Taken for a ride

When will the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality for Men and Women learn that that it has been taken for a (truck) ride? By reacting so sternly and sanctimoniously to the Yorkie advert ("It's only for the Men") they not only generated excellent publicity for the chocolate in question but portrayed themselves as dumbfoundingly naïve, swallowing the provocation as a grouper swallows bait.

The next phase of the Yorkie advertising campaign is: "The Girls want it too!" showing a nymphette wrapping her lips over the brown bar, with the caption below "As demanded by the National Commission". The commission has been set-up (or, more precisely, they have set themselves up).

There are a number of lessons to be drawn here but they are regrettably not what the National Commission wanted. They are about how specialist bodies set up by the government as part of its modernisation drive are (1) hijacked by partisan interests who are as keen to promote their own self-importance as the issues they claim to tackle and (2) how humour, as Umberto Eco pointed out long ago, is subversive of all power including our new oppressive orthodoxies which have replaced the old ones of religion, (3) the alacrity with which such authorities begin their public trajectories by latching on to something "symbolic" as a "symptom" of "underlying realities" to make their point, which is none other than to demonstrate their power by baring their fangs, (4) how such bodies are ultimately the enemies of what Popper called The Open Society, attempting to hijack the state to pursue their agendas and (5) how politicians, lacking as they do any sense of what constitutes civil society, are in thrall to such authorities, who often then land them in a public relations mess (as with the smoking ban) or makes them look like idiots.

I note too that the name of the commission reinforces gender stereotypes, rather than questioning them, as indeed it should. Why use the terms "Men" and "Women", rather than using the term "Commission for Gender Equality"? As any academic will tell you, at least those concerned with the human sciences, such as anthropology, there is more to gender than "male" and "female".