There seems to be a national moral panic about what little children wear. Wait, what?
Tamara, London
“Wait, what” indeed, Tamara. As all you good Guardian readers surely know, gender is a big topic of discussion in this country and elsewhere, with a lot of people overturning and re-examining long-held assumptions. And this is a good thing! Feminism is all about challenging conventions about gender, so I was rather thrilled by this idea of a global feminist awakening. President Gloria Steinem would rule the land benignly and schoolchildren would recite the lessons of Simone de Beauvoir: gender is distinct from sex, anatomy is not destiny and gendered behaviour is learned, cultural and completely distinct from biology. At last, the rigid perimeters of gender would be relaxed. We have come to the promised land, people!
Except, of course, that is precisely what hasn’t happened, and, if anything, certain gender cliches seem to have become only more hardened. This is partly because the media, instead of using this growing interest in gender to examine old prejudices, has used these discussions to play aggressively to type. So, last week, the Daily Mail and the Sun ran political-correctness-gone-mad front pages about how the Church of England says little boys can wear tiaras and that a drag queen somewhere once read to some toddlers. And everyone knows rhinestones and drag queens are gateway drugs to Oscar Wilde poetry. Put those toddlers in Reading Gaol!
Honestly, can you imagine caring about this in the 21st century? It’s like people who wait to paint the baby’s room until they know what sex it is – what, because if your boy sleeps in a pink room he’ll be irreparably damaged? Hey, here’s a thought: maybe let’s not screw up children more than necessary with these antiquated gender stereotypes or by suggesting they have anything to do with biology, OK? So with the powers granted to me as a style columnist, I officially decree children must be allowed to wear whatever the hell they want, case closed.
It so happens that this nonsense has coincided with increasingly angry arguments about something rather different, but still gender-related. These have taken place between transgender rights activists campaigning for transgender women to have access to women-only spaces, and women expressing concern about how anyone will be able to stop predatory men from gaining access to these places if all they need to say is that they self-identify as a woman. The latter group have been sneeringly referred to as “Terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and, following on from the nonsense about children in tiaras, some people have described all this as a “moral panic”, even a “trans panic”.
But, given that women have been conditioned for centuries to respect and fear male strength, and we are in the midst of a wave of news stories showing just how common sexual assault is, to conflate the Daily Mail worrying about the masculinity of toddlers with women voicing anxiety about their personal safety is clearly both disingenuous and misogynistic. Of course, trans women need protection from violent men – all women do. I’m just really not clear about why some women’s requests for safety are taken seriously while others are taken as proof of bigotry. Any man – and I have seen many online – who thinks he is proving his liberal credentials by shouting down women talking about these fears really needs to have a good long look at himself. Because this behaviour is – dare I point out the obvious? Dare I? – hideously patriarchal.
LBC’s James O’Brien helpfully provided a doozy of an example last week, when a woman called in to his show to discuss gender and, after a discussion about the clothing choices of toddlers, O’Brien proceeded to make the conversation entirely about himself.
“Why would you feel uncomfortable getting changed in the room next to me?” he demanded.
“Because you’re a man,” she responded.
“What do you think I’m going to do? What are you worried about?” he asked. Because nothing proves women have nothing to fear from men more than a man insisting he should be allowed to get naked next to her.
When the caller provided some statistics on voyeurism and an example of a male predator in a women’s changing room, O’Brien called her “obsessed” and “paranoid” and claimed that all this fuss over changing rooms was silly because “every time you’re out in public, you’re at risk of sexual assault”. Yes, James, women are aware of that, and maybe that’s why many of them are concerned about taking their clothes off next to men?
“You want Islamist segregation in place, because men can’t be trusted,” he concluded. One day you ask for a women’s changing room, the next you’re demanding sharia law. That’s how it works, ladies!
O’Brien was treating this subject, not with the empathy it deserves, but with the blunt shouting hammer of talk radio, and it helped precisely no one. It is beyond my comprehension how any man can dismiss any woman’s fears about male violence, now of all times, and it has become my litmus test for how feminist a self-described feminist man really is.
To help everyone, here are my handy cut-out-and-keep rules for how to navigate this moral panic minefield. One: Anything you read in the tabloids about gender is 95% likely to be nonsense. Two: Men who are dismissing and shouting at women about how they have nothing to fear from them really need to be educated in the concept of irony. Three: All women’s fears of male violence should be respected. Four: Most of all, everyone – kids, adults, beloved house pets – should just wear whatever they want. Because it means nothing and gender stereotypes are stupid.
Case closed, happy to help, thanks for stopping by.
Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com.
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