International Women’s Day, doncha just love it? Well, if I’m honest, I’m not a big fan. Of course I get it, but why do us girls need a dedicated day to air our grievances and highlight how wonderful we are to the world?
I mean, call me old-fashioned but in my humble experience most of you men are shit scared of us anyway. We only have to say jump and, if you’ve got any sense, you’ll beg to know how far?
Over at The Drum – remember them, they were the ones who took on the might of WACL and lost badly – they ran over 20 stories about the “event”; they even relaunched their Exceptional Women of the World (EWOW, nice acronym) podcast “with a global scale”.
And, unlike The Drum Network, which has legitimised paid-for editorial puffery and, in doing so, completely undermined the rest of the trade press, EWOW is free, shock horror, even for women.
Meanwhile Campaign, a magazine that is run by women but spends most its time writing about the man-spreading world of advertising, there were no less than 16 stories linked to International Women’s Day. Marketing Week scraped the bottom (surprise, surprise) with three.
This august magazine ran a big fat zero – well, apart from that rather amusing yet apparently frowned upon retail ad featuring a woman threatening to beat up her fella under the strapline: “Stop looking at Adidas trainers. Why can’t you look at porn like a normal husband?” (My god, you can’t possibly have an ad featuring man-bashing, even in a jokey manner.)
So does this make Decision Marketing the favoured organ of the misogynistic hordes, other than their own organ of course? Actually no, because we write about the sisterhood all the time. In fact, if we don’t I give McKelvey a hard slap – he’s used to it, he’s got two older sisters and you wouldn’t mess with them. And, anyway, the DM industry has got loads of women in powerful positions, and long may it continue.
Back in the day, so I hear, kids used to quake at the threat of “wait till your father gets home”. Bah, these days it’s more like “for god’s sake don’t tell mum!”
We are not a pushover, so let’s get this straight. Life can be shit, whether you’re a bloke or a woman, but the one inescapable question – the answer to which could make a massive difference for us girls, International Women’s Day or not – is: why can’t they just give us a few more damn toilets?
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