Are women interested in current affairs? (And why I hate Woman's Hour)

[BrummieOnTheRun]

I spent the last few days ranting to DH about the fact that certain stories that primarily affect women don't appear in the media.
Like the nationwide policy of downgrading local maternity services (only reported locally, ignored by national media) putting 1,000s of women and babies' lives at risk each year. Or is that each month?
Like loans to women entrepreneurs being at higher interest rates than those to men as we are perceived to be higher risk.
Like the cost of childcare and impact on (primarily women's) employment being treated as a minority issue. We're 50% of the population and most of us have/will have children.
Blah, blah, blah.
Have always been pissed off that Woman's Hour, instead of having the political and intellectual clout of the Today programme, has spent approx 6 minutes superficially covering important issues to cut them off to discuss bloody borsch recipes. Or drama 'that women might enjoy'.
Then a depressing thought occurred to me...maybe it isn't that most 'current affairs' isn't interested in women, maybe most women just AREN'T INTERESTED in current affairs and that's why women-centric issues aren't widely covered?

I agree, Soapy, but my point was that sometimes it isn't a decision based on informed-choice, but on expectations and what we've been raised to think is the norm.

I do think things are changing, but, as with most things, it's an organic thing and takes time. I don't have any daughters, but I do wonder if I'm not a good role model for my boys as they may grow up thinking it is the norm for women to stay at home and raise the children. This will not be good if they marry women who want to have a career and a family. So it's down to all of us to ensure that our children, be they male or female, do not grow up with certain assumptions as to what happens work-wise once children enter the picture.

Soapy, Just to clarify, because I started the thread, my point certainly wasn't that women were forced into this situation.
It was that once in this situation/these situations, whatever the 'cause', women's voices weren't being adequately or seriously represented in the media. But is that down to apathy or dis-interest in current affairs, etc.

Soapy - women don't make them. That's my key issue. A lot of women have only themselves to blame and it's not use complaining about second place careers etc etc if they let their husbands do nothing at home and women put their careers second. By all means do that with enthusiasm because you want to do it but don't complain if you don't like the results.

Lots of women and men who have children and work full time manage things reasoanly well. In fact I like to argue having children makes you a better worker because you have so many financial obligations to your children you're not likely to take time off, leave, go round the world or emigrate. You're there working hard in a stable marriage for years. The customers and people I worked with have children and that was so when I was 22 with a baby working full time and I found it gave me a maturity and commonality with older people at work which stood me in good stead. It was a plus point, a benefit, not a ball and chain.

The other issue on the press is black killings get much less press than say the killing of that middle class solicitor (by black youths). The papers print what their readers want to read. Interesting issues. I suppose a free press will always be like that. It was "the Sun wot won it" etc

Brummie - sorry - you are right

It was the way the thread then evolved that made it sound like it is 'the system' that is responsible for women's position in society - rather than the choices that women (along with men) make which reinforce the stereotypes.

But having said that, anyone who was involved in that wonderfully heated debate on working families might be interested in the reports by ex-City lawyer Jill Kirby for the Centre for Policy Studies /link{http://www.cps.org.uk/}

Noone in govt takes a blind bit of notice, but interesting reading...

The press just seems to like to churn out propaganda and flawed or misrepresented studies to make women think they're better off at home because of a hidden agenda to keep women down and chained to the sink. If you do a study of articles in the Times and look at how many are anti working mother and how many pro it's about 5% pro and that's just the Times. It's been a huge change as if someone has said let's put Stepford Wives in the water and get them all back at home fussing over clothes and Martha Stewart. Loads of these women have fallen for it too, a kind of mass collective hypnosis or indoctrination. Girls in pink, breastsurgery, women's bodies changed to please men thinking they're doing it to please themselves and the myth that part time work is somehow in women's and society's interests. We will look back in 30 years and laugh that we could ever have this kind of ethos.

I'm doing ethics at Uni as part of my course. i thought it would be exciting, student debates and the like. The reality? mainly female class (2 men) and of about 20 only three of us ever even open our mouths. i find that really, really depressing.

I've always been politically active and erm, opinionated LOL, and I ahve to say most females don't see this as an attractive trait. Not all obv, but that ahs been my experience. Men seem to be OK if they're self confident- and I can't be doing with the ones that are too put off by a women with an opinion anyway

Xenia wearing pink? Sorry surely being oppressed is when anybody amkes you feel bad about the choices that are right for youa nd your family? And if that's wearing pink or indeed working part time (which DOES work for many- me in the past for a start) then go girl- just make sure its for you, and that it makes you happy.

I'm starting to feel you have a very strong agenda Xenia which doesn't seem to leave much space for other people's choices. I think women should respect other women as equally capable of making choices.

Perhaps its not that women arent interested in current affairs. they just know that polictical bias ia the flavour of the day and that honesty and current affairs often have a mutally exclusive relationship. I remember once seeing the same picture appear in the times and either the independent or the guardian. I was about civil inrest in china the same picture carried two different explanations for what was happening completing contradicting each other.

Xenia bullying does not an empowerer make.

I have to say that I'm rather offended by the suggestion that, because I'm a SAHM, I'm being kept down and chained to the kitchen sink. It is a valid choice to stay at home and I'm very lucky that I actually have that choice. Many women don't and these are the ones whose ability to return to work is compromised by childcare not being very high on the agenda of the policy makers.

I do feel that women are the victims of their own making to a degree, but you don't overcome generations of indoctrination (that the man has to be the main breadwinner, etc.) in a short time. It's down to us to ensure that our children grow up with a different perception of what can be.

