Outrage over M&C's party skirts the issue of sexism

Rachael Micallef
By Rachael Micallef | 24 January 2016
 

There are many things we should be outraged about when it comes to women in advertising. Burlesque dancers are not one of them.

On Friday the industry collectively lost its shit over a party that, for the most part they didn’t attend. Mumbrella wrote, in gritty, enthralling detail, about the activities of the M&C Saatchi 21st birthday party, which in the account resembled more bucks night than birthday. I was there – it wasn’t – but this isn’t the point. See here for M&C 'devastated', apologises for burlesque party.

What is the point is that there are many, many things we should be outraged about when it comes to women in advertising. Burlesque dancers are not one of them.

Look at this industry. This is a sector where the levels of senior creative women is staggering - in that they simply doesn't exist. The talent is there but it isn’t fostered, recognised, promoted or celebrated. It’s a well-documented problem with studies and research and case studies.

And how do we as an industry deal with that problem? Opinion articles full of manufactured rage from an editorial team that is mainly men.

I don’t mean that as a dig at the Mumbrella team – most of whom I get along with well – but as a woman, I don’t need anymore white men, who have lived with the privilege of being white men, telling me when and how to feel outraged.

They are recipients of the privilege they are “calling out”, without any idea what it’s like to be in this industry (or any other, or indeed in society) on an uneven playing field.

I have had co-workers blatantly hit on during business lunches, phone calls from anonymous females crying down the phone line about sexual harassment, meetings where people have offered to explain to me “what programmatic means” before I’ve had a chance to open my mouth and tell them that ‘thanks, I actually know’.

Even some of the women on the article who wrote comments defending M&C Saatchi were whipped with personal jibes – the exact same attitude the article was meant to be holding to account.

With this as a backdrop – and I’m just a journalist, not a creative – it’s hard not to see this latest incident as pure clickbait: complete distraction from serious issues that women in this industry deal with on a daily basis.

When we focus our energy at a party with burlesque dancers, when we shout at how this offends our moral sensitivities, when we bandy together in collective outrage on a message board, we are skirting the around the point, so many times that it is dizzying.

And it makes me fucking livid.

It’s not the first time this has happened. Momentum flared up after Leo Burnett posted an image of its new creative team – all men, all white. And while this industry pretended to be outraged for a week, it was well and truly forgotten by the time the next news story rolled around.

And for those who don’t know, the M&C story came out on a day when AdNews broke news that a fantastic, adland woman – Nitsa Lotus – had been made MD at a major Sydney agency. For all the conniptions on the Mumbrella message board, not one person thought to mention or celebrate that fact. Hundreds of comments on how women aren’t news in this country and no one gave a shit that a woman is running the show.

It makes me question the motives of much of this industry. Do you really want change? Then be outraged by the things that happen in your backyard. Don’t sit on a website, throw around comments and pretend to be enlightened. Don’t write opinion articles telling women how to feel and certainly don’t forget that this is an issue next week, when we all have something else to point fingers at.

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