WOMEN’S FUTURE IN THE LAND OF EQUALIA
Writer Catherine Mayer:
AT CARDIFF Book Festival last night, I had the pleasure of chairing a conversation with Catherine Mayer – author, journalist and co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party. And although we didn’t physically leave the realms of the Angel Hotel, she took us on a metaphorical journey to a wonderful place called Equalia.
Mayer imagines this gender-equal society in her book Attack of the 50ft Women – How Gender Equality Saves the World.
It’s a tour de force of feminist polemic, forensic research drawing on data from across the globe and some fabulously funny anecdotes – ending with a tour of Equalia, “a tantalising preview of the gender-equal future that could be ours”.
The book’s title is inspired by a schlocky 1950s sci-fi B-Movie, as Mayer explains: “That particular movie is a very funny one because when it came out in 1958 – where it’s in that case Attack of the 50ft Woman, singular – it was an expression of fear about what an empowered woman might do. And in this case, the woman has a close encounter with a space alien and grows to 50ft tall and immediately goes on the rampage and kills people.
“There is then a 1993 version of the movie that has instead become a parable of the benefits of female empowerment. It stars Daryl Hannah and when she grows to 50ft, sort of starts smashing the patriarchy and making things better. It’s still a terrible movie, by the way, but a wonderful poster, which has been adapted for the cover of the book.”
The image on the dust jacket is certainly an arresting one but the words inside seize the imagination most, as Mayer explores, debates and explains how the planet remains resolutely a man’s world for all the progress we imagine has been made.
As she commented in a recent interview, she wrote the book she most wanted to read: “A journalist just told me she found it ‘a pageturner’ and that made me happy because I want readers to be as gripped by this subject – and as motivated to create change – as I am. I wrote Attack of the 50ft Women to fill a gap. I couldn’t find a book that explained why women everywhere are still at best second-class citizens or that explained the debates and controversies that too often divide the women’s movement. I also wanted a book that would set out the case for gender equality being good for men – as it is – and that would help readers to imagine a gender-equal society. Gender-equal societies don’t exist and neither did such a book – so I wrote it.”
Just as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reminded us this week that a male feminist is not an oxymoron, so Mayer underlines that gender equality benefits men too.
Patriarchal ideals of masculinity can impose impossible pressures on men. The cliches of big boys not crying and males being told to “man up” in situations of emotional turmoil remain. And the impact on men’s mental health can be devastating.
In a powerful chapter entitled “Being a Man”, Mayer recalls interviewing inmates of the Maze prison, confined for terrorist offences on both Republican and Loyalist sides of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Reflecting on the brutal “brotherhood” of political gang culture the Troubles inflicted on young men, she reveals a startling peacetime statistic.
“The strangest, saddest legacy of the conflict shows with terrible clarity the toll on men of the narrow ways in which they have been permitted to define themselves.
“In the first 15 years after the 30-year Troubles, suicide rates in Northern Ireland more than doubled, killing nearly as many people as the entire conflict in half the time. Seventy-seven per cent of victims were men. The strongest spike occurred among those who came of age amid the bloodshed but the pattern is repeating in generations born after the peace. ‘The transition to peace means that externalised aggression is no longer socially approved. It becomes internalised instead,’ one study concluded.”
On the more everyday domestic frontline of chore wars and parenting, gender equality helps men as well as women.
As Mayer writes: “Recent studies have spoken to the negative impact of stereotyped gender roles: men who are the sole breadwinners for their families suffer greater strains on their health and wellbeing. The reverse is also true. A large-scale statistical comparison discovered that men in more gender-equal Nordic countries are healthier and happier than their peers in more patriarchal countries.”
So male readers need not fear the Attack of the 50ft Women – they have much to learn and indeed gain from it. And women readers who imagine the glass ceiling has long since shattered may yet be astounded by its revelations, as Mayer herself was as she dug deeper into the data.
“It wasn’t the individual details that shocked me, but the accumulation of evidence of the barriers to women and how these become higher and wider for women of colour or from poorer backgrounds or with disabilities or because of sexual orientation or just because of the passing of the years,” she explained.
The individual details, however, are still pretty eye-opening. While I could have guessed that British men on average earn 18% more than women, that fewer than 8% of elected heads of state and prime ministers globally are women and that women are twice as likely to appear naked in films as men, some of the smaller findings illuminate the big picture.
Did you know, for example, that women drivers are more likely to be