I have mixed feelings about current affairs.DP is obsessed with it to the point of rudness and neglecting the kids. He will stand in front of the TV with his back to everyone and watch the tail end of BBC news. A little while later the C4 news which takes us to 8. We might have a break then until the evening news but any documentary in between will usually get a look in and we finish off with Newsnight. If he is really lucky he may be able to hop between a doc and a news programme. He also will read the guardian on line at various points through out the day.

Now I know current affairs are important but what goes on in your partners life and kids life is important too!

I also have a sister who works on the fringes of politics and loves to let us know how much inside info she has (gossip about politicians really).

I am not sure how interested I am in current affairs but I have no choice but to hear it all day. My parents were the same as my DP. A lot of it I find depressing and having recently gone through a bereavement I do find some issues terribly sad to listen to.

I find trashy magazines good stress relief and a bit of a guilty pleasure. I know they are crap but the mindlessness of them is therapeutic.

I'd love to be chained to a bloody sink and have someone else do all the worrying about all this crap.

This work outside the home full-time and be a mum, too, is killing me.

I HATE it.

If this is what it means to be liberated, they can have it.

You know the Gramee (micro-enterprise) bank loans mainly to woman in the third world because they're known to be a lesser risk than men precisely for the reasons Xenia stated, so I was very interested in the earlier comment that first world banks take the opposite approach.

As for woman not being interested in current affairs - dangerous stuff that - you might as well just give your vote back.

fwiw I like woman's hour & radio 4 generally

You see Xenia and Soapy, I disagree. I don't let dh get away with anything. He is one of the most domesticated dhs of any of my friends.

But I am the only one who can take stat mat leave, and therefore it makes no sense to jeopardise both careers. I am a vehement supporter of men being allowed to take the 6 months paid pat leave. Until we even things up, women will always be fighting against the current in the workplace.

I don't agree that it is my "fault", but then people rarely do. I don't feel aggrieved either, because I know I can't have it all.

I honestly believe that for most women, it is just too difficult to have it any other way. We could have fought harder, but I didn't have the fight left in me.

I can't be bothered to argue about feminism and women doing housework and childcare at home tonight.

On debating yep key issue - one reason I find it so hard to be with most women and virtually all my friends are men because women are so very very dull and domestic. I have been at school mother's dinners and you know what they were talking about ... brands of suncream. Can you imagine it? Where are these women dredged up from? Where were they educated or how did they sink to such depths.....

Thank goodness my daughters aren't like that.
"Most females don't see this as an attractive trait."... yes I or anyone else has an opinion and I love it when people disagree with me but a lot of women seem to want some kind of stupid harmony where we have a love in and all adore the same PC ideas we all share as if debate were a problem so yet again we have women in a sense doing themselves down, being worse than man in wanting to emphasise -woman who has a view bad. Man who has a view - virtual God. Woman forceful in the workplace bad. Man forceful in the workplace - hero.

Thank God for men.

To be honest though Xenia, don't you think that is why mumsnet is so refreshing, because women on here do have views?

I had always been better friends with men before I met dh, but since then I don't feel as comfortable having close friendships with men. So I have found other women who also got on better with men and who did want to talk about real issues.

We aren't all fluffy headed idiots, and surely to say so perpetuates the fact?

'Thank God for men. '

Well, I agree with that, although probably not for the same reasons you do .

I'm a 'girly girl', though, in many a sense.

Maybe they want to talk suncreams b/c, well, sometimes you just can't be bothered 'debating' all the time.

Sometimes you just want to enjoy a nice night out.

Sometimes you it's nice just to have some peace and often enough, when you open your mind - even to suncreams - you learn a thing or two.

I guess we won't be seeing you on the Style threads then, Xenia?

[runs away to paint nails Rouge Noir and blether on the phone w/Mama about nothing whilst sipping a lovely Bordeaux]

I like current affairs and hate the Today programme. It's all dull machismo, the same cynicism every day, and John Humphries is, in my opinion, intellectually challenged. Today limits what current affairs actually mean. Woman?s Hour has a lot more going on than Today. Sometimes some of it isn't to my taste - but you cant please everyone all of the time.

Well thread seems to confirm women interseted in things domestic and men the wider world. Plus ca change. Go join the Taliban.. oops they won't let you paint your nails....

Sorry laughing at myself now and I have to get my twins to bed and I always wear high heels and I'm a single fairly attractive feminine feminist.... but I could nevre choose an evening with women talking about suncream to a dinner with a politician talking about Government policy.

Just catching ip with the thread but I think your post of 2 December, 2006 1:40:59 PM, Brummie illustrates that perhaps we expect a little too much of woman's hour and rather than picking holes in it's wide format we should be pushing for more than an hour dedicated to 'women's issues' - only when they stop being a minority issue will they be assimilated into the wider political agenda.

Not all women are ignorant of real issues and policy. And no, I am not obsessed with all things domestic. For me, being in the home (part time) is an emotional connection to my children, and this is my focus. I know I am needed here, no-one can replace me.

It isn't a deliberate choice to opt out of the world, but it is an inability to put the home on the back burner in the way men do.

One day I fully expect to disengage from the home to some extent and then I will take my place amongst the policy makers.

Xenia, all I can say is - you shouldn?t judge these women so harshly, especiallu when you aren?t in a position to understand them as individuals. I'm a driven, dare I say it, intelligent woman and before I had kids the thought of being at a toddler group filled me with horror. But you know, it's a bit like masculinity and machismo - the more of an issue you make about it, the more insecurities you show.

I'm confident enough in my own intelligence to have a no brain conversation at times - and bloody well enjoy it too!