Mind the Gap

Unless you’ve been on another planet the past few weeks, you’re probably aware of the furore caused in the UK by Jack Straw’s request that Muslim women constituents remove their veils when meeting with him, and the case of a Muslim teaching assistent suspended for refusing to remove her veil in front of male colleagues. Now we have a top Australian Muslim cleric on indefinite leave after his comments about immodestly dressed women hit the headlines.

I haven’t posted about veils or Islam, partly because I believe the row is being stoked by cynical and evil western political and mass media manipulation. A small minority of Muslim women in this country have been wearing the veil here for decades without causing any more trouble than any other group dressing in a way that challenges dominant British social norms, or expresses their religious and political views. So I’m sure it’s no coincidence to see veils made a serous issue at this moment in time and I won’t be at all surprised to see legislation propsals aimed at Muslims in the near future. I feel the veil is a red herring in a row that’s really about something else entirely. Having said all that, I would like to highlight some pieces I’ve found especially interesting and challenging recently.

First from Muslim women:

Muslim journalist Zaiba Malik spends a day wearing the veil and decides it’s not for her, but her experiences are a must read for everyone.

After a few hours I get used to the gawping and the sniggering, am unsurprised when passengers on a bus prefer to stand up rather than sit next to me. What does surprise me is what happens when I get off the bus. I’ve arranged to meet a friend at the National Portrait Gallery. In the 15-minute walk from the bus stop to the gallery, two things happen. A man in his 30s, who I think might be Dutch, stops in front of me and asks: “Can I see your face?”

“Why do you want to see my face?”

“Because I want to see if you are pretty. Are you pretty?”

Before I can reply, he walks away and shouts: “You fucking tease!”

At Blogher, Pari Esfandiari considers the politics of the veil in Hajib Hijacked.

Gone those days when I used to sit in my parents home in Tehran, in my miniskirt, next to my mom with her modest dress, my aunt and her head scarf and my grandmother and her chador. Three generations of women, who were united in respecting, tolerating and defending one another’s choice of outfit without even thinking politically.

Today, the veil is far from a personal choice – the veil has turned to a symbol of political significance that has many layers. For some women, the veil is a sign of religious devotion and asserting one’s Islamic identity; for others the veil is keeping up with a fashion trend. For Arab youths who are angry over the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the veil is a silent protest against their governments’ collaboration with Washington.

The veil also is at the crux of cultural clashes and East-West tension.

From India, Annie at Known Turf also looks at issues of dress and compulsion in the Bedsheet and Bigotry.

I can understand the temptation to call for a ban, because, sometimes it seems as if that is the only way to protect women from a forced tent-ization, to divorce their clothes from their rights and duties.

Yet, I would like to reserve the right to wear a burqa, as and when I choose to.

Because I will NOT do anything you force me to do. I will NOT wear a bedsheet even if that’s the only guise in which I am allowed to enter heaven, for I don’t believe in a God who cannot bear to see his own creations uncovered. But nor will I NOT wear a bedsheet, just because you don’t like it.

And if a woman with her head covered, frightens you, you probably have deep-rooted insecurities and need to see a shrink.

Meanwhile, another Muslim journalist in the UK, Houzan Mahmoud, finds the veil problematic.

The veil is not merely a piece of “cloth”, but a sign of the oppression of women, control over their sexuality, submissiveness to the will of God or a man. The veil is a banner of political Islam used, to segregate women born by historical accident in the so-called “Islamic World” from other women in the rest of the world.

From a non-Muslim perspective, I found ex-nun Karen Armstrong’s piece particularly interesting.

I spent seven years of my girlhood heavily veiled - not in a Muslim niqab but in a nun’s habit. We wore voluminous black robes, large rosaries and crucifixes, and an elaborate headdress: you could see a small slice of my face from the front, but from the side I was entirely shielded from view. We must have looked very odd indeed, walking dourly through the colourful carnival of London during the swinging 60s, but nobody ever asked us to exchange our habits for more conventional attire.

Meanwhile Aspazia apologizes:

On behalf of feminism, I want to apologize to Muslims, and particularly Muslim women, who endure unfair criticisms for their decision to wear headscarves. The politicization of the headscarf is the most cynical misuse of feminism for despicable and deplorable foreign policy aims.

I agree; as feminists it is absolutely imperative that we stand up against the political manipulation of feminist rhetoric to justify slaughtering people and destroying lives in Muslim countries.

