Meet Client #9 - the Luv Gov

Just aired on BBC 2 and available in the UK on BBC i-player for a week Client 9 - The Call Girl and the Governor was directed by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Watch a trailer. It's the story of Eliot Spitzer, the first Jewish President the US never had, campaigning lawyer who took on the mobsters ( eg. the Gambino family) and won, then as New York's Attorney General took on Wall Street's Masters of the Universe - and appeared to be winning. Elected New York State Governor, things started to unravel between Albany's Escher-esque State legislature and the cellar of Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's house, complete with heavy punch-bag. Bruno was friends with all kinds of, shall we say, resourceful but unforgiving people, some of whom included the grandiose Wall Street icons the abrasive and self-righteous Spitzer had recently enraged and who were still fulminating thunderously. Apart from the fact that we have wonderfully iconic cameos of masculinity in its middle and old-age, dark, furious, brooding and cynical against the fading light of its conflicting dreams and its dwindling capacity to carry them out without protheses, we have a dramatic and self-attributed display of hubris, as Spitzer was apparently addicted to sex with enormously expensive escorts and spent a small fortune on them (his own, however)  over several years. When this was revealed in March 2008, he resigned, which of course meant that his whole staff complement, innocent of any offence, lost their jobs as well. The woman who took centre stage and revealed most of her mystique on the front pages of dozens of magazines including the doddering Playboy in the affair, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, was far from being Spitzer's muse - it would appear that he only saw her on the odd occasion but that it unfortunately coincided with an authorised wiretap. She achieved specious celebrity and a short-lived pop-career from the affair, and now, suitably photographed with both business suit and gravitas-delivering spectacles, writes a relationship advice column "Ask Ashley" in the New York Post. "Angelina", the girl that Spitzer actually most often saw over a long period, who declined to appear in the movie but allowed her very intelligent words to be spoken by an actress, has an even darker secret to hide: she's now a commodities trader. A rare and disturbing exploration of personal ambition, corporate power, sexuality, surveillance, hypocrisy, fraud, frailty, duplicity, violence, idealism, greed, revenge, overwheening arrogance and occasional reflection that might in the end be just more bathos anyway, everyone comes out of it badly and leaves us with the profundly depressing feeling that there's no-one you can trust and no-one ultimately has any boundaries. OK, we knew that anyway but being reminded of it is hardly uplifting. Nevertherless it's a revealing study of the connection between greed, power and sexuality that we rarely get outside fiction. And as one of the interviewees remarks, there's a culture specific aspect to this - had Spitzer "The Luv Gov" been a French politician he'd probably still be doing the job; almost certainly if he were Italian. As Hubert Waldroup, artist and procurer comments, we are all both animal and angel.  On the evidence here it's animal, angel and idiot. Quel dommage.

Not enough of a good thing

According to the GMI Ratings’ 2012 Women on Boards Survey which covers 45 countries and 4300 companies globally, there are now more women on boards of directors than ever and the global average has for the fist time edged over 10% to 10.5. Better still, the percentage with the critical 3 seats has risen to 9.8% tantalisingly close to the magic 10.

Industrialized economies as a whole have 11.1% of directors  who are women, 63.3% of companies with at least one woman on the board, and 10.5% of companies with three or more.  Emerging markets have only 7.2% of directors who  are women, only 44.3% of companies with least one woman on the board, and 6.3% of companies with three female directors. But national figures also vary greatly: Norway has 36% female directors, Germany 13% , Japan 1% , South Africa 17%, China 8.5%, and Brazil and Italy both 4.5%. Interestingly the two big risers this year, France and Australia, both illustrate the importance of policy: France being boosted by legislation, Australia by a corporate governance code amendment, and a high-level mentoring program. The debate between legislation- or quota-driven change and reliance on inspired activism rages on.  Read a discussion of  the GMI Ratings Report from which you can follow a link to download it.

