World of Women

IT’S THE YEAR 2020 and Jade Goody is the President of the People’s Republic of England and Wales. The Ten Year War with Scotland – started after Ewan McGregor ignored a UN resolution and swore to continue acting – is finally over after England agreed to give UNESCO World Heritage status to the deep-fried Mars Bar. The most watched TV show is I’m a Celebrity, Give Me a Colonoscopy, closely followed by the 754th series of Lost. Al-Qaeda gave up its war with the West to declare a jihad against Jose Mourinho. England’s cricketers have tested positive for traces of polonium 210, but still couldn’t beat a Blind & Disabled XI. And Chancellor Carol Vorderman has declared a tax on cabbage.
Men are officially the weaker sex. It had been on the cards since the start of the century, but was finally confirmed last week when the Gross National Product of Colleen McLoughlin exceeded that of Japan. This came in the same week legislation was passed to allow female employees an extra 10 days of annual leave. They now have statutory rights to time off for Bad Hair days, Feeling Fat days and Nothing To Wear days. This is on top of recently introduced “pregnancy-empathy” legislation. Under this law, any male worker who fails to use the words “beautiful”, “radiant” and “wonderful” while addressing a pregnant colleague will be liable to dismissal for “bullying and harassment”. Of course, it wasn’t always like this…..

UNDERPANTS

Not that long ago it used to be a man’s world. Men were great. They could have a beer gut, not change their underpants for several weeks, and still get laid. Male grooming products hadn’t been invented. Footballers’ wives and girlfriends kept out of the limelight and in the kitchen. The Spice Girls were a cruel joke yet to be invented by some tone-deaf, lesbian matriarch who accidentally got a job with the record label. Loaded was a brilliant read, but in a non-ironic way. You could comment on a female colleague’s dress without having to pay a six-figure sum for bullying in the workplace. Happy days. Even Margaret Thatcher was believed to be a man.
But then something happened. There was a cultural shift, not quite as cataclysmic as the meteorite colliding with earth that wiped out all the dinosaurs, but one which would eventual lead to the extinction of Michael Barrymore. It can be traced back, in Britain at least, to around the same time as the deregulation of broadcasting. That single act meant there were suddenly hundreds of TV and radio channels and thousands of hours of airtime that needed to be filled. And what easier way to fill them than with programmes about shoes or curtains. Yes, the boom in makeover shows had started. And that meant an opening for thousands of people on the margins of society who had previously only aspired to becoming housewives or interior designers. Yes, women and gays suddenly found themselves in demand. A tsunami of hormones and cyclical mood swings swept into the workplace. And those that didn’t get a job or fancied something a bit cushier, turned to writing instead. That’s why even now the bookshelves of WH Smith still groan under the weight of reams and reams of chick lit.

BOG

The consequences of this drastic and sudden evolution were seismic. Women suddenly realised they were special, and that Andrea Dworkin might have had a point after all. Bog standard health and safety legislation wasn’t enough for them. Whole rafts of new laws and regulations had to be introduced into the workplace to protect their rights and respect their idiosyncrasies. Menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, childcare, date rape and water retention all had to be taken into consideration. Even today, somewhere in a remote, underground bunker, piled up next to confiscated copies of Zoo, Nuts and the Aby Titmuss-edited issue of The Economist, there are statistics that show that, in terms of working days lost, a male worker costs significantly less to employ than an equally well-qualified female worker. (They are probably buried next to the official 2006 report into “date rape drug” incidents which revealed no evidence of drugs, just lots of women getting pissed on alco-pops.) But God forbid the employer who says as much. They’ll be banged up in court on harassment charges before they can say “I was only stating a biological fact.”
All these new employment laws gave women a renewed sense of purpose. Their purpose was to screw their employers for every penny they could get. Remember the case of Helen Green from August 2006? She worked as a secretary for Deutsche Bank in London. While there, she had an affair with her boss and enjoyed several promotions. This was standard office practice at the time. But she also didn’t get on well with a group of her female colleagues. They would occasionally make fun of her by blowing raspberries, pretending she had BO or occasionally “crossing their arms in a dramatic fashion and staring at her”. Again, most of us would think, pretty standard office practice. We all work with people we don’t like. Some of us have difficulty concealing it. Some people might think the standard, everyday office tactic of ignoring someone is far worse than blowing raspberries at them. But what happens in real life in offices up and down the country strangely didn’t matter in this case. Miss Green convinced a High Court judge she was a victim of “harassment”. And the High Court judge awarded her £800,000. Male workers everywhere suddenly thought twice about hiding their female colleague’s stapler for a joke.

