One of the more baffling male reactions to Women's Lib when it started was - why couldn't we be more witty and light-hearted about it? Why did we have to be so serious, strident even?
As nobody enjoys being called humourless it was a point to puzzle over. No other political group pushing its case was expected to be funny. Does anybody complain about a lack of humour among trade unions? What was the basis of this curious demand that we should be funny? Funny was far from what we felt. Five years ago we were all simultaneously making our own discoveries about how we had been conditioned into being what we were. "Conned" was what we felt. So naturally this recurrent male plea for us to be funny was part of the "con". After a little more reflection we saw what it was. Men are used to laughing at us. Humour is directed against women, as it is racial minorities, as a kind of discipline. Take an example. A girl goes into a bookshop and says she wants something to read. "Something light or heavy" asks the assistant. "It doesn't matter, I've got the car outside." Try transposing that to the male, and it isn't funny. To be fluffy-brained as a young woman, or dragonish as a mother-in-law, is the way women appear in traditional humour. And naturally once we started to be active politically the familiar old weapon of ridicule was used. We were seldom represented as less than strident, and one Sunday newspaper even referred to our "pendulous breasts" in its account of our first march in 1971. That tired old joke about bra-burning, which as far as anyone knows never actually happened, became a switch-off mechanism for further thought. Advertising had already added an insulting dimension to our lot. We are portrayed as total idiots, keeling over with indiscriminate gratitude for detergents, cosmetics and foodstuffs, or keeling over sexually as the male's reward for buying this or that cigar, box of chocolates, bottle of booze or brand of petrol. Television advertising, where we are looted and belittled nightly, demonstrates to our children that we are complete fools, nor is this mitigated by a serious use of women in other programmes. It was with this in mind that Women in Media, the group I joined in 1970, began to write to the B.B.C. and the television companies. Women should be used routinely in news announcing and current affairs programmes, we suggested. Our lack of success is evident every night on the screen. Perhaps we weren't funny enough?
Meanwhile another generation is growing up with the impression that women have very little to do with real events and spend most of their time being grateful for hair sprays that win admiring glances. Of course we all know this is nonsense, in a way. Yet woman as a charming idiot is deeply implanted by these means in male mental reflexes and women are either passive or understanding about it. We are still accepted as a sort of lesser thing than themselves. "Just a girl", is the expression even now being used on commercial radio by a company that offers help with office organization. It can all be done by "just a girl". While women may no longer be told not to worry their pretty little heads about such things, it is clear that the pretty little head rates far lower than its male equivalent. Our identities are constantly prefixed by our looks. "What does she look like?". Count how many times you hear that a day. Was any other political leader in history so physically analysed as Margaret Thatcher? Are we treated to detailed accounts of the physical attributes of male politicians? We are still defined by our hair colour, our shape and our voices, and they limit us every time they are used. Would an ugly woman be allowed through? Although women are usually represented as being willingly passive and unambitious, it is amazing how many legal devices, social curbs and quota systems had to be employed, and still are, to keep them in their place. And that is the nub and kernel of Women's Lib. A woman's right to choose. Historically she had no choice. Given the choice it is amazing how she has cut down on the number in families, seeks abortions, struggles towards a less confined existence. While a woman may bear the child she doesn't have to be that child's only minder. A child must also be a man's responsibility and when that child has measles his job must be in jeopardy too. A dream world, you say, and one that can easily be shattered by the administration of a thick ear. But even that old private horror is coming out in the open now. And what of love, and what of tenderness? Of course it will be there. But do the myths have to stay? Can't we start to accept that the sexual stereotypes have been far too extreme and that, for most of us, the truth is different. The super woman, bearing 12 children, and the super man, going off to the North West Frontier, are not what we need, nor indeed what we want to be, and yet they are still implicit in every argument as though we couldn't accept that we can be free of them now. Men are understandably resistant to these changes because it is not to them that the main turn in events has happened. The Pill has come to women and it is the biggest single event in their history. They are free now. As and when they wish to be. This is not to say that all women will wish to be childless and independent of men. This is not what Women's Lib is about and it needs repeating constantly since this is the usual interpretation. Throughout history some women, we don't know how many, wished to be free to choose. Now the time is coming when they can. It is as simple as that.
