Women in power can be as bigoted as any man
‘Novelty print tights have become totems of everything from female empowerment to blue stocking civil rights’
Fox-print tights – have you got yours yet? Not as a ’tis the season to wear novelty gear thing, but a statement of female solidarity? If this sounds absurd, that’s because it is. And yet women on social media are being urged to don the “OMG too cute!” legwear in response to the alleged mocking of incoming Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones’s outfit as she was shown around her new school, sorry, office, last week. And if this doesn’t sound serious enough to merit a movement, try injecting the word “mocking” with Carrie-esque bucket-of-pig’s-blood-over-the-head connotations, and you’ll see where we’re at. According to Women’s Wear Daily, which first reported the “incident”, 44-year-old Jones – the surprise “bright and bookish” choice to replace Graydon Carter after his 25-year run at the magazine – left her future colleagues “nonplussed”, “aghast” and “shocked” by her choice of outfit on the meet and greet (a navy dress and The Tights), with Anna Wintour even reportedly fixing the hosiery with one of her “trademark stoic glares” (how Condé Nasters still haven’t worked out that these are just Wintour sneaking in 40 winks behind her Chanel sunglasses, I don’t know).
The backlash has been swift, disproportionate and – like anything debated and conflated on social media – childish. Both Jones and novelty-print tights have become totems of everything from female empowerment to blue stocking civil rights; meanwhile, Asos has sold out of fox tights as “zoo stocking” campaigners around the world revel in yet another empty meme in the name of feminism.
“Radhika Jones is more than the woman who wore fox-printed tights” was the title of one hilariously solemn online opus. And given her credentials (degrees from Harvard and Columbia, former Time magazine deputy managing editor and editorial director of the New York Times books department) this seems self-evident. But are we more than the women who bitched about those tights? Because as unwelcome a thought as this may be in our man-bashing climate, women are sometimes pretty vile, too. And once we get into the positions of power we’ve worked so hard to reach, we’re not necessarily paragons of sisterly grace: sometimes we’re just as vicious and bigoted as any of the male heavyweights being brought down on an hourly basis.
In fact, the bitching that women do so casually and fluently in every professional arena is the exact equivalent of male sexual harassment. Why? Because it’s insidious but aggressive – and clearly felt by its “victims”. Because it’s designed to destabilise, denigrate and intimidate and because bitchiness is an inarguable part of women’s make-up – one of our basest instincts – just like the sexual urges men can choose to quash or act upon. But also because however loudly we “call out” this behaviour on social media, it will never be completely eradicated.
In a marvellous twist, hosiery-gate has, of course, been blamed on men. Apparently focusing on these feuds “is a tool of the patriarchy, inhibiting us from fighting against the sexist and misogynistic behaviour that keeps women from positions of power and equal rights”. Wow. And there I was thinking this was just a bunch of superficial women sniping about each other’s tights.