Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: How Gender Equality Can Save The World!
Not a single country anywhere in the world has achieved gender equality. In more than a few countries, progress for women has stalled or is reversing. Voters in the United States chose a misogynist over a female candidate for President.Yet in many of these countries, the majority of politicians and business leaders profess to believe in gender equality—as well they might. One report predicts a boost to global GDP of £8.3 trillion by 2025 simply by making faster progress towards narrowing the gender gap. Researchers point to many other potential benefits too, not least in improved relations between the sexes and a healthier, more peaceful planet.If gender equality promises benefits not just to women, but to everyone, why aren’t we embracing it? And how can we speed the pace of change? Fewer than nine percent of world leaders are female, but the few women who have broken through include towering figures such as Angela Merkel. Could 50-foot women save the day? These questions have gripped journalist and author Catherine Mayer since she accidentally founded the Women’s Equality Party in March 2015 and watched it grow in months from an idea to a vibrant political force with more than 70 branches across the UK.In ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMEN, her insightful, revelatory, often hilarious, and hugely inspiring book, she tackles those questions and many more, sharing inside views and experiences from building a party, and bringing together global research with analyses and interviews based on her own far-flung research.And she goes further. Campaigning for the Women’s Equality Party ahead of elections in May 2016, she noticed that many people found it hard, in the absence of any real-life examples, to envisage a gender-equal world. So she takes us there, to the place she calls Equalia. What is it like? Does gender equality make for a society that is more equal in other ways too? Who does the low-paid jobs? How does gender express itself in a place freed from gender programming? What’s the sex like? What’s on the telly?For some fascinating answers and brilliant thought experiments—and a blueprint for reaching Equalia—read ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMEN.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Catherine Mayer 2017
Catherine Mayer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008191160
‘Comprehensive, wide-ranging and journalistically rigorous. Attack of the 50ft Women is an important and timely book. Buy it for yourself, your husband or partner. Most importantly, buy it for your children.’
Sunday Express
‘If you’re male, and don’t think you need to read this book, that’s your received culture talking, and it isn’t doing you a favour. If you’re male or female, do yourself and the future a favour: read this book.’
William Gibson
‘Barnstorming’
Red
‘An inspiring, revelatory and often hilarious journey to explore the merits of a gender-equal society.’
Glamour
‘Empowering and full of hope, Attack of the 50ft Women made me feel 50ft tall. Glass ceilings beware.’
Sarah Shaffi
‘Compelling and deeply researched… Presents the multiple benefits of a gender-balanced world’
Lisa Randall
‘[Catherine Mayer] occupies a well-informed, fully-engaged middle ground [and] quickly gets to the main issue – endemic exploitation, discrimination, harassment and sexual violence perpetrated by men and boys against (overwhelmingly) women and girls … provid[ing] concise, painful examples of perpetrators’ seeming impunity even when charged for their crimes. [Attack of the 50ft Women] is a weapons store for the battles ahead.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘A tour de force of feminist polemic, forensic research drawing on data from across the globe and some fabulously funny anecdotes.’
Wales Online
To sisters, mine especially.
And in memory of Sara Burns, Sarah Smith, Michael Elliott and Ed Victor.
If we were socially ambisexual, if men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in ‘self esteem’, then society would be a very different thing. What our problems might be, God knows. I only know we would have them. But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation – exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth.
URSULA LE GUIN
‘Is Gender Necessary?’, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1976.
Contents
Introduction: The Shoulders of Giants
Chapter One: Gate-crashing the club
Chapter Six: What really shocks me
Chapter Eight: This should be everyone’s business
Chapter Ten: Adam and Eve and Apple
Chapter Eleven: Winter wonderland
Introduction: The Shoulders of Giants
A COLOSSAL ZOMBIE Scarlett Johansson commandeered London’s red buses a few years ago. She sprawled across the upper deck of a fleet of vehicles, face slack with simulated desire, mouth gaping wide enough to swallow a small terrier, breasts threatening to smother passengers seated in the lower tier.
Dolce & Gabbana’s advertising campaign intended to evoke Marilyn Monroe’s heyday, and it succeeded. The apparition recalled Nancy, the title character of a 1958 film, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. Nancy’s encounter with a space alien transforms her into a giant (‘Incredibly Huge, with Incredible Desires for Love and Vengeance’). The patriarchal authorities – doctors, police, spouse – chain her, but she breaks free and, naked but for an arrangement of bed sheets, embarks on a murderous rampage. Behold the dreadful power of woman unleashed (‘The Most Grotesque Monstrosity of All’)!
Zombie Johansson captured the inadvertent humour of the B-movie, but she was properly scary too. In her human incarnation she is the only woman to break through Hollywood’s diamond ceiling to claim a place among the ten top-grossing actors of all time. She chooses intelligent roles and has more than once pushed back against the chauvinism of Hollywood and its media ecosystems. Her dead-eyed alter ego belonged to the monstrous regiment of billboard women in perpetual march across the world. Nancy gained agency as she grew. Today’s 50-footers, hypersexualised and supine, promote a retrograde ideology alongside brands and products.
