Women are too serious, men are obsessed with bodily functions

Woman's Hour was in characteristic form this morning in a discussion about why there are so few women cartoonists. Whilst the Guardian's Nicola Jennings stopped short of actually saying that women aren't funny, she managed to imply it by admitting that she felt that women are basically a bit too serious for the job.

But it was only as Jenni Murray asked in a baffled and weary tone why men put condoms and bottoms into their satirical cartoons that Nicola Jennings came out with her most astonishing revelation, that 'men are obsessed with their bodily functions, quite simply.'

At least somebody is telling it like it is: men are just filthy, aren't they? If only Ms Jennings wasn't too serious to draw a satirical cartoon about it.

Not quite sure where all the successful female stand-ups who do routines about menstruation and pubic hair fit in, though. I suppose they're either the exception that prove the rule, or they're just not as serious as they ought to be...

However equal women get they will still have to do the cleaning

A lengthy and positive discussion today with 'New Feminist' Kat Banyard, who talked about the recent surge of support for equal opportunities and the desexualisation of women. She ended by saying that it is both men and women who are campaigning for this, illustrating her point with an anecdote about an enthusiastic young man at a recent march, which was then shat on from a great height by Jenni Murray who sarcastically quipped 'But will he know how to change a nappy and use a hoover?'

Ah, indeed. Men may indeed be capable of being as passionate about equality as women, but they're never going to be able to do household chores - a women's work is never done! As if Jenni Murray would even let a man try to clean her kitchen (or indeed change her nappy).

And so one of the show's more encouraging items was neatly written off by a myth about the domestic uselessness of men combined with a subtle insinuation about what jobs women really ought to be doing. Kat Banyard could do worse than to add getting rid of Woman's Hour to her list of campaigning issues...

Films are for boys, women have to make do with TV

Hooray for Julianne Moore (or, as she was apparently called by her classmates, Freckle-Face Strawberry), who was on hand today to answer that age-old question: why do you never see women in the cinema?

It came down to that good old woman's hour assertion that they're simply too busy.

"It's hard for us to get out and go to the movies... I mean, I don't go out at night. [...] I think women have a tendency to watch television a lot more."

This is apparently the reason why the movie industy is currently making "lots of graphic spectacle movies which will travel globally" - but, as Jane Garvey sagely pointed out, "they're for young boys" (cf. Titanic, Alice in Wonderland and the everso masculine The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

Freckle-Face then had a good rant about all the films being made that don't have women in them, which put me in mind of all those womanless films I've seen, like...

Um...

Politics is for men, kitchens are for women

In today's programme, Jenni Murray gave us her own unique insight into the meaning of "feminisation" when she asked David Cameron: 'How much is this openness, this letting us see you in your kitchen, how much is that somehow to do with the feminisation of politics?'

To his credit, after a moment of uncharacteristic hesitancy Cameron sniggered and said 'I'm not sure it's a Mars/Venus thing...'

Though Jenni got her own back at the end of the programme by reading out only nasty emails that had come in about him. Bitch.

Women are supportive, men are bulls

In today's programme, psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman revealed why giving things up for Lent is so much easier for women:

"[Women] tend to be very supportive to one another - guys, when they hear that their friend is trying to lose weight or whatever, it's a red rag to a bull, they just do everything they can to make the person fail."

Bloody men - it's a wonder they ever get anything done, the way they deliberately set out to undermine each other. And thank goodness that Jenni Murray was there to add her own experience to the debate: "Yes, I've seen guys operating like that, somebody's trying to give up drinking and, 'oh come on mate, have a pint!' - yes, you're definitely right about that." Presumably the fact that she did a quasi-Northern accent for the man in question says something equally profound about the differences between the genders.

Men are blinkered, women are innately modest

(Reproduced from Talk to Rex, 30/1/10)

One of the problems of driving a car is that I occasionally find myself listening to a radio programme that I would never consider turning on in other circumstances but which is so compellingly dreadful that I have to keep listening. Undoubtedly the biggest culprit, which invariably sees me yelling at my car radio and crashing into road barriers, is Woman's Hour.

What is this programme even for? Is it there because the rest of Radio 4's heady mix of politics, analysis, culture, drama and gardening just won't appeal to the poor dears who stay at home to bathe the children and peel the potatoes? Of course, we don't need a Gentleman's Hour - we have The World At One in which serious issues of the day are discussed; but thank goodness that Radio 4 have put aside an hour, at least, for those of lesser intellect to hear about more domestic, frivolous concerns.

One recent edition that nearly made me throw my car off a motorway bridge had Emma Thompson's mother telling a truly horrendous anecdote about a time she inserted a clove of garlic into her bottom to cure her piles, but - my! - imagine the dreadful smell when she passed wind! Is that really suitable subject matter for daytime radio? Is it? IS IT?

But it's not the sheer randomness and silliness of the content that drives me up the wall. It is the fact that this programme is habitually sexist in a way that even Jeremy Clarkson couldn't get away with; even if the programme's very existence didn't implicitly reinforce a gender stereotype, its discussions regularly take a whole load other other mythical gender distinctions and shamelessly repeat them as if they're scientific fact.

I was pretty damn cross about last week's "why women want a bigger kitchen" discussion (why, pray, am I not allowed a bigger kitchen too?) but yesterday went a whole step further in a discussion of "why women don't write as many letters to newspapers as men do".

First up with a neat answer was Sarah Sands of the London Evening Standard, who explained that "time is a big issue". Apparently, women don't write letters to newspapers because "they're just too busy".

Doing what, exactly? At no point did Ms Sands stop to explain what it is that means that men are so much less busy than women, except in a vague sentence that seemed to imply that all men are students or retired. She clearly has an unquestioningly Wodehousian world view in which women do all the work while men sit around writing letters to the Telegraph.

Without pausing to justify her illogical theory, she went on to add that with women "there's this innate modesty" which means they're less prepared to mouth off about things which annoy them. Which is so laughably inaccurate that I might have chuckled heartily, but for the fact that the Observer's Stephen Pritchard leapt in to agree that "women have a natural desire to be more considered and reflective", a brazen fallacy compounded by the patronising edge in his voice which suggested that he was prepared to tell the little ladies what they wanted to hear if it kept them out of the way while us men got on with running the country.

Not one to make a sweeping generalisation about women without modestly dragging his own gender through the mud, Pritchard added: "men are single-issue people... we tend to be incredibly blinkered!" Unlike, presumably, Sarah Sands of the London Evening Standard who believes that women do all the work in the world. In the same simpering tone which, horrifically, seemed calculated to forge a path into Jenni Murray's knickers, he went on that "women have this tremendous ability to do half a dozen things at once which men certainly don't share!"

How bloody dare he!!! I couldn't do my job if I wasn't able to do half a dozen things at once! Besides which, if women are able to do half a dozen things at once, why aren't they writing letters to newspapers at the same time as doing all those other things they're so busy with?

I'm the last person to advocate equality as sameness and know that, broadly speaking, men and women have important physical and emotional differences. But if you were to believe the sweeping, self-contradictory, discriminatory, patronising crap spouted about men and women on Woman's Hour you would form a view of gender that was last fashionable around the beginning of the 20th century, the very thing that women chained themselves to railings to escape from in a brave yet apparently uncharacteristically single-issue manner.

The feminist in me is half-inclined to chain myself to railings outside Broadcasting House until Radio 4 pull the programme from the airwaves, but time is an issue as I'm so busy, so instead I have written a considered, reflective blog about it (I'm too innately modest to write to the Telegraph).

Shit - I'm a woman.