In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, Taylor’s new music video has turned the tale of gender imbalance on its head.
Transformed for 4 minutes and 15 magical seconds, in “The Man”, Taylor is the alpha male. In power suits and on yachts, she’s the guy who put the work in and is lapping up the credit. If only Taylor was Tyler, she’d be celebrated as a glittering “entertainment tycoon”; not shamed and disregarded as “unworthy” or a simple “rich b*tch”.
Taylor/Tyler’s workplace frustration strikes a chord with the origins of the movement for female equality in the 60s. Betty Frieden, the chief feminist freedom-fighter of the era, dreamt of achieving societal respect for women. All around her, women were facing dismissal as soon as their employers discovered they were pregnant. Even without children, the glass ceiling of opportunities for our sex was positively concrete.
Betty envisioned a world where every woman would have an opportunity for a career that worked around her. Flexible hours and take-home, creative work could allow a woman not only to balance her home/office commitments, but to unite them into complementary facets of her multi-dimensional identity. Policies that supported the family would empower the woman at its helm. Under Betty’s vision, women could win on their own terms as women; not being forced to comply with the discriminatory employment systems created for working men.
Then exploded the sexual revolution; and with it, a rival female mascot – the “Cosmo Girl”.
She was the wild one, the glamour puss, the young free and single career woman living in New York City; working hard, playing harder, “liberated” to chase fulfilment in pleasure and money and “free sex”. Gone was the fashion of winning support for the family team; in was radical individualism and hedonism. Thanks to the new availability of the pill and of abortion, our pin-up girl was now free from responsibility. She could work like a man, act like a man; temporarily or even permanently sterilizing herself to shed the uniqueness of her mothering capabilities. This new formula found “equality” not in shifting the structures of the workplace to make room for women in all their capacities; but by shifting our womanhood to accommodate for the pressures of a male-dominated society.
I can’t tell you how many times that I, as a millennial female, have been seduced by elements of the imagery of becoming like Cosmo Icon Carrie Bradshaw; trotting through my New York kingdom with skinny shins resting delicately in $525 perfect stiletto points. Be wary. The fatal twist in this story – from real-working-woman to Cosmo Girl – rests on two terrible ironies:
- The Cosmo Girl wasn’t real. A least not to start with. The tell-all book from 70s Cosmo journalist Sue-Ellen Browder[1] reveals how the magazine created the idealist caricature as a marketing product – encouraging women to spend indulgently on beauty, on clothes, and on a burgeoning market of sex products. Women bought into the lie, sought success through emanating these revolutionary values, and propaganda prevailed. We are what we eat. Greasy media happy-meals full of silk, stilettos and sex-tales can be just as insidiously poisoning as any sustained overindulgence on drive-thru fries.
- The ideal of the Cosmo Girl wasn’t created for us girls at all. In “Sex and the Single Girl” (the novel behind “Sex and the City”) Helen Gurley Brown sells the one-dimensional Cosmo Girl as the new hot commodity purely based on her value to men:
“When a man thinks of a single woman, he pictures her alone in her apartment, smooth legs sheathed in pink silk Capri pants, lying tantalizingly among dozens of satin cushions, trying to read but not very successfully, for he is in that room – filling her thoughts, her dream, her life.”
If our value rests in our choice of Capri pants, it’s no wonder that Taylor feels overlooked.
Ladies, at this iconic moment in so-called “herstory“, we took our eye off the ball.[2] We stopped pushing for flexible working hours, workplaces creches, and at-home career accommodation to allow women, men and their families to flourish in all their many capacities. Instead, we upheld the caricature, and we looked to compete with the individualistic man on his own terms – inevitably finding ourselves, like Taylor, underwhelmed with the results. The yard stick of success still measured each individual on how much of “The Man” they could become.
Fifty years after Frieden, Jameela Jamil tweeted:
On the contrary, pushing an ideal of “freedom from motherhood” for half a century hasn’t brought us equality. Equality could have come by involving working men more in the care of their families, and supporting families in order that women could have the best opportunities at work. Instead of shaping men into better husbands and fathers, the promotion of abortion has encouraged certain men that they can take advantage of women in apparent “risk-free” sex. It has devalued an amazing part of woman-beings, and perpetuated the notion, tragically consumed by women such as Michelle Williams and Busy Phillips, that we girls must sacrifice our children in order to compete for the same trophies as our male counterparts.
Equality doesn’t just mean that two things are the same. Women and men aren’t the same. Both can smash it in their careers, and many do so while simultaneously focusing on raising up the next generation. But both will achieve each goal in their own unique way. I don’t think that every person has to be a parent, or even that every parent necessarily has to work. But, the women’s movement sells us short by shouting victory in Rowe v Wade, but neglecting to champion true support for females in all of their amazing capacities. We need respect on the basis of our own gender; not only in comparison to the other.
Thanks for sparking this thought, albeit inadvertently, Tyler/Taylor. You’re the woman.
[1] Sue Ellen Browder, ‘Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement’ (Ignatius Press, 2015).
[2] Indeed, ironically, it was two men – both of whom stood to profit from the abortion industry – that convinced Betty to change her vision and use her platform to pursue abortion liberalization.
LMWrites 