Hi everyone, welcome to this video where we'll be discussing Marxist analysis and its role in critical media studies. So first of all, let's take a look at what we mean by Marxist analysis. What is that? Well, Marxist analysis analyzes artifacts from the perspective of class difference and the implications of the capitalist system. So that may be vaguely familiar to you if you've heard of Marxism before. It doesn't have anything to do with the communist system necessarily in terms of the political system in that regard, but that we may be familiar with from the Soviet Union, for example. But it does have to do with examining artifacts from a sense of economy and the economic systems and the class differences that that creates. So let's move ahead here and jump in and see what we're talking about. First of all, some of the major premises, the big ideas behind Marxist analysis. There are some of the major themes here that things we need to be aware of. First of all, economic realities are greater than other ideologies, according to Marxist thinking. Those economic realities are what define us. And so our materialistic items are what define us, not our ideas. In other words, that's a core of Marxist, the Marxist system and Marxist analysis that economic realities really outweigh everything else. Everything comes down to money, according to Marxist analysis, really. To sustainability and to economics. There's a constant conflict then between the classes because that's the most important thing. Marxist ideology, Marxist analysis says that there's constant conflict between the hands and the have-nots, so to speak, because of that economic difference, because of the difference in the scale of the economy that they live under. And this is reflected then in all forms of expression that the media artifacts that would result specifically in critical media analysis. That's what we'd be concerned with, using Marxist analysis that those differences in class, those differences in the economic viewpoints and the economic sustainability really are reflected in all the forms of expression of the media that would then be created. So major questions we have here, who does the benefit? Marxist analysis would say, who does this benefit? And how are the lower classes being oppressed by whatever it is, by whatever message is being sent here? So those are some of the major premises historically. And in a more contemporary sense, there are some more specific perspectives we need to consider here. First of all, the profit motive influences media creation and practices. So at the end of the day, media is about making money. I mean, it is a business, right? The media is about making money. There's some people who do it for free, I guess, or do it for whatever. But really, the profit motive for the vast, vast majority of media artifacts is to make money. And so that profit motive, the desire to make money, is what influences then media creation and practices. Why do we continue to see shows that I hate? Why were the Kardashians on TV for so many years? Because people watched them and somebody could make money from it. Despite the fact that I didn't care for it, it's not my thing. Well, enough people watched it, that it was making somebody money, and that's why it continued to go on. There's a profit motive there. That's why these things get made and that influences what gets made, how it gets made, all those kinds of things. So some current practices that influence this and in a contemporary sense and influence the world of contemporary media. Our first of all, concentration is one. So the concentration of media, meaning that really most media in the United States is owned or created by or in some way sheltered under one of these six companies, Comcast, Disney, CBS, Viacom, News Corporation and AT&T now that they've merged or bought on Time Warner and Warner Media really influence and control the vast majority of media that we see in the United States. In some way, it's either created by this company or created by a company that they own or created by a company that they're in partnership with. So that's what we mean by concentration of media, that the media is largely controlled by one of these six organizations. A lot of the media that we consume is controlled by one of these six corporations. Then we also have the idea of conglomeration, right? That these companies are connected beyond just being owned by the same company. So you have this conglomeration of AT&T owning all these different media companies, for example. Now, again, they own Time Warner, so they own a lot of different types of media. And not only that, obviously, they have a phone service. They're a mobile provider for cellular service, but they also own direct TV and all those types of things. They own a variety of different media outlets. And so they're one of the big six, but they also just own them a conglomeration of different media outlets. And so we see that as an influence in current practices as well. Integration is another one. Integration is a huge one, especially, again, we have this concentration. These conglomerations are all really kind of tied together. And in integration, we see these companies start to work their their pieces together a little bit more and start to weave things together a little bit more. So, for example, just as just week one of the NFL season, this they advertise that there are five Walt Disney company platforms to kick off the season. OK, so here you have you have they have the first game of the season on our first Monday night football game of the season that was on five different platforms all owned by Disney, ESPN, ABC, which run it together. The ESPN crew works on ABC because they're both owned by Disney, of course. So you have integration of ESPN and ABC a lot of times. And not only that, you have the integration of, of course, worldwide of sports, world or wide world of sports. And Disney is, you know, an ESPN product at Disney that they're integrating there. But you have Disney working across all these platforms, ESPN, ESPN to ESPN plus their digital streaming platform, all that kind of stuff. So Walt Disney involved in that first Monday night football game on five different platforms. And that's just what they were advertising there. That does include all the other ways that they were involved as well. So so you see that integration between all those different Disney companies and Disney products working together on a single product on a single media output there. Not only that, but you have Disney who owns all these different properties now, they own the Star Wars properties, they own Pixar, they own Marvel, they own the Marvel prop movie properties. Anyway, they own all these things, right? And now it's all available on Disney Plus.  Integration, they're bringing all of this together. Not only that, but now you can get the Disney Plus package, streaming package with Disney Plus, ESPN Plus and Hulu Plus because Disney owns everything, right? So they can offer them all together. You have integration there. So what impact does this have? Why does this matter? What does what does this mean for all of us? Well, we start to see things like the following. The Office is one of the most popular streaming programs that has really been viewed so many times. So I think it holds a record for the most hours viewed of streaming television in the world right now. At least the moment had that world record. It's on Netflix forever. And that's where it really gained popularity. Netflix really lucked out that when the office started to gain popularity, people really wanted to watch it. They watched it a ton on Netflix, right? And so for years, Netflix had the monopoly on the office and benefited from that greatly. Well, then NBC decided they wanted to start their own streaming platform. And NBC not only aired the office originally, but they owned the property. They created, they produced it. So you want to see integration there. NBC's television division made the office. Then they aired it on NBC. And now they decided they want it back on their station. So in January of 2021, they took it back. And it's no longer available on Netflix, right? You can't watch it on Netflix anymore. If you want to watch it now, you have to go to Peacock to watch the office, right? So they brought it all back into under the NBC umbrella, so to speak, right? None underneath them, the Comcast umbrella. So now everything because NBC is owned by Comcast. NBC Universal is owned by Comcast. So again, we come back to the big six owning all this stuff and really wanting to benefit from it themselves. So you see this integration there. They're continuing to pull things in. Everybody's got a streaming platform now. I mean, like every television station, they're all competing against one another. They're all pulling in their own properties and which is in turn forced Netflix to be much more proactive in creating their own shows and really developing new stuff. So you also see a lot of multinationalism in current and the contemporary media environment, multinationalism, which is different than globalization. Globalization has more to do with just being having a company across the world and being known across the world. Multinationalism indicates that you are preparing products and creating media specifically for that environment. So, so for example, you may be familiar with America's Got Talent. Very popular show here in the United States for America's Got Talent. And of course, we have acts from all over the world and judges from all over the world. In fact, on the most recent season before judges you see here, none of them are actually from America. Howie Mandels, Canadian, Sophia Vergaros from Colombia, Simon Cowell, of course, from the UK. And and why can I not think of her name now? From Germany. The OK, it doesn't matter. She's from Germany. Anyway, America's Got Talent