As reported at Jezebel, 2011 “was either lacking severely in girlchievements or a banner year for lady pandas.”
Summarizing BBC’s “Faces of the Year,” Erin Gloria Ryan writes:
…the rest of the list will leave people who were hoping for a progressive set of female movers and shakers disappointed. Sure, it includes Michele Bachmann… and Dilma Rousseff, the first female President of Brazil. But the list also includes Charlene Wittstock, a woman famous for almost not marrying a prince, a very wealthy Spanish duchess who married a younger man, and Pippa Middleton, a woman famous for being related to a woman who married a prince. We’ve also got two sexual assault victims on the list— Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who was dragged away from reporters while trying to tell them she’d been raped by Gaddafi forces, and Nafissatou Diallo, the woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her in his $12 zillion per night hotel room. And then there’s the US Marine who successfully asked Justin Timberlake to go to a dance with her.
All in all, more than half… are rape victims, princesses and thereabouts, or bears.
And as SocImages reader @ThatJohn pointed out after comparing the BBC’s lists, men are noteworthy for doing things, women for having (often violent) things done to them.
Who would you nominate as a woman of the year?
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 23
Anonymous — January 1, 2012
How about peace campaigner, Hetty Bower. Oh, and she's 106.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2011/dec/16/women-of-year-2011-in-pictures#/?picture=383355232&index=3
Leslee Beldotti — January 1, 2012
Right. Because obviously what Pippa Middleton does is WAY more important than anything this lady does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Lagarde
/sarcasm
JacquelynJoan — January 1, 2012
The 3 women who won the Nobel Peace Prize!
Elizabeth Warren!
Gabriel Giffords!
Fernando — January 1, 2012
While I'm not trying to minimize any problems this list has, the list for male faces of the year isn't all that better. It has a lunatic, two men who were murdered, one who was kidnapped and another man who killed himself.
Both lists have at least one current political leader, one republican politician who took part on the presidential race, a person noteworthy for something celebrity related, an athlete and an artist.
I'd say both lists are pretty even except when it comes to royalty and bears. Instead, the male list has a military man and another politician.
Jose Cuicahua-Perez — January 1, 2012
The real question is why is Michelle Bachmann on this list?
eduardo — January 2, 2012
Michele Bachmann? Didn't she talk about Christian wifely submission? Now we know that they're joking...
LarryW — January 2, 2012
Lists such as this tend to be highly subjective. Rather like best and worst movies or best and worst novels, etc...
Elena — January 2, 2012
a very wealthy Spanish duchess who married a younger man
Well, the House of Alba has a bit of history behind (just... ask the Dutch, or don't), and the current Duchess (who is in the Guinness records for number of aristocratic titles held by a noble) and her family are pretty much the only local aristocrats with media relevance nowadays, apart from the royals. Where media = prensa del corazón, the kind of tabloid periodicals that chronicle the love lives of otherwise rather uninteresting people. It's complicated.
That said, yeah. Pretty weak.
Grahammiller1 — January 2, 2012
Is it not deceptive to post this as "top 12 women of the year"? My read on this was the top 12 news generating women of the year, I don't think this translates as top 12 women of the year.
Lala — January 2, 2012
They like to put our president(Brazil) in those top woman lists, but did you know that in her first year of power five minister left the government because of corruption? Including the most important one.
Leukothea — January 3, 2012
Well, actually, No - the BBC was *not* listing the 'Top Twelve Women' of 2011. You have distorted things: this was a list of 'Faces of the Year 2011 - Women'. Quite different (see for yourself: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16203296 ).
The BBC article is about Notoriety, not Merit...... Quite different....
Anonymous — January 3, 2012
Personally, I'm a little bit disappointed in how the women who, in my opinion, bravely stood up for themselves in the wake of horrible sexual trauma have completely had their actions, and, by extension, their identities, collapsed under the one-dimensional title of "rape victim."
While I agree that, on the whole, women do gain more celebrity by having violence done to them, I feel that it's unfair to simply cast these women aside as victims.
They DID do something, they refused to simply remain helpless, and they attempted to confront their attackers. If we refuse to acknowledge that, then we're making them into the one-dimensional female victims that we claim the media is interested in.