L'entente execrable

A couple of quick thoughts about the British media's view of Carla Bruni Sarkozy, wife of the French President Nicholas Sarkozy, during their state visit to the UK this week. The President's wife has been the subject of some deeply obsequious coverage right across the board, wherein such weighty matters as her choice of shoes and general deportment have been discussed with breathless excitement and in minute detail.

One question we might ask ourselves is whether the husband of a female French president, no matter how immaculately turned out, would have received anything like this kind of attention. One suspects not. That the President's wife is widely and freely assessed for her value as an ornament, gives us a pretty chilling measure of the strength of misogyny that remains in Britain today (or at least amongst these several journalists).

Another question is this: if Sarkozy were not such a great Anglophile, who - as I wrote here - is widely welcomed in Britain and the US as the man to improve the backward French and make them more like us, would his wife still be fawned over in quite the same manner? If Sarkozy were a traditional French nationalist, publicly challenging US-UK foreign policy and the wisdom of post-Thatcherite economics, is it not likely that his wife would either have been ignored, or portrayed as snooty, prim, aloof etc. etc.?

"Britain", we are told "has fallen in love with Carla". Actually, I suspect that if you polled Britain to test this assertion, you'd find that most people don't know Carla Bruni Sarkozy is. In these articles, we can take "Britain" to mean 'journalists covering this story'. And I suspect that the real love is a broader political one, for her husband, who has finally done what every jingoistic member of our political class for the last thousand years has dreamt a Frenchman would do, and admitted they were wrong about everything, and we were right. So at a third level, the love here is self-love.

I can't imagine that the simpering court scribes we might have expected to find hovering around some medieval monarchy would have portrayed the consort of a friendly head-of-state in a substantively different way (her hair! her shoes! her exquisite poise!). And I suspect this collective display of journalistic forelock tugging is as much an expression of political/cultural preference for a neo-liberal ally as it is one of latent, thoughtless sexism.

Feminism

I've always been a little puzzled when, from time to time, I hear a woman begin a sentence with "I'm not a feminist or anything....". I wouldn't expect, for example, to hear a Jewish person say "Now its not that I'm against anti-semitism or anything ....".

It says something about political debate (and, perhaps, who shapes it and who it serves) that "feminism" or "feminist" have by now acquired the status of swearwords. This belongs to the same broader phenomenon that smears moves against racism and other forms of discrimination as "political correctness". Perhaps its also "political correctness" to note the following facts about the fate of the world's women in a report in today's Independent:

"Figures compiled by the British government, development agencies and human rights groups resemble a roll call of shame:

* Two-thirds of the world's 800 million illiterate adults are women as girls are not seen as worth the investment, or are busy collecting water or firewood or doing other domestic chores.

* Two million girls aged from five to 15 join the commercial sex market every year.

* Domestic violence kills and injures more people in the developing world than war, cancer or traffic accidents.

* Seventy per cent of the world's poorest people are women.

* Violence against women causes more deaths and disabilities among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war.

* Women produce half the world's food, but own less than two per cent of the land.

* Of the more than one billion people living in extreme poverty, 70 per cent are women.

* Almost a third of the world's women are homeless or live in inadequate housing.

* Half of all murdered women are killed by their current or former husbands or partners.

* Every minute a woman dies as a result of pregnancy complications.

* Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, yet earn only a tenth of its income.

* One woman in three will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

* 43 million girls are not able to go to school.

* Last year, one million HIV-positive women died of AIDS-related illnesses because they could not get the drugs they needed.

* Human Rights Watch, in reports on 15 countries including Afghanistan, Brazil, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Togo and South Africa, has identified violence against schoolgirls, child domestic workers and those in conflict with the law as on the rise.

* Women across the developing world are the victims of systematic abuse."

Read the rest of the report here. And see also Sue Himmelweit on Feminist Economics over at UK Watch.