This coalition hasn't forgotten women. It's targeted themWe have a government that has socked it to women socially and financially, with worse to come, and yet is shocked we don't love it back
It's easy enough to do, I guess. You're rushing round trying to keep on top of everything, but you know you might have forgotten something. It'll come back to you later. Oh yes – women. Where did you put them? When did you last see them? Retrace your steps. From the superb leaked memo this week, we see this government has been so busy "messaging about deficit reduction" it has simply forgotten how to get its message through to women. Perhaps more specifically, to women who may vote for them. Please don't confuse these guys and tell them all women are not exactly the same. We don't want to blow their freaky-deaky minds.
If I was feeling forgiving I could think, well, it happens in every field – this "whoops, what woman?" deal – why should the government be any different?
You think to yourself, let's make a funny, topical show about the news. It will be such a laugh, and so you get something like Mock the Week, where two teams of three men compete, chaired by a man. This is not some deliberate gender apartheid, relax people. It's comedy! Or you could edit something like a satirical magazine, and occupy the higher moral ground of Ian Hislop, a place I can barely imagine, and just happen to think that describing all female journalists, whoever they are (Deborah Orr?), as Polly Filler or Glenda Slagg is hilarious. It's a scientific fact that men never write badly or fill up the back half of newspapers with drivel. Ever!
If you are really anti-establishment, you can have a blog named after Guy Fawkes with its regular Totty Watch and encourage your clientele to take part in a really creepy smutfest. That's really one in the face to the system, boys! Or how about selling crappy T-shirts with slogans such as "Nice new girlfriend, what breed is she?", or ones that provide a list of excuses for domestic violence. Weirdly, just as a new campaign aimed at teenagers starts because, repulsively, many teenage girls are used to being kicked or punched within relationships. Anyone who complains about these things is probably some hairy, humourless ho. That's right, and here I am.
Because I am too long in the tooth to listen to the excuses any more. I have been in too many situations where someone at the last minute remembers the missing vital ingredient to their plan. And I get the token-woman phone call. TV people, radio people, people giving prizes, people discussing or campaigning often have a great lineup. It's just that they have forgotten the woman thing. By the time they phone someone like me, they are deranged by their newfound passion for the appearance of equality. "We think you'd be really good at it because … " They cannot say, "Because you are a woman", so twisted are they by now in their sudden antisexism they can't risk sounding ... sexist. So they just start begging. Perhaps any of us "token women" should be flattered by our exalted status. To be one of the boys. It's what we always wanted!
It isn't, actually. What we wanted a lot of the time was for it not to matter. For it not always to be an issue. That's the hopeless ideal. In grownup company and in grownup companies, in positions of power and positions of pleasure, some of us are men and some of us are women. Equality would mean the presence of women as simply normal – not abnormal, not tokenistic, not even snigger-worthy.
The vaguest notion of any kind of equality would mean you could not govern for a year with a load of policies that create higher unemployment for women, while further impoverishing women on benefits. You could not suggest the so-called work-life balance is simply a female issue, or assume we are all wives and mothers. This leaked, panicky memo shows these guys waking up to the fact that many women are not simply disappointed but bloody livid, that women are not an afterthought; nor are we an interchangeable, homogenous mass to be spun over with some "family-friendly polices".
Their solutions are as convincing as flowers from the garage. "Sorry love, I was in the pub all night putting the world to rights and I simply forgot about your existence. I'll take the kids swimming at the weekend, promise."
Are we so easily fooled? This government hasn't forgotten women. It has targeted them. This is central to conservative thinking, part of an ideology that is still in flux between the right and left of the Tory party. We have seen this more acutely over the issue of reproductive rights, but it underlies much of Tory "philosophy". This division of women into good and bad, deserving and undeserving, Madonnas and whores. They don't all say it outright, but listen properly to what Iain Duncan Smith says. While the Lib Dems are meant to put the brakes on this, they have somehow also forgotten to have many women on board. So we now have a coalition that has smacked women right down, that has socked it to us socially and financially, with worse to come, and yet is faintly shocked we don't love it back.
What happens in the Westminster bubble runs parallel to the white noise of misogyny that soundtracks so many women's lives. We may not know the words, but we can all hum the tune. Not all men hate women, of course not. But the assumption that all women are somehow the same, that our priorities and capabilities are lesser than those of men runs deep. The ideas of the coalition run shallow.
Can we be won over by giving us little treats like shorter school holidays? I say banish this absurd euphemism "family-friendly" and ask why we are telling single mothers to get off benefits as childcare costs and unemployment soar?
The middle-class preoccupation is still with "career women" running themselves ragged, and it's also problematic. Here we have Sarah Jessica Parker in I Don't Know How She Does it. Pearson's novel was extremely well written, but even in 2002 I could not identify with Kate, the central character, a crazily competitive banker. Working motherhood is not a new phenomenon. The charting of it as middle–class crisis is. And this, at heart, is a conservative message. For we are somehow to recognise this as personally true but politically irrelevant. It's not.
Economic crises push all parties to their most reactionary corners. One Labour response was Blue Labour, another attempt to push women back into their place. The Tories or the coalition need no such rebranding. This is not a party that governs in the interests of women, only women of a certain class.
Its social liberalism is entirely misunderstood. As with true Thatcherites, you can do morally what you damn well like (whores, drugs, mistresses) as long as you can afford to pay for it. It is the poor that are moralised about. And if they are poor women, even more so. Women are paying the price for men's "successful" handling of the economy. Did we really need a leaked memo to tell us that the feral overclass hasn't considered us? I want to see the memo that tells us that this is actually their core strategy. But they don't even need to write that one down.
Guardian
