Are we wasting our time with feminism?

Am I wasting my energy by banging on about feminism?

From trying to ban the boobs on page 3 of the Sun to putting a woman on British banknotes, there are more feminist causes and campaigns than you can shake a phallus at. But are we barking up the wrong tree?

Women in the west

There is an argument that feminism has done a lot of its work. Women are doing pretty well (in the west), so we should focus our energies on other issues and inequalities.

And it's true that in a lot of ways things aren't really that bad - women in the UK are entitled to free education, to maternity leave, we can drive cars, have our own bank accounts and own our own homes.

Women in the UK have more or less equal rights with men, even if we don't quite have equal opportunities, but that doesn't mean that the work of feminism is done. Sexism is still rife. A CMI White Paper on Women in Leadership this year found:

• Women earn on average £423,000 less than men in similar careers during their lifetimes
• 47% of the workforce is female, but only 32% of managers, directors and senior officials are women
• Only 15.6 of directorships are occupied by women on the FTSE 100
• Women receive less than half the bonuses than their male counterparts (£7,496 compared to £3,726)

Choosing a cause

There may still be work to be done before we have complete equality, even in the UK. But could our efforts be put to better use elsewhere? Should we put the feminist agenda to one side and be championing human rights or the eradication of poverty instead?

If you follow the logic that there are more important things to support, putting issues in a hierarchy, then we'd end up only ever championing a single cause - the one at the top of the hierarchy.

We'd have to decide a single topic that is most important and pledge our support only for that. Would you choose cancer or world poverty?

More than just helping women

Of course, feminism is intimately connected to a lot of the most important causes - to name but three:

• Education - girls are more likely than boys to be denied this
• Violence and abuse - women are more vulnerable to this
• Poverty - childcare means this often has a bigger impact on women than men

Pursuing feminist aims can have huge benefits - for example, educating women and improving their employment opportunities can help lift both them and their families out of poverty. This means that feminism does much more than helping women - it can positively benefit everyone, including men. 

Women may be doing OK, but we still need to pursue a feminist agenda, because it's only fair that women and men have equal rights and opportunities, but also because by providing these things we can improve life for women, men and children in so many other ways.

Let's say bye bye to boobs

Is the most important thing you can say about a woman really the size of her breasts?

This is the message that the Sun newspaper sends everyday when the biggest image of a woman on its pages is a girl posing in her pants on its notorious Page 3.

No More Page 3

This week I want to write in support No More Page 3, a campaign asking the Sun to stop running this feature.

The campaign was started nearly a year ago, by writer and actor Lucy Holmes. She asks the Sun to drop page 3 because:

• It's misogynistic - suggesting a woman's main job is to remove her clothes so men can look at her
• It conditions readers to view women as sex objects - as 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted, this is a bad idea
• It suggests breasts are there purely for the titillation of men
• Showing only C or D cups on very young women implies that other breasts are ugly
• It tells women to base their worth on how sexually attractive they are to a man

Here is a video in which she explains these reasons, with some personal anecdotes.

Page 3 and me

I hadn't been sure about where I stood on the No More Page campaign. But I've changed my mind about lots of things recently (see last week's Lessons in Life post), and now I want to support it.

I thought 'live and let live' - we're all sexual beings and it's natural that we find the body parts that emphasise our sexual difference attractive. But publishing pictures of topless women and ogling these pictures, falls in the same camp as obviously ogling women in the street. It's open objectification of women. If your partner does this when you're with him, you shouldn't put up with it - it's disrespectful and unnecessary.
I previously intellectualised these kinds of behaviour as:

• (Heterosexual) men find women attractive because they are women
• It's therefore normal to find women other than their wives/girlfriends attractive
• In an honest relationship, it's OK to be open about this

I don't actually think this is acceptable. There's nothing wrong with finding other people attractive, and if you're free and single, there's nothing wrong with quietly checking someone out. But blatant ogling, particularly when you're with your partner, is deeply disrespectful.

Similarly, I thought maybe that images of scantily clad lovelies in the media were harmless, if the women were happy to do it and the men happy to look at it. But if you agree that it is misogynistic, encourages women to be seen as sex objects and tells them to base their self worth on how attractive men find them, then it's not harmless. It's actually very, very harmful.

Woman as sex objects

I don't want the daughter I'm about to bring into the world to grow up thinking the best thing she can do with her life is to be skinny with a good pair of boobs. It's nice to feel attractive, but there are a lot more important things in life.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the men who enjoy ogling the daily page 3 girl would probably not be comfortable if they opened the paper one day to find their sister, daughter or wife's nipples looking back at them.

Really, it's all about seeing women as sex objects, and we're not, we're people. The massive growth in equal opportunities for women in the past few decades means that it is now widely accepted that women's place is not just the kitchen and the bedroom. The continued existence of Page 3 is a throwback that suggests we should go back there.

If you want to do something in support of the No More Page 3 Campaign, you can sign this petition to Sun editor David Dinsmore - Take the Bare Boobs out of the Sun.