As a female broadcaster, I know how 'lookism' holds women back
Every woman who works in broadcasting has stories about how her physical appearance is judged. When I first worked in TV, I learned a female colleague was – in a senior male’s opinion – “eating herself off the air”. For many onscreen women, the advent of high definition (HD) television was less about improving viewing quality for the audience, and more about a new level of scrutiny of their looks.
Warpaint-like makeup does not fly on HD, so there is nowhere to hide the multitude of sins it used to cover. And by “sins” I mean perfectly natural blemishes, wrinkles or signs of ageing. In theory, this could have presented an opportunity to change attitudes. Instead, I have witnessed women feeling new pressure to have cosmetic procedures, or even plastic surgery.
I doubt the proponents of HD were thinking about the fate of older women when they rolled it out. But it’s just one manifestation of the deeper problem the broadcaster Libby Purves lamented this week, when she accused the BBC of “lookism” towards older women. Midweek, the show that she fronted for 33 years, ended its run in 2017. Purves, 70, pointed out that other older women – including Sue Barker, 64, who has been presenting BBC One’s A Question of Sport for 24 years, and Woman’s Hour’s Jenni Murray, 70 – have also left their fixtures in recent weeks. Those middle-aged women who do remain, Purves pointed out, “must struggle to look youthful”. This is true even for radio, now that video clips are used on social media and photography on the BBC Sounds app.
The appearance of women on TV has always been policed, and current affairs content has been no exception. A two-decades-old study of 128 female US TV anchors finding that they struggled with perceptions of their physical appearance was followed up in 2018 with research that found that little or no progress had been made. In fact, some things have been getting worse. In an academic paper last year with the self-explanatory title “I Always Watched Eyewitness News Just to See Your Beautiful Smile” , researchers found the requirement to interact with viewers in real time opened up new avenues to harassment and scrutiny of women based on their appearance, to seriously detrimental effect.
Of course, the reason we are watching television is so that we can see something visually stimulating. But the idea that this needs to be in the form of a young woman, or one who is thin, has perfect teeth, or is generally age-defying, is demonstrably nonsense. A cursory glance at the physical appearance of many of the older men who remain staples of our TV schedules eviscerates that notion.
That many of the women Purves is talking about work in radio is extraironic. If having a “face for radio” is one of the richest insults you can pay someone in the broadcast media, it seems the current expectations mean older women don’t even meet that low bar.
I have skin in this game, and I struggle with it. I spend a lot of time on camera, and in the last two years making documentaries which required intense, long days being on camera over an extended period of time. Filming the same series over months or years means attempting to look consistent in spite of all the physical changes that inevitably take place when the seasons are changing. Your weight is fluctuating; and you are, of course, getting older.
I wanted to rebel against the pressure, but instead I arranged the same strategic hairstyle for every shoot, and got up long before our dawn calls to apply extra under-eye concealer. I didn’t want to challenge our expectations of how women should look on camera; I wanted people to think I looked good. I am not at the age that the kind of ageism Purves describes kicks in. But one day I will be.
If you wonder why anyone should care about the fate of female broadcasters, it’s because what happens to us is not just a symptom of what happens to women in general, but also a cause.
The images of women we consume in the media shape our perceptions of value. Seeing what Purves described as “grey and stout” women hosting popular programmes reinforces the fact of their expertise, their generational and lived experience, and a beauty standard that includes them. The BBC makes a big deal about keeping Mary Beard and Kirsty Wark on our screens, but when many older women are being dismissed from their roles it normalises the idea that they are socially, professionally or aesthetically redundant.
These attitudes are prevalent in many other professions as well. Research shows that notions of physical capital remain highly gendered in professional services firms such as law and accounting, where women who conform to a rigid set of expectations may succeed where those who don’t are crowded out. These expectations are linked with whiteness, thinness and being “feminine” in appearance, while endorsing masculine norms in their approach to work.
It’s not surprising that the women Purves named are all white, because so few older black women have been afforded the kind of longevity that exposes them to the problem of ageing on air in the first place. Writing this, I noticed that a highly Googled search term right now is “too many ethnic minorities on TV” – revealing a backlash even to the inadequate progress that has been made. But if white female broadcasters with national-treasure status are at risk of being discarded the minute they no longer conform to ideas of youthful female beauty, it looks less than peachy for everyone else.
• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist
rious as much for their potential danger as for their perseverance. Because the chemical bonds that hold the compounds together don’t break down easily, they last a very long time – a reality that has led to a commonly used name for the group: “Forever chemicals.”
