How to Attract a Man: The Daily Mail Way

Here’s an interesting one. The Daily Mail has an article on a psychological study that says women who bare 40% of their naked, womanflesh in nightclubs are more likely to attract a man than those who don’t show enough or those who show too much.

So what? Well, as usual, it’s the way the Mail reports on these issues that makes them so ludicrous.

“It is the question that has troubled many a young woman as she dresses for a night out: How much should she dare to bare? After all, if her clothes are too revealing, she may catch the eye of the wrong kind of man. But too prim and she may attract none at all.”

Insert your own DUN DUN DUUUUUN here.

Ah, that age old question. Now, obviously there’s no point in a woman going to a nightclub if she can’t attract a man. And, more importantly, she must do everything she can to appeal to a man. We all know women don’t ever go to nightclubs to have fun with friends or – god forbid – attract other women. The article continues.

“Seventy hours of recordings revealed that a man was much more likely to ask a woman to dance than vice versa. While this may not seem surprising, it is important because it meant that the female clubbers had to compete against each other for male attention. And clothing - or lack of it - was one of the factors that helped them stand out.”

It paints a pretty dismal view of nightclubs doesn’t it? Women are reduced to nothing more than passive sex objects whose sole function is to stand out from the pack in order to be “rewarded” with male attention. While sexism from the Mail is nothing new, is it really necessary for the article to use this sort of language? There no place in the article for anything other than an essentialist, heterosexist mating ritual.

But wait – there’s more.

“Suitable outfits might include a sleeveless dress that skims the thighs. But showing off any more flesh than this could be counterproductive. Dr Hendrie said: 'Any more than 40 per cent and the signal changes from "allure" to one indicating general availability and future infidelity. 'Show some leg, show some arm, but not any more than that.'”

Yes, Sir, Mr Science Man! What Hendrie is really saying is that showing any more than 40% of their skin means the woman is a whore, a slut, a slag, and any other insult men fling at women. More worryingly, perhaps, are the hints at something more sinister; we’re all aware of the sexist argument that rape victims’ clothes or behaviour means they were “asking for it” and now that idiotic notion has a pseudo-scientific study to back it up – you were showing more than 40% of your skin, they’ll say, what did you expect?

As a lesbian who doesn’t particular like clubbing (I’d rather go to the pub instead) I’m probably not the target audience for this information anyway but it doesn’t change the fact that it paints such a negative image of women being subject to and seeking men’s approval. As far as the article explains, the study was observational and none of the people in the clubs were actually interviewed, so Hendrie is putting his own patriarchal values onto the data – it is he who thinks that a woman showing more than 40% of her flesh is a bad thing and indicates that the woman is easy or likely to cheat in the future, all the data shows is that these women were asked to dance less frequently.

The fact is women at nightclubs don’t dress solely for men’s approval and nor should they. This study and article fails to take that into account and instead paints women as desperately motivated by the thought of attracting a man, and doing anything they can to gain male approval and attention. The article seems intent on shaming women for their sexual behaviour. While never said explicitly it seems to belong to the same ideology that says that while men who sleep around are studs, women who do the same are slags. Sadly, I’d expect nothing less from the Daily Mail.

Gately's "Unnatural" Death

Breaking: Gately death due to complications of queerness. 

So says the latest homophobic hate piece from Jan Moir over at the Daily Mail.  Not in so many words, of course, but the message is clear nonetheless.  Gately’s death was not natural, screams the headline.  What’s not written is the implied justification for this opinion: because Gately’s sexuality was not natural.  Sad and homophobic as the piece is, it’s also rather funny the lengths that Moir will go to to blame Gately’s sexuality for his death.  Moir’s concluding piece of evidence that his queerness killed him? Gately and his husband may or may not have had a threesome on the night that Gately died.  Because straight couples never have threesomes.  Or, for that matter, engage in sexual practices more often associated with gay men. 

