It was there, in the cigar and testosterone filled basements of this ultimate male sanctum, that Germaine Greer's warning began to echo in my ears again. As the token woman among 70 men, I was conditionally accepted - but only on their terms. If I was prepared to work 10 hour days, wear managerial woman suits, put up with cigar smoke and bad behaviour, with being treated at times like part of the furniture, and at other times like a bit of flesh they could flirt with when they needed a diversion, I could achieve a measure of acceptance. But if I wasn't prepared to make work the number one priority in my life and conform utterly to their codes of behaviour, I would be excluded from their game. I would be squeezed out of my position, to return once again to the ranks of outsider, a marginal creature men would not tolerate in their inner sanctums.
Was this, I began to wonder, the point of all our striving. To have the same opportunity as men to sacrifice our personal lives, work 80 hours a week, drop dead at 45, and otherwise trap ourselves in lives that were as stressful and sterile as I perceived most of the lives of these chief executives to be.
Sue Kedgley, "Heading Nowhere in a Blue Suit", in Sue Kedgley and Mary Varnham (eds), Heading Nowhere in a Navy Blue Suit, Daphne Brasell Associates Press: Wellington, 1993, pp. 18 - 19
Sue Kedgley is writing of the late 1970s.
2 comments:
Off topic, but this one appears to escaped you ladies here...
From the WTF? File - http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10699963
Anna Faris - a hottie if there ever was one - went on an American talk show recently and complained that New Zealand men
"...yelled at her while she was walking in downtown Auckland. "I'm walking home, I've got my backpack on, got my jeans on, and this carload of guys - they were like in their 40s, from what I could glimpse - they said, 'f*** you, a***hole'." Lopez asked her why they had shouted the obscenities. She replied: "I don't know, and, like, three minutes later, a car full of older gentlemen said, 'show me your tits, you stupid b****'. "I was like, you tell me where you are at - I'm going to go home to your place and I'm going to show you a good time with that kind of treatment? Oh, yeah..."
So, a pretty straight forward bit of cringeworthy fuckery from a bunch of boorish assholes towards Ms. Faris then.
But check out the reaction of one Ian Long, "a special projects advisor" for tourism new Zealand - http://www.tourismnewzealand.com/media/contacts (I was so astonished I actually checked to see if he really existed)
"...But Tourism NZ spokesman Ian Long said no one would take Faris seriously. "In the same segment, she accepts an award for being a pothead stoner of the year and she's quite clearly had a few. I don't think she has any credibility," he said..."
As Deborah Coddington points out in the Herald http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10701423 Mr. Long appears to be unable to distinguish between acting and the real world -
"...For the record, Faris' award was from High Times magazine, for her role in the movie Smiley Face, in which she eats cupcakes laced with cannabis, with disastrous results. Can't Long distinguish between real life and acting? It's a bit like saying we shouldn't take Dustin Hoffman seriously because he played someone with autism in Rain Man..."
Seriously, what a douchebag Ian Long is. I suppose if she'd been gang raped by a car load of guys he would have claimed that everyone knows that the house bunny was asking for it.
Anyway, Mr. Long's email address and mobile phone number is conveniently on the Tourism NZ link provided - maybe an email - or better still a polite but firm phone call, is in order?
I blogged about it: http://www.boganette.com/2011/01/can-we-haz-nz-tourism-boss-who-isnt.html
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