is a very popular show here in the United States, right? Very popular and so popular. In fact, in fact, I don't even think it started in America, but it started in Britain. But now it's so popular that it's all over the place. You've got you. You got Myanmar, Got Talent. You've got all these different, you know, Germany's Got Talent, all these different talent shows all across. So it's been nationalized for all these different markets, right? So that each of these markets has their own kind of thing. And in fact, then it comes full circle, though, when you think about the fact that America's Got Talent now has the champions where they bring in winners from other countries or great competitors from other countries to compete on a special season or Americans Got Talent. So we have this multinationalism where the products are being created specifically for those markets and that's become a current practice, not just to ship, you know, episodes of friends over to another country, but to create your own show within the context of that country, your own show of friends and create those characters and have it in house and have it be more specific to that culture and that context. So multinationalism is a major factor in the media today. So we have these different contemporary things that are that are influencing the media in ways that impact the sense of Marxism as well. This study of Marxism. OK, a couple common questions that come up in Marxism when we're doing critical analysis of using the Marxist analysis, some common questions that you're going to be asking a lot of times when you're doing that. Whom does this benefit? If the work is accepted, successful, believed, who does this benefit? Does this benefit somebody in lower classes that benefit somebody who's already rich, one of the big six, right? Does it benefit them? Who does this benefit? Who benefits from this particular piece and and and the acceptance and popularity of it? What's the social class of the author who created this? You know, what's what person from what perspective is this being created? Which class does the work claim to represent? And so again, not not who does it represent, but what class does it claim to represent? So we know who created it. Are they trying to represent themselves as something different, though? What values does it reinforce and or subvert either one? What values of that class does it reinforce? Or which ones does it go against? And what conflict can be seen between the values of the work between the values, the work champions and those it portrays? So what it's claiming to do and what it's actually doing to those matchup? So just give me a real quick example here. I picked it a while ago, picked it and did this analysis on us on a very popular song and just picked that number one song in the chart at the time, which is Drake's What's Next, right? And I don't know much about Drake and I know who he is, but I had to do a little research in order to do analysis on this particular song. So I watched the video, I listened to the song. I got to got to know Drake a little bit. And this is what I discovered when I asked these questions, the same questions. Who does this benefit if the work is accepted or successful? I believed, obviously, benefits Drake, of course, as the artist. That's it benefits him not only financially, but in terms of his notoriety and his popularity and his success as an artist. Also benefits his record label, of course, benefits any of his business partners, benefits all of his, you know, the people that he represents in terms of advertisements and things like that. So it really benefits a lot of those people in the same way. I guess it benefits, though, also the people who work on those projects, the people who film the videos and who record the music and the people who are the engineers behind those things, the people who, the custodians who clean those studios and things. It supports a whole kind of ecosystem of people. This work does. But so the work primarily benefits Drake, but it does benefit a lot of other people as well. What social class is the author? Now, Drake makes a big deal out of claiming his middle class roots and really kind of middle, lower middle class roots. But there's this at the moment. I mean, that may be true for his past, I'm not sure. But, you know, I'm not doubting his word on that. But but at the moment, it represents somebody who is very wealthy. I mean, the guy owns part of the Toronto Raptors, you know, NBA team. So he's not doing too bad. He's his music has been good. He's has an acting career. He's part owner of the Raptors. He's got a lot of things going on. So he is definitely in the upper social class. I mean, in terms of wealth, in terms of economics, he is in the upper social class at this time, which classes that were claimed to represent. I mean, again, he claims to be more of a middle class guy and the music kind of claims to represent that attitude and that philosophy of life of the middle class and the kind of the street level regular person, so to speak. Well, values is a reinforcer subvert, you know, reinforces kind of the notion of of of loyalty, companionship and those types of things throughout the video. That's specifically the video that I watched for the music video for the song. It does go against some of those values in terms of the clothes that he's wearing, the cars that he's driving, the things like that, go against some of his claims to be, you know, one of the people and so to speak, those types of things. So so there is some contrast there. And then what can be seen between can be seen between those values, the work champions and those portrays. Again, as I just mentioned, clearly he's an upper class guy trying to portray himself as, you know, I'm just one of you. I mean, doesn't necessarily come off that way, but it does give us something to strive for, too. You know, for people who are interested in that type of lifestyle, it gives you something to strive for to say, if you can do it, then I can do it and so forth. So so it does, you know, bring some of those values across as well. OK, so those are my thoughts on that song. And that's my effort at Marxist analysis in a nutshell. Right. So feel free to do your own, though. That's what we're doing. We want to examine things through this lens of economy and think about, you know, how does this represent the work of the different classes? How does this bring the classes together? Economic and social classes together? How does this pull us further apart? Any artifact that you look at, whether that's music or music, video or movie or piece of literature or anything at all in art installation, how does this represent different social classes? And how does this bring us together in terms of those social classes and the works of economies? So feel free to do that on your own, your own Marxist analysis. If you have any questions about this or any other type of content from media criticism standpoint or critical media studies, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you via email and in the meantime, I hope you'll get out there and do a little work in Marxist analysis thinking about how economy and class affect the media that we see and just putting another critical lens on our view of the media that we take in.


Ladies and gentlemen, Salamite, back with another freaking weekend video. Happy Monday for me. It might be a Wednesday for you. Either way, happy, happy, glad to be here. We're going to talk diet today, nutrition, some strategies I've been using and things that I've worked with many applying athlete over the years. And again, hopefully we have a general scope of nutrition, right? Macronutrients, calories, what these mean, how to use them, protein, fat, carbs, if not, check out 50% Facts. We actually went step by step on a lot of these strategies in old videos. That's a podcast with me and the one and only Jim McDonnell, legendary. And we literally give definitions and break down how, when to use them. That's available on all platforms. But today, again, we have more psychological routine strategies that can maybe help some of you out. If you're new, tell me a favorite, give this thing a thumbs up, help the algorithm, subscribe, new video Monday, Wednesday, Twitch stream every Monday through Thursday. That's four times a week. I'm chilling, chatting, answering all your questions, having a good time, playing some video games and talking mess. Let's dive in. So some of the basic strategies I've been talking about, someone asked me and even my roommate, who some of you may know, asked about how and when to eat. And one big strategy I have for people is build that routine. And I talk about routine, obviously with lifting, whether it be kind of a superstitious type deal or even just a machine. How I approach the bar, what hand goes first, what step goes first, how I breathe, what I'm thinking, and do this over and over. One to kind of mentally make that track burn in to our brains. But it goes beyond that when we come to diet. Our bodies begin to be hungry and build into that routine and be satiated in between. So our energy levels will be more stable. Now, old school thought is to eat six times a day, smaller meals. And there is some truth to that in terms of spreading out our protein and optimal muscle gain, protein synthesis. But it's probably minuscule for the majority of us. And even pro bodybuilders at the elite level or people with a training age like me, I joke about being old, I'm not old old, but I've been training for 15 years plus. It may, it's not going to make or break your progress, right? It may enhance it slightly, but it's that top percent. So for the majority of us, spreading out our proteins is a really good idea. You want to eat about your body weight and protein, body mass, to get a rough estimate. A day, you don't want to slam that 100 for me, 220 grams, 200 grams in breakfast and not have any the rest of the day. But we also don't need to eat 10 grams every half hour. So find that balance in what works for your schedule long term, depending on your work schedule, kids, sleep, activity, et cetera, et cetera. If you can get two to four good meals in, spreading that protein out, and keep that in there. Keep that on the weekends, keep it on your off days, keep it on vacation. That will allow you to control your appetite a little bit better, control again your energy a little bit better, and make progress in the long term. And then when we do decide to diet or bulk, we can just add a little bit of calories or take away a little bit of calories from each one of those meals. Second thing we always talk about is just protein.  