What is more troubling about the article is Moir’s insistence on turning Gately’s death into an argument against “the happy ever after myth” of marriage equality. 

"Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

It is important that the truth comes out about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death."  (Emphasis mine).

The fight for marriage equality has nothing to do with Gately’s death.  She is taking one possible case of something that might not have even happened as proof that gay marriage doesn’t work.  By the same logic I could point to a divorced couple as proof that all heterosexual marriages don’t work.  You can’t base any conclusions on a sample of one.  For that matter, I wasn't aware that (possibly) having a threesome automatically meant your marriage was dysfunctional anyway.  I'm sure it works for plenty of people.  There are happy and unhappy same-sex relationships just as there are happy and unhappy heterosexual relationships, and besides, I think straight people have the monopoly on dysfunctional marriages, don’t you?  They’ve been doing it a lot longer than we have (if we can do it at all, that is.)

In Moir’s world all queers are promiscuous, and destined for an early death.  The use of the phrase “strange and lonely” brings to mind Dyer’s “sad young man” of the Hayes Code era films; a stereotypical character that was frequently made ‘safe’ and/or ‘saved’ through death.  And that, it seems, is Moir’s final point.  Gately deserved to die for daring to be queer.  That he did so in a way that Moir believes condemns his “very different and more dangerous lifestyle” all the better. 

After all, how can someone who lives an “unnatural” life have a natural death?

UPDATE: This issue has been getting a lot of coverage on twitter today, with the result that the Mail has changed the headline on the article but not on the links to the right (via: @charltonbrooker).  
UPDATE 2: They've changed the links on the right now as well (via: @charltonbrooker).

The Semantics of Gay Marriage

According to a poll published by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press last week 57% of Americans now favour “allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements with each other that would give them many of the same rights as married couples, a status commonly known as civil unions.” This number is up from 45% from the same poll in 2003. This means that a majority of Americans now support civil unions for gays and lesbians. The interesting thing about the poll is that is also found that a majority of Americans (53%) oppose gay marriage. In the last year, support for civil unions has grown the most amongst the 53% who oppose gay marriage.

Proponents of civil unions often stress that they offer all the benefits of a marriage and it is only the name that is different. And yet, according to this poll, if the same rights are called a marriage rather than a union they are no longer supported.

One reason for this semantic issue is that these people believe marriage to be a religious union and since a lot of mainstream religions believe that homosexuality is wrong gays and lesbians should not be allowed to marry. However, they don’t question heterosexual atheists who want to commit to each other and get married, or ask them to refer to their marriage as a “civil union” because they don’t conform to certain religious beliefs. So why should they ask the same of gays and lesbians? The fact remains that in modern secular societies marriage is no longer simply a religious institution. There are very real legal, social and economic benefits to getting married. Giving gays and lesbians these rights in the form of “civil unions” smacks of the same bullshit hypocrisy that saw African-Americans regarded as “separate but equal” not so long ago.

I’m not asking for the right to be married in a church. While I might not like the discriminatory stance some churches take to gays and lesbians, I can accept their opinions and beliefs. All I’m asking for is the right to call my civil marriage a marriage, like so many heterosexuals do.

I don’t want to gain an important civil right only to be reminded that I wasn’t good enough for the real deal whenever I reference my marital status. In a startling display of insensitivity last week, The Sun and The Daily Mail referred to Kevin McGee as Matt Lucas’ “ex-husband” (yes, including the quotation marks) when he committed suicide. During the course of my googling for this blog post I also found the BBC at it in December 2006 when the couple “wed” (again, quotation marks are theirs) and celebrated their “marriage.”

The message is clear. Any relationship I have will never be as good as a heterosexual one and certainly never worthy of a true marriage, whatever that is. Someone has decided that a “marriage” is a heterosexual privilege and one more way to mark gays and lesbians as different and unworthy. It’s only a word, but no one knows better than the LGBT community how much words can hurt. Fags and dykes can’t get married but gays and lesbians can have civil unions.