Unusual Media Epiphany

I had an unusual media epiphany last week, and it had nothing to do with Trafigura, Jan Moir or the balloon boy, whatever that last one was all about.

No, what happened was this. I was sitting on a train, reading an article in the financial pages of the Guardian, on my way to a conference in Exeter.

So far, so unremarkable. The article was about WH Smith's business plans. It's going to open 80 new outlets inside office buildings, based on the success of a number of shops it's set up inside hospitals. Profits are up at WH Smith, the article added, thanks to the canny strategies of its CEO, Kate Swann.

It was at that point that I had my epiphany. Here was an article in a newspaper about a successful FTSE 250 company that happens to have a female CEO. Not only that, but it had been written by a female journalist (Julia Finch), and was being read by a female business person (me).

And yet at no point was the gender of the reader, writer or subject made an issue. The article didn't appear in the women's pages, or in a glossy women's supplement. The reporter didn't mention what Kate Swann looks like, what she habitually wears, or whether she has a partner and kids at home. There was no accompanying picture. There were no allusions to the glass ceiling. Readers were not invited to view Ms Swann's success as an exceptional achievement for someone of her gender.

It was just an ordinary article about business in the business pages of a national newspaper.

And I thought: 'This must be what reading the paper is like for men all the time.'

I know that by drawing attention to it I'm bursting the bubble of ordinariness surrounding this article, and turning it into something remarkable, and therefore defeating the whole object. But for a little while it did give me a glimpse of a glorious future media landscape in which women are just people, and our gender is neither here nor there. And that made me very happy.

Oh, and hello again everyone, I seem to be back!

Quote Of The Week

From Liberty's head of fashion buying, Olivia Richardson, on those new-season platform shoes that not even models can walk in without falling over:


(Photo courtesy of Jezebel)

"I don't think practicality comes into it. It's more of an empowering assertion of your own femininity."

Yes. I've always found being rendered unable to walk very empowering. Also, as anyone who's ever had one too many Diamond Whites will attest, falling over is very feminine. Bonus femininity points if you manage to flash your new-season satin-bowed Damaris knickers* while doing so.


* DAVE: WARNING: PANTS

Children Of Women

We may have scoffed at Theo Paphitis's apparent lack of understanding of human biology when he complained that women 'get themselves bloody pregnant', but this story in today's Guardian suggests that he may actually have been on to something.

According to the article, new US census data reveals that fewer children are being born in the States, a problem that's also contributing to ageing populations across Western Europe. The reason for the decline? It seems that fewer women are choosing to get themselves bloody pregnant. As a result, family sizes are declining:

'The findings also highlight the shrinking of the average American family. In 1976, women on average had 3.1 children, but that figure had fallen by 2006 to 1.9 children. That is below the level of fertility needed to ensure a stable population - 2.1 children per woman is known in demographic jargon as "replacement-level fertility".'

Is it just me, or does anyone else spot anything strange about this? Either we've moved into some kind of futuristic women-only society without my noticing, or the Guardian is suggesting that the decision to have children and raise a family is the responsibility of women and women alone. There's not a single mention of fathers anywhere in the whole article. It's almost as if men were entirely irrelevant to the whole process of creating and nurturing new life.

Which raises the question: what are men actually for? A question perhaps best answered by this comment from the BBC's Have Your Say site, preserved for posterity by the chaps at Speak You're Branes:

Mothers are far better at dealing with housework & crying babies & screaming kids…& all at the same time as well.

Fathers, & males in general, are IMO more likely to crack under the pressure and/or more likely abuse babies & children left in their care in one way or another…and that includes verbal abuse & also sex abuse.

Generally speaking, nowadays I wouldn’t trust men to discipline small young child unchecked, while considering that many men are now on or dealing in drugs.

magicalways54, Romford

So there you go - women are for having babies, while men are for bringing home the crack at the end of a hard day's drug dealing.

Crumbs.

My Vagina Foo-Foo Is None Of Your Business

I see today's Guardian has cottoned on to the new (American) fad for 'vaginal rejuvenation'.

This, for the uninitiated, is what you ask for when you've already had cosmetic surgery on all public-facing parts of your body, but still feel the profound psychological emptiness that comes from believing Cosmo, Glamour, the Daily Mail etc. when they tell you (explicitly or implicitly) that men - and indeed the world at large - are only interested in how you look.

According to these women's-media tossers and their assorted plastic-surgery charlatan chums, how you look 'down there' is now just as important as what your face looks like, how skinny you are, and so on.

But what gets me about the Guardian article is the way it starts off being all horrified that women are being pressured by the media into getting their labia sculpted into alleged man-pleasing contours, but then ends up going on about how maybe we *should* be worried about the general fitness of our vaginas after all.

After all, why worry about ending up a spinster (which is probably your own fault for having unattractive labia, you negligent slattern) when you could be worrying about ending up an incontinent spinster?

This nonsense has gone too far, and gone on for too long. I'm thinking of organising a ritual burning of every women's magazine and women's supplement in the land. If only it would stop raining.

IN RELATED NEWS: Thanks to my dad for sending me this empty-headed niaiserie from the Weekly Telegraph, in which some British woman offers to reveal to other British women - for the bargain price of £2,500 - how French women stay thin. I say: spend the £2,500 on Gitanes and smoke yourself skinny. You'll feel so much better.


UPDATE: Leonie said: 'what else is wrong with me that i should really do something about already? do tell.' Well Leonie, had you considered that you might need shoulder liposuction? Come to that, maybe we ALL need shoulder liposuction, to fill (or rather, empty) the gaping black void that we all feel when we realise we don't look exactly like Keira Knightley.

'Their Brains Turn To Mush'

Today's G2 quotes Theo Paphitis (some kind of businessman, apparently) holding forth about the uselessness of pregnant women:

[Women] "get themselves bloody pregnant and ... they always argue that they'll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal".

(My emphasis.)

Is that so, Mr Paphitis, whoever you might be? Perhaps you'd like to know that even in my advanced state of uselessness, I have managed to do the following in the past couple of weeks:

1. Write a 2,000-word paper on how best to manage old corporate WANs and modern IP networks.

2. Write a list of recommendations for how to keep Eastern Europe economically competitive, which will (apparently) be presented next week to the president of Romania.

3. Write a number of letters to senior government officials persuading them that buying my client's software will help them to meet their revised 'efficiency targets' under the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review.

4. Write an executive summary of the European software industry's recommendations to the EU for policy revisions designed to encourage technology-based innovation.

Of course it could always be the case that I just *think* I did those things, and that what I actually did was scrawl a number of rudimentary pictures of bunnies in crayon on the back of a cereal packet.

And there is the fact that yesterday I forgot to take my towel and my underwear with me when I went for a swim, meaning that I later had to trail round Asda WITH NO PANTS ON, the horror.

But still.