O'Neill is half-right: the coverage of Brooks' appearance at Leveson was gendered, and there is a lot of stereotypical crap circulating about her being a redhaired woman with ambition. Some of that is snobbery too: the belief that a non-privileged person can only reach the top in Britain if they're wily and ruthless and corrupt. However, I don't think the media's portrayal of Brooks has been as sexist as it is of, say, Louise Mensch or Harriet Harman, let alone someone like Ann Widdecombe. Moreover, it's not just her: the unusualness of seeing the fearsome chiefs of the Murdoch empire before an enquiry, looking like ordinary people in trouble, isolated and fragile, has been too gobsmacking for hacks to cover in anything other than the simplest stereotypes — Brooks' appearance and femininity, Rupert Murdoch as a senile Aussie, James Murdoch's business school Americanisms and daddy's boy background. Plus, pictures of Brooks on the business pages make a change from middle-aged men in suits and specs.

What O'Neill is missing, of course, is that as editor of the Sun, Brooks was responsible for plenty of gendered stereotyping of her own. Its effects were far more damaging, its targets not always as powerful. The obvious question to ask is: if she's so upset at being on the receiving end of "gendered questioning", how did she justify working for the Murdoch press for so long? Why didn't she do anything to tackle it at The Sun?

In addition, Brooks played up the image of 'poor little me' girl at her appearance. Clothes send out signals, and she knows that as much as anyone. Dressing as she did sent out as clear a signal as if James Murdoch had turned up in a 'wacky' tie, or Rupes in his jogging shorts.

As for the coverage of female politicians, good points. Widdecombe gained attention as much for her appearance and dress sense as her batshit views. Otherwise we'd all have been falling about laughing as that Eurosceptic twunt in the stripy blazer hoofed on SCD. As for Harriet Harman - yes, and the neat alliteration with 'harridan' doesn't help her, nor does her association with causes the lazy find easy to brand 'PC Gornmaaad'. Louise Mensch on the other hand has played up to the Emma Frost*/ballbreaker image quite deliberately I feel. As did Caroline Fint, mind.

*X-Men reference.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

So the ones gendering it are "the liberal press", are they?

Another example of "Liberal = anything I don't agree with".

_________________
Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

I agree with what you say. The difference is that hardly anybody did comment on the Murdochs' appearance. Whatever Brooks wore, however she styled her hair, it was going to be noted and analysed for meaning. The Murdochs, as blokes, can dress 'neutrally' or 'meaninglessly', can make their appearance a non-issue. Brooks has to manage hers, must try to control how it will be interpreted — and in a situation such as Leveson (where, let's face it, pretty much everyone who doesn't work in Fleet Street was watching to see her get her comeuppance) whatever she wears will be turned against her.

This applies more generally as part of the 'rise and fall narrative' which is starting to be applied to her. Her hair, in particular, once a symbol of a type of defiant warrior femininity, is now something she uses to cover her face, to twirl girlishly as she prevaricates with an answer. It's a reminder of the power she used to exercise, and thus of her fall from grace. It's also coming to symbolise the vanity and over-confidence of a period during which, it turns out, we were systematically lied to by our masters and mistresses. The collective consciousness wants retribution and remorse and punishment to wipe away the memory of those years — not least our own complicity in sustaining the Murdoch empire and the culture of impunity on Fleet Street. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, if this were France in 1944, Rebekah Brooks would be bald.

Think about the symbolism of head-shaving.
In Freudian terms a castration, a removal of strength and power. Brooks' hair is a weapon in her considerable arsenal, this is a woman with very highly developed emotional intelligence, I would hasard.

So in effect for a woman, the physical appearance is taken as the starting point, while for a man it's only mentioned if genuinely arresting?

If so, it's more evidence of the institutional everythingism of the media (see posts Ad nauseum), finding her of interest because she is a woman rather than because of what she has or hasn't done. Reflected as well in the ongoing fascination over the more personal or intimate parts of her testimony (yeah, love, focus on the trivial, who's shagging who etc).

However, seeing as she was part of that world and helped in no small part create and maintain it, my sympathy is limited.

