Culturally speaking, sex equality's hard to find

Published on Wednesday 6 June 2007 01:10

'WHAT is wrong with women?" That is the question recently posed in an internet essay by Joss Whedon, the Hollywood scriptwriter responsible for, among other things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And if you're not familiar with the Whedon oeuvre, you might just leap from those bare facts to the wrong conclusion about the question and the questioner.

In fact, far from denigrating women in his films and television programmes, Whedon is widely celebrated for his female characters and the stories he creates for them. His question was part of a reflection on what he sees as a near-universal misogyny. "How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue, that half of us are inferior...?"

The starting point for Whedon was violence against women, from "honour killings" in Pakistan to Hollywood's recent fad for thoroughly nasty horror films with predominantly female victims. He may well be right to diagnose a fundamental violence in American popular culture, but his ideas left me wondering about more peaceful aspects of human life, not least politics in this country.

I don't know whether Professor David Kerr is a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I have no doubt he is an intelligent, thoughtful man. The Rhodes Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Cancer Therapeutics at Oxford University, he spent two years producing a plan to restructure the NHS in Scotland, a plan that the new Scottish Executive has decided will not be implemented, at least when it comes to centralising hospital services in a few "centres of excellence".

Understandably, Prof Kerr is not happy about this, and has said so. But his parting shot at Nicola Sturgeon, the new health secretary, was striking. "There is a sentimental, emotional, irrational aspect to this decision", the professor has been quoted as saying. Which made me wonder: would he have chosen the same words if the decision was being taken by a male minister? I don't know the answer, but taken at face value, there is something distasteful about the remark, carrying as it does the implication that Ms Sturgeon is somehow more apt to be driven by her heart than her head, the silly little woman. For all his intelligence, Prof Kerr's comment wasn't a million miles from the moronic jokes you used to hear about women prime ministers and presidents, and how the country ends up going to war once a month.

Still, perhaps the professor simply chose his words badly, and I should give him the benefit of the doubt. That's not something I'm willing to offer Cardinal Keith O'Brien, because I have no doubt that Scotland's ranking Catholic chose his words with a great deal of deliberation last week when he offered his latest thoughts on the Abortion Act.

Much ink has already been spilled asking whether his eminence should be in the business of political lobbying, and over the tastefulness of his comparison of abortion and the Dunblane shootings. Personally, I have no problem with the cardinal's appeal. Freedom of speech is for everyone, and that means that a churchman has the same right as anyone else to say things that are stupid and unpleasant.

Take a step back and consider the basic, stripped-down facts of the abortion debate: a minority religion whose hierarchy is exclusively composed of childless, unmarried men presumes to dictate to all women what they should be able to do with their own bodies. The word arrogance is almost too small to contain the enormity of the offence here.

Most telling is the Church's attack not on the behaviour it finds objectionable, but on the law that permits the behaviour. If the Catholic hierarchy had real faith in women as full moral beings, surely there would be no need to change the law on abortion: the cardinals could simply explain to the female members of their flock that abortion is wrong, and trust women to heed that guidance. Instead, the cardinal and his colleagues appear to believe that women really are morally and intellectually inadequate to the task of following the Church's teachings; only men wielding the force of law can save these frail, inferior creatures from succumbing to sin.

It's surely no accident that Churches that ordain women have a rather less obnoxious attitude towards abortion than the cardinal's. But putting women in positions of authority is no guarantee that attitudes will adjust.

Anyone who hopes for a more serious political discussion about equality between men and women might have been encouraged by the fact that two of the six candidates for Labour's deputy leadership are women. Then someone mentioned handbags. For the record, Harriet Harman thinks it's wrong to spend hundreds of pounds on a bag; Hazel Blears thinks it's up to everyone to decide what they do with their money.

It could have been an interesting debate about politics, economics and personal choice. Instead, a clutch of newspaper stories and even Radio 4 turned the exchange into a proxy beauty contest, as if the accessories chosen by Ms Harman and Ms Blears have some bearing on their qualifications for the job. Strangely, none of those thought to ask how much Hilary Benn spends on ties, where Peter Hain buys his suits, who cuts Alan Johnson's hair. It's hardly surprising: how many female politicians are known for their dress sense or appearance? And how many male ones?

Legally and financially, we move ever closer to the parity between men and women that both logic and justice demand. But culturally, it's hard not to think that some of the bad old ways remain deeply embedded, still sometimes shaping our ideas, our language, our shared political conversation. Sexual equality in British public life? Gandhi was once asked what he thought about western civilisation. He replied: "I think it would be a good idea."