Again, we want to hit about our body weight and lean mass per day. We want to keep it consistent day in, day out, or protein intake, but you don't have to overthink it. Sometimes just ordering, if we're loose and we're not trying to step on stage or we're not trying to be a world record power lifter, just focusing in on that protein, making sure whatever meals we do cook or choose to order out. The majority of it is protein based or based around our proteins. Third thing I've talked about for a long time is tracking your food.   Maybe you can get a little bit excited about it. Food is supposed to be enjoyable. It's supposed to be cultural.  I love food. So why not plan ahead so you know what you get to eat and then it's easier to stay on with it, right? If we have a programmer or a coach, we step into the gym. We know exactly what we're doing from warm up to finish. If I have no clue what I'm doing in the gym and I just show up and start randomly doing things, who's more likely to have a better workout, stay consistent long term and make progress long term? I don't wanna duh you, but duh. Last but not least, got a question on Instagram. We're doing it all the time. So selling Mike, M-I-K-K-E, two K's on Instagram, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday's a fitness Q and A. Try to answer all your guys' questions. Wednesday and Friday are just general Q and A's. Maybe we'll switch one to lifestyle and one to business or something. Maybe Wednesday will be lifestyle, Friday will be business. But for now, it's Monday's pure fitness, Wednesday, Friday is ask me anything. Someone's asked about carnivore diet. Should I focus on carnivore diet like people do or calories in versus calories out? Now, what I answered and it's obviously 10 seconds on Instagram is calories in and calories in general aren't independent of these diets, right? All of these diets rely on calories. To steak has calories. Food has calories. Water's kinda the only thing that ain't got no calories.  If you lose weight on 2,000 calories and you're only in ribeye, you'll lose weight. If you lose weight around 2,000 calories and you only eat broccoli, you'll probably lose weight. If you are losing weight on 2,000 calories and you eat a general balanced, nice and rounded variety of foods, you'll probably lose weight and have the most amount of fun. So there's nothing that I think an elimination diet unless you have something, some kind of issues with food, gluten, et cetera. An elimination diet is just probably isn't it. Again, I love food. I love the culture of food. Cooking, watching, sharing meals and trying a variety of foods is something I enjoy and I think it's a great part of life. Even if carnivore, I love steak, don't get me wrong. I love a nice ribeye. I cook a mean ribeye. Even if carnivore promised me a healthier life, whatever that means and a longer life, whatever that even means, it's just unlikely for me to choose that path based on I want to enjoy my time here on the planet. It's all finite. We're probably all going to die unless somehow someone can upload my consciousness which may or may not happen to a little flash drive and I find a new vessel to travel around this spinning ball through space which also may or may not happen because maybe I hop onto another vessel, flesh a vessel and then hop onto Mars and now I'm two vessels away from where I started and maybe we go on forever but I digress. I think enjoying my time here is way better off and I also think the health benefits of having a vegetable or fruit, oh my goodness, here and there might be worth it long term. I think a little bit of fiber in balance is going to help my stomach long term, God forbid. I just think people with these extremist attitudes trying to be controversial or trying to do something different in an industry that we don't need difference. There's a lot of science coming out on strength conditioning and fitness and nutrition but there's so much we already basically know and now we're looking into minutia of programming. We're looking into these little things that can help us improve but they're just, it's garbage if you ask me, it's absolute garbage.  Everyone's trying to be different to create content because it's not fun and I can speak from experience. It's not fun to talk about the deadlift because nothing's changed in the deadlift and try to help you guys but I truly want to help you guys so I still talk about the deadlift. There's some new ears that are still learning how to deadlift and there's some of you guys that are still trying to refine your deadlift so I still talk about it for the thousandth video because I know that's what's truly going to help people. I'm not going to invent some new type of deadlift for me to click bait that it's now the best lift in the world to try to make more dollars to get more views. Do I want views? Uh huh, do I want more dollars? Uh huh, do I want to keep my morals and truly help people over those views and dollars? Uh huh, times a million.  Give it to you the best I can, no R rated intended. I want to help you guys and so for all those out there doing that, I give you the thumbs down but carnivores not the answer. It's not having some balance in your life. Even from a, again, a pure health standpoint, I can whip out the studies if you really want but from an enjoyment of life. And the truth is I've never met a carnivore that actually only eats meat.  So don't be fooled by this. Don't be fooled by their raw, raw, trying to be different tough guy only red meat. Enjoy yourselves, take care of yourselves, take care of your loved ones, enjoy it and surround yourself with some good company like we say around here. Don't get me wrong, I've tried some really silly diets. I'm human just like you and I want to find the most optimal way to get fit, be strong, look good and be healthy. But sadly the truth is in moderation it is in that balance and it is in enjoying life. There's no shortcut, everyone would say that too, there's no shortcut but actually the shortcut is only rib eye. That's just not it. The only shortcut is only grass, that's not it either. Enjoy yourselves, it's an absolute pet peeve of mine, it's happening everywhere. On Instagram it happens to be with exercises, on YouTube it happens to be with nutrition, on Twitter people are wildin' about carnivore this and other stuff that. Keto's gone mainstream, we're going downhill, we're going downhill kids, stick to the truth, stick to those you believe in, there's great guys, there's great information out there, the Eric Helms of the world, the Lane Norton's of the world, they're there to lead us, I read and follow them so that I can re-gurgitate what I learned and try to help you guys out. Share my journey with you, I appreciate you so much, solid mic, a couple tips there, stay hydrated, stay balanced, if you're more serious about it, track your food intake, keep that protein high, keep it a priority, regular meals is key for so many people, just set some times. And it's okay if you're within a half hour or whatever, don't ruin your life over, but setting times, being consistent is number one, just like our training. Is there a better or worse time to train without the day, in the morning and night, when I'm gonna be more powerful or more testosterone, probably? But overall if we just set that time in our schedule, we'll be more consistent long term, a month, a year, two years, five years from now, we're gonna be closer to where we wanna be, closer to our goals. So, appreciate you again, new videos, catch you on Twitch, please come hang out man, I'm having lots of fun, that's the community, that's the thick squad, T-H-I-Q, solid mic, I'm outta here.


