Of lipstick and power
TAKING ON THE BIG BOYS:
Or why feminism is good for families, business and the nation
By Ellen Bravo
294 pp. The Feminist Press $15.95
Reviewed by Marilee Kenney Hunt
According to Ellen Bravo, the two-decade director of 9to5, the “Big Boys” are “a relatively small number of men who have a real stake in maintaining gender discrimination. They are the ones who control wealth and power.” She points out that some of the big boys may even wear high heels and lipstick but, “regardless of gender, they’re part of the group.”
The big boys are not a cohesive, card-carrying type of group. Rather, they are the ones who assist in maintaining the status quo because it serves them—a fact they may not even recognize. They believe their supremacy and entitlement are actually earned, deserved and beneficial to all. In that way, although the actual power brokers are rather small in number, most men and many women serve to support the big boys’ societal foundation.
From an overview of how big boys came to be through her final chapter giving specific bulleted suggestions on how to take them on, Ellen Bravo sets a course for undermining the “big boys” to restructure society’s power and replace it with equity— particularly for women. It is a great companion book to Evelyn Murphy’s Getting Even: Why Women Earn Less Than Men and What to do about It.
Bravo relies on her lifetime experience in 9to5 and as a speaker and activist for equity to provide real-life stories that illustrate her points. Using humor along with seriousness of cause, she dispels the myth that all feminists are sourpuss men-haters constantly grinding their axes on those around them. She certainly wields her weapons—mostly her tongue and pen—but in such a way as to help those with good intentions and a desire for change, and an understanding of what needs to be changed, find out how to embrace the cause and move it forward.
She notes that the big boys’ tactics are minimizing, trivializing, patronizing, catastrophizing and demonizing.
As examples of minimizing and trivializing, she notes that during a TV show another panelist once pulled out a news clipping that claimed someone had accused a professor of sexual harassment when he kissed a student under the mistletoe. How innocent the professor appeared, and how foolish was the student who complained about this sweet holiday tradition. Bravo points out, however, that ”engaging tongue and loins against an unsuspecting student might be pretty intimidating.” Given that perspective, the professor’s innocent holiday-tradition actions are not at all trivial.
In describing patronizing behavior, she recalls a time when Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative anti-feminist, appeared on TV sporting her sure-fire prevention for sexual harassment: a button with one word: “lady.” Schlafly had determined that if you act like a lady no one would dare or be permitted to harass you. Bravo notes that she was cheered when an audience member pointed out that reading the button required staring at Schlafly’s chest.
Catastrophizing (is this actually a word?) is effective because it plays on existing fears and ignorance, exaggerating them to make anti-harassment laws seem to be unreasonable micro-managing of workplace interpersonal interactions in a way that is impossible to either understand or implement. Bravo’s example is of executives who become frightened to tell women employees that they look nice for fear of being sued. Exaggerations so overstate the situation that observers may believe the government has “gone too far” and is placing onerous regulations on employers that stifle their productivity and inhibit collegial working relationships.
Finally, she describes how effectively demonizing a complainant silences the voices of those being wronged. Her example here was the deeply religious and proper Anita Hill who, in the wake of Senate hearings on the confirmation of now Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, was labeled “a little nutty and a little slutty” when she was neither.
Bravo takes on the issues of welfare reform, the problem of balancing work and family, alternative work styles and their implications for and impacts on women, and much more. In the end, she sets out a chapter on “How You Can Help Get There” that gives practical advice for women from any walk of life who want to take action to achieve equity.
I recommend this be read with a glass of wine and a sense of humor. It will aggravate and disappoint any reader who has been deluded into thinking women have “made it” or are specially advantaged in the workplace. If you are willing, however, to face the fact that there is still work to be done to achieve equity, this book provides both the motivation and the manner to move forward.
Marilee Kenney Hunt is National Director of Strategic Planning and Policy for the Victim Rights Law Center’s (VRLC) , and was Executive Director of the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence from 2003-07.