Sexual intercourse, said Philip Larkin, began in 1963. In America, it began the year before. Sexual intercourse began, at least for women, or at least for unmarried women, in 1962. It began when a 40-year-old woman called Helen Gurley Brown published a book called Sex and the Single Girl.
"Dear Helen," her mother wrote in a telegram a few weeks before it was due to come out, "if you move very quickly, I think we can stop publication." You can see why Gurley Brown's mother might have wanted that. Not all that many mothers in 1962 would have wanted their daughter to offer tips on how to start an affair. Not all that many would have wanted her to offer advice on how to bleach facial hair, or make a "Fabulous Little Dinner", or a "Semi-Fabulous Brunch", just to get some sex. And most would probably have preferred their daughter not to mix up tips on cooking, and sewing, and decorating "on a budget", with quotes from Alfred Kinsey.
But Helen Gurley Brown, who died on Monday night, didn't listen. The book came out. It sold two million copies in three weeks. And it caused a very big fuss.
Helen Gurley Brown didn't mean to cause a fuss. "It's just a pippy-poo little book," she said when people like Betty Friedan said they found the book "horrible" and "obscene". But "nobody", Gurley Brown said, "ever got off his high horse long enough to write to single women in any form they could associate with. If they had, somebody else would be the arbiter for single women."
So, for a while, Gurley Brown was. She wrote the book, and then commissioned the articles, and surveys, and advice columns, in Cosmopolitan, which she edited in New York for 32 years, because she wanted women, and in particular single women, to have more fun. "When I wrote it," she said, "if you didn't have a husband you might as well go to the Grand Canyon and throw yourself in." Helen Gurley Brown didn't want women to go to the Grand Canyon and throw themselves in. She wanted them to have a lot of sex, and a lovely time.
She certainly cared how she looked. Like the girls in Sex and the City, which would never have existed without her, she cared a lot how she looked. She looked, like those girls, as if she thought a lettuce leaf was a treat. Like those girls, but into her eighties, she wore miniskirts and high heels. She had a nose job, a breast job, a face-lift, an eye job. She thought a female body was something you had to pay a lot to maintain. She did this, or said she did this, because of sex. "One of the paramount reasons for staying attractive," she explained, "is so you can have somebody to go to bed with."
Helen Gurley Brown didn't think, as other people who said they were feminists said they did, that a woman needed a man "like a fish needs a bicycle". She thought that if you were a heterosexual woman who liked sex, you needed a man quite a lot. You didn't need a man to look after you. You didn't need a man to define you. You needed a man because it was less exhausting to have one on standby than to have to catch a new one every time. She met her own husband when she was 37 and looked after him "like a geisha girl". Marriage, she said, was "insurance for the worst years of your life".
Does this sound like a feminist? This woman who asked how any woman could "not be a feminist"? This woman with the taut face, and neat nose, and heels? Is it possible for a woman who made the whole world talk about the sexual needs of women, and who had millions of men searching for a tiny bump of flesh they'd barely heard of, not to be a feminist? Do all feminists have to look, and sound, and dress, the same?
Fifty years after the publication of the book that shocked her mother so much, we seem to be talking about how women look more than ever before. Our magazines now have photos of people who are meant to be famous "celebrating their curves" or "looking gaunt", which is just a way of saying they're too fat or too thin. Many of these women are "famous" just because they have appeared on TV shows that have made them famous. Others are famous because they're someone's girlfriend, or wife. And if, like Jennifer Aniston, you're famous because of your talent or career, you'll only get in these magazines because you've lost, and are looking miserable because you've lost, a man. You might be enjoying your freedom, and also having a lot of lovely sex, but these magazines don't want to know about freedom and lovely sex. They want their readers to know that you're nobody without a man.
They seem to have forgotten, if they ever knew, that most women don't always want to think about how they look, or whether they've got a man. You can't just forget it, if you're single and want to have sex, because sex is a dance, and how another person looks is part of that dance. But beauty, as Helen Gurley Brown also said, "can't amuse you". It's "brainwork", she said, "reading-writing-thinking", that can.
And it's brainwork that gets you money. "If it does not bring you happiness," she said, "money will at least help you be miserable in comfort". By this, she meant money you earned. In 1962, when most women were dependent on their husband's incomes, this was quite big news. In 2012, when many girls say they want to marry a footballer, and be famous for being famous, it is still.
It would be nice if all the people who said things we think are important looked, and lived, in the way we'd want them to look and live. Helen Gurley Brown worked, for many years, in an office with leopard print carpet and pink silk walls. At the time of the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment case, she said that sexual attention from men was "almost always flattering". You don't have to be Betty Friedan to think that's a shame.
She wrote a book called Having it All, but she didn't have children and didn't want it "all". She didn't bother with theories. She didn't care about theories. She cared that women got more of what men have always had: more money, more sex, and more power. "The only thing that separates successful people from the ones who aren't," she said, "is the willingness to work very, very hard." It isn't always true. Some women work hard and don't get much. So, of course, do some men. But after the fortnight we've just had, we need as many voices as we can find to keep reminding women, and men, and girls, and boys, that if you don't ask, and don't try, you don't get.
Helen Gurley Brown Part 2
She will no longer come into the office as she did nearly every day for 67 years, but in that same sparkling skyscraper the great work of Helen Gurley Brown, who died this week aged 90, carries on. In conference rooms and at their desks on the 38th floor of the Hearst Tower, a group of articulate women seek to answer the eternal questions: what a piece of work is man, what does he want in bed and what are the 47 sure-fire ways to leave him gasping like a trout on a line.
One hundred million teenagers and young women around the world now read a version of Cosmopolitan magazine shaped by the wise-cracking former copywriter from rural Arkansas who pulled herself up like a pair of fishnet stockings and preached a message of sexual pleasure.
“Just editing Cosmo for 14 years, I feel I’m a better wife and partner,” says Kate White, 61, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan’s flagship US magazine and keeper of Gurley Brown’s flame.
