In the end Bingle's downfall is also a salutary lesson for other young women that sexism still rules, 40 years after the publication of The Female Eunuch. Despite the best efforts of Germaine Greer and her sisters to destroy the value of female modesty, the fact remains that if a woman trades on her looks and body alone, she will eventually pay the price. Like young men who go to war or wreck their bodies in contact sport, young women don't fully comprehend the effect of the sexual war zone until it's too late. They end up with post-traumatic stress disorders of a different kind.
via www.smh.com.au
Devine's column is on the right track, though she doesn't highlight the media's role in these regular fiascos, nor the role of self-serving publicists fueling the flames as they hunt for a few easy bucks.
News Ltd in particular seems to see coverage of these issues as something akin to schoolyard bullying - pickout the vulnerable and pursue them to they cry and crumble. It's not really enough to suggest, as Devine seems to, that 'society' has the problem and the media is somehow not complicit in that. If you stake out the poor girl's house and hound her mercilessly (and repeatedly over several years) you can't then focus on the Internet as the problem. Social media played just a minor part.
Nevertheless, there are some real issues here that go to the heart of sexism in our society. I recommend you read this great article that appeared in the Guardian earlier this week - How the 'new feminism' went wrong -
Instrumentalism has taken over from romanticism as the governing female philosophy. Madonna-ised woman sees everything, and everyone, as a means to her end. She views her body instrumentally: the "hypersexualisation" of women noted by Walter in Living Dolls has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with self-marketing. Everyone is constantly orgasming, yet they've never seemed less convincing. They aren't fake, but phoney, a form of spin. They are meant to be overheard, conveying empowerment.
A recent interview with sex blogger Zoe Margolis portrayed her as an icon of liberation. But Walter doesn't fall for this: in the 90s she was happy to take women at their own account, believing their assessment of themselves as empowered-women-of-the-90s, but not today. Living Dollsis more sceptical than The New Feminism. Interviewees' claims to be happily promiscuous, porn-loving, sex-texting women-of the-noughties are properly scrutinised this time, and her accounts of the emotional and psychological costs of this way of life are plausible and compelling. But she's less convincing about the causes of the phenomena of "hypersexualisation" and "exaggerated femininity", so named, I imagine, because she couldn't use "hyper" twice.
Walter puts "hypersexualisation" down to a rise in sexism– not the old-fashioned sort but something more sinister that never quite comes into view. The second half of her book explains the return of traditional femininity as a result of a greater belief in determinism. She is right to point out that we no longer believe in conditioning, but surely wrong to say this belief has been supplanted by essentialism – a belief in innate differences between the sexes. The Madonna-ised woman views femininity as a tool for getting what she wants, whatever that may be. In this moment, it is more or less compulsory for intelligent women to reveal a passion for baking cupcakes. The domestic goddess is a pose, not a reversion to old-style femininity. Now that "attitude" is out and old-fashioned feminine virtues are "in", so Madonna-ised woman is ready to reveal that cake-making is her number one "guilty pleasure".
As a woman who would like to see more equality in the workforce, I don't think the Bingle affair is about sexism, but stupidity. Michael Clarke was right to be annoyed with Bingle for telling her story, it only served to bring the "shower scene" to the forefront in the media. People have said this should be more about Fevola than Bingle, but if Bingle had kept her greedy mouth shut, it would have been.
I agree with Kitty Flanagan from the 7pm Project, perhaps Bingle could do with some lessons in "How to Delete Photos from your Lover's Mobile Phone"...
Posted by: swoosieb63 | 13 March 2010 at 08:20 AM