’s get back to business.”
There are women who go to the doctor because they feel that something is wrong and the physician dismisses her fears as hormonal, missing the cancer that is just starting. The heart attack waiting in the wings. The brain tumor dismissed as “stress headaches.”
There are women who live in abusive relationships, who talk to pastors or police officers, who are told in effect “Just don’t piss him off and you’ll be fine. Lighten up a little.” There are women who cannot afford to pay the rent, who can’t save for college for their children, because they are paid 80 cents for each dollar a man in the same position would make.
But magazines trivialize it all by addressing these issues on page 63 right before the style section on page 64 and right after the two page ad for Viagra on pages 61 and 62. They quote either Gloria Steinem or Phyllis Schlafly, run photos of the airbrushed actresses on “Desperate Housewives” and write up headlines about how groundbreaking “Sex and the City” was in making women more real.
Real?
I’ll tell you what is real. What is real is a guy sitting across from me in my office, his cookie-duster mustache twitching, handing me a ridiculous offer on a listing and saying “I can walk you through it if you don’t understand, gal.” What is real is standing by a chain link fence and watching a college student on minimum wage talk on a cell phone to her friends while my daughter and the other children in the after-school program clamor for her attention. What is real is working one and a half full time jobs and going home and working another full time job, like millions and millions of other women, and then being told how grateful we should be for the advances that have been made in equality.
What women need is for the country to catch up to the progress we have made. What we need is to start taking ourselves seriously. We need to stop buying magazines that run four page spreads of Paris Hilton toting a tiny dog in a purse. We need to ask John McCain this: “Seriously? This? Her? Really? REALLY?”
This is not a screed about Sarah Palin, because that poor woman is not the problem. She’s just a symptom. When are we going to say that we refuse to accept the futility of the present and work together to make things better for ourselves and our daughters? When is it going to be okay for a woman to be intelligent, decisive and ambitious–and not be considered a bitch when a man with those attributes is considered a leader?
This is rambling and written off the cuff, so it’s not as polished as I would like. But in the words of my mother in law, “Just because I sound irrational does not invalidate my position.”
What I need and what I want are two different things. I need (not just for me, but for everyone): food, shelter, justice, equity, dignity and opportunity. I want all those things, too, but there are other things I want that can wait: writing a book and having it published. Going back to school. A new bathroom, straighter teeth, looser fitting waistbands.
I’m standing up today to tell everyone that I can compromise and wait on the optional things. But I have had it up to HERE with waiting for the essential things. Not just for me, but for all of us. We cannot settle for just enough. We can’t settle for a pat on the head, gal, and a promise that sometime real soon those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling will be more than just a metaphor.
At least, I can’t.
Stumble It!
This comment runneth over. It has turned into its own post. Sorry to hijack your blog, but …
It’s true that there have been advances made in equality; they just don’t go far enough. A large establishment’s pay practices became publicly known a few years back. When asked why its policy was to pay its male managers more than its female managers, the response from PR was that the men have families to support at home.
This is nonsensical! Equal pay for equal skill and equal work. Anything less is unacceptable. Furthermore, has it escaped this company’s attention that there are different family structures? Stay-at-home dads, single parents, same-sex relationships, etc., etc., etc. Why should the men make more than the women? There is no justifiable answer.
I work full-time. I’m in school full-time. And I’m a wife and mom, so I also work at home full-time. My schooling directly relates to my job and is designed to facilitate advancement. And as a student, I have an average in the high 80’s to low 90’s; I’ve also taken one scholarship so far and am aiming for more. So if I don’t get treated nice and paid appropriately, I become inclined to move on. Fortunately, my current employer has no gender bias issues of which I am aware, and so I’m good. But it hasn’t always been the case.
At another company, where I was denied advancement potential, they were pretty brazen about this. I had a male friend who applied for an opening on par with what I was doing. When I handed in his resume and gave him a glowing reference, I was told that they couldn’t hire him; he wouldn’t be happy because the role was clerical and a man would really be looking for something more advanced. Seriously! That’s what they said!!
Anyway, this is something of a hot button issue for me. And I’m irritated by the notion that Newsweek would put a cutesy lipstick drawing out there to try and drum up a female audience. As if they don’t already have one. And as if we’ll be all “Ooooh … look at the pretty colours … I wonder if they’ll tell me how to properly apply my make-up”. ‘Cause that’s what women really want. Obviously. Haven’t you seen that commercial with the vacuous model who announces to the world “What I really want is for my foundation to match my skin”. (World peace be damned!)
Okay. Enough ranting for today. Suffice it to say: I agree with you on this. I don’t know when it will ultimately be fixed. These things just seem to take a lot of time and a lot of work. But for now, I hope that you get fewer and fewer men trying to explain these difficult real estate deals to you, the poor little gal who’s clearly in over her head. Fatheads!
Sorry, one more thing I meant to discuss. Even in an academic setting, women get to deal with a fair bit of discrimination. You can refer to this old post, where the author of my Economics textbook made a delightful faux pas. I wonder what the author’s gender is, hmm?
And then I read this today, and it was DEAD-ON.
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/101202/
Wowzas, Mar … right on.
Well written, well said (and without being polished? Kudos!)
(can I call you Mar?)
(has your gray cloud of “overwhelmed” lifted at all?)
Hear, hear!!
I could not agree with you more.
It’s one reason that I’m glad I work in a union, where salaries are advertised and based on objective criteria — because I’ve worked in other places where it has been clear that all of my male colleagues made more money, because we all worked for male managers who thought it was just plain common sense that men should be the “breadwinners” in their families.
Good grief!
Maternity leave and parenting leave, part-time opportunities, alternative work schedules and telecommuting — these are all things that workplaces need to be doing for ALL of their employees. (That, and a candy jar…)
Have you read Are Men Necessary? It depressed me (to the point where I couldn’t finish it), but Maureen Dowd did a not ineffective job of pointing to the problems that women have perpetuated themselves. She talked about a mom’s club in L.A. where the women began their meeting with this: “Let’s go around the room and tell everyone what our husbands do!” It has become fashionable, I think, for women for wear aprons again. (And I mean that metaphorically — I have no complaint with a real apron! And I do like shoes.) But seriously, who the hell is Sarah Palin?? America likes her because… why? Somebody tell me.
I have a lot of attitude today.
I’m also a big fan of these gals…
http://www.momsrising.org
I don’t see an irrational thought in this post…You must be good at rambling, or maybe you’re just hormonal.
Seriously, you said this very well, unfortunately just as with civil rights and the problems with racism, we got more rights and then were expected to perform above and beyond, and perpetually recreate ourselves just to stay afloat.
There is still much work to be done.
I’m reading you backwards, Mary, but gal, you are on a roll.
Wait. I’m back.
You know what I worry about? I think people have imbued this election with so much import. Everything feels so desperate and precious. But the problems are so deep and wide, that no single person is really going to do anything substantial to fix it. I know that probably sounds horribly cynical and defeatist, but it’s how I feel. So, one guy or the other is going to win, and nothing will change and then the people who were half believing in a miracle will lose all hope.
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