She stands at the forefront of research into sex, the female orgasm and the fantasies of men, of course. “But the No 1 reason women come to Cosmo isn’t for the sex information, it’s for what makes men tick,” White says. “Please explain him to me. I know he’s different from me but I need to understand.”
Thus a group of women in New York labour to explain men to three million women in America, and their conclusions, usually spelt out in lists, appear in Cosmos from Mongolia to Peru.
“After Helen left Cosmo — I believe she was 74 — the company created this position for her as a sort of editor of the international editions,” White said. “Everybody toes the line in terms of vision.”
It sounds a little bit Miss Havisham, I say and White chuckles. “Well, all I can say is I knew Miss Havisham, Miss Havisham was a friend of mine and Helen was no Miss Havisham. She really was all in, even in her final years at Cosmo.”
I had called her to speak about Gurley Brown’s role in the sexual liberation of women and her legacy at Cosmopolitan. “I’m just in some ways a maintenance worker,” she says. White, who hails from a small town in upstate New York, recalls being summoned to Hearst Tower to be told that she was to take the helm at Cosmo. “Some great guy in circulation said, Kate, don’t panic,” she says. “Cosmo had such a clear DNA . . . Part of the reason I’ve been able to make the circulation grow — we are No 1 in the US — is because I really try to channel her.”
She channelled Gurley Brown for much of our interview, too, though occasionally a piece of Kate White escaped, such as when I asked her whether she preferred Fifty Shades of Grey or something from the canon of Danielle Steele. She said that she liked the work of Julian Barnes, particularly his latest book, The Sense of an Ending, about ageing, loss and death.
Gurley Brown’s attitude to ageing was similar to her view on gaining weight: both must be avoided at all costs. She had cosmetic surgery and declared that “if you’re not having sex, you’re finished. It separates the girls from the old people.”
She warned older women that “you can’t be sexual at 60 if you’re fat”. These are areas where White felt it necessary to modify the DNA of Cosmo. “I just did not feel comfortable doing articles on plastic surgery,” she says. She also sought to alter the sense that an absence of athletic bonking indicated failure as a human being.
The latest issue contains a confessional article by White’s assistant headlined: “I’m a Virgin Working at Cosmo!” though the writer does conclude on an aspirational note: “When it does happen . . . thanks to Cosmo, I’ll be an expert in bed-breaking, ‘O’s [orgasms], tongue tricks” and a baffling practice involving sweets. This last skill is, apparently, a lost art.
The contents page also promised an article on how to “Make Your Boss Want to Pay You More!” Gurley Brown famously suggested that sex might help; readers are now advised to fix the photocopier.
White defends Gurley Brown against outraged feminism. “She ushered in the sexual revolution. “There are women who never experienced physical pleasure because they didn’t know they could.”
Against the charge that Cosmo seemed to be about pleasuring men and not bothering them with too many thoughts of your own, White says: “It seemed like you had to make a choice back then, between being a woman and being a success. I think what she was trying to get at was that you could be all those things.”
Against the accusation that women were sold a lie, that one could pursue a career and wild sex and still easily finish up married with three children, she says: “I wouldn’t blame that so much on Helen. There were things when the women’s movement began that we didn’t understand.”
She recalls cover stories in the 1980s “about women getting pregnant around 39–40.” “I had my first kid at 37, I was lucky I didn’t have any fertility issues,” she says. White now has two grown-up children and lives with her husband, Brad Holbrook, a television news anchor, in Manhattan.
But Cosmo recently ran a piece “with fertility experts saying that the time to try to get pregnant is between 25 and 35”. She also has a piece in the works about “new evidence” of a male biological clock. “Not to put pressure on you,” she says.
I’m 33. How long have I got? “Oh, well, get busy, come on!” she says. Her laugh is warmer than a cackle, but quite throaty all the same. At this point I thought it necessary to pretend to be a woman for the sake of readers of this newspaper, who receive, at least in these pages, very few checklists aimed at sensory pleasure.
So how do I please my man? I say. Now I was channelling a woman and she was channelling Gurley Brown. I thought this tangled set-up might give her pause, but this is the Cosmo USP. It was like asking Rick Stein how to grill haddock. “Men tell us that they do want to feel needed,” she says. “It’s important to let him know that, as independent as you are . . . you still love having him be the big spoon in bed. I also think one of the mistakes women make is underestimating the amount of sex men want. Am I wrong?”
Busy women “tell themselves, he’s not saying anything, he’s OK,” says White. But most men want more sex, she says. “You say, ‘Maybe I’m going to have sex more than I would naturally choose to have it but then I’m going to ask him for something, too.’”
I say — possibly still in character as a woman — that I’m glad women are getting something for all their hard work. All those tips on how to pleasure men in the September issue’s “25 sex moves he secretly wishes you’d try: they’re so specific, it’s shocking!” might otherwise seem rather submissive, not to say regressive. “Only if you’re not expecting an equal amount back,” she says. “It’s a two-way street every day at Cosmo.”
White also writes novels and self-help books. It must be tricky for her, and indeed everyone else at Cosmo, to keep writing about subjects Gurley Brown dealt with in explicit detail six decades ago.
Perhaps a bigger problem for Cosmo is the internet, where young women may search for sexual advice, and at least in the UK, the proliferation of women’s weeklies that are just as explicit about sex.
In America, however, Cosmo still reigns supreme, and a great many self-proclaimed feminists are less critical than they were a decade ago.
While a great agitator for women’s sexual pleasure, Gurley Brown also advocated acting as a “geisha” for one’s husband and cooking him breakfast every morning. It is hard to imagine any young woman doing that. “Somebody on staff once said they were talking to her and she said, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go and fix David his egg’,” says White. “I’m all for being a geisha, I really am. As long as my husband continues to be my love slave, too. Which he is.”
