Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: From man-made mess to a better future – the truth about global inequality and how to unleash female potential

Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: From man-made mess to a better future – the truth about global inequality and how to unleash female potential
Catherine Mayer

‘Buy it for yourself, your husband or partner. Most importantly, buy it for your children’Sunday ExpressEssential reading from Catherine Mayer, recently named one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Global Policy on Gender Equality.Not a single country anywhere in the world has achieved gender equality. In more than a few countries, progress for women has stalled or is reversing. Voters in the United States chose a misogynist over a female candidate for President.Yet in many of these countries, the majority of politicians and business leaders profess to believe in gender equality—as well they might. One report predicts a boost to global GDP of £8.3 trillion by 2025 simply by making faster progress towards narrowing the gender gap. Researchers point to many other potential benefits too, not least in improved relations between the sexes and a healthier, more peaceful planet.If gender equality promises benefits not just to women, but to everyone, why aren’t we embracing it? And how can we speed the pace of change? Fewer than nine percent of world leaders are female, but the few women who have broken through include towering figures such as Angela Merkel. Could 50-foot women save the day? These questions have gripped journalist and author Catherine Mayer since she accidentally founded the Women’s Equality Party in March 2015 and watched it grow in months from an idea to a vibrant political force with more than 70 branches across the UK.In ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMEN, her insightful, revelatory, often hilarious, and hugely inspiring book, she tackles those questions and many more, sharing inside views and experiences from building a party, and bringing together global research with analyses and interviews based on her own far-flung research.And she goes further. Campaigning for the Women’s Equality Party ahead of elections in May 2016, she noticed that many people found it hard, in the absence of any real-life examples, to envisage a gender-equal world. So she takes us there, to the place she calls Equalia. What is it like? Does gender equality make for a society that is more equal in other ways too? Who does the low-paid jobs? How does gender express itself in a place freed from gender programming? What’s the sex like? What’s on the telly?For some fascinating answers and brilliant thought experiments—and a blueprint for reaching Equalia—read ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMEN.

To sisters, mine especially.

And in memory of Sara Burns, Sarah Smith, Michael Elliott and Ed Victor.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#ulink_b0d2a26a-368f-5478-8cdb-886832f38af7)

Charles: The Heart of a King

Amortality: The Perils and Pleasures of Living Agelessly

Epigraph (#ulink_7925d58a-3142-5792-9409-05ca0b869549)

If we were socially ambisexual, if men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in ‘self esteem’, then society would be a very different thing. What our problems might be, God knows. I only know we would have them. But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation – exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth.

URSULA LE GUIN

‘Is Gender Necessary?’, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1976.

Contents

Cover (#ud31ee423-03f0-5b6d-963f-55e2c281c286)

Title Page (#u72fb4bc5-4018-512f-90ce-38b9eb951f50)

Dedication (#u4ebbc63c-2a00-59ae-97e5-94243fb54dff)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#ulink_ef8de35d-763f-5431-a187-478cb6f3da18)

Epigraph (#ulink_bd9f2367-3f27-513e-9915-7ee130460be6)

Introduction: The Shoulders of Giants (#ulink_ffd02bc8-dcba-5f13-8c81-0b1dd0bd1329)

Chapter One: Gate-crashing the club (#ulink_8b917d2e-79a2-5191-8d9a-84b262b40cb4)

Chapter Two: Votes for women (#ulink_87866d15-9a40-5c5c-a198-c4bdf5104224)

Chapter Three: All womankind (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Four: Being a man (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five: Home economics (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six: What really shocks me (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven: Frozen out (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight: This should be everyone’s business (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine: Unbelievable (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten: Adam and Eve and Apple (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven: Winter wonderland (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve: Equalia welcomes carefree drivers (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes and References (#litres_trial_promo)

Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction: The Shoulders of Giants (#ulink_8be8bb16-8f91-5b4c-87fb-e6567127eb96)

A COLOSSAL ZOMBIE Scarlett Johansson commandeered London’s red buses a few years ago. She sprawled across the upper deck of a fleet of vehicles, face slack with simulated desire, mouth gaping wide enough to swallow a small terrier, breasts threatening to smother passengers seated in the lower tier.