The British Sociological Association is the United Kingdom's Association for Sociologists and our aims are to support sociologists, promote sociology and sustain sociological research, teaching and imagination both inside and outside of academic life. So one of the ways in which we do that is by holding events such as this as well as conferences.  I'm especially pleased to be able to introduce tonight's speaker, Professor Mary Evans, who as you've heard is the seventh person to present a talk in our series. I personally am indebted to Mary for co-authoring a small book called Work on Women with David Morgan in 1979 as an annotated bibliography of research publications on aspects of women's lives. This was extremely useful to me and a colleague Ruth Waterhouse as we prepared to teach a new course on women and society in 1980. At the time, Mary was at the University of Kent. She still retains Meritus Professorship in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research there. And now most recently is a Meritus Leverhulme Professor at the London School of Economics. She was formerly co-editor of the European Journal of Women's Studies and has published widely in Sociology and Women's Studies on topics as diverse as love, detective fiction, austerity, autobiography, social class, higher education and who could forget, Jane Austen. Mary's work has examined how gender informs and structures the social world. She's been central to the development of women's and gender studies in the UK. Her work has taken place in the context of teaching sociology, but the poorest boundaries of that subject allowed her to consider aspects of the world often ignored by sociologists, particularly works of fiction. In Mary's latest book, The Persistence of Gender Inequality, published earlier this year, she demonstrates why many people consider her to be one of the foremost sociologists of her generation. The book is a very good read and demonstrates why sociological understanding and insight is vitally important when considering the big issues of the day and none could be more urgent than that of inequality. The book title alone made her an ideal speaker for the series of lectures. Please welcome Professor Mary Evans. Thank you very much for those introductions and thank you to everybody for coming along this evening and my welcome to you all in addition to those welcomes which have already been expressed. This lecture, as the title suggests and as the previous two speakers have also suggested, is going to be about gender inequality. I start from the idea that this has not disappeared, but that the form in which it nowadays confronts us is very different from that of 100 or even 50 years ago. So what I want to do in this present lecture is to look at our circumstances today in 2017 and to suggest tentatively some ways in which new forms of inequality are being formed. We already know about various forms of gender inequality. I am not the first person speaking about this, I'm sure, at the British Library or elsewhere. And we don't just know about gender inequality in 2017. We've known about it for decades and even centuries. But the four aspects of gender inequality which I would cite as central to the assertion of this kind, this form of inequality between women and men. In both the past and in the present are these and there are four, inequalities of income, public power, responsibilities for care and forms and means of representation. All four are of course experienced in different ways according to differences of class and race. So I start from a position, a position which can be demonstrated, has been demonstrated through evidence collected by such institutions and groups as a women's budget group, the Fawcett society and of course argued with real coherence and force by writers for more popular audiences such as Laura Bates. There is no shortage of evidence on this subject. But what I want to do here this evening is also to attempt to think about the ways in which gender inequality is being reproduced and about these new forms that I suggest that it is taking. So this is going to involve a discussion of the ways in which perceptions of class have changed over my lifetime and how that and new forms of technology have also impacted upon and changed forms of inequality. So what I want to try and do together then and or bring together is think about those social practices which are constitutive of gender inequality.  And if we go back only 20 years we can find some very considerable literature on the subject that now exists. But in that rich literature with names such as Thomas Piketty and Danny Dawling to mention just two, there's very little mention if you look either in the text or in the index of those books of the particular inequalities of gender or race or in the ways in which these particular and other inequalities enforce and support other forms of inequality and unequal relationships between human beings. So we've got two extensive, very distinguished, very meticulous forms of evidence that are too often I think not connected. And I think that this really matters today because of the forms of inequality between the genders that I've mentioned and also because of the ways in which we're thinking about social inequality in Britain today demands that we consider these kinds of connections. And I also want to say since social inequality is so much at the fore of people's minds these days that I want to emphasise as Selina Todd has done that poverty inequality is nothing new. And let me quote from Selina Todd's book which is called The People, The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, where she writes, Despite the post-war reforms, class inequality was never eradicated and came back with a vengeance in 1979. Now in 2017 we have only to look at present evidence about austerity, the ways in which people are producing evidence about the ways in which universal credit might work to know that those situations of poverty inequality still very much exist and what's more are being, as some people would very powerfully suggest, actually enlarged. So how, when we know about contemporary social inequality, can we understand and think about gender inequality and see the ways in which the two forms of unequal relationships are intertwined. What I want to do to try and look at this is to identify three central forms of change which I think have occurred in the past 30, 40 years and see how these particular forms of change have both enlarged and changed forms of inequality and the changes are these. The dissolution of some forms of class boundaries, the creation of a new social contract and with it a new ideal of the citizen and the rigor of expectations about women's appearance and conduct. Both these latter changes constitute what I want to describe as forms of aspirational coercion and it is this idea of aspirational coercion that I want to add to those four forms of gender inequality which I mentioned previously. And finally, and tentatively, I want to suggest that the ways in which these contemporary forms of inequality are not just a crucial part of the making of gender inequality itself but that this form of inequality is itself productive of maintaining social inequality. I don't for a moment think that in 45 minutes of this lecture I'm going to be able to achieve the merging of those two huge silos of information but I'm going to try and propose some connections. So the next question in all this is exactly where to start. Well I'm going to start with an autobiographical context and I'm going to start back at my girls' grammar school of the late 1950s and early 60s, a school in a leafy suburban part of suburban south east England with an intake that was more or less entirely white and middle class. But one of the remarks, in fact possibly the remark which I remember from the seven years at this school, is a remark which teachers often produced if we had failed to do our homework properly. And the remark was this, you'll end up working in Woolworths and that was the spectre which was put before us, grammar school girls in that suburban world. Now of course Woolworths has disappeared but sports director is still there and there are other forms of very unequal and not to be very much wanted forms of work. So what this suggests to me is what Barbara Erin Reich was to define in 1989 as the fear of falling. The extent to which middle class and the professional middle class is fearful of not being able to maintain its class to position. In my days at school there was a huge amount of energy put into forms of cultural separation, wearing our hats in the right way, having our skirts at the same length, not sitting on tops of buses. All these kinds of things were part of making sure that we separated from popular culture and indeed the undesirable elements of this suburban population. So those differences of class marking have I think disappeared in some ways and that of course would support the argument that class lines are less marked than they once were and we should congratulate ourselves nowadays perhaps on a greater democratisation. Except of course the class lines haven't quite moved in the ways that was once hoped and the fear of falling of which Erin Reich wrote has become precisely that for many sections of the middle class and especially its younger members. We hear of people who have been described as just about managing but I think we need to add to that sentence the phrase the words to stay in the same place. So what I also want to remark about this use of talking about class here and in the light of these change circumstances is the confidence that some people still use the term middle class. And I think this is one of the remarkable paradoxes of the current usage of that term. And I want to take two examples because I think these two examples show a great deal about the way in which people talk about class and some of the implications which are important. The first one is this in 2011 David Willits who was then Minister of State for Higher Education spoke of middle class women taking away good jobs quote from bright working class men. Now this comment to anybody who likes to analyse sentences in detail is probably one of the richest ones in our contemporary history. Priceless social information here. The assumption of course that there are a few tall poppies amongst working class men, those bright working class men who might be deserving of entry into the middle class. The idea too that working class women don't matter, working class women and people, non-white people were not considered in this sentence at all. And most appalling to me the taken for granted assumption that it's perfectly reasonable for an economy to have good jobs and bad jobs. So in that one sentence there's a lot going on about class. But three years later in her autobiography Hilary Clinton wrote on page 516 that probably not all of you have reached that point but anyway persevere. Again what she wrote was this and I quote the global middle class is the natural ally of the United States. Now I found this sentence extraordinarily interesting and fascinating because of course the sentence is assumption rich. That there's a definable group of people who constitute a social group of particular value and who will endorse the right kinds of values. A degree of social liberalism