Sometimes You Need Balls
If you have a vagina, you might be pleased. You might, it's true, not be all that happy that it seems to be the rudest, nastiest thing footballers can think of when they yell at each other on a pitch. You might, it's true, not be all that happy that having one doesn't seem to boost your chances of high office, or high pay. But if you have a vagina, you can take some comfort from this: you may well be brighter than someone who doesn't.
If, like me, you read that women are getting brighter, and wanted to find out more, and Googled "women getting brighter", you might, it's true, find quite a few entries saying that "Millions of Women are Getting Brighter Washes". You might read that if they use a particular washing powder, which I'm not going to mention in a column, it "restores linen to snowy whiteness". You might, like me, think that if your linens ever had a "snowy whiteness" it's a bit late to start trying to restore it now. But if you started again, and swapped the word "brighter" for the letters "IQ", you could get rid of all the washing, and learn that a world expert (who doesn't have a vagina) has done tests that show that women are more intelligent than men.
Before, we weren't. For the past 100 years, in fact, which is how long they've been doing the tests, we weren't. Before, to call a spade a spade, which some of us can't remember newspaper articles on the subject ever doing, we were more stupid than men. But now, according to the tests, we're not. Now, according to the tests, men are more stupid than us.
This seems to have cheered quite a lot of women up. "I was stunned," said a woman called Polly mentioned in another newspaper. "I just automatically presumed," she said, that "t'was always thus". How hard, she said, could it be "to remember to put a toilet seat down"? A woman called Helena mentioned in another newspaper, who said she was a "consultant", but not in what, said she thought women "probably always knew deep down that they were the more intelligent ones". But, she said, we "let men continue to believe they ruled the world".
The trouble, Helena and Polly, is: they do. The trouble, Helena and Polly, is that you don't need to be able to put a toilet seat down to run a country, or a bank. The trouble, Helena and Polly, is that only a fifth of MPs are women, and less than a quarter of the Cabinet, and only 15 per cent of board members of FTSE listed companies, and only about 2 per cent of chief executives of the top 500 companies in the world. The trouble, Helena and Polly, is that the statistics are so damn depressing they make you think you'd rather be reading websites that tell you how to get your linen snowy white.
Helena and Polly don't seem to have asked all that much about the tests, or exactly what kind of "intelligence" they measured. They don't, for example, seem to have wondered if they might have been the kind of tests that made you think about lots of different things at once, rather than, say, the kind that made you think about how you should fix an interest rate to increase your profits. They don't seem to have wondered if the tests were telling you anything you really wanted to know.
Helena and Polly don't seem to have wondered whether perhaps what you needed to get on in the world, and particularly in the bits of the world that seemed to have the most influence, like politics, and business, and banks, wasn't the kind of intelligence that was measured in IQ tests, but something that, if you wanted to be like a footballer and talk about bits of the body as if they were other things, you might call balls.
The expert who did the research doesn't talk about balls. There doesn't, in fact, seem to be all that much research about intelligence and balls. There doesn't, for example, seem to be much research about how testosterone helps you make your way, in politics, and business, and banks, but how it doesn't always help you do your job well when you're there. There doesn't seem to be much research about the risks it seems to make people take, and how it makes people think they're playing a game when they aren't.
If there was research about testosterone, it might show, as some studies do show, that female traders do better than male ones, and female doctors are safer than male ones, and that you can, as Christine Lagarde, who runs the IMF, and knows quite a lot about being a woman in a man's world, has said, have "too much testosterone in one room". But it might also show that you can have too little.
It might, for example, look at teaching, and social services, and big chunks of the public sector, and think that the culture in them was often a culture that people thought of as female, and that this culture didn't always get the best results. It might think that what these areas needed wasn't always more of the things that people thought of as female, like listening, and smiling, and being, or seeming to be, nice, but less.
If you have a vagina, you can certainly be pleased that women are getting brighter, if they're getting brighter, but you might also think that what the world needs isn't more studies showing that women are brighter than men. You might think that what the world sometimes needs, and particularly if it wants to get a better balance of power, and money, and washing, is for men to be more like women, and for women to be more like men.
Do You Need Men?
MAMMALS are named after their defining characteristic, the glands capable of sustaining a life for years after birth — glands that are functional only in the female. And yet while the term “mammal” is based on an objective analysis of shared traits, the genus name for human beings, Homo, reflects an 18th-century masculine bias in science.
That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species.
The central behaviors of mammals revolve around how we bear and raise our young, and humans are the parenting champions of the class. In the United States, for nearly 20 percent of our life span we are considered the legal responsibility of our parents.
With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.
That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell (egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in prison or at war, living or dead.
Think about your own history. Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.
After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of your mother’s prepubescent ovary. Then, sometime between 12 and 50 years after the two of you left your grandmother, you burst forth and were sucked by her fimbriae into the fallopian tube. You glided along the oviduct, surviving happily on the stored nutrients and genetic messages that Mom packed for you.
Then, at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells that he had shed. They did not merge with you, or give you any cell membranes or nutrients — just an infinitesimally small packet of DNA, less than one-millionth of your mass.
Over the next nine months, you stole minerals from your mother’s bones and oxygen from her blood, and you received all your nutrition, energy and immune protection from her. By the time you were born your mother had contributed six to eight pounds of your weight. Then as a parting gift, she swathed you in billions of bacteria from her birth canal and groin that continue to protect your skin, digestive system and general health. In contrast, your father’s 3.3 picograms of DNA comes out to less than one pound of male contribution since the beginning of Homo sapiens 107 billion babies ago.
And while birth seems like a separation, for us mammals it’s just a new form of attachment to our female parent. If your mother breast-fed you, as our species has done for nearly our entire existence, then you suckled from her all your water, protein, sugar, fats and even immune protection. She sampled your diseases by holding you close and kissing you, just as your father might have done; but unlike your father, she responded to your infections by making antibodies that she passed to you in breast milk.
I don’t dismiss the years I put in as a doting father, or my year at home as a house husband with two young kids. And I credit my own father as the more influential parent in my life. Fathers are of great benefit. But that is a far cry from “necessary and sufficient” for reproduction.