Finally a couple of pieces on the Australian Mufti.

Hu Blog offers a Muslim feminist response.

But this Alt Muslim.com article raises a very important question:

On October 12th of this month, 38 highly respected and theologically diverse clerics from the Muslim world wrote what is widely considered a respectful and engaging “Open Letter” to the Pope in response to his controversial comments about Islam made during his Regensburg address in September. Not only was the letter of historical significance, but it also represented an articulate and reasoned invitation to dialogue from Muslims with the Papacy on matters of theology and faith. The signatories included top scholars from Bosnia, Croatia, Egypt, the United States, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Kosovo, Oman, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Iran.

Around the same time, a single Muslim cleric in Australia, Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, delivered a sermon to about 500 followers where he allegedly compared some women who do not dress modestly to uncovered meat being left out for a cat.

I wonder which story received more news coverage.

Cynical manipulation indeed.

Sour Duck has some more posts here.

This week is Pro-Choice Week of Action here in the UK.

I really should have known that.

Hat tip Sour Duck.

Spoilers!!

It may well be that, having not watched many (any?) Martin Scorsese films, that did not view this one through the somewhat hazy and rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia, and so I may not be getting ‘the point.’ However I fail to see what all the fuss is about, and if this is Scorsese returning to form, I certainly won’t be viewing the back catalogue. But of course, I am going to make a little fuss of my own, because we like to do that now and again here at Mind the Gap.

This film is lazily homophobic and sexist, I say this because I am sure there are more creative homophobic slurs in existence than ‘faggot’ and ‘homo’, but these are the only two that get a look in as characters get randomly accused of being ‘a homo’ throughout the film (of course there aren’t actually any homosexual characters in the film at all). Women, I’m afraid, are referred to through out the film by the collective noun ‘cunts’. Yes ladies, we are our vaginas and nothing more. In fact from the three examples of female characters put forwards in this film (caricatured as the office totty, the love interest and the gang bosses mistress, so as not to confuse the audience with any kind of female complexity) it is quite clear that Scorsese doesn’t really do women, apart from in the most literal sense of course. All three women had regulation tight bottoms, long floppy hair and the ‘love interest’ (who was also a psychiatrist who just happened to exceptionally thin and beautiful) had an annoying habit of leaking tears all over the place after the first sex scene was over.

But that’s not all. This film is deeply conventional and against the context of gang films available, the violence isn’t even shocking. There is even a jaunty scene where Ray Winston makes a joke about murdering his wife, gosh how amusing. This film is ten years too late to be shocking, and from the first 10 minutes you know everyone is going to die. In fact if you just sliced the last 20 minutes off this film you would vastly improve it by giving it some nuance and complexity. As it is, there is little point to it as it fails to ask any nuanced questions about the nature of good and bad or the psychology of the characters, bar that of Leonardo DeCaprio. Mat Damon is a consistent cardboard cut out bad guy who doesn’t even seem to have some fun with his part.

This is another film that is so liberal in it’s blood splattering, I assume to establish it as a ‘serious, adult’ film that it has the faint whiff of a group of men who never quite got over being beaten by gangs of boys in the school yard. This is of course a very male interpretation of what is serious and adult, and I’m sure it will appeal not only to those in the grip of Scorsese nostalgia, but also to 18 year old school boys giving it a guaranteed audience. Frankly I find the whole thing rather juvenile and primitive. I can only assume that because Scorsese made it has been given some artistic kudos but frankly it’s not that good. This is a remake of the (superior) Hong Kong based film Infernal Affairs and I can only assume it was made for people who can’t be bothered to read subtitles.

On the plus side, Leonardo DeCaprio acts the pants of everyone, while Jack Nicholson gives a fine performance in his trade mark psychopath role.

If you’re at Harvard or Brown University, keep an eye out for a little feminist hello from Cardiff.

One of our agents has been busy.

The 25th (and first year anniversary) edition of the Carnival of Feminists is up at Philobiblion.

Thanks very much to Natalie for keeping the carnival on the go. It always gives me hope!

I just wanted to draw attention to this interesting artical by Polly Toynbee in the gaurdian on the rights of women in an increasingly non secular society.

