Mary Beard on Radio 4 now with Point of View about Miss World 2011

[EleanorRathbone]

NOW!!!

But the women in high heels and make up being the enemy? Is that how you felt as a non-make-up wearing angry young feminist?

I think we all got the metonymy.

(though we probably should get a private detective onto Miss Venezuela, just in case she is the one pulling the strings behind this whole patriarchy thing.)

The 'daring to say stuff online you wouldn't dare say in real life' has a good side too, though, especially for people who are shy or likely to be intimidated by the famous or highly educated.
If people won't speak otherwise because they're scared of looking stupid, and anonymity allows them to do that, then a bit of rudeness might be a price worth paying.

I'm confused.... I thought the patriarchy was the enemy. Have I been doing feminism wrong, too?

I prefer the anonymity of the internet. Through not knowing who you're speaking to, you have to treat everyone as an equal. You don't know who the academics or professionals are. You can't tell who's in their 20's, to explain their argument away as a lack of "life experience", or who's in their 60's, so you can argue their point away as them being "too old to understand modern day struggles".

When we do not know who we are addressing, we have to address them as equals to ourself.

Yes I don't think people have just been aggressive. We just want to get to the bottom of the reason for your nonchalance towards MW and learn something of the difference between 2nd wave feminism and current feminism.

The comment about Miss V being the enemy is so interesting because today feminism is notable for NOT seeing other women as the enemy but for focusing on changing the system and so that comment really jars with me. I'd love to know if 2nd wave feminists were quick to judge other women for their choices (as ES refers to upthread). I suppose in a way it would have been natural to do so because 2nd wave feminists were operating within the "divide and conquer" framework of the patriarchy and feminists were so desperate to get out of the roles assigned to them.

It is a common argument bandied about by anti-feminists that feminists are too judgmental of women who choose "traditionally feminine" pursuits and I have always seen this as a strawman argument, without any real truth. But if MB's comment re. MV is representative of the attitude of 2nd wave feminists then I've been wrong.

MB, could you look past the weirdness of the nicknames and tell us something about that?

'You can't tell who's in their 20's, to explain their argument away as a lack of "life experience", or who's in their 60's, so you can argue their point away as them being "too old to understand modern day struggles". '

is this where the asymmetry comes in, then, that's making Mary uncomfortable? It's not really about names, it's about what the people on both sides of a discussion know about each other? It matters in feminist discussion more than other subjects because it's so personal? Because like someone said earlier, they could tell her their name. But it wouldn't make any difference.

anyway this is interesting but I have really got to go to bed, goodnight everyone.

The thing is Mary, you might have been using the claim that Miss Venezuala wasn't your enemy as a rhetorical device, but in doing so you also restated the sexist belief that women are each other's enemies who compete with each other for male attention and rewards. Of course in that situation a beautiful woman is going to be another woman's enemy. It's how in fact sexist men want women to view beauty pageant contestants - their existence is supposed to make us feel insecure and doubt ourselves and believe we don't measure up. Only one woman is allowed to be Miss World after all.

By using her to represent the Miss World contest, you hid every single male-created patriarchal structure responsible for the contest and instead reduced the protests down to being against one woman. As a rhetorical device it failed, at least on feminist terms.

The Miss World protestors were very clear that they weren't judging the beauty queens but the men behind the contest, the men enabling it (bouncers, journalists) and the man fronting it, Bob Hope (or Blob Hope as Mary Daly called him).

If people 'got' the metonymy of 'Miss Venezuela', then why have they gone on and on about whether she is, or is not, the enemy? I suspect that the metonymical point has not been widely taken.

I see what you are saying about the freedom of anonymity. But from my point of view. well, I am tough (long feminist training on that), but if I want the tone of some of these comments (especially the early ones) would have been quite bruising.

Perhaps you should know that women who have not commented but read these comments have asked me whether I could manage this.. answer, yes I can. And you probably know that .. I mean: do a radio prog, and take what comes. But it does come over rather more hard core than you may realise.

Elderberry, a name holds no information about who a person is. An age, a title or a career allows someone to draw stereotypes about that person.

People do not change under a pseunodym,, if people know personal stuff about the person behind that pseunodym. For example,some people may know that, behind the name FrothyDragon, I'm a 38 year old married mother of six kids, (ok, I'm not, but I don't want to give true facts, here...) and address me differently to how they'd address me as an 18 year old single mother of one child. People will make assumptions, based on what they know about someone, not their name. And I suspect that's what makes Mary Beard uncomfortable. :)

People who have continued to ask you why you cast Miss V as the enemy know full well you weren't talking about 'Miss V the individual'. What is not clear to me is what 'whole' she is standing for. All beauty pageant contestants? All women? All young, attractive women? It's not clear.

And really, I can't see that any of the comments here have been 'hardcore' when you consider that women voicing feminist opinions on the internet are regularly bombarded with rape threats and worse (see the recent debate in the Guardian about this). Another good reason for the anonymity here.

As a well respected public intellectual and the author of the piece under discussion, Mary has something to gain by using her real name here (i.e. an expectation of deference, perhaps).

Whereas the rest of us don't stand to gain anything by using our real names here.

Good point, Prolesworth. :)

No that's not what make me uncomfortable.. it is the disequilibrium. You know exactly who I am , I dont know who you are (except ES). That make our apparently equal conversation strange...I am well used to taking what anyone says seriously; that's my job. My point was that pseudonyms allow and encourage a particular sort of aggressive (and I would say unhelpful) rhetoric... which you do not find (so much) in authored comments

Prolesworth.. I dont give a fuck for deference.
The only way I can engage in this discussion is as me.. but it is very weird talking to these nicknames.