If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to secure sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The only technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw or turkey baster, and the basic technique hasn’t changed much since Talmudic scholars debated the religious implications of insemination without sex in the fifth century. If all the men on earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction.
Ultimately the question is, does “mankind” really need men? With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis.
It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing. It’s also true that men have, on average, a bit more muscle mass than women. But in the age of ubiquitous weapons, the one with the better firepower (and knowledge of the law) triumphs.
Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?
Recently, the geneticist J. Craig Venter showed that the entire genetic material of an organism can be synthesized by a machine and then put into what he called an “artificial cell.” This was actually a bit of press-release hyperbole: Mr. Venter started with a fully functional cell, then swapped out its DNA. In doing so, he unwittingly demonstrated that the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot be manufactured, but the male can.
When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered, “They’re entertaining.”
Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough.
Women Health
Can you believe it? Women now live shorter lives in America than in any other major industrialized country!
That was just one of the startling warnings delivered by Hillary Clinton in a stem-winding speech introduced by Tina Brown at the Women in the World Summit Friday.
This is a historic reversal. We may still be the richest and most powerful country in the world, but recent studies find that many of today’s American women will live shorter lives than those of their mothers.
Why? No one cause jumps out, as Clinton acknowledged, but I learned one of the possible reasons when I tracked the wellbeing of women in their 50s – traditionally the stage of life in which American women have been most satisfied. Many average American women in midlife—ages 45 to 55—today are bogged down by worry, sadness and depression, according to results teased out of daily tracking by Gallup and Healthways, a wellbeing improvement firm. Working together, we found that emotional health problems are reported by more than 20 percent of women in midlife. Despite a record number of women in this age group taking anti-depressants, they are less happy than American women of their age at any previous time.
Emotional health cannot be separated from physical health. The number of physical problems rise as emotional problems mount. Today more than 20% of these women have three or four emotional health risks, and admit they don’t have enough energy to get through the day. Is it any wonder that a greater proportion are developing —and at younger ages — chronic health problems like hypertension and diabetes than previous generations of women in the same life stage? They also admit to being obese and smoking more.
What correlates with this dismal health report card?
Out of the large sample of women in midlife questioned by Gallup and Healthways, one in five of them are family caregivers. And fully half of the family caregivers say they are “suffering” or “struggling” and show lower well-being on almost every measure than their counterparts who haven’t yet been tapped to care for their parents or spouses.
This is a national crisis. And we are not addressing it as part of the unfinished agenda of the 21st century. That global agenda was declared two decades ago by then First Lady Hillary Clinton, from a hostile podium in Beijing — when she declared that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
If you’re a 50-year-old woman who isn’t worried about “having it all” but about losing it all – your job and your life savings – because you’re giving away your time free as a caregiver for your slow-aging parents, you may face the greatest of hidden losses: the loss of your own health.
I have heard from thousands of women caregivers about the stress that comes with giving up a good job to do right by an ailing loved one, only to find themselves considered too old or too “unreliable” to be rehired.
I have heard from countless women caregivers about the stress that comes with giving up a good job to do right by an ailing loved one, only to find themselves considered too old or too “unreliable” to be rehired. When women are called upon to manage the medical and financial and spiritual needs of a chronically ill parent over some years, they risk losing their own identity.
“Who am I?” they ask themselves, once the all-consuming role of primary caregiver ends. Often, they can’t even remember what they used to like to do. And not infrequently, they die of a heart attack or stroke on the way to the hospital or memory care center to see their elderly family member.
Even giving the unpaid work of family caregivers a value of just $10 an hour, the estimated value of that work now amounts to over $400 billion. Yet they receive no reimbursement, no tax breaks, no paid leave from most of the companies they work for, and scant national recognition.
There is a powerful economic argument to be made for communities of care to ease the solitary burden. We are losing the potential benefits of many women at the peak of their skills and experience. Expected to do more with less and less help, many burn out early, and will add to the tsunami of aging Americans needing high-cost health care.
The bright spot in this otherwise dismal story is the model of Hillary Clinton. Scorned as a meddling First Lady, she says she has been “ribbed and kidded” over the years by “otherwise thoughtful people” for making a strong case for equal rights for women and girls. She says she has been challenged in board rooms and official offices across the world. But she never retreated. As Obama’s inspired choice for Secretary of State, she seized the opportunity to pursue her lifelong mission on a global scale. In countries as disparate as India and Pakistan, Egypt and Libya, just about everywhere she traveled, she has argued that women’s participation in their economy, their politics, and their country’s peace-making efforts will bring greater prosperity. She has the facts to back up her claim.
But diplomacy is a slow dance. To foster cultural change takes years, decades.
That is what drove Secretary Clinton to travel to an unprecedented number of countries in her four years as Secretary of State. In the process, she has been transformed into a heroic figure in the eyes of many women around the world. She has not achieved this remarkable transformation by hiring a new message manager or by apologizing for being aggressive in pursuit of her agenda. She just worked her heart out and punished her body to make this issue a pillar of America’s foreign policy. After the alarm raised by a crisis in her own health, the audience was clearly relieved to see Hillary looking rested and vibrant in a hot-pink jacket. She spoke with the authority of a person who knows the world more intimately than many heads of state and whose vision is clear. Her fans erupted with cascades of applause.
And now ready to follow in her mother’s mission, Chelsea Clinton is poised to become a leader of her Millennial generation. Her panel at the Women in the World Summit was a seamless segue from her mother’s speech. She urged young women to seize the opportunities opened up by technology to create websites and write programs that can help to change the world. Even if their lives are threatened by being outspoken, they can use the internet to spread their messages to the ends of the earth.
Why Did Almost All Societies Consider Women Inferior?
All modern societies evolved out of agrarian societies. Before the Industrial Revolution, the male endurance value and physical strength translated directly to political power. Men fought in wars, hunted beasts, erected buildings, and plowed fields PRECISELY because they possessed the physical stamina to do so at a far greater degree than females.