PFAS compounds are also ubiquitous, used in a range of products, from food-delivery boxes to nonstick cookware to stain-resistant clothing. But one of the most troubling routes to PFAS exposure is drinking water that has been contaminated by discharges from factories and other facilities.
Indeed, PFAS have been detected in the drinking water of more than 1,400 communities in 49 states, according to research by the PFAS Project at Northeastern University in Boston and the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an advocacy organization that estimates that 110 million people may have tap water contaminated with the chemicals.
Investigations begin
The Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates US drinking water, has been investigating PFAS since the late 1990s. It set voluntary guidelines of 70 parts per trillion (ppt) for two of the compounds combined that are most studied and believed to be dangerous: PFOA, or perfluorooctanoic acid, and PFOS, or perfluorooctanesulfonic acid. (For context, 1 ppt is the equivalent of one grain of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, according to some estimates.)
But despite the agency’s 20-plus years of information gathering, it still has not issued an enforceable nationwide standard on PFAS. The agency has failed to act even as more about the risks of the chemical group has become known, and even as some scientists and environmental organizations have concluded that a far lower concentration of PFAS in water–1 ppt–is a more appropriate limit.
The EPA won’t comment on a proposed 1 ppt limit, saying it would be “inappropriate to prejudge the outcome” of a regulatory process now underway.
But David Andrews, senior scientist at the EWG, says the agency should enact the stringent standard. “The scientific research supports a value of 1 ppt or lower to be health-protective,” he says.
And an examination by Consumer Reports found that while the EPA’s power to regulate chemicals in water is limited, the agency has waffled for years. “The EPA hasn’t taken a sciencebased approach to this issue,” says Brian Ronholm, CR’s director of food policy. “It’s imperative for Congress to pass legislation that establishes PFAS limits in drinking water.”
That lack of a national standard has implications not just for tap water but also for bottled. That’s because bottled water is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates contaminants in bottled water after the EPA sets a limit for tap water.
CR recently tested 47 bottled waters and detected PFAS in 43 of them. Carbonated waters were more likely to contain PFAS, with several–including Topo Chico, Bubly, and Polar–showing levels above the scientist-recommended 1 ppt limit.
A regulatory vacuum
Consumer watchdogs and researchers have long called for action on PFAS. “I first asked the EPA more than 19 years ago … and we are still waiting for a comprehensive, national response,” says Robert Bilott, an attorney who led a class action lawsuit in the 2000s that accused the chemical company DuPont of contaminating drinking water in the Ohio River Valley with PFAS.
That battle, which led to a courtordered study of 69,000 residents that found significant health risks, was depicted in the 2019 movie Dark Waters. DuPont, while denying any wrongdoing, agreed in 2017 to pay $335m to settle the dispute.
Frank and Lisa Penna, the Horsham Township couple, allege one possible explanation for the EPA’s delay: the government itself is a major PFAS polluter and is avoiding substantial cleanup costs. In a 2016 lawsuit, the Pennas allege that PFAS migrated from the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove, near their home, into groundwater. Thousands of gallons of firefighting foam, which contains PFAS, had been dumped at the base during exercises over many years, they allege.
The Pennas also claim that tests of their private well found PFOA and PFOS levels of 298 ppt and 701 ppt, respectively–up to 10 times the EPA’s voluntary limit.
The Pennas’ case went to trial in August. Part of the government’s defense? It can’t be held liable because PFAS remain “unregulated”.
Navy spokesperson Lt Gabrielle Dimaapi declined to comment on the Penna case, citing ongoing litigation. But she says the navy has spent $200m investigating and responding to potential PFAS concerns and is “working collaboratively with our regulatory partners and concerned communities”.
Forty years of clues
In their lawsuit, the Pennas presented documents that they say show the government knew of the possible risks of PFAS for decades before the EPA moved to curtail their use –a claim the government denies. That includes a 1974 report commissioned by the air force that examined how to dispose of aqueous film forming foam (AFFF), the technical name of firefighting foam, because air force environmental personnel had “expressed concern for disposing of AFFFs after use”.
Lt Ronald Kroop, who led the study, elaborated on those concerns in an August 2019 deposition: “It’s going in the ground,” he said. “That was acknowledged, accepted.” What wasn’t known – and needed to be – was the impact that might have, he attested.
The burdensome law
Part of the problem, researchers say, is that Congress has also made it hard for the EPA to act.
It wasn’t always so. When Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, it granted the EPA authority to regulate drinking water. Soon after, the agency adopted standards for about two dozen contaminants, according to research by James Salzman, an environmental law professor at UCLA.
But over the next two decades, water utilities began to push back, citing the high cost of removing contaminants, and in 1996, Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act. The amendments “basically gutted the law,” making future regulation unlikely, says Erik Olson, senior strategic director of health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental organization.