with a commitment to the market economy and that those values will have been produced through certain forms of credentialised education. In the case of the second quotation of course there's an implicit assumption that the global middle class of which Clinton speaks will also share the values of the United States. So Willis and Clinton spoke in ways which of course invoke and accept radical social separation and leave many of us wondering what place in global politics might be occupied by that considerable part of the population which lies outside their definition of middle class. And in any population in any country of the world that part of the population is very considerable. And of course the political repercussions and events that have taken place I think have been very much related to those kinds of reception to reception of those ideas about the separation of the middle class and the rest. But two questions I think we should ask here about the ways in which we speak of this binary difference between the middle and the working class. What does it mean? The first is that we might wonder why the term middle class is being used with such confidence given that for many people the term is becoming in both objective and subjective terms redundant. Graduates working with few benefits and those in white collar jobs who have seen their conditions of employment gradually worse than can't find very much security in the term middle class. Traditional markers of middle class life have been increasingly uncertain. But as that social uncertainty has increased and I would emphasise it as a form of insecurity which is challenging both the literal and the symbolic meaning of middle class. So of course we have seen in that those groups in the population frantic efforts to maintain that position. The second point I would make is that the term middle class when used by politicians and others is often what might be described more accurately as the upper middle class. The world of the professions elite higher education and a commitment vague as it might be to aspects of high culture. Higher rates of university of education have not in themselves enlarged this class yet it remains a version of definitions of middle class with enormous and considerable aspirational authority. Yet in those elite professions the law, the senior posts in medicine, the civil service, the academy, the military, the church, the media it is still the case that white men dominate appointments. You do not have to read massive tomes of sociology and I'm sorry to say that in this context. However you need only read the footnotes to the two volumes of Charles Moore's autobiography of Margaret Thatcher to come across an endless series of white public school educated men who occupy key positions in the British state and in the central institutions of our country. As countless people have pointed out the 7% of the population educated at public schools do still get a considerable number of those good jobs of which will it spoke. It's a very clear case of the persistence of the transfer of social and cultural capital from one generation to the next. But a form of education which alarmingly seems to have increased its authority in recent years as state schools are derided and public schools suggested as models of excellence. So in these confused and anxious times about various forms of insecurity one of the progress narratives to which we cling is that of the emancipation of women and the argument that gender equality has been achieved. Although of course it's clearly impossible to argue the same thing for race. But this narrative about women obscures the ways in which new forms and expectations are paid work together with established forms of educational inequality continue to support what I think and what I would maintain are gendered forms of inequality. So at this point I'm going to introduce a new form of social subject an individual and a collective human being. A person who is the master of the universe a high point of our models of the contemporary citizen as well of course as the title of Daniel Stedman Jones's study of neoliberalism. The person is both very real in that they're very often a high earning corporate subject or a person occupying a specifically important post in some kind of central institution. But a white male person a master likely to have acquired that fundamental characteristic of successful masculinity in the UK a public school education. A marker of what Mike Savage has described as class origin. It remains a building block of white male privilege and has continued so for decades if not centuries. It should concern us for all the reasons that has concerned us in the past because it should also I think concern us today rather more because we have increasingly allowed that this form of privilege is somehow not relevant. It has nothing to do with patterns of exclusion and yet stands as a marker for all that is admirable in secondary education. So my further point here is that whilst we can condemn the literal absence of those others who are not white male and privileged from various elites. It's the impact of the fantasy of the position of the position of the master of the universe which is at least as important. Being a commander of men has always dominated the aspirations of the ruling class. But what interests me here and this is where we get to the point where it intersects with gender is the way in which this idea of the powerful autonomous individual replete with choice and agency has now become generalized as a human ideal. Assumptions about the access to choice and agency including that of the organization of our psychic and sexual lives has gone some way to removing the expected strength of the connections between our class of origin and achieved adult status. This generalization which I suggest now sometimes takes the form of making individual choice the determinant of individual situation continues to have different consequences for men and women. For women what is achieved here I think in 2017 is the fusion of two problematic narratives one of emancipation the assumption of the achievement of the emancipated subject and the other of the unfettered autonomous social subject a human ideal which derives from certain positions of the masculine and masculinity. Now I recognize I fully recognize that very few men and even fewer women ever come to be masters of the universe. But what concerns me is the way in which we construct and organize our fantasies and subjectivities about who and what we should be. So here we turn to a second change where I think that gendered forms of inequality have both continued but also arguably increased. The change is that those narratives of women's emancipation which I have mentioned have often cited the greatest greater increase in the numbers of women in paid work and from this have rapidly assumed that women compete on a level playing field with men in terms of employment and other public contexts. There is so much to note here in these assumptions. The refusal of historical evidence about the numbers of women who always worked. The extent to which women's employment is consistently more likely to be part time and interrupted than that of men. The famous double shift of women and other two other very important factors. One is that we're still very far away from thinking about what Miriam Glucksmann has really importantly described as the total social organization of labour in which we think or we should think about all kinds of tasks for others and ourselves which are performed outside as well as inside paid work. The second is the growing push to work of the British state and this I suggest is fundamentally transformative in terms of the making of social expectations about women and in it the form of this transformation is that women's respectability the way in which the female subject is deemed to be respectable has begun to shift away from that of sexual behavior towards that of the paid employed woman. Not just the paid employed woman but the paid employed citizen. I am not here suggesting for one moment that sexual double standards abusive forms of the control of women have disappeared. In the what has appeared in the press in the last three weeks it would clearly be impossible to maintain this. Nor am I saying that paid work cannot be emancipatory or engaging although the quality of paid work is too seldom considered for all those who are employed. But I am saying that paid work has become the gold standard of the behavior of the adult citizen. It's a discourse which I would further suggest does not bring with it clear advantages for women or anybody who cares nor is it generally as it should be presented as part of the interests of those who are determined to decrease the extent and the generosity of state benefits. So let me consider this in two further ways. One is the implication for ideas about care and the second is that of ideas about shaming and to think about care and shame in the context of women in particular. We all recognize and many of us increasingly confront this question, we all recognize our need for care and we are constantly told of the crisis in social care, the increase in the elderly population and so on. But what we too seldom also consider here is the way in which our concentration on the virtue of paid work decreases the social value which we attach to unpaid work. Feminists of the 1970s put an enormous amount of energy into arguing about the value of the unpaid care work of women. But that argument has increasingly had to compete with that other narrative which I've just suggested. That paid work is the essential form of work and the other forms of care should be secondary to it. Battles are fought and sometimes won over questions of the state provision of childcare. But other battles in which the care involves the conditions of forms of mental and physical health