I'm a HUGE fan of saying, "History does not occur in a vacuum." Which is a fancy way of saying, "S*** throughout human history happens for VERY good reasons." Back before the Industrial Revolution, human fertility was the highest premium factor in existence. People lived to have babies, and babies were the most important thing men and women brought into the world. The female role in reproduction—shall we say—involves a lot more time, effort, and pain (and before recently, a hell of a lot of death). Every moment women spent pregnant (which was a LOT of time) was time that she would have been taken away from power-playing.
This was for a very good reason, reasons that no longer exist (and a reality we now live in that we take for granted). More than half of all human beings died before their second birthday. Life was largely physically challenging, oftentimes painful, and disease was relatively rampant. Life wasn't quite as short as most people make it out to be (mean life expectancy was around 38 years because of child mortality, but only another 10 years is added once we factor in those who make it to their teens, meaning that life expectancy hovered around 48 - still awfully short).
So, to put it plainly, women had a place in society that wasn't just dictated by male prejudice (while it certainly existed); it was dictated by the needs of society. Gestating was (and is) a very time-consuming affair. Rearing children could not be done in day-care centers or public facilities. There were no public schools, no social safety nets, no labor laws: All that existed was family and church/temple/mosque (and religious organizations weren't in the business of providing much in the way of social safety nets). Women were needed at home because the lack of sophistication in society basically relegated most men and women into the roles that they had: men = physical power / social manager and women = home power / child-bearer.
We (and I'm a passionate gender egalitarian) may want to say it was because of "those prejudiced men who kept women down!" but that's just a bit too simplistic. Even women back then didn't question their role; even women in power (queens) believed in those roles. Nobody knew any different! There were very real reasons rooted all the way back into the dawn of humanity, lost to the obscurity of the ages. But we know, most definitely, that the gender roles played by men and women were necessary for society to continue because life was physical, generally short, and dependent upon those roles.
Now, with the advent of the industrial and medical revolutions, suddenly there was surplus wealth (to pay for schools, social programs, safety nets), machines that equalized strength, education to give both genders a chance at contributing to society and longer human lives to fill our cities. With this, the necessity of having babies to preserve society diminished. The need for strong and durable men to work in fields, factories, and in war began to diminish because machines did the "equalizing" work. This has continued apace even to today, in places where machines do ALL of the heavy lifting and all that matters is brain power. Now, there may remain a few select jobs where brute physical strength is at a premium (front-line soldiers, miners, construction, etc.) and those are likely to continue to be dominated by men for obvious reasons.
And so the equalizing of the genders is not something that "men granted" but which society needed and women rightly demanded. We know now that no organization can prosper without tapping into the full mental and emotional potential of both genders (anything less is both a horrible waste and a recipe for failure). In fact, we're reaching a point in development where if we do not demand that everybody contribute to their full potential, then we notice a massive creative lag in that society. More importantly, as a growing world of humanists, we understand that no society can truly be free until every citizen has the same rights; to deny even the least of its members carries the potential to deny all of its members freedom and liberty.
Should Women Pay More?
ObamaCare requires insurers to charge men the same for their premiums as women in 2014.
This attempt at fairness is anything but. If fairness were really the guiding principle it would be quite simple: Women would pay more for health insurance because women consume more health care.
First, let’s address the obvious. Women carry and deliver babies. Maternity care is expensive, and a rising number of women are taking on these costs without the help of a husband (nearly half of American first-child births occur outside of wedlock).
But child-bearing is not the only reason women’s health costs are higher. There are certain non-sex-related ailments that plague women with more frequency. When I sustained my second significant injury from running this year, I learned that stress fractures are more common among women. This also goes for strains and sprains. Women’s bodies tend to be smaller and more prone to wear and tear.
Yet women also tend to live longer. Life expectancy for American women is 81 years, compared to 76 for men. That’s great news for women who get to enjoy more life, but it’s also five more years of costly doctor’s visits and treatments. Men have a shorter lifespan, in part, because they are 3 times more likely to die in accidents (13 times more likely to be killed while at work), and 3 times more likely to be murder victims. Unexpected and sudden deaths are tragic, but they are also cheap compared to other deaths due to long-term health conditions. End-of-life care can be the most expensive kind of health care, and women survive to consume more of it.
Women’s greater attentiveness to their own health likely also contributes to their longevity. Pregnancy and child-bearing aside, women seek preventative care and visit doctors more often. But these additional screenings cost money, and the person receiving the care should pay for it, not other members of her insurance pool (community-rated or not). After all, women may reap the benefits of this behavior by living longer lives; they should also take on the costs.
People are uncomfortable in acknowledging sex differences in health care costs, but they should recognize that those same differences crop up in in other markets, too. It’s not discussed as frequently, but sometimes men are the ones paying more for certain purchases, like car insurance. Would it be fair to charge women more for it just to give men a discount?
A better, more equitable solution would be for both men and women to pay for more non-catastrophic health expenditures outside an insurance plan. This is the only way to ensure that individuals – not pools of people – pay for what they consume. But given our current environment that encourages third-party payment, gender-based pricing is a tool that should be available to insurers. If our premiums don’t reflect our risk, our claims, or our costs, then some people will be overcharged and others undercharged. The overcharged parties will underinsure, and the undercharged parties will over-insure, perpetuating the problems in our current system.
The Real Women of Mad Men
People always ask me three questions about my life as an advertising woman in the sexy, sexist era of Mad Men. Were women really treated like second-class citizens? Yes, but we didn’t even resent it. We were actually grateful — those of us lucky enough to scrabble and claw our way up to being a copywriter instead of a secretary. Grateful for this foothold in the totally male-dominated world of advertising.
I started at 32 as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather in New York in 1964 and eventually became one of the top names in the business, rising in 1989 to be president of the agency Earle Palmer Brown. I steered the famous “I Love New York” campaign in the 1970s. People have called me the real-life Peggy Olson.
