Media, Technology and Society

Is Feminism Dead? Can't Women Choose What Careers they Want?

"My husband is an aerospace engineer. Of the approximately 400 engineers that he graduated with back in the 80’s, two were women. And I’m sure that if you look at graduating classes everywhere you will find disproportionate levels of males and females in pretty much every area of study, because we live in a free country where people get to choose their careers, and it just so happens that men and women tend to choose differently. That is the reality.

Unfortunately, well-meaning liberals are not known for considering reality when they meddle with government policy. They look around at the disproportionate levels of men and women in various careers and they conclude that it is the tyranny of men, not the choices made by women, that is responsible for the imbalance they see. So in the aerospace industry, for instance, companies that want to do business with the government must often meet minimum quotas of female employees. This leads to disproportionately high salaries and lowered standards for women in that profession. And so it goes.

Before you declare that women are underrepresented anywhere, whether it be a profession, a management position or the legislature, find out what the pool of available candidates looks like. If only 10% of the candidates for public office are women, for instance, then it would be silly to expect them to represent 50% of the elected body. I know you said in a previous post that you’ve gotten lazy about your research and that’s fine, but in this case opining without researching the facts has lead you to falsely blame your fellow males for what you perceive as terrible injustices towards women.

By the way, what evidence do you have that ‘conservatives’ are responsible for keeping women down? It is chauvinism, not conservatism, that is the real problem for women, and my own experience is that chauvinism has no favorite political ideology."

Perhaps you are right Carol. To be sure, it is possible that any given ratio of women to men in a profession reflects some kind of inherent preference which escapes all environmental influences which might exist. Perhaps there is some inherent, built-in system which regulates the preferences and capabilities of women and explains how they disproportionately end up in careers in the retail and service professions - careers which pay dramatically less than say, aerospace engineering.

However, to use an extreme example, consider the status of women in the Taliban regime of Afhganistan before the US/Nato coalition displaced them from power. One could use Saudi Arabia for another example. Both regimes have very gendered policies in terms of the way women are generally expected to behave by the male religious and political elite of that given society. Let's also assume, that over time, this system comes to be accepted, or 'naturalized' by the very women whom the system oppresses.

So, on the face of it, both the men and the women accept this system as "normal". To an outsider, the fact that women are prohibited from driving or hold no political office might seem obvious evidence of discrimination. To those within the society, they might say that is the women "choose" to stay home and 'provide for their husbands and children'. Or they might say that the Koran instructs them to live in this manner, or that it is men that should decide what women want. This is familiar patriarchal thinking, with long associations with not just orthodox Islam, but also with many Christian traditions. Significant numbers of Christian social conservatives outline preferences that women stay at home and raise a traditional family, deferring to the guidance of their husband where applicable. Of course, this traditional family comes at the expense of a career and so on. Let us recall that it has been mere decades since women were technically the property of males within a family structure. To be fair, not everything about holding a career is wonderful and great, but lets not pretend that social conservatives do not have a particular idea of how women, as women, fit into the societal structure.

In the case of the 'extreme' example I've used - Saudi Arabia, or the Taliban - the west clearly looks at women under these situations and labels them oppressed. This is reasonably because in comparison to western women, these women neither exercise nor 'CAN' exercise freedoms exercized by women in western, liberal democracies.

If, overnight, women in Saudi Arabia were somehow allowed to drive, or hold political office, it might take some time before the representation among women among the driving or political class equated with men. In the interim time, at any point before equality was achieved, people might say, well, what we have now is real 'choice' and all the women that might ever want to be politicians or drivers have chosen their path. Any further effort to achieve equality is silly.

Possibly, they are right. However, they could also be incorrect as well. Social attitudes and preferences, held by both men and women, take time to change. It may take generations before women are brought up in environments in which they can imagine being drivers or politicians, and in which, they can overcome social and gender barriers, often within the family, towards being a driver or a politician. Their husbands might prefer less intellectual women, or women who can't drive and are therefore more dependent upon them - and so on and so on.

The point is, any sitaution where parity is not achieved in any significant arena in a democratic society, whether politics or aerospace engineering - may have more of a basis in the socializing and conditioning of career preferences of women than in anything else.