But even through knowing our names, you do not know us...

Even with our real names, there would be a marked disequilibrium.

This isn't hardcore at all. We've simply disagreed with some arguments you made on the radio Mary.

Also this is one tiny thread in the Mumsnet feminist section, which will have a much smaller audience than the original radio broadcast did.

I'm still glad to be defending the Miss World protest here and wondering why someone who calls themselves a feminist would be saying that it shouldn't have happened and there are more important things to worry about (now where have we heard that one before?).

And I realise you didn't say it as strongly as that, but that was the tone and the direction of your arguments.

Lordy. Have you heard yourselves? Non-issue aggression? Personal undermining.? Wild deliberate misinterpretation. It reads like a feeding frenzy on another woman as if she had poo-ed on your best-drawn picture at primary school. One or two of you really need to grow up.

I missed this in one of the earlier links. Julia Long the organiser of the protest responds to Mary Beard:

'As one of the organisers of the protest outside the Miss World contest, I was disappointed that Mary Beard did not take the trouble to inform herself of the nature of the protest before giving her opinions on its supposed redundancy.

If Prof Beard had read our flyers, she would have seen that the protest was directed against what the contest represents, rather than the contestants. We certainly do not see Miss Venezuela as "the enemy" - rather, we oppose the objectification of women that such contests perpetuate.

Our chants make the links between this kind of objectification and other aspects of women's inequality. The "freedom bin", into which we threw lads mags and scalpels, symbolised new forms of sexism that have become normalised in the intervening years between this and the original 1970 Miss World protest. .

Prof Beard claims that the Miss World contest should no longer be a priority for feminists, but merely refers to her own comfort with her ageing body, and new-found personal tolerance of what she sees as the "bodily choices" of others.

While I'm delighted that Mary Beard is comfortable in her body, to conclude from that that battles around female objectification and sexual commodification have been won betrays a serious ignorance of the ongoing issues of ageist and sexist discrimination faced by women in relation to their appearance.

The beauty industry continues to grow even in times of economic downturn. Increasingly intrusive and risky procedures have become far more common since the original Miss World protest in 1970 - from facelifts and silicone breast implants to "nasal tip enhancement", the "internal bra" (a "revolutionary surgical breast support"), labiaplasties and "breast boosters".

Painful practices such as waxing - not only of legs but also underarms and pubic area - have become near-compulsory for young women, alongside dieting, eyebrow threading, spray tans, false lashes, stilettos and visits to the nail bar and the hair salon.

Rather than opposing the dictates and pressures on women to appear a certain way, Prof Beard argues that it is simply a question of "making those constraints work for you". For feminists, however, simplistic notions of "free choice" are seldom an adequate way of explaining gendered social phenomena, and individual adaptations are rarely a solution to structural inequalities.

For those of us protesting outside the Miss World contest, there is a clear relationship between beauty pageants and a massive industry which thrives on selling a message to women of their inherent physical inadequacy and unattractiveness. Beauty contests normalise the judging of women as objects, in spite of the PR-driven efforts of the organisers to make us believe otherwise.

The groups protesting outside Miss World - the London Feminist Network, Million Women Rise, OBJECT, and UK Feminista - campaign energetically on a range of issues including violence against women and justice for rape victims; the government's spending cuts; abortion rights; and the normalisation of pornography and the sex industry. We don't see the Miss World contest as unrelated to these injustices.

An important dimension to the protest was the presence of several of the women from the original 1970 action, who joined a new generation of feminists singing, chanting and laughing. Prof Beard may indeed have "sold out on feminism" and become more conservative in her late middle age, but luckily, others have not."

Thunder I certainly didnt say that.. my puzzlement remains why you all (well I guess that's about 10 of you on this site, may be more elsewhere) should have got so angry at me.. the piece was a) about puzzlement at changing visceral reactions and b) emphasised the especial debt I had to feminism for more or less everything...and crumbs, it's like a torpedo (so much so that mates wonder if I am standing up to it ok)

I think the disagreement (and frankly it is marginal disagreement) is constructive).. but perhaps we could all be more generous to each other

Ooooh, look... Pan's come to tell us naughty feminists off for having an opinion... Thank you, Pan. I do miss having a man to keep me in line...

Thunderbolts, I'll return to that post in a little while. Looks like interesting reading, but dyslexia is playing up today, so can only deal with small chunks at a time. :(

I'm sorry for the deference remark Mary: I didn't mean to be offensive but reading it back I can see that it is. What I meant to say was that by posting here under your real name - which you didn't have to do, by the way - you gain something. The guarantee of our attention, if nothing else. You've nothing to lose by it because you're not a regular contributor on this forum, and furthermore you're a public figure responding to comments about something you authored and broadcast under your real name. So yes, there is a disequilibrium of some sort, but I don't believe you're at any kind of disadvantage in this discussion by using your real name.

the julia long piece is on the bbc 'reponse' website .. along with that of a 'beauty queen' taking a predictably different line,, and 300+ comments.. which you may or may not be interested in.

oh Dont - that was a really boring simple little riposte from you.
night.

Cross-posted.

Not angry. Frustrated (at the lack of engagement with particular points that have been raised repeatedly) and disappointed (at the undermining of feminist action, and the bolstering of antifeminist myths i.e. that 'the enemy' is other women).