Did we actually have three-martini lunches every day? Well, men did. If you wanted a big idea from the creative guy, you had to get to them before noon. We women seldom went out for lunch at all. I think it’s the female work ethic. Someone had to be there sober if the client called at 2pm with a problem. Plus, we couldn’t afford it. We were making only about half of what our male counterparts earned and in addition working longer hours and doing extra jobs like making the coffee and washing up.
Was there really all that sex in the office? Yes, sex in the office, sex in the stairwells, sex in the hotels around the office. The agency Young & Rubicam was famous for that. People could slip out for “noon-time jollies” and the protocol was if you bumped into someone you knew in the lobby you just averted your gaze. It was “don’t ask, don’t tell”.
Sex was in the air. Remember: the revolutionary Pill had just been approved. This was an era of revolt, of freedom, of burning draft cards and flags, and hippies and Woodstock and protest songs. An era of “turn on, tune in, drop out”. Women were beginning to let the hair grow under their arms and burn their bras and proclaim that they could do anything men could do. There was a lot sexual harassment, of course. And nobody to appeal to. The term “sexual harassment” didn’t exist. If your boss made a sexual advance and you wanted to advance your career, well . . . that was your decision.
In my memoir, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond, I write about a creative director who sexually harassed me for 18 months. I couldn’t tell my husband. He would have come in with a gun. Many women did use their wiles to work their way up the ladder, thinking: “If I have an affair with the creative director, I bet he’ll make me a copywriter.” It was always the senior men with locked offices and couches who had affairs. The poor junior men tended to have cubicles without doors and just chairs. It was a mark of seniority when you got a couch.
Of course strong women were emerging by then too. Gloria Steinem was becoming the leading feminist. We marvelled at Yoko Ono’s incredibly strong influence over John Lennon. And that he seemed to be hypnotised by her. I was at the Ogilvy agency when trouser suits for women started to come in and I was the first to wear one in the office. People would say, “Are you on location shooting?” They couldn’t understand it.
But I don’t think women showed great solidarity for each other back then. And I don’t think they do today. We’re not very good at networking and helping each other up the ladder. I think the problem is that there are not that many spots open for women and those of us who have almost reached the top are very, very uneasy about a woman or two who may have reached the same level at the same time. To a large extent I think the women who run successful companies are childless, single or divorced. They’re still making sacrifices like Peggy.
Peggy has to be the odd woman to get on. She’s bossy. And in my day the bossy woman was considered an ultimate bitch. It was the cliché of all time — the big, tough, manly woman boss. Fortunately I’m only 5ft tall so I was always able to come across as non-threatening. I think that was part of the reason I was successful early on. I never wanted to flirt or bat my eyes, but it helped to be slim and feminine.
People do compare me to Peggy. I think she’s a little humourless, with an almost nasty streak, but she and I did come up the same path. We clawed our way up from being secretaries to copywriters and then creative directors. Later I became president of the agency Earle Palmer Brown but I was very happily married with two children and a very supportive husband who was a successful architect and thought my career was just terrific. On those awful days when the housekeeper/nanny was sick and I had an important meeting, he’d stay home from the office. And men simply didn’t do that in the 1960s and 1970s.
By the 1970s advertising featured women as astronauts and bosses bringing home the bacon, lauding the superwoman, but in reality working mothers in agencies were seen as bad mothers — feeding their children frozen foods. It simply wasn’t done to work if you had children under 12. The headmistress of my daughter’s school thought I was a terrible mother because I worked after 3pm.
As for the wives of the senior agency men who stayed at home or parked themselves at the Hamptons during the summer, I thought they were really dumb. They obviously were complacent and had no idea what was going on. Their husbands would be alone in the city Monday to Friday night and it’s very tempting if you’re thrown together with an attractive woman, day after day, and she understands what you worry about, or the importance of landing the Lucky Strike account.
Having said that, I’m afraid I didn’t have sympathy for the predatory women. It was a case of: “Hey lady, you’re increasing the way men disrespect us and inviting more sexual harassment towards all of us.” I think some women embraced sexual freedom because it was the thing to do. And others were feeling more empowered. It was a very confusing time. You wanted to be a feminist but you wanted to be feminine. You wanted to get to the top but you didn’t want to be a boss lady.
I remember a wonderful copywriter at Ogilvy who got divorced saying to me: “Jane, you should try it. It’s just wonderful to be able to go to bed with anybody and not feel guilty about facing your husband in bed every night.” And I thought: “Heck, she’s trying to get us all divorced, what a remarkable thing.”
Mad Men is approaching the 1970s now and people think things changed but it wasn’t until later in the decade that women started to march down Fifth Avenue for women’s rights. The civil rights and gay rights movements were happening but women were still not really standing up for themselves. In the 1970s, everyone was urging us to be the superwoman, the supermom. Now I think the pendulum has swung back again. In the Four Seasons restaurant on 52nd Street, apparently the most popular drink at lunch is iced tea.
I remember the day I became president of an ad agency. I thought my dream had been realised. I walked into my new office and couldn’t decide where to put my favourite desk. After the removal men had tried out several different places, one said crossly: “Lady, why don’t you wait until your boss comes in and let him decide.”
Feminists and the Rape Debate
Chrissie Hynde has committed the ultimate sin for a former feminist icon: she has offended the Sisterhood.
The Pretenders singer, whose sultry looks graced a million teenagers' bedroom walls in the Eighties, has perpetrated the terrible crime of speaking her mind about rape and sexual assault. For that she must now pay the price and be cast out of the Sisterhood.
The exact details of her transgression have been angrily spelt out by professional feminists who lined up to attack Hynde for daring to talk about her own personal experience of sexual violence.
So what did the 63-year-old say that was so wrong? In her new memoir, Hynde said that she took "full responsibility" for being sexually assaulted by an Ohio biker gang when she was 21, while she was drunk, high on drugs and had chosen to get on the back of a gang member's motorcycle.
