Wendy Mesley come on down

By Sharon Dunn - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:03 PM - 15 Comments

It was 1976, and I had just been hired as a television news anchor and staff announcer at CBC’s Halifax station. Only 22 years old, I had been put through a complicated audition process beforehand—anchoring both the six and 11 o’clock news, including at-the-board weather and interviews, then turning around the very next day to host early-morning radio at 6 a.m., and the afternoon show at 4 p.m., before racing back to the TV studio to anchor the six and 11 o’clock newscasts all over again. Over a 24-hour period, I was a one-woman band—all a test to see if a woman could keep up to the “rigours of the job,” as management put it, something I suspect a male announcer had never been asked to do. It seemed to be a set-up to ensure I’d fail, but when I refused to be reduced to a withering heap on the floor, the bewildered CBC bosses reluctantly confirmed my position on staff, and my trial period was over. I had made it—the first-ever female CBC staff announcer in the Atlantic provinces. (By that time, Jan Tennant had held the distinction in Toronto for five years.)

I was a pioneer, and pioneering was not to be easy. Criticism abounded from within the ranks: male announcers were aghast, managers were still leery, even some female employees expressed their displeasure (“women shouldn’t be reading the news”; “they aren’t credible”; “their voices are too shrill”). This was a time when the only shows women hosted were afternoon-tea-type programs about flowers and food and arts and crafts—shows I abhorred. The most widely held belief, even among those who begrudgingly accepted my appointment, was that my time in TV would definitely be short-lived—women anchors would surely be out of a job as they aged, well before they reached 40.

Four years later, when I moved to Toronto to anchor CBC’s flagship 6 o’clock TV news, I realized things weren’t much better when one Toronto manager told me that women shouldn’t be anchors because “men become credible as they age and women just get old.”

Continue…

The birth of Botox feminism

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 2 Comments

When U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid proposed a five per cent levy on elective cosmetic surgeries and procedures to help fund the US$848-billion Senate health care bill last month, a Robin Hood-style logic appeared to be at work: let those who can afford Botox or facelifts subsidize low- to middle-income citizens currently without health care to the tune of US$6 billion over 10 years. What he didn’t foresee was that those very low- to middle-income Americans would take to the streets to protest the so-called “Bo-tax” as an infringement of a perceived enshrined right to smooth foreheads and surgically enhanced breasts.

“Washington leave our boobs alone” read a placard at a rally in New York’s Times Square organized by a Park Avenue cosmetic surgeon. “The tax directly affects me,” Irma Cadiz, a 33-year-old hairstylist saving for a US$7,000 tummy tuck, told the New York Daily News. “If I have a heart attack, will they tax that, too?” she asked, revealing how conflated elective cosmetic procedures have become with necessary medical intervention. Opposition to the Bo-tax from the American Medical Association further muddled the matter. As did its denunciation by the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest feminist lobby in the U.S. NOW’s president Terry O’Neill argued the Bo-tax unfairly targeted women, who comprise 90 per cent of cosmetic surgery recipients—especially middle-aged women facing workplace discrimination who rely on sometimes risky cosmetic procedures to “freshen” their image.

Continue…

A co-ed school in Saudi Arabia

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Education in Saudi Arabia used to be strictly segregated along gender lines. That’s all changed with the opening last month of the kingdom’s first co-ed university—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Not only will women be able to study and work alongside men, they won’t be required to wear veils and will be permitted to drive cars—both serious no-nos for all other Saudi women.

It’s a bold move in Saudi Arabia, where the status of women has often been described as akin to apartheid. KAUST exists outside the education ministry—it’s run by Aramco, the state oil company, which invested $10 billion in its construction. The university is part of King Abdullah’s plan to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil, and to create new opportunities for the large Saudi youth population (more than half of the population is under 25). To do this, KAUST could be considered a trial balloon to expand women’s education. Continue…

The Women of MAD MEN

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 3:31 PM - 6 Comments

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the strength of the female characters on Mad Men, an unusual thing in a time when most shows do not have a lot of multi-dimensional parts for women. Amy Chozick’s article in the Wall Street Journal talks about the predominantly female writing staff of the show and the way they write for Betty, Peggy et al.

I think that the historical element in Mad Men, which I sometimes have reservations about (because of the museum-piece quality it lends to some stories and the way it invites us to distance ourself from the story) really works for the female characters. The problem with most female characters today, and indeed for hundreds of years, is not just that they’re written entirely from a man’s point of view, but that they define themselves mostly by their relationships to men. This was true even of the “butt-kicking babe” characters, or professional women like on Grey’s Anatomy, who tend to start strong and slowly sink into a morass of ‘shipping and getting caught between two men and stuff. And yet, because they are supposed to be modern liberated women, the show can’t really make an issue of its problem with defining its women or with giving them interests, lives, and feelings that don’t revolve around men. For the writers to deal with that problem head-on would be to admit that they have not, in fact, created super-liberated role-model characters, and not only don’t they want to admit it, they’re not even necessarily aware of the problem.

