arleeshar's picture
Tue, 28/02/2006 - 10:22pm — arleeshar

On Monday night Mushroom, Rooster and I attended an extremely full filming of SBS’ Insight programme - entitled “Sex, Power and Politics”, with Special Guest Star Maureen Dowd, she of the bookful of rhetorical questions about, well, sex, power and politics. Due to an inopportune visit to the toot, I was the last person to enter the studio and thus narrowly missed my opportunity to sit in on the actual filming and possibly air my actual opinion on the actual conversation; I spent the time instead in the Green room gulping champagne and commenting on the effect of the harsh downlighting on the ubiquitous Catherine Lumby, as the cameras panned across the audience. So while my commentary might lack a little in its claim to the authenticity of the participant, I was able to get an uncut birdseye view of the proceedings.

Sadly Maureen was a little disappointing in the interview department; she seemed interested only in repeating sound bytes from previous interviews easily found on the interweb, and providing opportunities for said Lumby to bob her head up and down in agreement for the cameras. The conversation drizzled around pronouncements about the ersatz behaviour of young women, focussing on the rigidities of “The Feminists” ** and the Experts’ pronunciations on the plastic surgery rebellion, and punctuated by Dowd’s drawling comments about marriage chic for young girls as expressed through “Mrs Pitt” tshirts on 12-yr-olds. This struck me as sad, and as more shallow than the show should of necessity be; questions about raunch culture, femininity, power and balance and the younger generation were being spoken to and about, by and large, by ‘expert’ members of older generations, from Maureen to Catherine to Eva to Peter Fitzsimmons, for crying out loud.

The only young female member of the Panel of Experts appeared to be the unsuffixed Gianna, a woman who pole-danced her way out of the Big Brother House on a wave of viewer nausea, and allowed a fellow housemate to flop his meat and two veg onto her head without complaint in an effort to retain the good opinion of her housemates. Her contribution consisted of a defence of her decision to pose for a men’s mag - namely, that other girls in the magazine were wearing far less than she was. It was nice to know that she wasn’t allowing other people to make her feel bad about her decisions, but otherwise… In the absence of any real competition, Cosmo Editor Sarah Wilson visibly swelled in her role as the closest thing to a font of knowledge about Young Women’s Point of View, complemented by her obvious affinity to Youf as expressed through an overapplication of fake tan and a preponderance of ruched three-quarter pantaloons.

This isn’t to say that young women and young men from the general audience didn’t get a chance to contribute to the discussion, but their contributions tended to be based in and validated by personal experience, and to have a generally self-righteous or self-justificatory tone. You know the sort of thing, I am not a feminist but, said one, I am not a slut but, said another. It was clear that Feminism was the enemy, at least to all but one or two young women who was quite assertive about their Capital F status, but who or what was the friend? Youf disappointingly showed little engagement with the questions, and disconcertingly little sense of humour about the whole affair. Where were the young women who wanted to at least engage with Dowd’s ivory-tower claims about our - not her - generation’s experience of power and sexual politics? Where were the young women who wanted to talk about - just for example, just from my own soapbox - employment issues and their impact on women ‘having it all’? Where were the young women who had actually read Dowd’s book?***

Anyway, the most interesting and least vapidly equivocal point of evening came from a younger man who stated quite plainly that his own preference was for a woman who would have his dinner ready for him when he came home, but that she should also be someone interesting who he could talk to. I liked him; like the women in the audience, he “wanted it all”, but unlike them, he was definite and honest about what “it” was and who embodied “it”. He sat back in his seat, resplendent in the uncomplicated knowledge that what he wanted was antithetical to views espoused by “The Feminists” - but then, so is raunch culture, and so is post-feminism. Is the enemy’s enemy the friend? Clearly not, because the audience resoundingly catcalled the man and his espadrilles too. But the confusion displayed by many young women about what they want was absent from his placid brow, and I silently and drunkenly wished him good luck in his quest for the FemBot ideal.