The EPA says it has issued several drinking water regulations to “strengthen public health protection” since 1996, including revisions for arsenic, bacteria, and water served on airplanes.
But since then the EPA hasn’t implemented a new standard for a previously unregulated contaminant. “The agency has not been able to muster the energy or the political will to jump through all those hoops and regulate a single new chemical through that process in 24 years,” Olson says.
Thousands of compounds
Regulating PFAS presents special challenges for at least two reasons: Thousands of the compounds are already in use, and manufacturers keep introducing new ones, though it’s unclear whether they are any safer.
As a possible solution to those problems, researchers argued in a June letter to the journal Environmental Science & Technology that the government should manage PFAS as a “chemical class”–in other words, one standard for all related compounds.
“It takes 20 years to even consider regulating one, and we’ve got thousands,” says Olson at the NRDC. “It will be literally geologic time before we see regulation of most of them.” Worsening the problem is that while some companies have stopped using PFOA and PFOS, many are replacing them with less-studied PFAS compounds.
The American Chemistry Council, an industry group, says that these newer chemicals are safer and that regulating them as a class isn’t reasonable, because “many PFAS chemistries have very different profiles from PFOS and PFOA.”
But the letter from researchers in Environmental Science & Technology said that replacement PFAS can be “equally environmentally persistent.” Other research suggests that those replacements are linked to similar adverse human health effects.
The case for a lower level
Advocates and researchers who support the 1 ppt limit for PFAS in drinking water point to growing research linking even very small amounts to potential harm, as well as the compounds’ persistence in the environment.
One key piece of evidence is a 2013 study partly funded by the EPA and led by Harvard environmental health professor Philippe Grandjean that showed a decreased vaccine response in children exposed to PFAS. Grandjean’s paper recommended a drinking water limit for PFAS of 1 ppt.
Last year, the EWG recommended 1 ppt for all PFAS, citing Grandjean’s work along with other research associating the compounds with delayed mammary gland development in rodents.
The American Chemistry Council disagrees. “The science does not support a 1 ppt level,” the group says.
But some experts say even 1 ppt is too high. The NRDC, in a 2019 report (PDF), acknowledged that toxicity data is limited but said that a zero tolerance is needed “to provide an adequate margin of safety to protect public health from a class of chemicals that is characterized by extreme persistence, high mobility, and is associated with a multitude of different types of toxicity at very low levels of exposure.”
Jamie DeWitt, a PFAS researcher in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine in Greenville, North Carolina, agrees. “We shouldn’t have these compounds in the environment,” he says. “We shouldn’t have these compounds in our body.”
How to address PFAS
Consumers can take some steps to limit their exposure to PFAS, including testing their home water, filtering their water, choosing bottled waters carefully, and avoiding products that contain the compounds.
But consumers can’t solve the PFAS problem alone, says Alissa Cordner, co-director of the PFAS Project Lab at Northeastern University. Though industry bears some responsibility, it’s unlikely to act without government action, she says.
Ideally, the EPA should set limits on PFAS in drinking water, says CR’s Brian Ronholm. But because that could take years, Congress should mandate more immediate action, he says.
Arlene Blum, executive director of the nonprofit Green Science Policy Institute, suggests that states can act more quickly to tackle the problem. “The amount of hoops that the federal government has to go through makes it really difficult,” she says.
A few states have set PFAS limits below the EPA’s 70 ppt advisory, according to American Water Works, an industry group. In 2019, Vermont set a 20 ppt limit for five PFAS compounds combined, while New Hampshire passed limits on PFOA (12 ppt) and PFOS (15 ppt). At least nine others have proposed PFAS standards.
But Linda Birnbaum, the recently retired director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Science and now a scholar-in-residence in the department of environmental sciences and policy at Duke University, says there is an even simpler solution.
“I keep asking: why the heck are we making chemicals that are never going to go away?”
It will be literally geologic time before we see regulation of most of them
Erik Olson
the decade’s best.” It reached No 2 on release, and spent 18 weeks in the UK charts.
He thanked his producers, Inflo and Danger Mouse, “some of the best musicians, artists, creatives around, they’ve really helped me grow”. Asked why he given the album his name, he said he had experienced “imposter syndrome … it was taking things away from the experience of doing my dream job. So I made a decision when I was making this album that I wanted to be myself, enjoy it, and not hold back, and show myself as clear as I can be.” He also said he wanted to be “loud and proud” about his African heritage, as the son of Ugandan immigrant parents.
Kiwanuka was the bookies’ favourite to win, followed by Laura Marling, Kano and Moses Boyd. After his nomination, he told the Guardian: “The Mercury is a place you can celebrate artistic merit – one of the few places that upholds that in the mainstream.”
