International Women’s Day

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Dean and other speakers have noted that there is quite a high proportion of men speaking in this debate. That shows that there is progress. I remember, not so long ago, when I was the only man speaking in a long train of Baronesses, although I have to say that I quite enjoyed that singular role.

In the film “Black Swan”, the actress Natalie Portman portrays a dancer who is under extreme pressure to be successful. The film documents her struggle with anorexia and bulimia, which, in the film, go along with a lot of self-harm and self-cutting. The ballet dancer Mariafrancesca Garritano, from La Scala in Milan, claims that one in five female dancers suffers from severe forms of eating disorder, which are also very common among female athletes. I was quite moved to see a piece about the British athlete Chrissie Wellington in a newspaper about two weeks ago. She has won no fewer than 13 Iron Man competitions—triathlons where they do a two-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and then a marathon of 26 miles. Contributions from noble Lords will be gratefully accepted. In this account, she documents her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in a moving way. One thing she said that made an impact on me was that women suffering from these things are,

“driven, compulsive, obsessive, competitive, persistent and seek perfection”.

In my contribution to this debate I want to pursue a theme that I have raised once or twice before in your Lordships’ House, which is that although economic equality is important and crucial for women, it is not enough. Women in our culture, and increasingly across the world—and especially younger women—suffer from a tyranny of appearance and the body. To put things rather crudely, there is a great fault line in our society where men are judged, and tend to judge themselves, by accomplishment while women are judged—and surprisingly or not, tend to judge themselves—by appearance. This is a deep schism in our culture. Anorexia, bulimia, other eating disorders and self-harm are 10 times more frequent among women than among men. They are at the outer edge of the radical uncertainties that many women feel about their bodies and their identities—especially, again, younger women. The recent survey in the UK showed that 50 per cent of girls aged 16 to 21 would seriously consider having surgery to improve their appearance.

Eating disorders, self-harm and worry about body image are not the antithesis of the increasing economic success of women. On the contrary, as the examples that I quoted earlier show, they are especially common among achievers—and again, as I said before, in the younger generation. These disorders are spreading across the world in the most remarkable fashion to areas where they did not previously exist at all; they include China, India, parts of the Middle East, Latin America and urban, affluent areas of Africa. In Africa, it is possible to see within a few miles of one another one woman dying of classical starvation—in other words, simply with not enough food to eat—and another woman in a cosseted urban area dying from the effort to become thin, because anorexia kills. It is the most lethal of all the mental disorders among young women.

From this I would draw three conclusions, which I would be happy if the Minister would comment on if she has time. My first would be that the goal of the emancipation of women should not be just equality but should be freedom, where freedom is defined as being at ease with one’s identity, life and achievements, and recognising their importance—and being at ease with one’s body. Secondly, I propose that the emotional emancipation of women is just as important as their economic emancipation. At the moment, it seems to me that in affluent countries particularly, across the world, women are paying a huge price for success. There is a kind of emotional crippling associated with success. Thirdly, although the cultural stereotyping of women is defined by appearances everywhere, it is not at all impossible to think of policies that can combat it. For instance, one is a far more radical curbing of advertising aimed at young children. Anorexia now starts at six or seven years old, when girls are sometimes dressed in full make-up with nail polish. That overlaps with the sexualisation of children, which is one of the most noxious aspects of contemporary societies today.