It’s everywhere.

By Dwysan Rowena.

I re-read this fabulous article on casual sexism by Natascha McElhone recently.

This was my response at the time:

For someone like me who is a bit obsessed with equality and feminism it was even a bit of a surprise to me that her day consisted of so much casual sexism.  I even thought perhaps the writer was a bit unlucky.  So I thought –  tomorrow I’m going to try and spot ‘casual sexism’ and if I’ve got anything to write about I’ll write about it.

So here I am.

I’m going to cheat a bit and cast my mind back to last night.  I was on Twitter, I’d watched the X Factor and then Downton. As I do, I’m sitting in bed flicking through Twitter and Lady Gaga comes up quite a lot on my timeline, I think I might follow her, I hadn’t realised.  I was wondering what her ‘monsters’ thought of her routine on the X Factor, she was dancing around in a nude coloured bikini to a song called ‘Venus’ in which she sings about her body and that you can ‘do what you want’ with it.   I think I’m a bit odd as a feminist as I don’t tend to have the same issues as many feminists have about that/Miley Cyrus etc – I often wonder has anyone asked them what they think, instead of making assumptions.  But that is a different article.

Anyway back to Ga Ga and Twitter – so I thought, wonder what her fans tweeted about it as it was quite a bizarre, eccentric performance.  There was the usual ‘love you so much’, ‘retweet me’, ‘you’re my world’ but also there was  stuff like ‘hoar’ and ‘all your fans are faggots’. In the world of Twitter I think we became so desenstised to this kind of language.  Homophobia. Sexism.  Some had even tweeted #hopeyoudieofcancer.  Not just sexism. Vile. Awful.  All driven by her wearing a nude coloured bikini.

This morning when I woke up at 6.20am to feed my yappy Jacakpoo, I made a cuppa and got back to bed for ten minutes.  The first article I read was about rape and how the reports had gone up but the referrals by the police to the CPS had gone down.  Sexism?  Why are allegations of rape going up but the referrals to the CPS going down? I know I’ve repeated myself.  But.  Why?

Back to my day.

As I leave for work I bumped into a guy with his little dog, we talked about the weather, he looked at my breasts a couple of times while talking to me, I’m not sure if I’d have noticed that much had I not been thinking about writing this.

On the way to work I listened to the radio, male presenter of course.  I listened to the radio then the sports news, all relating to the male football matches over the weekend. There was a Britney video of her ‘riding’ a broomstick apparently.

As I was driving I was behind a lorry, from Poland I think.  On the back of it, on the right side it had a provocative naked quite nicely drawn woman with her finger in her mouth.  On the other side there was a drawing of what looked like a young boy pissing on a lamppost. Smiling.  Looking at me.  Weird.

As I was driving to work, I was thinking about equality, I often think of how we could make the world a more equal place for women.

We are doing better in school than our male counterparts but all the statistics tell you after that after school and university, our place shifts.

Women made up 19 per cent of FTSE 100 directors on 1st October 2013, and that is viewed as a good thing!  The government wants 25 per cent of FTSE 100 directors to be female by 2015.  And that is supposed to be a good thing!! Women make 22.5 per cent of MPs. 22.5 per cent – and this is a good thing?!  5 per cent of editors of national newspapers are women. 5 per cent!!

I think, I do think that this is because men obviously (as the statistics show) still rule, well – everything and predominantly.  I think many men don’t want equality.  Some do, I know they do, but I don’t think most do – so if they are making the decisions, if they are predominantly making the laws, is there any surprise that things don’t change dramatically, that equality is still such a long way off.

Back to my day.

I get to work, all of the staff apart from the 3 partners are female, all of the admin team, all of the nurses, the manager (me).  I really get on well with my ‘bosses’, they are three great GPs, however they are 3 male GPs, where are all the female GPs??!

I start work and I’m called down within a few minutes to see Mr X, the content of this conversation of course is not relevant but he greets me with  ‘hi love’ and then he touched my arm as he was talking to me.

I remember speaking to him previously on the telephone, he had made comments about my bum. He then asked me, which man was ‘high up’ in order that he could address a letter to. Actually, I replied, her name is…

Later on I have a technical issue and have to ring an IT company to solve it as there is a software conflict with the server.  During the call I’m told that perhaps the information would be ‘too complicated’ for me to follow.  I do wonder whether a man would have said this to another man.  Actually I found it rather easy to point to start, programs blah blah and blah.

Sometimes I think it is so easy, even as a feminist, to be drawn into the world of accepting casual sexism.

Some of the things that happened I had to think about because they pass me by.

It’s half term and my son needs ‘looking after’ of sorts this week. Who makes these arrangements?  Mum of course.  Why?  Because it is actually easier for me to work flexibly, to alter my days and hours than his dad.  Why is that?  Why can’t employers offer the same flexibility to dads as to mums.

I’m not talking about the ‘law’. I’m talking about common sense – if all employers had some common sense when it came to parenting it would make it so much easier. I don’t take the p*ss in work.  Monday I might work until 7, tomorrow I might go in at 11.  OK – that might not work for every job but with some forward planning, it probably could.

During the day I have conversations with other women.  They mainly are about food (whether to eat that chocolate or not), diets (how much weight has been lost/gained), marriage, babies, new kitchens, being a mum, becoming a granny.  I wonder to myself how many men have talked about those subjects today, with their colleagues and friends.

I drive home to the radio and I hear the presenter talking about how he likes Katy Perry and he apologies for not being ‘laddy’ enough.  The pressure is on both sexes it seems, to fit in.

Maybe I’m being picky today to *see* sexism and inequality.

Thing is, it hasn’t seemed that difficult.