_________________
Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

Hugo Rifkind made similar points in today's Times, re. Mitt Romney's schooldays. Hair and how it's styled (or the lack of it) is a highly visible statement of character, tribal loyalty, personality, musical taste, politics etc. All the way back to Samson.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

Pretty much. A woman's appearance is always considered meaningful. It's never just a surface or a series of mix-and-match decisions taken on a blurry morning; it has to point to something deeper, an essential truth about her character or lifestyle. The hoary old game still played out in the sidebar of shame is a bras-de-fer between the 'information' the woman wants to transmit about herself through her appearance (stylish, sexually active, 'enviable', etc) and that which is revealed by the unsolicited paparazzi photos taken in the supermarket, or the 'unguarded moments' when a celebrity falls out of a nightclub and exposes her modesty. It's not hard to dig out the timeless stereotypes in this: woman as mysterious enchantress, earth mother, the whore masquerading as madonna.

For a man near the top of the kyriarchy, the opposite is true. He is not frivolous or vain; all that can be read from his appearance is a non-rejection of straight white male normalness. He may wear a blue tie one day, a red one the next (probably chosen by his wife, perhaps she even ties it for him); otherwise he seems to dress in the same way for most of his adult life — and, if a public schoolboy, longer. This gives him an air of constancy. Public figures who deviate from this template — William Hague with his baseball cap, John Major's cabinet when they went on their casual-dress retreat — are ridiculed. Indeed, any suggestion of individuality beyond perhaps Ken Clarke's shoes is sneered at: witness the reaction David Cameron is getting when he talks about his taste in music. The stereotype behind this is the self-effacing professional, monastically dedicated to his work (see all detective series). Such devotion would be compromised if he were to show personal interest or emotional investment, or be overtly distracted by the shiny objects that are, nonetheless, the deserved rewards for his effort.

This masculine ideal is associated with the proper, uncorrupt exercise of power. It intrinsically excludes women, because as I've argued women cannot dress 'neutrally'. A women's look is always about herself, and that goes against the professional ethic of impartial, impersonal invisibility*. When a group of women are gathered together, they do not look identical, they do not form a 'club' — they are individuals who happen to be proximate. They will end up competing and fighting with each other. They cannot be trusted to "take one for the team". If they did, it would be for the wrong kind of team — a team for women's this or women's that.


I'd put it differently. I'd say that, in media narratives, there is womanness in everything a woman does. The content and the significance of that womanness may change with events. As recent coverage has shown, the idea of manness does not exist in the media, not even in stories about sex gangs or footballer rapists.


I have no sympathy for her at all. That doesn't mean she's wrong about the coverage being gendered, and it certainly doesn't mean that gendered or sexist coverage is acceptable. As someone (you?) pointed out on another thread, media discourse about Karen Matthews was horribly sexist, but that tells us everything about the media and nothing about Karen Matthews. I maintain that Louise Mensch is being covered, positively and negatively, in extremely gendered terms; I don't think it matters that she plays it up because, as I've argued, she doesn't have a choice — either she genders herself on her own terms, or the media will do it for her on theirs.

* Mrs Thatcher is an interesting case. The matronly-headmistressy victorian matriarch might be an exception, as an acceptably retrogressive yet righteously vocational exerciser of power. It's certainly no accident that Thatcher's trademark was not her hair or her clothes, but her handbag — an accessory of femininity that is non-sexual and held at arm's length.

Guess what? The real racists aren't that horrible rump of Ukrainian football cunts, but people who've drawn attention to it!

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brend ... enophobic/

Farmers often collect all the shit and rubbish from their farmyards and cowsheds.

Sometimes they collect human excrement as well and mix it in.

They put it into pits and let it rot in the heat that it generates.

It forms a crust of foamy, rotted filth that you can smell a mile away.

It's foul, dangerous and sometimes infectious.

That's Brendan O'Neill, that is.

You surpise me.

I expect that trade unionists that fight this millionaire's government's attcks on workers' rights are the true enemy of working people too.

Peter Tachell's the ulimate homophobe.

The RSPB hate birds.

etc etc

You're dealing with some loathsome people under that article there Tubby.

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MY COMMENTS ARE FROM THE HORSES MOUTH AND ARE ALL FACTS

The comments, the horror, Fuuuuuckkkkkkkk .....................

I admire your courage for going in there Tubby.
I don't have the courage to follow you into that heart of darkness.

Good luck against the "Whatabout inner London where you'll get stabbed by blacks" brigade.

Excellent, pinching that.

I made the point that we fought World Wars once. Now apparently, we're all too shitscared to walk around East London.