The discussion, if it can rightly be called a ‘discussion,’ about feminism and feminine beauty practices which has taken place on feminist blogs recently seems to have become particularly vindictive and counter-productive. I am not going to get into the “can you be a feminist if you engage in feminine beauty practices?” argument here, but just to clarify my position from the beginning, I generally try and stick to Carol Hanisch’s argument in her essay the Personal is Political. The early radical women’s movement took the ‘pro woman’ line that personal problems are political problems: ‘There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for collective solution.’ This means that I do not want to argue about whether individual woman should not wax their legs because I don’t see how that argument makes any difference to present conditions, and I think it serves to divide women into the good sister/bad sister roles we’re all manipulated into occupying. If we sat around at Mind the Gap meetings arguing about who’s the better feminist because she doesn’t shave her legs, we’d never get much done; hell, we probably wouldn’t even have a group, and we probably wouldn’t deserve one.

I do want to say more about this argument, but right now I want to talk about femininity, feminism and class. Recently, the Happy Feminist and Hugo Schwyzer wrote long posts in response to the femininity debates (both contain links to earlier posts on the subject). Hugo’s, in particular, drew heat from feminists who grew up working-class, angry at the white middle-class privilege underscoring the entire discussion.

Bitch Lab said,

you can see how it’s damn disappointing to hit BlogLandia to find this overweening obsessiveness on issues that matter primarily to white and middle/upper-middle class people — because they don’t have to think about making a living on the edge of poverty. they never had to think about how some women might like to “dress up” becasue for 8 hrs of their lives, they’re wearing a freakin’ uniform. …Hence, it all has to be about gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender because and centered on that issue because lawd knows we couldn’t possibly, you know, hold more than one concern in our heads at the same time. The luxury of white and class privilege is that you can imagine that you can decide when race and class matter. A lot of other feminists can’t. And worrying about high heels and pink tool belts is so much horse hockey.

Arwen said,

I said it at Happy’s and at Feministe too: to me, the femmy issue is DEEPLY rooted in class, and what may be dis-empowering on gender (heels, for example), may in fact be portraying *economic* power, (not having to work for 10 hours doing assembly line work on one’s feet.) No one really expects their hispanic maid to show up in heels, and if she did, she’d be construed to be trying to use sexuality to advance herself through her employer. Whereas a female lawyer can show up to court in heels, and very few believe she’s trying to sleep with the judge.

My experience with feminine beauty practices has been oppressive. You can read about it here if you’re interested, but now I realise that when I wrote about my experiences, I should have paid a lot more attention to the fact that my own attitudes to feminine practices are deeply class-based. I have not been talking about “femininity,” I have been talking about the specifically white middle-class femininity that affects my life, and which often seems to be taken for granted as a universal experience for all women when white middle-class women speak on the subject. Hence the accusations of class privilege: white middle-class people are all too used to getting to speak for everyone.

When we have fights about waxing for example, are we assuming that all women can afford waxing, that waxing is expected of all women in the same way, and that waxing has the same significance for all women? The way in which women experience, or take part in feminine beauty practices, is enormously tied up with class, race, and also sexuality.

The construction of white middle-class femininity and its practices define my experience of oppression, not least because my own family has, over the last two generations, been in the process of achieving middle-class status. My father comes from a working-class family. His mother was a milliner and later a caterer, his father was a merchant seaman, and he was the first in the family to go to university. My mother’s parents were also both from working-class backgrounds and were obsessed with becoming middle-class. My maternal great grandmother drove herself crazy trying to convince everyone that she was white and middle-class (she was neither, but that’s a story for another day), and so the feminine beauty practices encouraged in my maternal grandmother and mother had a lot to do with the pursuit of a middle-class white identity and with erasing marks of race and working-classness.

Over at the Happy Feminist’s I made a guilty admission to sometimes feeling superior to women who take part in the practices of femininity and Happy noted that she too has had that feeling at times. I know this feeling is wrong headed (see the Personal is Political) but it’s almost a reflex. I’ll be striding along in my boots, see a woman in high heels and think, ‘How can she walk in those things? Doesn’t she know they might damage her legs?’ Then I’ll see a woman in heavy makeup on a bus and think, ‘Why does she waste her time and money!’ Then I mentally slap myself on the wrist for presuming myself to be in a position to judge the actions of other women. As I said above, we try and avoid such arguments at MTG meetings, but occasionally when the wearing of makeup has been mentioned, a number of women (including me) immediately pipe up: “I don’t wear makeup.” Anyone looking at the speakers could not be under any illusion that they are wearing makeup, so why make the statement at all? What effect does the statement have on women in the room who are wearing makeup? I’d hazard a guess that they feel pissed off if they interpret the claim as being about claiming feminist status thanks to their freedom from all that ‘nonsense.’ I will write more on the illusion of freedom from gender norms at some point.

