Sexism

On the bus into college this week I noticed some new billboards, billboards advertising everyone’s favourite lunch/pub crisps “Hunky Dorys”. If you haven’t seen the billboards they contain lovely girls playing rugby, now as strange a concept as people advertising female sports is, that is not the issue. The lovely girls playing rugby have evidently worked up quite a sweat or been involved in a few grabby tackles as they seem to have lost quite a lot of their kit. Now, you may want to sit down for this….but….the majority of men don’t mind seeing scantily clad women near a packet of crisps, in fact if you threw a pint then it would be every mans fantasy, right? No, you’re wrong and maybe a little bit sexist.

For too long men have been objectified and forced into boxes that women have made for them. Men are expected to like certain things, things like farting, steak, sports, beer, climbing things, conquering nature, fighting, building things and of course destroying things. It’s not that simple though I for one…do not find cars all that interesting…I find them boring and tedious. Does that make me less of a man? I am afraid of spiders, is that such a bad thing? I have never once bought “Maxim” or “FHM” should I feel inadequate? I do watch football matches but I am ashamed to watch them in the pub in case another male asks me my opinion on it and I say something ridiculous. Thankfully I do not feel I am alone in feeling like I do not fit the caricature of the stereotypical male.

As evident from the Hunky Dorys sexism kerfuffle….yes kerfuffle, scantily clad women are the hallmark of typical male body Nazism, but on the other hand no one raises an eyebrow about scantily clad men. I’m all for equality but this is not the case, the lovely girls advertising crisps is somehow offensive but the magnificent male specimens above are somehow acceptable because let’s face it, the ladies love a bit of eye candy too. This is the perfect example of “equality when it suits”. The people behind Hunky Dorys are monsters but the people behind Manowar are just having a bit of fun and I for one am disgusted.

This all comes in the same week as a proposal to make the Dail more gender balanced, which means making it so that a certain quota of women have to be members of the Dail in any given term. Now, just to clarify this, I believe women are just as capable of running the country into the ground as any man but the Dail should be made up of candidates that the people have elected, imposing a certain quota on the number of women who should be members seems to me a bit like tokenism. Women are fully capable of being politicians, I don’t doubt their ability to do the job but saying “X” amount of women should be in the Dail seems undemocratic, if the people choose to elect “X” amount then fine, but the problem is not with the Dail it is with the parties. If more parties put forward female candidates then people would have to vote for women instead of men and that’s not equality, no sir, not in this mans world.