It is because of the ease with which some argue that any system of oppression is 'chosen' by women that organizations such as Status of Women and many other organizations which advocate on behalf of women's rights exist. Yes, conservatives will inevitably sniff at these organizations and the implicit notion that individuals' choices are structured by often unrecognized environmental factors, and that any over-arching goal for society (e.g. equality) smacks of being "forced into choices." That said, when the goals are as valid as equality, surely we can all benefit from this type of 'social engineering'. Is there such a thing as taking equality too far, in say, the sense of political representation. Can women representing approximately 50% of individuals in the vital areas of political and economic power be taken too far? Equality in the areas where it matter is a valid goal, whether or not every woman wants to participate in these areas or not. We as a society can, and should strive to remove barriers towards the attainment of this goal, not question whether the goal is worth setting in the first place - or should be forgotten after having only been partially achieved.

The "I AM AFRICAN" Advertising Campaign: Cause Celebre or Cause for Concern?

I was flipping through the fall GQ today, and I came across this bald image of Sting sporting orange (apparently tribal) paint smeared across his face with the title "I AM AFRICAN" below it. This, I discovered is an advertisement for an AIDS campaign called 'keep a child alive'. The caption is followed by the text "help us stop the dying. Pay for lifesaving aids drugs that can keep a child, a mother, a father, a family alive. visit keepachildalive.org to help." It all sounds well and good. And then, a friend pointed me to two other sets of images, this one, with Gwenyth Paltrow, followed by this image, which you can view by clicking this View this photo . View the image below first...

What are these images about? On the surface, they're a campaign to raise public attention about an issue - AIDS in Africa - which is already in the public subconscious, especially after the Live Aid concerts initiated to pressure the G8 leaders to adopt measures to help the global fight against poverty, AIDs, and developing world debt.

The use of celebrity images in advertising campaigns designed to stimulate public attention and awareness around social justice issues is nothing new. The celebrities who take part in these campaigns receive praise for engaging in an issue that is certainly deserving of increased public and political attention. But is it effective? What is communicated with these campaigns?

These images remind me of the controversy surrounding famed advertising photographer Oliveri Toscani, and the Benneton campaigns of the 1990s, in which he used visceral, intimate images of war casualties, dying AIDS patients, racial archetypes and other images in glossy fashion advertisements sporting the Benneton logo. Toscani claimed he was using the modern day language of advertising to communicate a message of social justice, and that doing so in a fashion magazine, and in the medium of advertising, was merely a means to an end.

Critics decried the fact that the overwhelming context of consumerism and the logo accompanying the imagery used, meant that what was communicated was less a message of political action, but a subversion of the meaning of what it means to live with AIDs, or of contemporary identity politics. What resulted was to subject images which have a certain meaning, especially those which depict images of death and suffering, to a context in which images are examined, digested and 'consumed' in a matter of seconds. How are magazine advertisements any kind of appropriate arena within which to place serious political or social justice statements? What does it mean to place a corporate logo on an image of someone dying of AIDS? Is their suffering a commodity?

With this most recent image campaign, there is of course, some kind of effort to raise attention about AIDS suffering in Africa. Of course, this is laudable as an intention, and to the extent that the celebrities involved are motivated on behalf of this intention - its all tremendously commendable. But I can't help and think about the stereotypes that are used and propogated by this kind of image. First, there is the assertion that "AFRICA" implies "AIDS". Of course, AIDS is a huge catastrophe, and the continent of Africa is home to many countries like Zimbabwe, which are virtually crippled by this single disease. Entire generations of children are growing up with no parents, since they have all died because of AIDS. And, of course, there are constraints on how any kind of social justice message can be crafted without being problematic in some kind of way. All of that being recognized, this image nonetheless perpetuates a notion that "all of Africa" suffers from AIDS, and that it is Africa, uniquely, which is afflicted by this disease. Why is this? AIDS is as much of a disaster in Asia, particularly rural China, as it is in many parts of Africa. Why stop at the association of Africa with AIDS? Why not have a picture of Gwenyth Paltrow with an AK-47 and a caption identifying her with the fight to reduce access to small-arms - a problem which also plagues Africa, atlthough not uniquely.

It is noble to participate in any social justice cause, but it is ignoble to participate in a campaign which insensitively perpetuates stereotypical ways of thinking about AIDS, or Africa. What does it mean to have wealthy non-African celebrities proclaiming themselves "African" as a way to motivate western advertising consumers to give money to African AIDS charities? Why not make it purely about AIDS, rather than situate the AIDS struggle as having anything to do specifically with race or geography. Granted, AIDS is especially a problem in Africa due to cultural practices around sex and condom use, Catholic church policies surrounding birth-control, a lack of governmental policies and other assorted issues. That said, there are ways to participate in an AIDs campaign supporting projects in Africa without engendering the kind of backlash seen in the response to the Gwyneth image.

