Dolce & Gabbana’s advertising campaign intended to evoke Marilyn Monroe’s heyday, and it succeeded. The apparition recalled Nancy, the title character of a 1958 film, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. Nancy’s encounter with a space alien transforms her into a giant (‘Incredibly Huge, with Incredible Desires for Love and Vengeance’). The patriarchal authorities – doctors, police, spouse – chain her, but she breaks free and, naked but for an arrangement of bed sheets, embarks on a murderous rampage. Behold the dreadful power of woman unleashed (‘The Most Grotesque Monstrosity of All’)!
Zombie Johansson captured the inadvertent humour of the B-movie, but she was properly scary too. In her human incarnation she is the only woman to break through Hollywood’s diamond ceiling to claim a place among the ten top-grossing actors of all time. She chooses intelligent roles and has more than once pushed back against the chauvinism of Hollywood and its media ecosystems. Her dead-eyed alter ego belonged to the monstrous regiment of billboard women in perpetual march across the world. Nancy gained agency as she grew. Today’s 50-footers, hypersexualised and supine, promote a retrograde ideology alongside brands and products.
We’re so marinated in this imagery that we seldom stand back to parse its meaning and impact. It is all-pervasive, not just on hoardings and print and broadcast but metastasised into myriad digital forms. The underlying messaging is little different to the drumbeat that helped return women to pliant domesticity after World War II. From earliest childhood, girls are taught to value themselves for their abilities: desirability, marriageability, tractability.
There are, of course, other role models, women of stature and astonishing achievement, but still they break through against the odds. Globally women own less and earn less than men, often in the worst and worst regulated jobs, undertake the lionesses’ share of caregiving and unpaid domestic labour, and are subject to discrimination, harassment and sexual violence.
Every woman navigates a world fashioned by and for men. Some pharmaceuticals fail us because they are tested on male animals to avoid having to account for hormonal cycles. We shiver at our workplaces because thermostats are set to temperatures that suit male metabolisms.
We’re left in the cold in other ways too. On February 6, 1918, the Representation of the People Act gained royal assent, for the first time giving the vote to UK women, if only to those 40 per cent of UK women aged over 30 who met additional criteria such as property ownership. The Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, a piece of legislation that came into force in November of the same year, meant these 8.4 million voters were not only able to exercise their new right at the December general elections, but in 17 constituencies could vote for Westminster’s first female candidates – returning to office the first female MP, Constance Markievicz. Yet the centenary of these momentous events opened not just with a popping of corks for the progress they enabled, but with a flatulence of punctured hopes. In 2018, the total number of female MPs ever elected surpasses the number of male MPs in the current parliament by only two, and that parliament presides over a country in which to be born female is still a lifelong disadvantage. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OECD) logs the gap between women’s earnings and men’s at 17.48 per cent in the UK, and this pattern is echoed across the world, with a gap of 17.91 per cent in the US and 18 per cent in Australia. Women have long been blamed for this gap. We don’t ask for raises often enough or we don’t ask right. Studies identify the real culprits: job segregation and discrimination.
Jobs traditionally performed by men attract higher wages than those held by women. The paradigm of the husband as the head of the household remains firmly lodged in the public imagination. One reason some employers pay men better may be that they think the men have greater need of the money. In the US, men in nursing are vastly outnumbered by their female colleagues, by nine to one, yet earn $5,100 more on average per year than female nurses. These disparities are echoed across the world.
Every woman lives with the constant tinnitus hum of low-level sexism. Most of us have been leered at or leched over and told we should be flattered by the attention. Almost a fifth of US women will be raped in their lifetimes, with close to half reporting other forms of sexual violence. One in three women worldwide will be subjected to violent sexual attack. The response to this epidemic is muted and muddled.
US prosecutors ask a judge to send a college athlete to prison for six years for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman; the judge decides on six months, concerned a longer period of incarceration will have a ‘severe impact’ on the perpetrator, who is then freed halfway through his sentence. In India, a woman is gang-raped to death; one of her rapists says: ‘A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.’ In Russia, where domestic abuse is thought to kill one woman every 40 minutes, legislators find a way to reduce criminal cases of domestic violence – by decriminalising ‘moderate’ violence and reserving criminal penalties for cases where beatings result in broken bones. The majority of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by terrorists in northern Nigeria are still missing; those who escape bearing tales of mass rape and slavery find themselves social outcasts. Egyptian lawmakers finally approve a draft bill that would dole out five-to seven-year jail terms for people carrying out female genital mutilation (FGM), an operation to remove part or all of the clitoris. The procedure – often called circumcision by those trying to minimise its brutality – has been inflicted on more than 90 per cent of the country’s women and girls. ‘We are a population whose men suffer from sexual weakness, which is evident because Egypt is among the biggest consumers of sexual stimulants,’ an MP protests. ‘If we stopped circumcising we will need strong men, and we don’t have those.’ Up to 1,000 women are sexually assaulted on the streets of the German cathedral city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015; the attacks trigger condemnation not of women’s oppression but of migration, reinforcing the false narrative that sexual violence is imported, rather than native to white European society. In October 2017, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences votes to expel producer Harvey Weinstein amid allegations by dozens of women of harassment, assault and rape. As details emerge, more women come forward, with stories not only about Weinstein but the entire film industry and then about other industries and, of course, about politics. A UK government minister, Mark Garnier, admits calling his female aide ‘Sugar Tits’ and does not deny sending her to buy sex toys, but blusters that this ‘absolutely does not constitute harassment’. Michael Fallon, Secretary of State for Defence, resigns after admitting he touched a journalist’s knee. Another journalist says he lunged at her. More Conservatives are accused of pawing and worse, but so too are MPs from other parties. Bex Bailey, a Labour activist, reveals that when she told a party official she’d been raped by a senior colleague, the official advised her that to report the assault would ‘damage’ her. This ‘is a problem in every party at every level,’ says Bailey.
Across the world, similar stories come to light. During a debate in the EU Parliament, several female members hold up handwritten signs that say ‘#MeToo’. The backlash starts quickly. This is, powerful men complain, a ‘witch-hunt’, yet the flood of stories shared on Twitter using the #MeToo hashtag are only revealing what women already knew, that sexual violence, threatened or actual, is part of our everyday experience. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences proclaims an end to ‘the era of wilful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behaviour and workplace harassment’, we shake our heads in disbelief. When the President of the United States muses that ‘women are very special. I think it’s a very special time. A lot of things are coming out and I think that’s very, very good for women, and I’m happy a lot of these things are coming out. I’m very happy it’s being exposed’, our jaws hit our chests. Because this is patently untrue.
The previous November, US voters have chosen Donald Trump despite hearing a recording of him boasting of assaulting women. ‘Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,’ he said. The recording prompted ten women to come forward to accuse him of assault, often in workplace settings. He insisted that they were lying. After all, two of them were too ugly to grope.
Many other aspects of his candidacy