What I didn’t say over at HF’s place is that I worry that my sense of superiority has been enabled by my interpretation of feminist thinking on the subject. No matter how much we claim not to be criticising what other women do when we critique feminine practices, if we’re telling them that they should analyse their behaviour, are we not putting ourselves in the position of authority, taking on the role of she who gets to tell other women what they should do/think? Where does the authority to make this demand on other women come from? Feminism? I was disturbed by HF’s post because I wondered why she felt impelled to explain herself. The comments over there are full of more women justifying their actions and talking about whether femininity can be feminist. Why, I asked myself, are they allowing themselves to be put in the position of she who must explain herself? The aim of HF’s post (correct me if I’m wrong) seems to be to discuss whether taking part in middle-class feminine practices can be compatible with feminist values. I think danger lies down this road too, the danger of setting up yet more standards of good and bad femininity, this time along middle-class feminist lines. Here are the bad practices. Don’t do these or you shouldn’t really call yourself a feminist; if you do them, you will at least have to beat youself up about it reguarly and ‘we’ think you should stop, even though we tolerate you. Here are the practices which are not too oppressive, but remember you’re still not as good a feminist as a woman who rejects feminine practices altogether. Wouldn’t “feminist femininity” just become yet another means to police the behaviour of women? Isn’t the policing of female behaviour what we really should be resisting?

I do feel that some feminist thinking enables my superiority complex (intentionally or not), but I also think that it comes from the very white middle-class femininity I like to think I’m resisting. Looking down on other women is absolutely fundamental to white middle-class femininity because it is all about feeling superior to other women. It’s about class, about exerting and expressing one’s economic power through the feminine practices in which you engage and, as such, it is very much about distinguishing oneself from feminine practices associated with women of color, working-class women and poor women.

White middle-class femininity polices the behaviour of all women, but it’s also very much about self-regulation. It presumes there are good and bad, right and wrong, ways of doing feminine. In the UK, middle-class women have words for the ‘wrong’ kind of femininity, words such as ‘common,’ ‘vulgar’ and ‘cheap,’ words which convey the economic nature of the issue. No middle-class woman wants to be accused of looking ‘cheap.’ ‘Trailer park trash’ seems to work in a similar way for people in the US. Middle-class feminine practices are all about appearing a certain way, about cultivating a good (modest, but expensive) look. Yes, you should look feminine, but you should never be ‘obvious’ about it. You are brought up to a horror of wearing ‘too much’ makeup, appearing with obviously dyed hair, in cheap clothing, or having too much of a tan and looking ‘orange.’ The items which signify middle-class femininity are extremely expensive because they are supposed to signify the economic power to buy them in the first place.

I remember being told as a teenager to apply just enough makeup to ‘enhance’ my ‘natural’ looks and no more. It is a discourse tied up with the discourse of female modesty. In the UK, the media regularly presents images of ‘bad’ women who go out and get drunk; they are called ‘ladettes’ and are filmed roaring and screaming, rolling around in the road, flashing their knickers at the camera. They are the women middle-class women are not supposed to identify with because they are doing femininity all wrong.

The argument about whether women should engage in feminine beauty practices, and the insistense that they must analyse their behaviour if they do, makes working class-women and women of color angry because it stinks of privilege, of the power and leisure time to sit at a PC (as I am doing right now) for hours on end and argue about wearing lipstick because you don’t have to throw on a uniform and rush out to a 10 hour shift at the minimum wage job you have to do to feed your kids.

I had a chat with a working-class friend the other day about these issues. I’m not saying my friend speaks for working-class women, but she did have something interesting to say to me about my attitudes. In the community where she grew up, women would save up a little money to treat themselves to the occasional trip to a beauty parlour where they could take a day off relax, spend time with female friends and relatives, and enjoy being taken care of because life involved an awful lot of taking care of other people, including wealthy women and their children. Feminine practices do not mean the same thing to her as they do to me. For the women in her community trips to the beauty parlor represent a treat, time off to socialise, take a break and spend just a bit of the money they earn on themselves for a change.

