Marianne Mikko at the PES Women conference in Copenhagen

24 May 2006

Dear friends,

After over a hundred years of struggle, the position of women in the society is still unsatisfactory. We still do not receive equal treatment with men.
The only hard evidence of the equal rights is the vote. Indeed, it is thirty-five years since the last big country in the West granted women the right to vote. I hope Switzerland will mark the occasion in proper manner. In Liechtenstein it is twenty-second anniversary this year.
Since then, not much substantial change is evident.
We are dealing with bits and pieces and gaining ground slowly. At the moment our attention is directed towards fighting the lenient attitude towards the crimes directed specifically against the women. The biggest problems are domestic violence and trade in human beings, mostly connected to prostitution.
From the purely logical viewpoint it is hard to understand, why bodily injuries and slavery “do not count” when they are perpetrated in privacy and against women.
The simple answer to that question is: it is the consequence of the present state of social discourse. Even of the paradigm and the whole dispositive if you will. I recommend John McCumber’s book “Metaphysics and Oppression” for anyone who might be interested in how the tradition of Western thought supported the oppression of different parts of the populus, women among them.
Now, in the present world, reading and discussing Plato, Heidegger or books written about them is not the way to influence the social discourse. The self-reflection of the society takes place on the pages of mass-circulation newspapers and in the 90-second clips of the TV news.
It is to mass media we have to turn if we want to uncover the roots of unequal treatment given to men and women by the media. There are two major subdivisions of this topic. One is the topic of gender balance among the workers in mass media, their respective positions and remuneration. The other is the way gender is constructed in the mass media.
I prefer to start with the second topic as it is directly relevant to the present state of the social discourse. The media is reflecting and at the same time creating the so-called “common sense”. And the “common sense” is a very powerful factor when it comes to political choices.
Let me give you one example from a smallish country, which belongs to the EU since 2004. A male actor has been rising to new fame as the archetypal vigilante [vidžilant´i:] citizen. After physically attacking a driver for cutting in the line at a car wash he has advanced to an opinion leader.
This impressively impulsive person voiced an opinion that the proponents of electoral quota for women belonged in a mental institution. He pretty widely seen as the voice of common sense. It would seem that opposing the measures directed at gender equality in politics automatically makes you a voice of common sense, whatever you might behave like otherwise.
The common sense in our media is definitely male. According to the studies of Barbi Pilvre, a journalist, a feminist researcher and a new mother, the mainstream media is gender neutral towards men. Men are perceived as representative of humanity in general. They are the neutral norm. Archetypical “members” of the public, if you’ll pardon my joke.
The women, on the other hand, are deviant [de’viant]. They have gender. The gender denotation of male members of the elite – business and political circles - is avoided, especially when the latter are voicing their opinions in the important matters. When women are expressing their views or appearing in the media for any other reason, their gender is almost always noted. The same goes for the representatives of more “feminine” professions – teachers, actors, models, musicians. Of course, gender is an issue when dealing with gay people.
It is as if nothing has changed since the Middle Ages, where theologians tried to explain the “fundamental crookedness of women” by the curvature of Adam’s rib, of which Eve was supposedly created.
Barbi Pilvre has also compared the reality to the media pictures of women. The stereotypes discovered and analysed in the nineteen-seventies are still alive. An average woman in media is younger, better looking and believes more in traditional values than her real-life counterpart. Of course, women continue to be used as sex symbols for the purpose of sales promotion.
Media also loves to expose women who are victims. Equally popular are personalities confirming women’s position as deviants, as exceptions to the norm. This includes women in masculine professions – in the army, police or motor racing – as well as in traditional female positions like witches or clairvoyants/fortune-tellers.
A different class are female members of the elite. The predominant attitude is to attribute the women’s success to circumstances, such as luck or protection. The failures, on the other hand, are seen as women’s own fault.
I am not sure, into which category female politicians fall. It is my purely subjective feeling that we get lumped in with the witches and female soldiers rather than the elite and their consorts. When dealing with the prominent female politicians, the media interest is directed at their personality rather than their career or contribution to the society.
My own observations show that male success, on the contrary, is mostly ascribed to their own prowess and their failures are attributed to bad luck or cruel fate.
***
So what should be done about it and what can be done about it? It is not enough to have more women working in mainstream media, even in the senior positions.
In Estonia, women have won the posts of the editors-in-chief in our biggest daily and our monopoly weekly. This has very little changed the attitudes. It seems that the difference is how the female journalists and editors are viewing themselves and women in general – through the eyes of the men or according to an original female or gender-neutral paradigm.
Right now, the female media professionals use the male paradigm. This is partly out of necessity. There does not seem to an alternative coherent and comprehensive paradigm for treating women.
Self-awareness of women, even among the intellectual elite is limited. The Seventies feminism has more or less achieved all the concrete goals it could think of. It has almost been dissolved in the mainstream. The media has become more politically correct in its expressions, even though there is a suspicion that its thinking has not changed enough.
We need a new way of thinking and communicating. The paradigm, which equates the male viewpoint with neutral viewpoint needs a credible, visible and tangible alternative. Then we can go about thinking how to better introduce this alternative.
Moreover, We need a new set of comprehensive goals to replace the current isolated campaigns. Presently, we do not know what is the desired balance of work, social and family life for women. We do not express at all well how we want to be depicted in the media. Probably because we are not sure about it ourselves.
I am really interested in seeing, what are the thoughts of the present panel on that account. From my side, I just would like to add that recently the winning formula has been to be in the centre. Centre-left, centre-right, the „third way“ – all have been considerably more successful than their precursors.
But of course it is difficult to position yourself in the centre, if even the most logical and moderate wish could be seen as fitting a patient of a mental institution.
Colleagues, the floor is yours.