which might persist for decades is seldom acknowledged. The master of the universe, the person produced out of discourses of exceptionalism and choice, the specialist, the highly skilled, is essentially to use Kathleen Lynch's memorable words, care less. So with success goes distance from care, a social association which establishes a connection between high achievement and being care less and being a low achiever and doing care. Women we know have always been the major carers for our society. But the political aim of getting people into work, notice the people in that particular phase, both erodes the value of unpaid work and makes little or no allowance for the continuities and the pressures of care that women face. The second issue which I referred to above is that of the ways in which in economic insecurities can shame. Clara Fisher has written of the shame once imposed upon the unmarried mothers of various countries, a form of sexual shaming and a marker of that previous version of the unrespectable woman. But more recently Emma Casey has written about more contemporary form of shame, the mothers who cannot provide for their children access to forms of consumption or even participation in various forms of activities which are part of their education. Again, the poverty that underpins this situation is not new. But what is new, I am suggesting, is the way in which the demands of the consumer culture are taken for granted as real needs and integrated into institutional and social contexts. One very simple example here because it is this time of year. The purchase and the wearing of Christmas jumpers in primary schools, something which from what I hear is becoming almost essential and compulsory. Now we might think that this is ridiculous. What does a Christmas jumper look like? Why would I want one? Why would my child have one?  So the instance of the Christmas jumper takes me to the third and final context where I think gendered forms of inequality have enlarged, that of the body and the body of women. A place where we all, which we all inhabit but one where material worlds have paid and unpaid work intersect with fantasies about ourselves. One element of that fantasy is how we think about our physical selves, of how we do our bodies. And here I suggest is one of the contexts in which gendered inequality is potentially formed. In this the body, body size, bodily appearance is central. And as many writers on women and their bodies have pointed out, a growing context of increasing psychic concern and anxiety. It's no longer an understandable fear about dying in childbirth. It's about looking, not just young and thin, but also confronting those new areas of the body that have suddenly acquired problematic status. And obviously I'm not describing those here. Just as science and medicine have increased longevity for some people, so that longevity is accompanied by new forms of worry about bits of ourselves. So fat, as Susie Orbach memorally said, is certainly a feminist issue. But I also think it's a wider social issue because meeting the concerns and the desires of women about their appearance plays such a large part in our economy. Consumption has associated with fashion is age old, that's not new. But the present energy and vitality of this area of both our productive and consuming lives has gained an importance in terms of both national and individual economies. The possibilities of the gratification of our fantasies about our appearance and the imagined transformation of our lives is everywhere. So the needs and the standards about appearance are presented in ways which connect with and inform that picture of the autonomous knowing subject of the modern global world. A culturally hegemonic female subject. And exactly how culturally hegemonic that female subject is could be brought home by information just like that of a story in today's Guardian newspaper which referred to the $10 billion worth of creams that are sold in parts of Africa to whiten the skin of African women. This is about a global subject. So being for women of doing femininity is both a global industry and a global concern. In this it seems to me aspirations have been enlarged but so too have the possibilities for the ruthless exploitation of women. Karl Marx wrote in 1887 about a young woman seamstress who had died from exhaustion while sewing a dress for people he described as noble ladies. Now the noble ladies don't dominate fashion today very much but death from exhaustion is just as likely to come for meeting the needs of a much larger group of people. So I'm hoping to make the case here for the consideration of the part that imagined forms of the feminine play in our economic in our economies and their growing inequalities.  A very real correspondence with reality. But as both the costs and the aspirations of living increase so too do the demands which we make on ourselves. Those demands occur in different gendered ways and I would argue that the bodies of women and the very person of womanhood has become a very important place for the making of profit. Not least because generally women are so much more connected with the making of fashion and fashion as change than men. This is hugely important because of the expectations and aspirations of the modern which are very closely associated with all forms of aesthetic innovation in which shifts in dress and general appearance are central. The energy of the modern as the world in which we live and in more precise economic terms that energy which is sometimes described as growth has to take a material as well as a symbolic form if it's going to become functional and to impact upon the economy. The modern needs sensation. It needs change. It needs to be able to construct different kinds of needs and of course those different needs come from different people. We all recognise that capitalist economies need new markets and new goods. We need to keep making, selling and buying stuff. Today one purchase online means that we'll be pursued to make further purchases. One dress leads immediately to suggestions for six more. But in the creation of these global sites of consumption we're also assuming the participation of women as consumers of an ability to buy the form of the fantasy of the modern. 21st century women. The fantasy includes of course that assumption that women now have it all, that in the words of the 1980s cigarette advertisement women have come a long way. Now in this assumption there are of course references to real changes in levels of health and education, legal and civil rights. But the assumption of the free floating female subject of the modern world remains a creature of fantasy, even as that fantasy informs quite toxic narratives about the costs to men of women's emancipation. And this of course leads me to that common sense of today which suggests that women can do anything. They only have, as Cheryl Sandberg has suggested, to ask. But of course the we who are being encouraged to do the asking, as Dawn Foster has pointed out, is highly problematic and may have little relevance to the millions of women who might not be in those positions of possessing vast and highly respected skills. But where, if women have come a long way, have we got to? We all know that more women, whether mothers or not, are in some kind of paid employment. But we also know that those forms of employment are often those of cooking, cleaning and caring. And caring and coping at home and in homes continues to be more often done by women than by men and by networks of solidaristic assistants usually involving female relatives and friends. These are foundational aspects of the United Kingdom in the 21st century where we see much that is traditional in the gender division of labour. Yet ideas about the achievement of level playing fields for women has considerable social acceptance and endorsement, arguably more so than is the case for that of non-white citizens. At the same time, the very limited recognition of the continuing inequalities between genders and races is accompanied by the expectation that the greater root of social equality for all lies in our immersion, our collective immersion in the values of competition, autonomy and individualism. It is thought essential to endorse social mobility without asking, and again to refer to Selina Todd, quite why we would want to maintain a society replete and determined to ensure social hierarchy. Most importantly here of course my hope is that at least some people in the political world would note that we might also ask why there should be such things as good jobs and bad jobs. So to conclude and to bring together some of these ideas. First, to recognise that the lived experiences of women as well as fantasies about the feminine and femininity have changed in the past 50 years. But this has not achieved gender equality. If I asked this if there is more or less gender inequality than 50 years ago, I would give the highly equivocal answer of saying that the freedoms are greater but so are the constraints. I would also argue here that the possibilities for the abuse of women through new forms of the media and new expectations about our appearance are greater and in the latter case endlessly more profitable. The contexts of exploitation I'm suggesting have been enlarged. The second point I would make is to return to that issue of class. To argue that the assumption of the erosion of some of the cultural divisions and markers of class has not served women and particularly a majority of women born outside the class origin of the upper middle class particularly well. Since it too easily assumes that the aspirational model of individualism and autonomy that continues to serve privileged male people is generally socially positive. This model of the autonomous social subject is one that depends upon access not just to employment but to its privileged and powerful