Nothing like a red, red, rose

From various blogs and the Socialist Worker we learn how not to celebrate International Women’s Day. Lecturer Cherry Hopton was suspended from her post at Angus College in Scotland for objecting to a piece of appalling kitsch planned at the college to ‘commemorate’ yesterday's International Women’s Day. The college decided to celebrate IWD by giving all the women a red rose by a ‘man in a grey suit’ because, as the posters initially stated, ‘all women love a bit of romance.’ It's really not that easy, guys (surely only men whose most expansively seductive gesture involves the all-night gas station florist could have come up with this dreadful schlock?). Cherry protested, and consequently was  asked to attend a "private" meeting with the Head of Human Resources. When she asked what the meeting was to be about and requested that she be accompanied by a union official, she was suspended without so much as a dandelion being proffered. I wonder what these cheesy autocrats think International Women's Day is supposed to be about?

When your stomach stops churning, you could consider signing this petition in support of Cherry and her employment rights. Or maybe send the Head of HR a nettle. Your call.

Reinstate Cherry Hopton

And while you're in the petition mood, child benefit, one of the major achievements of feminism, is currently under threat in the UK and in need of support.

Save Child Benefit

The first link is to Nick Lowe's "Stoplight Roses".

Doin' it for Themselves.. and the Rest of Us

OK, so it's not international womens day until Thursday, but if you're going to take advantage of any of the events associated with it, a heads-up is surely in order. The UK has close to 400 events planned, compared to just over 200 in the US, which is a reason to be proud but not, I fear, cause to rejoice in the sad plight of one of the wellsprings of feminism. Today's Guardian has a feature on Annie Lennox, to whom we owe the title of today's blog. Barclays Woman of theYear in 2010 Lennox thinks that gay men should be feminists and that men should be welcomed into the movement anyway. The paper has further comments by Woman's Hour's Jenni Murray, with a plea for affordable child-care (which may in practice be gendered but affects single-parents of whom there are a considerable number of men) and Australian novelist, humourist and campaigner Kathy Lette, who points out that whilst in the West the odd woman who gets through the glass ceilling is then expected to keep it clean whilst she's up there, in the developing world one woman dies every minute in childbirth - a statistic that's definitely beyond gender. There's going to be a lot of posturing and drama around on Thursday, and we might hope that some of the more sophisticated rethinkings of the gender divide don't get lost in the noise of the debate on how much flesh female pop stars should or should not reveal. The bottom-line remains, however, that globally and historically women have had and continue to experience structural and personal disadvantages that are frequently life-threatening simply because of their sex. If it takes a bit of drama and a few choruses once a year to get that point over, it's hardly being strident.

Eurhythmics - Sisters are doin' it for themselves

Guardian IWD 100 anniversary page 2012

The Return of the Lad?

Despite the bold attempt in the 1990s by young Ladettes to colonise the space vacated by males morphing into the New Man, it appears that masculine Lad-ism is back with a vengeance, having retaken that terrain, and the Ladettes with it. Although the Unilad website has now closed down, the Laddish discourse has plenty of channels open, including other websites, blogs, magazines and even alternative student newspapers. When done cleverly, it manages to deploy complex irony to deflect criticism as Rachel Aroesti points out in the link above. Some sites, such as Toplad, don't set their aspirations quite so high, however, with some stomach-churning posts, although True Lad does appear to operate at a marginally greater elevation. Recent outbursts have included the City boys rugby tour email leak, where rich lads outlined a 13-point plan for a trip to the Dubai Sevens, which included cheating on their girlfriends, and last year's Andy Gray and Richard Keys sexism-on-air scandal, resulting in Gray's sacking (as a serial offender) and Keys' resignation and apology. The flames were fanned further by Jeremy Clarkson leaping to their defence and condeming their punishment for "heresy by thought". Which you might think odd, because perhaps the only even half-acceptable defence of most of this type of behaviour is that it is thought-less.

The New Lad: Half a Boy and Half a Man?

 Natasha Walter looks at the effects on women of this atavistic trend in her 2010 riposte Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. On current evidence the second edition will need to be much thicker. Fnaar-fnaar.