Eleanor's Letter: Is the media sexist? I reckon it is and went on TV to say so

Great Queenager Hannah Waddingham calls out a Paparazzo for sexism

The male lens of the media in action: Hannah Waddingham calling out photographers for telling her to ‘show some leg’ last week

Dear Queenagers

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So it’s been a busy week. In fact when you read this I will be entirely off grid in Galicia in Spain, checking out somewhere we might run some trips. But back to the headline and Hannah Waddingham… On Tuesday I went on Good Morning Britain (I don’t know why my chin looks so square on the TV) to talk about whether the media is sexist. The brief answer is YES.

And yes, it’s one of my favourite topics. I spent 25 years as a senior newspaper executive and was also Chair of Women in Journalism so it is something I have thought about a lot. Indeed, although it is getting better, the media is still not a truly reflecting mirror, but a distorting lens. Women are usually seen through a ‘male lens’ - it is why the overwhelming majority of pictures you see in papers, tv, in advertising etc are usually of young women - or older women who look young. It was always a challenge to get pictures of older women in the paper. The general view was that women were there as eye candy to - as one old picture editor put it to me - “brighten up the page”. I spent many years hassling for there to be more articles about women with agency, doing things in their own right: the majority of stories which mentioned women (and there weren’t often very many) featured females as Wags (arm candy appendages of more famous men) or victims. Indeed on the day that went on ITV the papers were a walking demonstration of the sexist nature of the media: there on the frontpages was Donald Trump (his face) and Stormy Daniels (her cleavage). The debate was live because that great Queenager Hannah Waddingham (from Ted Lasso, if you haven’t watched it yet, please do!) had called out a paparazzo for sexism: he’d asked her to ‘show some leg’ on the red carpet and she’d said: “You wouldn’t say that to a man!” She is right.

A truly egregious example of the male lens! Even two female leaders are only judged on their legs - hopefully things are getting a bit better…

I have spent years calling out the kind of sexist male lens which even judges two female leaders on their legs not their policies (hopefully it is a bit better now). But I am not convinced that much has changed. I was at the dentist the other day flicking through the latest copy of Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Issue. It had about 8 huge stars on the cover – the men were in tuxedos, bodies safely covered, the women in micro dresses (flesh very much on show, all except for one).

That I’m afraid is the sexist media in action. It is part of the matrix in which we live. We are taught to judge our selves through its lens: whether it is cankles or bingo wings. We internalise its misogyny. And the media loves nothing more than a woman v woman spat – so of course at GMB I was put up against another woman, a former Big Brother contestant Ashleyne, who argued that it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. “The paps used to actively try to shoot up your skirt, or catch you falling out of a night club, now they are a bit more respectful”. Progress! Perhaps…

We have to keep calling this stuff out. It is the only way anything changes. I remember when as chair of WIJ I took a stand against Page 3 (yes it is only a decade or so since there was a topless woman on p3 of the UK’s biggest tabloid EVERY day). I remember at the time people telling me I was a killjoy, that it was ‘just a bit of fun’ – no-one minds. Well, I minded. I felt it was degrading to show women as slabs of sexual meat for men’s titillation every day in a mainstream publication. It allowed men to think it was ok to think of women in terms of tits… as someone with a large chest I used to get catcalled every day. My male colleagues would regularly talk to my chest not my eyes.

I think I was right to call it out. The idea of Page 3 happening now would be anathema. The world can change. But change only happens when we call out the matrix in which we live and insist that it shifts. We don’t just accept it because it is there…

Which is also why I became interested in Queenagers, and the way older women are often invisible in our culture. This is also part of the male lens. If women are generally valued for their youth, hotness and fecundity (yup the ways they are useful to men) then older women get a raw deal. I became interested in gendered ageism when I started to find it hard to get stories or pictures about older women into the magazine I edited… and then I realised how widespread it is. How the disregard and invisibility of older women leads to us often being made redundant or passed over at work as we pass 50 (what I call the Queenager brain drain). And how invisible we are in our authentic selves in the culture (over half of the women 45-65 we surveyed in our Noon research said they felt unseen and disregarded). This matters because it is hard to be what we can’t see. I couldn’t see the kinds of women I knew reflected realistically in the media or the national conversation so I founded NOON so there would be somewhere which saw the world from our perspective. My mission is to try and change the way we think about older – and indeed ALL women. I want us to be valued for ALL that we are – our creativity, our kindness, wisdom, experience, all the colours of the rainbow, not just youth and fertility. I want younger women to look forward to being Queenagers as when they hit their prime.

If women were truly valued for all of their qualities -not just as male lens eye candy – the billboards, TV and papers would look very different!

I am glad to say that it is shifting a bit. I saw an advert for shampoo the other night which had a grey-haired Queenager next to two younger women. It’s funny how the beauty industry particularly has gone ‘diverse’ – black women, brown women, women with tattoos, larger ones etc – but very rarely anyone older. Its the bit of diversity everyone forgets.

I have a joke that there are only about three older women we’re allowed to see in the media: Judi Dench, (national treasure) Miriam Margoyles (funny) and Helen Mirren (looks good in a bikini at 80). Where are the others? We’re getting some cool Queenagers creating content for and about us – I love Reese Witherspoon for instance, or Kate Winslet. But they definitely still look young. Even brands which serve Queenagers such as John Lewis don’t target us in their advertising. Queenagers are behind 90 per cent of all household spending decisions according to AARP, we are super consumers, say Forbes Magazine, but we appear in less than 10 per cent of advertising, (and then only as mothers or grannies or walking down the beach or on a cruise ship with a silver fox chap).

There are some honourable exceptions – JD Williams, a clothes brand – are running some upbeat ads around how it is great to be older, which play against stereotypes. And Sophie Van Ettinger at And Begin skin care left the mainstream beauty industry to create a new brand which isn’t anti-ageing (dread phrase it is a privilege to age, the alternative is to die) but pro-ageing.

This is a welcome change because the world is getting older, there is a deficit of births and by 2025 over half the workforce will be 50 plus. So it doesn’t seem sensible for brands to ignore older women who tend to have the money to spend (I don’t know about you but my Gen Z kids are still being supported by us…) statistically us oldies are richer, so why are we ignored by a sexist, ageist media?

Anyway rant over! I didn’t just do sexism this week. We also ran a brilliant session around AI – with Tomorrow’s World Maggie Philbin and our own Professor Kerensa Jennings on Monday (well worth a listen/watch if you missed it.) Oh and I filled in for Allison Pearson writing her column for the Telegraph. I’ll return to some of that here in the future!

So enjoy your Sunday – much love and see lots of you on Tuesday I hope.

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Love

Eleanor