locations. Thus for women the aspirational coercion towards the autonomous subject with all its associated connections in terms of the body and appearance that that subject is expected to take is a particularly complex and demanding goal. Work is increasingly about paid work. A validation which both obscures the work of care and continues both the low pay and the value of the paid work of care. So finally two comments. The first is that if we think about gender and social inequality together rather than separately. We are able perhaps to make some important connections in our thinking about what is being formed in about what is being called the new form of capitalism. In this new form there are clearly continuators with the past profit and the ownership of capital are still central as of the needs for new goods and markets. But how do we get those new goods and those new markets and those new desires which will create those new goods. Contemporary fantasies about the feminine of autonomy and the possibilities of endless beauty and endless youth doom millions to endless disappointment. Snake oil can be sold in its trillions but it will still be snake oil at the end of the day. But the collapse and the curtailment of those fantasies, the recognition that snake oil does not work is itself met by an industry of consolation. Indeed in many ways our failure to achieve to meet those high expectations of the feminine provides for itself the further opportunities for our consolation. Our very failure creates our new needs and new forms of manufactured means of healing. Real needs are no more generally and fully met than in the past but the always important fairy tales which we are told and which we tell ourselves of course have a greater material meaning. It is this issue of aspirational change and what I would see and what I would define as aspirational coercion which seems to me the fifth point that I would add to that list of four which I named at the beginning. A new form of certainty is being produced about what it is possible for human beings to achieve and in those expectations and aspirations it is of course very often women who are the least able to meet or to even experience any hope of meeting those expectations. Those expectations harm us all but my argument would be that they harm us in particularly gendered ways. But my second and final remark also this evening is this, to thank the BSA and the British Library for making this such a public space and for allowing me the space in which to speculate and to think aloud. My own view is that the public space within universities is decreasing. Academics especially younger scholars are all too often subject to pressures not so directly experienced in previous generations. The very idea that women both as studying subjects and objects of study should have a much greater presence in the academy was a product of a recent moment of history but a moment in which the spontaneity of discussion and the production of ideas was I think very much more possible. It led to very important changes which writers, academics such as Hilary Lang contributed to in putting forward the idea that care work should be paid and recognised. So hopefully forms of creativity and argument will persist and my very sincere thanks to all of you who have come this evening and to all those of you of course who made this evening's event possible and did the work of organising the event. So thank you. Hi, thank you very much. Wonderful lecture, it's really very resonant in all sorts of ways. My name is Rosie Harper. I'm interested in something that was quite early on in the lecture which was about the sort of re-emergence of the dominance of people, men particularly from public school backgrounds in our governing structures. I work quite a bit with people who I would call survivors of a public school and quite often when you speak to them for quite a while you find that they're trapped in their 7 year old emotional persona and yet the government is run by these people. I'm thinking of having seen Boris just before I came out genuinely looking like a 7 year old schoolboy and I just wonder how we've got to the stage where we as women have allowed that to happen. And whether there's anything we can do about it. Help. Thank you very much for your question because I think it's a really important recognition of the way in which these structures, both literally in terms of these institutions such as public school but also in terms of the values which they enforce upon those children in those institutions. You have to win, you have to do well, you have to compete. It's quite an extraordinary value in situations in which there's also a tremendous sense of the club, the old school, the network. And I think one of the things that is probably so problematic about those institutions to which you're referring and the products that it produces is that there's never an opportunity for people to work out. The ways in which you have to balance those two rather contradictory ideas on the one hand compete and yet on the other hand be totally part and loyal to this particular institution. And you can see that working through, I think, precisely the kinds of individuals that you've mentioned, you know, because there is still in them, as was very, very clear and is particularly clear, I think, in the case of the individual that you've referred to. A real desire to differentiate himself, to make himself, to compete literally, to say the thing that nobody else is going to say. But also has a strong sense of knowing that he is also best served by staying in a particular group. And I think it's those kinds of connections which are so interesting, but also, as you're suggesting, so powerfully destructive of many individuals. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. It's really interesting. I want to just go back to one of the points you made at the beginning about the representation of women and tie it up to the point you made about David Willits, which truly was one of the richest sentences in our time. But one point that you, I think, maybe didn't pick up in that sentence. And that is the representation of women as connected to bodies rather than minds. And that seems to me to have intensified enormously in the last 10, 15 years as women have become more educated. And one of the things about David Willits' sentence was that, in effect, he told middle class women that they were expected to maintain their social position through marrying middle class men or through their fathers. In other words, their education did not matter. They were not expected to nurture their minds, and they were expected not to and also that working class men could. And so, in that one sentence, he managed to dismiss the nurturing of the minds of all women. And that seemed to me to be a quite extraordinarily significant aspect of what he said. And he didn't even realise he was doing that at all, I think. Thank you. I think that's absolutely right. I quoted it as one sentence, but obviously it was a much longer speech in which I was obviously not quoting from and which I don't have access to at the moment, but there were all sorts of other things in it. And as you quite rightly say, he was suggesting that there's something very wrong going on in something which everybody was taking for granted, which is that you open up higher education to women, which in effect has happened since the 1960s. And I think the rest of what he had to say was sort of did suggest that social unease about changing the picture of the social world. What was going to happen? Would this make a difference to people like him? And I think that there's also that sort of fear going on. What is going to be transformed in my world about this new group of people being in it? And that perhaps is to read into those paragraphs or that paragraph perhaps too much. And I'm sure literary critics don't like people reading into things quite as much as I'm suggesting. But I am suggesting that that would be certainly something which I think he was hinting at. OK. Yes, there's somebody there. Yes. Hi. My name's Zana. And I've just started the Teach First programme, so I'm a student teacher. And I'm really interested in what you said about the kind of aspirational fantasy that's offered. And I think in teaching that's really important, like Teach First school is to end educational inequality and give those from more disadvantaged backgrounds a brighter future, I guess. But I'm wondering how one could make that brighter future more kind of gender inclusive and not just this, I can't remember your wording, it would be better than mine, but like a picture of something with lots of masculine characteristics? That is such an important and interesting question to think about. I don't think you have to, I don't think you can do it. And I think probably other people, well certainly other people have said this as well, you can't just do it by changing one side, you have to change both sides. You have to say, why don't we change the excluding side? Why does that side have those characteristics? Why is it so often assumed that with higher position goes distance from the private world, the domestic world, the world of care, the world of responsibilities to others, et cetera, et cetera. I mean why do we take that for granted? Because otherwise what I think you're going to put in place is all kinds of things which are going to perhaps succeed in that yes we'll support women, we'll provide better institutional care, childcare at work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what you're doing then is increasing the lowly paid employment for women who are going to take up those positions of care for others. But you're also not doing anything about the model which is producing that issue in the first place. And I think it's that model which is really the problem which has to be addressed. That