Dolce & Gabbana’s advertising campaign intended to evoke Marilyn Monroe’s heyday, and it succeeded. The apparition recalled Nancy, the title character of a 1958 film, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. Nancy’s encounter with a space alien transforms her into a giant (‘Incredibly Huge, with Incredible Desires for Love and Vengeance’). The patriarchal authorities – doctors, police, spouse – chain her, but she breaks free and, naked but for an arrangement of bed sheets, embarks on a murderous rampage. Behold the dreadful power of woman unleashed (‘The Most Grotesque Monstrosity of All’)!

Zombie Johansson captured the inadvertent humour of the B-movie, but she was properly scary too. In her human incarnation she is the only woman to break through Hollywood’s diamond ceiling to claim a place among the ten top-grossing actors of all time. She chooses intelligent roles and has more than once pushed back against the chauvinism of Hollywood and its media ecosystems. Her dead-eyed alter ego belonged to the monstrous regiment of billboard women in perpetual march across the world. Nancy gained agency as she grew. Today’s 50-footers, hypersexualised and supine, promote a retrograde ideology alongside brands and products.

We’re so marinated in this imagery that we seldom stand back to parse its meaning and impact. It is all-pervasive, not just on hoardings and print and broadcast but metastasised into myriad digital forms. The underlying messaging is little different to the drumbeat that helped return women to pliant domesticity after World War II. From earliest childhood, girls are taught to value themselves for their abilities: desirability, marriageability, tractability.

There are, of course, other role models, women of stature and astonishing achievement, but still they break through against the odds. Globally women own less and earn less than men, often in the worst and worst regulated jobs, undertake the lionesses’ share of caregiving and unpaid domestic labour, and are subject to discrimination, harassment and sexual violence.

Every woman navigates a world fashioned by and for men. Some pharmaceuticals fail us because they are tested on male animals to avoid having to account for hormonal cycles. We shiver at our workplaces because thermostats are set to temperatures that suit male metabolisms.

We’re left in the cold in other ways too. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) logs the gap between women’s earnings and men’s at 17.48 per cent in the UK, 17.91 per cent in the US and 18 per cent in Australia. Women have long been blamed for this gap. We don’t ask for raises often enough or we don’t ask right. Studies identify the real culprits: job segregation and discrimination.

Jobs traditionally performed by men attract higher wages than those held by women. The paradigm of the husband as the head of the household remains firmly lodged in the public imagination. One reason some employers pay men better may be that they think the men have greater need of the money. In the US, men in nursing are vastly outnumbered by their female colleagues, by nine to one, yet earn $5,100 more on average per year than female nurses.

These disparities are echoed across the world.

Every woman lives with the constant tinnitus hum of low-level sexism. Most of us have been leered at or leched over and told we should be flattered by the attention. Almost a fifth of US women will be raped in their lifetimes, with close to half reporting other forms of sexual violence. One in three women worldwide will be subjected to violent sexual attack.

The response to this epidemic is muted and muddled.

US prosecutors ask a judge to send a college athlete to prison for six years for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman; the judge decides on six months, concerned a longer period of incarceration will have a ‘severe impact’ on the perpetrator. He is freed halfway through his sentence. In India, a woman is gang-raped to death; one of her rapists says: ‘A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.’ The majority of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by terrorists in northern Nigeria are still missing; those who escape bearing tales of mass rape and slavery find themselves social outcasts. Egyptian lawmakers finally approve a draft bill that would dole out five- to seven-year jail terms for people carrying out female genital mutilation (FGM), an operation to remove part or all of the clitoris. The procedure – often called circumcision by those trying to minimise its brutality – has been inflicted on more than 90 per cent of the country’s women and girls. ‘We are a population whose men suffer from sexual weakness, which is evident because Egypt is among the biggest consumers of sexual stimulants,’ an MP protests. ‘If we stopped circumcising we will need strong men, and we don’t have those.’

Up to 1,000 women are sexually assaulted on the streets of the German cathedral city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015; the attacks trigger condemnation not of women’s oppression but of migration, reinforcing the false narrative that sexual violence is imported, rather than native to white European society.

And on 8 November 2016, US voters choose their President. The front-runners are a female candidate and a man who has been recorded boasting of assaulting women. ‘Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,’ he says.

After the recording emerges, ten women come forward to accuse him of assault. He insists that they are lying. After all, two of them were too ugly to grope.