There is also the issue of western charity and African economic and social problems. Celebrity charity efforts have rarely succeeded in galvanizing support for policy changes which can result in long term effects. It is easy to get on-board with a project which involves the public parting with money, sending it to an NGO in Africa, which then attempts to distribute AIDS drugs to the public. There is little political opposition for this kind of intervention, and it is easy to see why these efforts are popular with celebrities. Less popular, but more promising in terms of delivering long-term solutions to AIDS and other public policy issues, are lobbying efforts directed at Western policies which perpetuate conditions of poverty and disease in Africa.

If OECD countries were to stop unfairly subsidizing domestic grain, cotton and other industries which compete unfairly with smaller African producers, African countries could experience much-greater economic growth from international trade, and thereby relieve some of the financial pressures preventing African governments from addressing their own public policy issues. Made in Africa solutions are superior to Western interventions in many ways, not least owing to the efficiency of localized efforts and expenditures as compared to a lattice of poorly coordinated international NGOs all lobbying independently of one-another for slices of western public and governmental attention. These efforts are invaluable and needed in the absence of favourable conditions in African countries with disastrous political and economic infrastructure (Zimbabwe for example) - but they are a temporary solution. Unlike some, I don't advocate a "do nothing approach" for fear that any kind of charity removes incentives for African countries to solve their own problems.

Ultimately, if the cause is alleviating poverty or AIDs, it is often helpful to combat stereotypes that these aren't problems in the west. The US alone has 30,000,000 citizens living in abject poverty. Canada has a significant population of those living below the poverty line as well. AIDs continues to be an issue not just in Africa, but among many demographics in North America. Cultural prejudices surrounding AIDs and condom use continue to result in propogation of the virus in the US and Canada. It would be nice to see a campaign recognizing these problems as well as those unique to Africa, so the stereotype that AIDs or poverty are somehow Africa-specific can be thrown out.

Moreover, it is possible to argue that social issues advertising has a place in a magazine devoted to consumerism - but it requires finesse and a careful navigation of cultural identity. It is difficult to see how this latest campaign by 'keep a child alive' satisfies any of these requirements. If anything, the campaign perpetuates a dark continent of Zulu-like tribes with war paint, tribal necklaces and Bedouin shawls. In contrast, many contemporary African cities are essentially western, with office buildings, western cars and garb, and McDonalds outlets. In South Africa, which is a bit of an exception among African countries in terms of its economic development, this campaign would likely invoke a mono-culture which doesn't exist for South Africans and has little contemporary relevance. "Africa" and its problems can be summed up as accurately with stereotypical tribal-wear as "North America" can be summed up with cowboy hats and SUVs.

Documentarian weighs in on Hip Hop and Manhood

An interesting read for sure, and connected to my long-ago post lamenting the problems to do with cultural ghettoization - a phenomena I argued wasn't restricted to violent and mysogynistic forms of hip hop culture, but other sub-cultures as well. See the article on the cbc arts page.

From the article:

"Q: Public Enemy’s Chuck D once called rap music “the black CNN.” In Beyond Beats and Rhymes, he says that BET – a channel that airs hip-hop programming around the clock – is “the cancer of black manhood in the world.” Did he get it right twice?

A: I don’t want to misquote him, but I remember reading a statement where Chuck said that hip hop used to be like the black CNN, but has now become the black Cartoon Network. I’ve shown this film and had people – I mean mainly black audiences – give his statement [about BET] a standing ovation."

I think there is a growing consciousness of certain forms of hip hop as the "black CNN," something that assists the already significant marginalization of minorities in the US. Although many don't agree with stands taken by black celebrities, such as Oprah - going so far as to ban hip-hop from her show entirely - there is a basis for her anger at the sub-culture and its malevolent effects: feeding comfortably into racist perceptions of the hypermasculine, violent black male.

Out of all this though, the message that hip hop is not necessarily a pernicious influence, can't be lost either. Groups like Company Flow, Dilated Peoples, Jurassic 5 and many others are part of a growing group of hip hop acts that are self-aware of hip-hop's dark-side in a way 50-cent isn't. Even groups like Black Eyed Peas combine mainstream appeal with a progressive, stylistic appeal that doesn't involve g-strings, gun-talk and homophobia.