Sexism revisited

 All of a sudden men can be mocked and degraded too.

I’m worried.

I watch TV less and less, but I see more and more sexism, towards women of course, but also increasingly towards men. I see more and more semi-naked males, bronzed, buff, tanned, oily. 

They are running on my screen in their red small shorts. Their mouths are slightly open, their eyes are wide.

Narrating suggestively in the background, an intelligent, dominant, dismissive-sounding female.

I can’t remember what this particular one advertises (ironically) but as he walks towards the camera almost naked, he trips over and falls.

The female narrator refers to him as ‘thick’.

Whether she’s talking about his brain, his thighs or his covered penis, who knows.

There was the photograph recently of David Beckham that circulated every social networking site. He was pictured alongside his children with the caption ‘I would like to applaud David Beckham’s sperm’.

Imagine seeing that caption next to Victoria with the same heading but replacing the words ‘Beckham’s sperm’ with ‘Victoria’s vagina’.

It wouldn’t happen. There would be female uproar.

But it’s different for men. All of a sudden men can be mocked and degraded too.

Equality!

It has arrived!?

There’s the advertisements about men who can’t cope even with changing their babies’ nappies, the sparkly sugary drink where the women drench the man until he has to take his top off, and the oven cleaner that even a man can use.

So what’s going on?

Sexism, switched.

Why?

I believe if we women see a little bit of sexism against men then perhaps we won’t make such a fuss about the sexism against women.

If we see a man running in his shorts now and again perhaps we’ll ignore all those adverts of mostly semi-naked women.

You know the ones, where a woman suggestively sticks a burger in her mouth, or the one where a woman is on all fours on a snooker table.

Perhaps next time we’ll laugh when Seth sings ‘we saw your boobs’ at the Oscars, and we might ignore comments of  a Wimbledon champion being told she is not ‘a looker’.

Worse still,  I think this reverse sexism is working.

I think many young women in particular think we now live in an equal society but what they mean is they think men are being sexualised and marginalised as much as we are, so that’s ok.

They are wrong, of course, that the sexism is anywhere close.

If the media continues to encourage the sexualisation of men they then can further dilute the effect of the extreme sexualisation of women.

I read the other day that apparently advertisements which are sexist towards women don’t really exist anymore.

This is my point: the sexism is diluted and most people don’t even notice it any more.

But just because we’ve moved away from the 50s advertisements that consisted of such slogans as ‘the chef does everything but cook – that’s what wives are for’, it doesn’t mean that advertisements aren’t sexist; they are just more subtle.

Every diet company going features a size 12 woman wanting to lose weight. Mums sell chicken, men sell global economic research.  Women sell Disney, men sell children’s building blocks.

I believe that many people out there might think these are steps to equality.

For me, if equality means more men in their trunks, projecting their pecks while eyeing me up, open mouthed, on my TV screen, the only thing I’ll be stepping towards is the TV remote control, to switch it off.