With Mad Men, the writers have given themselves an advantage: they admit up-front that the show is set in a time when women played a subservient role, and that this is an actual issue in the show. It’s an issue in present-day shows too, but the writers aren’t aware of it; with Mad Men, they are, and the plots therefore have the women examining the issue, trying to figure out how to gain some kind of autonomy (or how much of it they want) and how much of their lives should revolve around men, being what men think they should be, acting like a man in order to get ahead in their world, and so on. They have to address these things, because they’re looking at the past from a present-day point of view, analyzing the roles characters play in this environment. Because the writers are so aware that these women are expected to define themselves by their relationships to men, they wind up thinking about what these characters are beyond that basic definition.

All these issues, as I say, still apply in today’s world and especially on TV, because TV and movie plots have an unconscious habit of forcing women into subservient roles. (What I mean by this is that in real life, it’s possible to go a long time without focusing on romance or relationships. On TV, it isn’t, because the easiest stories to come up with are relationship stories. But relationship stories, at least in fiction, have a way of making the man the dominant character in the relationship, thereby turning strong fictional heroines into weak ones through the gravitational pull of these old storylines.) Mad Men finds them easier to deal with because they’re part of the environment in which it’s set, but there’s no reason it can’t happen on a present-day show. It’s just that it usually doesn’t.

Summer reading

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 7, 2009 at 1:07 PM - 7 Comments

Three important book reviews that arrived on newsstands awhile back, but that I’ve only now just noticed online now.

First, our own Andrew Potter on Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis.

Second, John Baglow, of Dawg’s Blog, on Garth Turner’s Sheeple.

Third, our own Andrew Coyne on The Birthright Lottery.

Also, in that issue, but not yet online, is an interesting review by Marian Botsford Fraser of Sylvia Bashevkin’s Women, Power, Politics.

Why MPPs aren't having more babies

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 1 Comment

You would think that members of Canada’s provincial legislatures would enjoy a fairly progressive workplace—but apparently not. Not a single jurisdiction has developed a clear policy for maternity leave, and in many cases, female members could technically be docked hundreds of dollars of pay for missing sessions to have a baby.

Charlene Johnson, who last month became Newfoundland and Labrador’s first ever MHA to give birth while in office, found that out the hard way. She’ll have to apply for approval for the time she’s missing—and if she doesn’t get it, she could be charged $200 a day for her absence.

Continue…

How not to fall down in high heels

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 1 Comment

In Vancouver, a former runway model is giving classes to teach women how to walk in high heels. At 6 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, the professional-looking women, who have each paid $25 to attend, are sitting in a semicircle listening to the tips dispensed by High Heel Appeal workshop instructor Suzanne Fetting.

Forty-six-year-old Yvonne Van Amerongen raises her hand to share a nightmare high-heel story. “I was in Grade 12. I’d worn a dress to school that day and high heels to go with it. A boy I had a crush on was coming up the hallway. I was descending a set of stairs toward him and I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to impress him.’ The next thing I knew I was in a heap on the floor in front of him. That kind of swore me off high heels for the rest of my life. I just always associated high heels after that with the danger of humiliation.”

Continue…

‘Trim the hedge.’ Nudge, nudge.

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

The garden has been tilled as a metaphor for millennia. But never has it been exploited quite as baldly as in a controversial advertising campaign for a new Schick Quattro women’s razor. “Mow the lawn!” is the title of one of the spots—though it’s quickly apparent it’s not grass being shorn. The ad’s spunky singsong jingle is crammed with pubic-grooming double entendres: “It feels great to trim the hedges!”; “Spruce up your Aphrodite”; plus a reference to “tulips on the mound.” Racial stereotypes also abound: a black woman in an Afro wields huge clippers and sings: “Some bushes are mighty big”; an Asian woman trims a bonsai and sings: “Some gardens are mighty small.” And for those who prefer their heavy-handed metaphors mixed, a white woman pats a shaved cat at the end.

The campaign has become a sensation since its online launch earlier this month, which isn’t surprising: it’s the final frontier for a product that has evolved only marginally since Gillette introduced the Milady Décolletée razor for women in 1915. Schick launched its latest model, which has a razor at one end and a battery-operated “bikini trimmer” at the other, last December at a splashy event in New York featuring a burlesque performer.

Continue…

Iranian porn actors could face death

By Michael Petrou - Friday, March 20, 2009 at 3:46 PM - 6 Comments

Police in Iran have arrested a group of “beautiful young women” and charged them with making pornographic films—a crime that carries the death penalty in that country—according to the pro-reform Iranian website Fararu.

The website cited a source in the office of an Iranian law enforcement agency who said the arrested actors have already produced several amateur films for sale on the black market. The directors of the films were also reportedly arrested. It is not known how many actors and directors have been jailed.

Continue…

So sexy it hurts

By Cathy Gulli - Friday, November 7, 2008 at 3:59 PM - 3 Comments

Women’s magazines have long had a bad rap as the source of female insecurity, what with all those images of beautiful models. (Or articles suggesting all kinds of unbeautiful things women do, like make orgasm faces, but that’s another matter.)

Turns out, lad mags have a similar effect on men. But it’s not male models who cause them anxiety—it’s the female ones. 