It strikes me that that the insistence upon self-analysis and self-justification evident on feminist blogs such as the Happy Feminist’s might itself be an inheritance from the white-middle class femininity which demands that women constantly police their gender performance. So, I wonder if the insistence upon analysis of feminine practices is actually informed by the very femininity we claim to be resisting, the femininity that tells us we should analyse and police ourselves and other women for signs of doing it ‘wrong.’

To what extent, then, does the sense of authority, sometimes assumed, and the insistence upon regular self-flagellation for engaging in feminine practices, come from the discourse of white middle-class femininity which makes a virtue both of feeling superior to other women and self-policing? How have the concerns of white middle-class feminism, including the prioritising of gender performance as an issue, been influenced by the white middle-class femininity which makes gender performance and the analysis of gender performance into such a crucial issue for women? To what extent has white-middle class femininity influenced the white middle-class feminism which tends to dominate the field? Some of us may have given up the feminine practices, but this doesn’t mean we’ve given up all the attitudes, assumptions, norms and ideals we were brought up with. So, we really need to think about where we are coming from and how class and race inform the feminist issues we tend to prioritise.

* I suppose I’m assuming some sort of distinction between feminine practices and feminine identity in this post because feeling that you are a feminine person at the level of your identity does not necessarily mean you engage in any particular feminine practices. For instance, I know women who are not in any way feminine in terms of their identity but shave their legs for various reasons, and also women who say they are feminine but don’t shave. But that’s really a subject for another post.

* For the sake of convenience, I’ve made ‘white middle-class femininity’ sound like something monolithic in this post, when really I see it as a set of norms and ideals which of course are not taken up or experienced in the same way by all middle-class women!

STOP PRESS: Maya and Hugo continue the discussion in interesting directions.

At the last meeting Naiades and I informed group members that this blog is currently linked to a website involved in the promotion of hardcore heterosexual pornography. We explained, as best we could through our own confusion, that due to financial difficulties, one of most high profile male pro-feminist bloggers sold his web domain to a company which promotes pornography websites. While he has retained control of the blog itself, he did not come clean and inform readers that these links would be placed on the main website, nor did he explain that people hitting the site would be helping porn sites make their way up the Google rankings. (If I have any of the details wrong, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to the stage where I don’t want to read any more posts on this subject). You can find an extensive round up of posts critical, supportive and ambivalent here.

We went on to tell them that this blogger has also done a lot to promote feminist bloggers, especially those more marginalised within the blogging community, including Mind the Gap. We believe that Ampersand was one of the first “big” bloggers to link to us approvingly and send traffic our way and we were pleased to be noticed. With this in mind, we waited until Ampersand explained himself further in this post before moving on the issue. The rather evasive nature of his explanation makes us wonder exactly what is in that contract and whether he is currently able to criticise the company that bought his website.

Unsurprisingly, the members present at the meeting decided that they do not want this blog, which represents their interests, to remain linked to a website involved in pornography promotion. Just to make it clear that we’re not trying to avoid responsibility for the decision, Naiades and I do agree that it’s not appropriate to stay linked to Alas, a Blog at the current time. For the most part, I agree with Tekjani’s take. As far as possible, we don’t want to support the kind of company that has bought the domain, whatever we think of Ampersand and his motivations for making the sale.

I read Alas for the interesting posts and marvellous link farms. I’ve hardly ever ventured into the comments section because I find the threads hostile and cliquey, despite the moderator’s endless battle to try and make them work. I don’t know Ampersand, but I don’t believe he’s a secret anti-feminist trying to bring the movement down from within. This is a person who obviously spends a large proportion of his waking time thinking and writing about feminist and progressive issues and if none of that work has been genuine, all I can say is he’s a very strange person indeed. Personally, I think he’s someone who has seriously fucked up and at some point he might be able to explain the causes of that fuck up in more detail. It may well be true that his choices were limited, but he seems to agree with the opinion that he’s made a huge mistake. Yes, he should have been more upfront from the beginning. Yes, he should have been clear about the porn content and given people the chance to object. Yes, rage and mass de-linking were always inevitable, but it would have been over quicker and more cleanly. It’s worse now. As he commented on Kevin’s post at Slant Truth: “Bottom line is, I fucked up. If life only had a rewind button….” I empathise, but sometimes we take actions from which there is no way back. By that I don’t mean I think it’s all over for Alas or Ampersand, but it can never be the same as it was again and I’m sure he knows that.

