There’s an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in which WJM news producer Mary Richards is getting ready for an interview with a tough television critic. She decides to wear a pantsuit with a tie, thinking this will give her gravitas. The interview is a disaster. Her serious clothes don’t help her, though sharper wits may have. She may as well have gone jacketless, tieless or even sleeveless.
I’m very pro-sleeveless news anchors. But then I’m not distracted by brightly coloured frocks and shiny things. Regardless of a person’s attire, I can still hear what they’re saying. I love the sight of CNN’s Anderson Cooper with his fancy hair and his form-fitting black T-shirts. Yet, I’m able, while appreciating all the pretty, to listen to what he’s saying about squalor in Haiti. I love the sight of the roguish Italo-hunk Alessio Vinci, but I can focus when he talks about Silvio Berlusconi.
There are plenty of things to criticize about Sun News – it’s a waste to not put Ezra Levant in debate mode, for instance, and too many old news stories are being rehashed. While I haven’t watched Sun News in the evenings, as this conflicts with the many permutations of Law & Order of which I’m so fond, I know there are no women hosts past 5 p.m. I’d be hard-pressed, though, to think of a conservative woman in the Canadian media to whom I’d grant an hour of prime time.
Sun News, looking awkward and amateurish, needs to find its groove. Mind you, all Canadian TV looks that way compared with American TV. At least the Sun folks appear to be having fun, not to mention having a sense of humour about themselves.
But the sartorial selections of some of the women shouldn’t be an issue. If an anchor or pundit can read a teleprompter or speak extemporaneously without stumbling over foreign names, then they’re fulfilling their job description. The hysteria about the fact that some of the anchors are – oh, the humanity – showing their arms or cleavage would be laughable if it didn’t bring to mind what I call Victorian feminism.
It’s the priggishness that says a woman can only be serious if she’s, on a superficial level, sexless. It’s the misogyny that says women can easily provoke the baser urges of others, and it’s surely representative of the contempt in which women hold each other. One female journalist labelled Sun News “Skank TV,” before back-pedalling. (Ah, such conviction.) Another said she wasn’t calling anyone a skank, just objecting to how the women on Sun News were “being packaged” – a rather condescending view of one’s fellow females.
In other words, these women can be made to dress a certain way by others, such fools they are (which we know because they aren’t all wearing jackets). While I know nothing of the Sun’s dress code, I’d guess that no one signed a contract with a gun to the head.
This profoundly sexist criticism tells us more about the parochial mindset (or the puritanical obsession with sex) behind it than about the person wearing the allegedly skimpy clothing. It’s not a stretch to call it a sibling of the Islamic fundamentalist view of a woman’s body.
I tend toward the misanthropic, and I’ve been known to bash males. But even I think intelligent humans are capable of controlling their thoughts and of hearing what someone’s saying, even if someone’s attractive or showing flesh.
I’d hoped that Victorian feminism had died with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but apparently it was only keeping its eyes closed, thinking of England and waiting for Krista Erickson.
Rondi Adamson is a Toronto writer.
