Everyday sexism

Sarah Allen on the rise and rise of feminism

From the front desk of my classroom Joanna argued that society has always been biased against women.

And that literature is only about boy meets girl and pop music only shows women as sex objects. Society is just for men and they only want one thing, she claimed. Her boyfriend, with his heavy black eyeliner, backed her up. My attempt to open the subject up for debate failed. No one would dare to question this newly vocal orthodoxy.

Hot topic

Feminism is back. From the Daily Mail to The Guardian, the Houses of Parliament to nursery schools, sexism is a hot topic. Discussion of rape culture and domestic violence, representation and objectification has moved out of the academy and into our social media-soaked everyday world.

After a generation of assuming that feminist goals had been achieved by the girl-power 1990s, a fourth wave of feminism is demanding your attention and a change in culture. Laura Bates’s book Everyday Sexism (2014) is a typical voice of the movement, and a good starting point for understanding its latest manifestation with its twin themes; sex and work.

Stories on the web

Everyday Sexism started life as a website. Women were invited to contribute stories of their own experiences of sexism and overwhelmingly these stories are accounts of sexual harassment. So we hear about cat-calling (a lot), bosses expecting sexual favours, date rape, groping in clubs and schoolboys assaulting schoolgirls, though, of course, the reports are undated and their narrators unidentified. Some are recollections from childhood, ten, 20 or 30 years ago, some are very recent, some are from Western countries, but others come from South America with its machismo culture.

There are minimal statistics and no real analysis. As so often through the history of the women’s movement, narrative of oppression becomes the argument. This is hard reading, deliberately emotive and stirring. Hard for women to read and hard for men to read too, who are presented as aggressors in an extremely oppressive world. The question for the careful reader is how far this picture of victimhood corresponds with the ‘everyday’ world we all live in.

Statistics

A YouGov survey of just under 1,000 women this year tells us that 64% had experienced sexual harassment1. That appears to back up Laura Bates’s stories but, when we look more closely, we see that their definition of harassment covered anything from unwanted touching to staring and the question was not time limited; so, if you had ever been stared at, you would be included in that 64%. Another 2016 statistic is this: sexual crimes reported in England and Wales reached over 100,000 a year, the highest figure since records began. In 2015 30% more rape prosecutions were made than in the previous year. Are more sexual crimes being committed or are women (and some men) more likely to complain? Are more bringing complaints forward because they are more likely to be listened to? The police certainly believe the latter2, as well as recognising that the Internet has created new, seemingly anonymous, ways of victimising women.

Still, whether or not there are more incidents of harassment, and however we define it, any harassment is wrong and deeply demeaning. And to sit on a late-night bus, to be in a secondary school dinner hall or, indeed, to catch a glimpse of a pop video, will confirm that women are much more likely to be viewed as available sexual objects than they were a generation ago.

Sexualisation results in sexism

Natasha Walters, in her 2011 book Living Dolls: the return of sexism, describes our contemporary world in distressing clarity. She argues that the prevalence, even saturation, of pornography in our culture has brought about a great intensification of sexism.

A Home Office report in 2010 echoes this, finding ‘a clear link between consumption of sexualised images, tendency to view women as objects and the acceptance of aggressive attitudes and behaviour as the norm’. This is something that Laura Bates would agree with. The guys who shout at women in the street and the men who won’t accept no for an answer are, in part, products of our Internet age in which sex is available at the click of a mouse, anytime, anywhere. Women come to be seen as dolls to be measured against the airbrushed images of music and porn videos, and violent or otherwise deviant sexual acts are normalised. And if the statistics which suggest that plenty of men inside the church are addicted to porn are true, then the objec-tification of women is a problem here as well.

The impact of this on women is at its most obvious when women are assaulted and verbally harassed, but the harm goes much further. As women and girls see women presented as sexual objects, their self-perception is changed; they become complicit in a culture which controls them. Many begin to see themselves as objects too, focussing more on outward perfection, dressing in ways which flaunt their sexuality in a parody of femininity. Others, in an attempt to be strong, ape the worst of stereotypically male behaviour. Either way, women inevitably end up the victims. They are physically weaker than men. They are the ones who get pregnant. They suffer more from sexually transmitted diseases. They simply come off worse. These women are in our churches as well as in our neighbourhoods and desperately need a robust and loving answer.

Evil patriarchy?

Laura Bates’s answer is that more feminism is needed. More equality, more freedom, and a change in men, because it is the evil of patriarchy which has brought about the damaging society we live in. Sexual violence, she would argue, is part of a social structure which oppresses women, restricting them from positions of power and agency.

But Christians need to pause before accepting the label of feminist, however attractive and enlightened it might appear. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, championed by feminists, (‘wedlock is deadlock’ was their cry) which was supposed to usher in an era of freedom and equality, has led directly to our over-sexualised age.

The feminist project from the 1950s onwards which has called upon women to be independent from men, to see male protection as offensive and unneeded, has left many women vulnerable and encouraged male irresponsibility. As Christians, we should know that freedom and independence are not unalloyed goods.

Rejecting mutual dependence

The Bible tells us that relations between the sexes were soured by one man and one woman’s disobedient bid for freedom. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they rejected their calling to mutual dependence and brought on themselves the curse which would introduce a battle between the sexes. God tells Eve: ‘Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you’ (Genesis 3.16). The woman will want to catch and control, the man will dominate. Feminists understand the domination. Good.

But they fail to see that, while Adam bears prime responsibility as covenant head, Eve is guilty too. And Genesis tells us, too, that women bear the most pain from this part of the curse, so we don’t victim-blame. But still, we do need to do what feminists like Laura Bates won’t, and admit the responsibility of women alongside that of men. We are all culpable for resisting our maker’s design, for manipulating and exploiting the opposite sex.

To a movement which says submission is oppression and unlimited sexual activity is self-expression, the gospel offers an alternative: the Man who laid down his life for his bride and who made her beautiful with his purity. The church’s response to this new wave of feminism needs to be a wholehearted living out of this gospel, making the local church and home refuges for bruised and guilty people. Places where men treat ‘older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity’ (1 Timothy 5.2) and women adorn themselves with good deeds (1 Timothy 2.10).

Like Joanna, many women today see the Bible as an inherently misogynistic text; by engaging carefully with their ideas we can tell them there is a different story and a different song to be sung. A story not about power and exploitation, but about sacrifice and real freedom.

Sarah Allen read English at Cambridge and is a pastor’s wife in Huddersfield.