FARTING

And yes, regrettably it was mainly females who ended up suing their bosses and walking away with small fortunes. But we weren’t allowed to say that this was probably because men are physically and mentally stronger than women and that if someone “bullied” a man by making farting sounds as they walked across the office, they’d probably either ignore it or make their own infantile sounds back rather than suffer a nervous breakdown, need three months off work and finally demand half a million pounds in damages for “hurt feelings”.
There’ll probably be an outbreak of harassment suits following the Christmas party season. Elizabeth Weston, a lawyer with Merrill Lynch, won a £1m settlement after a male colleague had made lewd comments about her body at a Christmas party. Well fuck me. Most of us would launch legal proceedings if our colleagues didn’t make lewd comments about us during the annual office piss-up.
Then there’s poor Julie Bower, awarded £1.4 million for being forced out of her job as a business analyst with Schroder Securities. Of course, what you never learn in the stories behind these headlines is whether the “victim” deserved it or not. Come on, every office has got someone who deserves a good slapping, but because we are not allowed to physically assault them, we find other ways of tormenting them. It’s called office politics.

THRUST

Of course, most women can handle the cut and thrust of office banter without feeling the compelling urge to go running off to their solicitors. Unless it’s that time of the month. Then, they might not be quite so tolerant. It might be interpreted as an attentive and considerate gesture for a man to comment on a female colleague’s shoes one day, but second only to ethnic cleansing as an evil and despicable act the next. But should employers be made to pay for the effects of the moon on a woman’s mood? Would they be punished if one of their male employees turned out to be a werewolf? In some cultures, menstruating women were packed off to a remote hut for the duration, thus cutting down on the likelihood of any misunderstandings or incidents involving the letter opener. Maybe this would be a good use for Wales?
But of course the most spectacular difference between men and women is in the art of procreation. Whilst the man’s role ends after a minute or two, it’s a long, nine-month slog after that for the woman. Pregnancy is now regarded as second only to sainthood as a hallowed condition. For a female employee to get herself up the duff is like winning the lottery. She’s untouchable. She might look like Thunderbird Two, have the hormonal imbalance of Fred West and need a jar of pickled onions within reach throughout the working day, but if you so much as mumble “I wouldn’t wear Lycra if I were you, love”, you’re fucked.
Speaking as a down-trodden, worthless male who was sacked and reduced to applying for jobs as Davina McCall’s footstool - all because I was overhead speculating about the weight of pregnant Tracey’s breasts - I wonder how we got to this stage. Maybe things might have turned out differently if employers had made a stand against the unremitting barrage of workplace etiquette being hurled at them. Maybe society would be more equal if women’s biological peculiarities hadn’t been turned into the equivalent of Boots Advantage Card points. Maybe it would all have been different but for what happened in one of our best-loved TV soaps back in 2006…..

PIES

Consider this: you are man whose job depends on you keeping in reasonable physical shape and being active. If you start eating all the pies, pile on the pounds and are suddenly no longer as mobile, there’s a good chance you’ll be hauled in before your boss and told to shape up or ship out. And that would be fair enough. You took the job knowing its physical demands and had failed to meet them. If the cabbage soup diet and giving up the beer haven’t worked by next pay day, you know you’re out on your ear.
Now imagine the above scenario, but this time you’re a woman. And instead of eating all the pies, you get yourself pregnant. The job description made it clear that you would be required to maintain a svelte figure, and yet you have got yourself up the duff. You did this, because you knew your employer wouldn’t have the guts to sack you, even though your condition makes it increasingly difficult for you to do your job convincingly.
Well that’s the real-life situation that viewers of Coronation Street witnessed in November and December of 2006. Actress Debra Stevenson, who had been contracted and handsomely rewarded to play the part of Frankie, a flighty divorcee who slept with half the Street’s male residents before jumping into bed with her step-son, played the latter stages of the role while heavily pregnant. She looked ridiculous and obviously struggled under the strain of playing a character who was poles apart from her real life, child-bearing self. Even outsize coats and flattering camera angles couldn’t save her. Before she became pregnant, Stevenson looked and played the role brilliantly. But for the last couple of months, she just looked as if she wanted to lie down all the time. Millions of Corrie fans were cheated. Stevenson and makers Granada should have hung their heads in shame. Granada had conned its viewers previously when we’d been expected to ignore all evidence to the contrary and believe that obviously-pregnant actress Jane Danson was really saucy little nympho Leanne. It’s not as if Stevenson or Danson couldn’t have waited until their contracts ended before they fulfilled their womanly urges, nor was there a shortage of un-pregnant actresses available for hire. If the actor who played factory heart-throb Liam had suddenly developed love handles and jowls, he’d have been handed his P45 instantly.
That’s when the rot set in. That’s when pregnant women became untouchable, for all the wrong reasons.
And that’s why, in 2020, we are living in a woman’s world.

(c) Jack Havana 2006. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack's say-so.
This week, Jack Havana unsuccessfully applied for the job of……
……Press and Marketing Officer at the Dundee Contemporary Arts centre. Oh well, that’s me having to go without Sky PremPlus for another month.