Marling has now been passed over four times, with previous nominations for Alas I Cannot Swim (2008), I Speak Because I Can (2010) and Once I Was an Eagle (2013), as well as her album this year, Song for Our Daughter. Only Radiohead have been nominated more times without winning, with five nominations.
The winner was decided by a 12strong panel, featuring musicians Anna Calvi, Jorja Smith, Jamie Cullum and Supergrass frontman Gaz Coombes; broadcasters Annie Mac, Danielle Perry and Gemma Cairney; journalists Phil Alexander, Tshepo Mokoena and Will
Hodgkinson; and industry figures Jeff Smith and Mike Walsh.
Prize organisers had to make a series of changes amid the coronavirus pandemic, cancelling the traditional live event and announcing the winner on The One Show on BBC One, with Annie Mac. “It’s an arts prize – you look at it in the way you would the Turner prize in art, or the Booker prize in the novel, it’s that prestigious,” Mac said.
The other nominated artists were Anna Meredith, Charli XCX, Dua Lipa, Georgia, Kano, Lanterns on the Lake, Laura Marling, Moses Boyd, Porridge Radio, Sports Team and Stormzy.
While the Mercury shortlist was lauded for its diversity, with more women nominated than ever before, it was also criticised for requiring artists to hold a British passport to be eligible.
British-Japanese pop singer Rina Sawayama, who has lived in the UK for 25 years and has indefinite leave to remain, said of her ineligibility: “Things like that bring into sharp focus, like, whether I am even British. It’s just very upsetting.” Sarathy Korwar, a musician of Indian heritage who has lived in the UK for a decade, said: “Just one in many ways the othering occurs. We live here. We pay our taxes here. We make our music here. but …”
Sawayama said she was later told by the BPI, which organises the Mercury prize, that it was reviewing the eligibility criteria for next year’s award.
ness, Love at First Sight’s backing track offers a pretty brazen reworking of Daft Punk’s Digital Love, released less than a year before, but the song itself is fantastic: a masterpiece of the songwriterfor-hire’s dark art.
7. All the Lovers (2010)
All the Lovers is both anthemic and strangely melancholy: amid the fizzing synths, there is something elegiac about its implausibly catchy chorus. Winningly, she declined to remove the same-sex couples from its video and subsequently retooled the song live as a homage to her LGBTQ+ fans.
6. Slow (2003)
A strikingly minimal concoction of drum machine and analogue synths, Slow’s surprisingly skewed brand of pop is understated by the singer’s usual standards and hypnotically irresistible: entirely electronic, but warm and sensual, and apparently Kylie’s favourite of her own tracks. The Chemical Brothers’ characteristically intense remix is fabulous, too.
5. Shocked (1990)
Most Stock Aitken and Waterman artists who attempted to assert their individuality came to grief, but when Kylie did it, they appeared to rise to the challenge, abandoning their identikit sound, writing better, classier songs and, in the case of Shocked, commissioning a remix by DNA which is very 1990 – breakbeat, house piano, rap – and a delight.
4. Better the Devil You Know (1990)
They may have been cursed with no sense of quality control, but Stock Aitken and Waterman could be masterful pop craftsmen and Better the Devil You Know is the evidence: an effortlessly soaring melody, a perfect updating of disco’s cocktail of jubilant music and lyrical heartbreak.
3. Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2001)
It became so ubiquitous that it is easy to forget what a weird pop single Can’t Get You Out of My Head is: there are no verses, just a chorus and a queasy-sounding bridge; there is a distinct darkness about its coolly delivered lyric about destructive obsession. And the costumes in its video appear like an eery prediction of personal protective equipment.
2. Confide in Me (1994)
The moment when Kylie’s bid to reinvent herself as a more self-consciously sophisticated artist looked like it might work perfectly, Confide in Me is atypical among her greatest singles and an utterly fantastic song: sultry, atmospheric, bolstered by strings playing the melody of Jane’s a capella 1983 indie hit It’s a Fine Day.
1. Spinning Around (2000)
Over the course of her career, Kylie has tried her hand at being Indie Kylie, Moody Kylie, Mature Kylie and indeed Covering Toots and the Maytals on a Children’s TV Show Kylie (see her 2009 version of Monkey Man with the Wiggles). But the fact remains that Kylie was essentially put on this earth to make glitzy, euphoric, balls-out pop bangers, and Spinning Around is the glitziest and most euphoric of the lot. A bold restatement of core values following her 90s dalliances with the left field; a perfect pop-disco nugget, a single only the terminally joyless could fail to enjoy.