She then compounded her sin by saying that women who dress provocatively while walking down the street while drunk were also to blame if they were attacked.
"If I'm walking around in my underwear and I'm drunk? Who else's fault can it be?" she said.
"You know if you don't want to entice a rapist, don't wear high heels so you can't run from him."
Cue outraged squeals of "You can't say that!" from the Sisterhood. Because, according to feminist orthodoxy, women are not allowed to say what they think. In this brave new world, all women are embraced and championed, but only as long as they say The Right Thing.
Hynde, once seen as a strong feminist role model, had unwittingly breached the first rule of the Sisterhood club: if you want to belong, then you have to conform.
There is no room for debate, nuanced argument or even opinion in the Sisterhood orthodoxy. You're either a Sister and agree that women take no responsibility for anything that happens to them or their bodies whatever the circumstances, or you are a "rape apologist"
.
It's one or the other.
Hynde is not alone in being purged from the Sisterhood for her apparently unsisterly views. She joins Judy Finnigan, Mary Jane Mowat and many other women who have foolishly spoken their own minds without first checking the rule book.
Finnigan was forced to apologise for making entirely accurate remarks on the ITV show Loose Women about the rape case involving footballer Ched Evans, pointing out that the victim had been very drunk and that no physical violence was involved. The fact that she was quoting the judge in the case was completely ignored in the tsunami of feminist hate that followed.
Mowat, a former judge, was castigated last year for saying that rape convictions will not go up "until women stop getting drunk", because juries face an impossible task to decide whose version of events is the truth when the woman was too drunk to know what actually happened.
It was a statement of fact. The Sisterhood, however, has no time for irritating little details like facts.
Like her fellow Sisterhood exiles, in her comments about rape, Hynde was simply suggesting that women have to live in the real world, as it exists, and not a utopian paradise where sexual violence is a thing of the past.
There will always be rapists, just as there will always be murderers and thieves.
Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.
You have every right to leave your front door wide open while you are away on holiday and assert your right not to be burgled, but most people (including your insurance company) might advise against it. Similarly, you are entitled to walk into an opposing football team's local pub wearing your own club's shirt and demand not to be punched in the face, but you probably shouldn't be surprised if it happens.
In the same vein, telling a young woman she can wear what she wants, drink as much alcohol as she wants, go off with any strange man she wants and to hell with the consequences, is not a victory for modern feminism. It's just irresponsible.
All Chrissie Hynde has done is recognise that the world is not always as we would like it to be.
That does not make her a rape apologist. It just proves she is the one living in the real world and it is the Sisterhood who are the pretenders.
Implications of Male/Female Imbalance
The first words I say in The Ascent of Woman are: “There has never been a better time to have been born a woman.” I believe this to be true in aggregate and in particular for women in America. By every measurement we are either gaining on or are ahead of men. Since 2011 women have made up half the American workforce and the majority of the country’s graduates. But if we are getting our cake at last, guess what: we aren’t eating it, too.
When I was growing up, the message was that girls can do anything that boys can — and probably better. I don’t think it was meant to be a prophecy but it’s rather turned out that way. In America today the average undergraduate ratio is 57% women to 43% men. That’s the average, mind you. In some places it’s even worse. At Sarah Lawrence College, where I was a student, it’s more like 70-30.
Outside universities the gender gap isn’t much better. Among young adults with degrees there are five women for every four men. In some cities such as San Francisco, which is full of computer geeks and engineers, the imbalance is hardly noticeable. But others have turned into man deserts, especially for female graduates between the ages of 25 and 34.
Fort Lauderdale in Florida is the worst. If you are young, female and single, do not even think of taking a job there: it has 71% more women graduates than men. New York isn’t quite as bad but the figure is still terrible at 38% which is why, when you add the fact that up to 12% of the city’s male population is gay, there are 230,000 more single graduate women than men.
Yet only 20 years ago the dating decathlon was entirely skewed in our favour. During my twenties, when I contemplated my single graduate state I could at least take comfort from the knowledge that there were 117 Toms, Dicks and Harrys for every 100 of me. The only catch, according to a Harvard-Yale study published in 1985, was that I had to marry before I was 30. If I failed, then the dating pool would dry up before my very eyes, leaving me with just a 20% chance of getting married. If I were still manless by the age of 40, then my chance of a white wedding (or any wedding) fell to 2.6%.
As a 1986 cover article for Newsweek put it: a single graduate woman over 40 was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a husband.
Then came the revelation that the Harvard-Yale study was flawed. Later it transpired that Newsweek’s “terrorist” claim was actually a joke that had badly misfired. So, for a few years at least, it seemed as though women had nothing to fear except the ticking of their biological clocks. How wrong we were. The tick-tick in our ears was the demographic timebomb that began in 1996 when more women began to graduate than men.
I know what you are probably asking: is it really so bad that women are becoming better educated than men? The answer is yes. Yes it is. Please don’t get me wrong. The problem isn’t women and education; it’s what happens when a small disparity morphs into a major imbalance.
Right now there are nearly 2m more female than male undergraduates in America. To understand what could lie in store for many of these women, let’s go back to our unhitched 40-year-old. Assuming she hasn’t totally given up on the idea, she’s now swimming in her shrinking pond with only 33 men for every 50 women. The odds of finding someone haven’t yet reached the level of lightning strikes and terrorists, but they’re close.
Nowadays, of course, having a man around the house isn’t the be-all and end-all that it once was. Leaving aside the romance question, the mechanics of raising a child alone have never been simpler. Being a single parent doesn’t automatically lead to poverty if you belong to the managerial class — a section of society that is now more than 50% female.
The problem isn’t that women can’t find fulfilment without a boyfriend or husband. Of course we can. Nor is this about women refusing to “marry down”: since 2005 about 21% of wives have higher degrees than their husbands and 38% outearn them. It’s more about the law of the jungle as it translates to the mating habits of the hairless ape.