University of Missouri researcher Jennifer Aubrey explains it this way: guys don’t feel pressure to be as attractive as other men; they just want to be hot to women. 

So across the board, pictures of female models make men and women feel like crap. And yet, they dominate the covers and pages of most magazines. Why again?

She's leaving home, bye-bye

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 10, 2008 at 3:01 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s why the Conservatives are running ads like the one I posted below. From today’s Harris-Decima poll:

Note that the Liberals have pulled ahead of the Conservatives among women voters and pulled away from a three-way brawl with the Conservatives and NDP among urban women. What may be surprising is that the Conservatives led, and held their lead for most of the campaign, among women voters in general. Their hope seems to be to get that vote back in the campaign’s last weekend.

Women and men: still not the same

By John Geddes - Friday, September 19, 2008 at 3:45 PM - 3 Comments

Since we here at Maclean’s decided, right out of the starting blocks, to declare the women’s vote the big factor to  watch in this campaign, I’ve been intrigued to keep track of how this aspect of the election debate plays out.

So it’s interesting to see Bruce Anderson of Decima-Harris pointing to urban women under 40 as the key to any Conservative breakthrough, and suggesting that Stephen Harper’s surprising pre-campaign edge with this crucial slice of the electorate might already have fizzled.

By the way, if you imagine that the difference in outlook between male and female voters who look to occupy similar positions in society—let’s say, educated, career-oriented, well-informed—must be slight, think again. New research suggests the opposite: the closer the social status of men and women, the further their personalities diverge—men more competitive and reckless, women more cooperative and cautious.

More Babes With Jobs

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

A new study by the Center For the Study of Women in Television in Film concludes that there are more female characters on TV than ever, and that female characters are evenly split between workplace shows and domestic shows, whereas in the past, the majority of TV women were playing The Wife or The Daughter. Not to overstate the significance of that, because a likely reason is just that workplace shows now outnumber domestic shows (particuarly with the collapse of the domestic comedy).

Also, statistics can lie, and so can categorization. I’m assuming that most of the women on 30 Rock fit into the category of characters who are “not defined by their marital status,” because they have jobs and aren’t married. But let’s face it, the three most prominent characters on 30 Rock are a neurotic single woman who can’t land a man and has been explicitly compared to the comic-strip character Cathy (Liz Lemon); an airheaded idiot who wants a rich husband (Jenna) and a ditzy, lazy sexpot (Cerie). Nothing wrong with that, since all the guys are stereotypes too; I’m just using that as an example of why these studies are of limited utility. Still, it’s pretty clear that networks are making more of a play for female viewers now, and including more female characters who have some kind of existence on their own as opposed to being the Hero’s Girl.

Saudi Arabia's first hotel for working women

By Lianne George - Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 4:08 PM - 0 Comments

What do you do when you’re a businesswoman living in a country like Saudi Arabia, where until a few months ago, it was illegal for you to set foot into a hotel (where business is often conducted) without a guardian or “mahram”? (Now, after a Royal Decree was issued by Saudi prince Talal Abdul Aziz Al Saud earlier this year, the only requirement for women checking into a hotel is their national ID card. Also, the front desk must inform the local police of their room reservation and the duration of their stay.)

Well, the new Luthan Hotel and Spa, Saudi Arabia’s first women-only hotel, opened in March, was designed to ameliorate the situation. The project came together under the direction of 20 Saudi princesses and businesswoman, according to an article in Marie Claire magazine this month. Men (even boys) are forbidden from entering the property. All staff are women. Inside is a sort of “sanctuary” for female professionals where they can remove their veils, go for a work-out, or hang out at the spa, and presumably hold meetings without ever having to set eyes on a dude. Which is great. Except of course it doesn’t resolve the little matter of having to conduct business with men, who comprise 95 per cent of the workforce.

What women aren't talking about

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 1:54 PM - 0 Comments

When it comes to women’s health, topics that go undiscussed often relate to one of two things: intimate body parts or intimate relationships.

First case in point: There’s a fascinating recent study by the American Sociological Association showing that women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer often face a double burden—the disease and then its impact on loved ones. They struggle to relinquish the role of caregiver, can’t bring themselves to talk about their own fears and needs, and all that limits their opportunities for receiving support from others. This, obviously, can make treatment and recovery all the more difficult for them.

Then there’s this news from the Mayo Clinic, which found that many women have never been screened for colorectal cancer, even though it’s the third biggest cancer killer among females after lung and breast cancer. One of the biggest reasons is that women think of it as “a man’s disease.”

The message is clear, even if we don’t want to admit it. All kinds of cancer happens to all kinds of people. It could happen to you. Get tested and get help however and from whomever you can.

A pain in her back

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 5:24 PM - 0 Comments

Researchers at the University of Delaware in Newark have found that vitamin D deficiency among older women is often accompanied by back pain.

The study is published in the May 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The team analyzed the blood levels of vitamin D in 958 people over age 64. More than half of the women studied had pain somewhere in their body compared to more than a quarter of the men. 

Vitamin D levels had no connection to pain for men. For women, low levels had no connection to pain either—except when it came to back pain. In that case, women with D deficiency had double the chance of back pain.        

Continue…