I don’t feel at all self-righteous about this decision. I feel sad. The whole thing leaves a foul taste in my mouth. I’m aware that Ampersand has long been the target of feminist criticism; I don’t know how justified that criticism is because I haven’t been paying attention; but we all know that when people become positioned as leaders, deservingly or not, they fall very hard when they fuck up. And we’re all extra keen to drag them down because they’ve betrayed us, because we feel they represented us and therefore had some a duty to us and the causes we all appeared to support together. Quite possibly that’s true, but as I write this I don’t feel like an avenging feminist fury, I feel like a member of a gang moving in to kick the shit out of someone who’s offended the group, someone who’s already down on the ground. Get the bastard! He’s betrayed us like we always know he would! Perhaps if I’d been one of the first to find out about it, I’d be more righteously angry, but it’s too late for that now; I just feel queasy and disturbed. In the context of this blog I do think it’s the right decision to remove Alas from the blogroll, but I still feel like a bit of a bandwagon-jumping thug.

And I’m not sure I buy into the sense of betrayal if it’s based on a claim that Ampersand set himself up as a “great leader” and then did us all down. No one can set themselves up as a leader. Even if Ampersand really wanted to be the evil overlord of the feminist blogosphere, he couldn’t do it without our support. “We” the readers and linkers put the big guns where they are by reading their blogs and linking to them. As WOC bloggers have been saying for some time now, the power relations in the blog world mirror the hierarchical and racist power relations in society at large and I think we would all do well to turn a critical eye to the processes through which leaders in the feminist blog world emerge, while others, no less talented, are held back through subtle and insiduous means.

Finally, what happened at Alas clarified a sense of irony which has been lurking in my thoughts for some time now. Here we are trying to spread feminism through the very same medium currently disseminating the worst possible varieties of pornography on a previously unimaginable scale.

Please understand that this post is not intended as an implicit critcism of anyone who remains linked to Alas. We respect the rights of other feminist bloggers to come to different conclusions.

I quite liked this little article from the BBC. They used the BMI to calculate how ‘Obese’ a random sample of participanst were. They Cite 4 or 5 men at the bottom of the article, all who are ‘obese’ according to the BMI. to have a look at them they all look like fairly trim men. I think this highlights the big problem with the BMI, it does’nt take into account muscle mass and other factors which may affect people’s weight. I really think, as Winter argued in this post, that we need to turn the debate around from obesity and fat to healthy living which would be much more positive.

I’ve been sitting on this tasty little anacdote for about two weeks now as I didn’t really know what I wanted to draw from it. While it’s always fun just to give accounts of infuriating little anacdotes, I thought there was probably some issues worth talking about steming form this one.

Two weeks ago, our department had it’s graduate student cheese and wine night, which was followed by a trip to the pub. It turned out to be one of those occasions where people who seemed perfectly nice opened their mouths and came out with the most outragous statements. A friend and I ended up getting into it with two young male academics about the perception that it was difficult for women to get into academic psychology. Frankly, I have never seen such an emotional reaction from two seemingly intelligent youn men. One sat there and said that quite clearly men were “genetically superior” to women and that was why they had all the best jobs, and the other came out with several versions of the “women don’t put themselves forwards” or “women who do put themselves forwards for the jobs arn’t good enough” arguments. What struck me most was the almost agressive denial that there could be any prejudice against women, or that there in fact even was a perception that it was difficult for women. That we both had the opinion, of course, was discounted as being, statistically insignificant and therefore worthless.

What do I want to draw from this?

• These were youngish academics, the so called future of psychology, refusing to acknowledge the possibility of any prejudice. It worries me that while women have come a long way in law, little seems to have happened in terms of attitudes when you actually get people talking about it. What will the future be like for my generation of female academics and professionals?
• People in the west have not been ‘evolving’ for quite a long time now since servival of the fittest means that people who are genetically insuperior would have to die before being able to reproduce. In this day and age, most people get to reproduce, often if they want to or not. Therefore we are no longer ‘evolving’ from a purely genetic sense. our culture has eveolved from a point where being physically strong was a survival advantage and in general men are morphologically stronger, and thus have had the advantage and I suspect this is why they took the prime roles in society. But these days, being physically stronger has little to do with it, and society is hanging on to maladaptive behaviours.
• If women are not putting themselves forwards for the plum jobs (which I have no idea whether that is true or not) why not?

Moral of the story, don’t go drinking with people and start challenging their world views, it only leads to nasty emotional arguments that end up confirming exactly what you thought in the first place.