Anthropologists talk about the operational sex ratio (OSR), which predicts how sex imbalances will affect social behaviour. When males vastly outnumber females, there’s more violence, social unrest and greater emphasis on monogamous relationships. But when women outnumber men: ah well, there’s the rub. Let’s just say it doesn’t lead to peace and social harmony — or happy marriages.
According to a book that’s taking America by storm called Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game by Jon Birger, the current “mancession” enables men to behave like sexual predators without the usual social consequences.
The rot starts in college, where the recent increase in sexual assaults on campus has provoked a White House-led investigation. But it really sets in afterwards, aided by dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge and OK Cupid, that have made the casual hook-up easier than ordering pizza.
Hook-up culture has a veneer of egalitarianism that gives it a kind of social legitimacy. But, as a recent article in Vanity Fair argued, it is aiding rampant sexism. What works a little for women — the ability to sleep with someone without too much hassle — is working a whole lot better for men. Being a scarce commodity they can up their price, demanding sex on their own terms while giving nothing back.
Women are turning to apps such as Tinder — Tinderellas they’re called — because there are so few alternatives to meeting single men. But then they find themselves having to navigate a sex market that treats them like sellers.
The irony is killing. The under-35s are outperforming men on every level and yet it is leading to even greater male exploitation of female sexuality. Birger aims his advice at women. His suggestions include: try going after men in the suburbs (they’re less spoilt for choice) and move to a different city. Mine is aimed at men: just remember, the woman you disrespected today could be your boss tomorrow.
Women Pay More
Radio Flyer sells a red scooter for boys and a pink scooter for girls. Both feature plastic handlebars, three wheels and a foot brake. Both weigh about five pounds.
The only significant difference is the price, a new report reveals. Target listed one for $24.99 and the other for $49.99.
The scooters' price gap isn't an anomaly. The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs compared nearly 800 products with female and male versions — meaning they were practically identical except for the gender-specific packaging — and uncovered a persistent surcharge for one of the sexes. Controlling for quality, items marketed to girls and women cost an average 7 percent more than similar products aimed at boys and men.
DCA Commissioner Julie Menin, who launched the investigation this summer, said the numbers show an insidious form of gender discrimination. Compounding the injustice, she said, is the wage gap. Federal data shows women in the United States earn about 79 cents for every dollar paid to men.
“It’s a double whammy,” Menin said, “and it’s not just happening in New York. You see in the aisles the issue is clearly applicable to consumers across the country.”
A Target spokesperson said the company lowered the price of the pink scooter after the report was released Friday, calling the discrepancy a "system error." (The retailer blamed the same kind of glitch last year after catching heat for selling black Barbies at more than double the price of white Barbies.)
When asked about the price differences of other gendered toys — like the Raskullz shark helmet ($14.99) and the Raskullz unicorn helmet ($27.99) or the Playmobil pirate ship ($24.99) and the Playmobil fairy queen ship ($37.99) — the representative pointed to a company statement, declining to elaborate: "Our competitive shop process ensures that we are competitively priced in local markets. A difference in price can be related to production costs or other factors."
Researchers for the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs pored over toys, children’s clothing, adult apparel, personal care products and home goods sold in the city. The largest price discrepancy emerged in the hair care category: Women, on average, paid 48 percent more for goods like shampoo, conditioner and gel. Razor cartridges came in second place, costing female shoppers 11 percent more. Walgreens, for example, peddled a blue box of Schick Hydro 5 cartridges for $14.99. The Schick Hydro “Silk,” its purple sibling, was priced at $18.49.
Across the New York sample, women’s products carried higher price tags 42 percent of the time, while men’s products cost more 18 percent of the time.
Boosting prices according to who's buying is nothing new. Hairdressers often charge women more. Nightclubs sometimes demand more cash from men for admission.
Price discrimination on the whole tends to be worse for women, though. A 1994 report from the State of California found they pay an annual “gender tax” of $1,351 for the same services rendered to men. Women spend an average of 25 percent more on haircuts (that require the same amount of labor as a men’s style) and 27 percent more for the laundering of a white cotton shirt, a 2002 DCA study showed. Another analysis from the University of Central Florida found women’s deodorants typically cost 30 cents more than the same product for men. Wrote the authors,“The only discernible difference was scent.”
The pricing differences extend beyond basic services and goods. Until courts knocked the practice down, insurance companies in Europe charged women more because women live longer. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies in the United States cannot factor gender into cost.
New York City law has banned gender discrimination the pricing of services since 1998. Businesses cannot legally charge more for haircuts or dry cleaning, for example, based on the patron’s sex. They must instead offer gender-neutral rates by labor intensity. That doesn’t mean local companies always follow the rules. DCA inspectors issued 129 violations for gender pricing of services this year, compared to 118 in 2014. California and Florida's Miami-Dade County also prohibit selling the same services to men and women at different prices. No federal law, though, requires businesses to set gender-equal prices on products. New York City’s report was released to heighten consumer awareness, Menin said, and to publicly shame companies with glaring disparities.
Of the 24 retailers in the New York City report, the worst gender pricing disparity surfaced at Club Monaco, where women’s clothing cost an average of 28.9 percent more than men’s clothing, according to an independent analysis by economist Ian Ayres. Urban Outfitters trailed with a 24.6 percent gender premium, followed by Levis with 24.3 percent.
In 1991, Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, sent men and women to car dealerships across the Chicago area. He learned white women were charged 40 percent more than white men, supporting the stereotype that dealers assume women knew less about car values. Gender equality has improved considerably since Ayres’s paper was published — so why do blatant price disparities persist today? “One contributing factor is profitability,” he said. “You’re pulling an extra dollar out of a certain group of consumers.” Companies might be exploiting the idea that female shoppers are willing to spend more money than their male counterparts, he said.
Of course, a woman’s sweater might be crafted with nicer fabrics. A man’s sweater might be stitched with cheaper polyester. But that often isn't the case. Frequently, the only difference between two products is color. “Those prices aren’t being driven by costs,” Ayres said, “but just because you take advantage of certain groups but not others.”