Sexism in The 2010s - Village Magazine

 — village December 2009 - January 2010

   debate about

the dynamic between the sexes, as manifest in

unedifying Zeitgeist television programmes

like the recent RTÉ “Battle of the Sexes” is prim-

itive and ill-informed. Alienated Stereotypes

overarch the discussion: women are insincere

and hormonal vamps who want a man with

money to facilitate their own vacant materi-

alistic and lookist tendencies; men are useless,

belching, housework-avoiding, uncommuni-

cative and ageist football obsessives in search

of submissive girlfriends and mistresses. The

stereotypes are sterile. Village prefers to cel-

ebrate the diversity and to embrace the inerad-

icable diﬀerences, where they exist - which is

rarely - as positives that make intercourse

more exciting.

This generation - both men and women

- has had to construct new paradigms where

there were few equitable or progressive mod-

els in previous generations, particularly in

Ireland. Women typically now must balance

a job with child-minding: men must mind

children as well as go to work. This is surely a

grounding, balancing and conﬁdence-enhanc-

ing phenomenon for both men and women.

Village’s perspectives as always are driven

by equality including equality between the

sexes. We need not even deﬁne equality for it

to be evident that, since neither sex is inferior

to the other, both are equal. Village promotes

positive discrimination to undo the structural

imbalances of continuing anti-egalitarian prej-

udice and historic biases. It is our belief that we

still live in a world where the opportunities for

women are very signiﬁcantly restricted solely by

virtue of their sex. It is not possible to say quite

the same for men. There is a fundamental equal-

ity deﬁcit where, according to ICTU, women’s

income is around two-thirds of men’s income;

and, adjusting for diﬀerences in hours worked,

women’s hourly earnings around  per cent

of men’s. Glass ceilings move ever higher and

more diﬃcult to pinpoint but remain very real.

Women’s choices are also restricted by the pres-

sures to make home. Women continue to be

burdened with a disproportionate amount of

unpaid work, in particular caring responsibili-

ties and household chores. Even though %

of paid work is done by women, they do %

of unpaid work. Where they do work for pay,

women are often torn apart by the stresses

of balancing it with child-rearing. Women’s

employment is concentrated in low-paid, low-

status and part-time occupations. The % of

the population who hold % of the wealth

are predominantly men. Only % of our TDs

are women. % of our Catholic priests are

men. Their God too is a man.

The lower status of women is manifest

in the sexual objectiﬁcation, and persistent

stereotyping, of women as decorative, passive,

dependent and nurturing. This is reﬂected in

the witless Bunreacht Na hEireann, our out-

dated all-overarching Constitution, which in

Article  recognises that “by her life within

the home, woman gives to the State a support

without which the common good cannot be

achieved; and that the State shall, therefore,

endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not

be obliged by economic necessity to engage

in labour to the neglect of their duties in the

home”. The Constitution is silent as to the sup-

port provided to the State by women who do

not have the presumed “life and duties within

the home” (and indeed as to the status aﬀorded

such runaways).

And the State’s history of recognition

of women’s rights does not reﬂect well on

us. Legal equality in the workplace largely

depended on interventions from Europe. For

   2010:

 



Sexuality is complex,

discrimination is controversial

and sexual discrimination is

an aggregate of the fraught

fractiousness of its components

“The stereotypes

are sterile”