In the last year or so, I've noticed that I've become much more sensitive to something that I probably didn't pay much attention to before. It's not just because I've moved but it's also because, as a part of that move, I've assumed a certain degree of responsibility for a twelve-year-old girl and that's changed my paradigm a bit.
I have to confess something. I was always very glad that Little 'Un was a boy - partly because it meant he'd be into boy-stuff like me (I could show him Star Wars and comics and Scalextric) and partly because it meant I'd never have to deal with things like boyfriends and the consequences of all that stuff.
Did you spot it? The sexism that ran through that whole paragraph? The unstated - but nonetheless present - assumption that boys are slightly better than girls; that there is a difference between "buy-stuff" and "girl-stuff" and that girls can't like "boy-stuff." There's also a slight whiff (or perhaps more) of hetero-normative bias, with the assumption - or is it expectation - that neither of them would be homo- or bisexual.
And that's what I'm starting to become more aware of, over the last year: that kind of underlying, subtle sexism/gender stereotyping. I saw a article yesterday that said something along the lines that not all men hate women but that all men benefit from sexism. I'm becoming more aware of that and more aware that there's a lot of sexism about, it seems to me: we are far from being an equal society.
I remember going through a similar process in the late 1970s/early 1980s when what was known then as "political correctness" began to gain momentum. I use the inverted commas because at the start, the term was used as a form of insult to anything that challenged the existing way of things. Any change, any suggestion that some forms of language or behavior were exclusive or insulting, was greeted with the response that it was "political correctness gone mad."
Eventually we came to see that "political correctness" was about becoming more inclusive and a better society. That work isn't finished yet: not when women are still threatened with violence purely because they are women; not when women are still paid less than men for the equivalent job; not when women still occupy an unequal position in society.
Let me give you a simple example. I went to see The Heat yesterday. I enjoyed it and I'd recommend it - I laughed a lot - but as I was watching, something was bothering me a little bit, something felt a little bit strange. It took me a while to spot but what I was noticing was the fact that this was the first film I'd seen in a long time with no male leads. In fact, it was the first film I can remember seeing this year that would even pass the Bechdel test. Before The Heat, the last film I went to see was RIPD, which has two male leads. I didn't notice that: that didn't strike me as odd - it was what I was used to.
As a man, did I enjoy The Heat less because of it? No. Did I find the film harder to engage with because I had no male leads with which to identify? No. Was I offended because all the men in the movie are hopeless or evil? Well, a little bit, but that's beside the point: The Heat is a good film with no strong male lead characters and that's unusual. And it shouldn't be.