association, that association, that the Nordic countries have gone some way not to solving but they have recognised that every person in those societies, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, every person in those societies has responsibilities outside paid work. That's the flat line, that's the levelling out, that's I think what has to change. And it's possible in those societies because they're smaller societies, it's possible because in the couple of cases they have more public money which they are prepared to see as public money. But I think that that's the way that you have to move forward. Thank you. Is there somebody back there? No? Okay, sorry, here then. Thank you. My name's Kim Hamer. I've just taken up about four months ago a role of being a governor at an all girls academy in north London. So following on from the last question, it's a little bit more about what should I be bringing to these girls for our next generation who are going to have to live in this world, be resilient and resourceful and lead fulfilled and happy lives. Right. Okay, thank you, yes. Well, I do congratulate you on the definitive question. I think we should say to all children, all teenagers, what do you really want to do? What do you care about doing? This doesn't necessarily fit in with an aspirational model of how much you're going to get paid or who you know, which kind of hierarchy you're going to rise up in and be president of, chair of, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the thing to talk to young people about is what do you actually passionately care about? And because if you, I mean, I go back to human thinking about nothing matters about what you do rationally unless you care about it. Passion never let rationality be subject, dictate your passions. And I think that that's really important sentence wherever it comes, wherever it is another sentence, which is a hugely important one. And they will probably think, well, actually that's really liberating to think that because, you know, my parents are always telling me that I ought to be an accountant, but I'm not sure I really want to be an accountant and I apologise to any accountant. But, you know, what I really want to do, what I'm really interested in is X or Y. OK. That's what I would say. Now there is somebody at the back there that I was looking at before. There's a couple here as well, but somebody there. Yes. Hi there. My name is Megan Sullivan. I'm from the Humanity Foundation, so Women's Empowerment Charity. I have a quick question.  I guess my question is that women's empowerment and some of the aspirational issues you mentioned are a global issue today. And just how potent do you think the version of empowerment or aspiration that we're espousing now is? Are there forms of maybe less unequal gender feminism being espoused in other places? Or is this pretty much all-consuming as everyone jumped on the bandwagon? And are there things we can do to change it? OK. I think the narrative of empowerment is one which we should take extremely seriously and very critically. Because I think it's very easily, it very easily falls into that place which I feel critical of. It's any kind of empowerment if you get paid for at its empowerment. And I think that that is a very dangerous place because then what you are opening up is all kinds of possibilities for the employment of women, which are very much greater profit to the people employing those women than women themselves. So I am very, very wary about empowerment narratives actually. Also because of course women already possess empowerment. Again, it's an issue of thinking behind those ideas and thinking about the structures which actually inhibit the agency and the choice of women. It's not just saying that you have to empower women, give them some magic dust which is going to make them empowered. How about some magic dust or some rather more explosive dust which does some damage to the structures which are preventing the emergence of that empowerment? That seems to me to be another way of thinking about it and really quite an important one as well. Now there was somebody here and then somebody at the back first. Thank you very much for the lecture. Just on two subjects or two quick questions. First being women's body issues. I'm in fashion, I'm a professional clothier and I teach men how to dress for women, for business and women. The second question would be that disparity in dress codes keeps us so segregated and causes enormous amounts of problems but doesn't do anything to raise the issues of gender equality. As far as the way women dress for business also, with the stretch fabrics, etc, etc, does nobody that many favours, apart from body hugging, which sort of defeats the object when it comes to business. I would love your views on those. OK, dress codes, instances. Yes, business has dress codes, a lot of the high street has dress codes of one kind and another. Again, I will turn to this idea about coercion. The woman who was sent home from work because she wasn't wearing high heels, not just small heels but four inch heels, being told that she could only come to work dressed in this way. She tried to bring a case about that in terms of sexual discrimination in the workplace and the case was not taken forward, she didn't win the case. It created discussion and it created debate but what was I think really worrying about that debate is that there were people prepared to endorse the idea that women who were going to be in the public space should look quote attractive. It's a very sexualising norm it seems to me being told that you have to come to work wearing four inch high heels. Who is this for? What exactly is going on here in which we are actually saying this is part and parcel of your job description? This is not about whether you can do the job, it is actually what you are going to present as an image of yourself. I think that kind, we have to think about that, we have to think about dress and how women dress outside the areas of dress codes, uniform etc etc. In terms of very much more general sexualising changes that have taken place in the last 20, 30 years which campaigns about the dressing of young girls have also become involved in. We have become very concerned, we have started to notice that dress is not just a matter of choice, other people are choosing your dress, there is a lot of coercion going on in a way in which women think they ought to dress. This isn't necessarily of course an imposed coercion but it's a coercion which actually becomes part of women's imagination about who they are and what they want to look like. Of course it doesn't affect everybody but I'm saying that it's there and I think it's too powerful not to recognise it and to identify it. So is somebody here and then somebody on this rep? My name is Ege, I'm working as a teaching fellow at LSE. Exist, thank you very much for your research and presentation. Existing research shows that although there are more women in labour market, men's involvement in care work and home work, house work doesn't increase including Britain and other countries. As far as I know Nordic countries targeted this very sharp and persistent gender based division of labour at home in order to change the gender regime and gender inequalities. If I didn't understand you wrong, you are suggesting that care work should be paid and recognised and I feel like this magical dust targets capitalism more than patriarchy. So I got a bit confused about that. I agree with you about the question of gender division of house work. Debates about that go back to the 1970s. We started to measure who did what at home. That's quite a now 50 years of that literature and nothing seems very much to changed. It's changed around the edges a bit but not very much. I mean one thing that has changed is that there's been a certain amount of duplication in terms of certain household tasks like cooking in movement to the service sector. I mean that's one shift that we can identify something that we have seen happen but in terms of the gender division of labour that doesn't seem to have shifted very much. How you change it, I think that is a question. You have to address through socialisation, you have to address through discussions of what you teach children to be able to do, all sorts of questions which I think are incredibly deep seated in our culture. Deep seated taboos which we can think about the taboos which has taken generations to shift. The idea that man could not push a pram 60, 70 years ago that would have been unacceptable in this country. It's a bit like the folk story of any man who carried an umbrella in Glasgow was attacked because it was thought that he was a homosexual. So those kinds of folk stories sort of locate that kind of cultural resistance to shifting gender roles. And I think one of the things that you raised which is disturbing is that more women being in work doesn't seem to shift what you've identified. But as I say, some of that shift has moved to the use of the service sector. Person here in Blue Sheep. Hi, I'm Bita Reyes, social consultant. What's the relation between the class divide and gender inequality? Do you think that that's an obstacle in terms of progressing women and also women to be involved more in decision making process? It can't not be because we all inhabit social class. Everybody here, everybody outside has a social class. We're all classed just as we're gendered citizen, racialized citizen, so we're all classed citizens. It can't not is my answer to your question. How it makes a difference I think is through the different expectations and aspirations which are located in us through class. And that's why I was so eager to discuss this issue of the idea of the specialist autonomous subject, which I think has become the focus for so much concern, ambition, direction within large sections of the middle class. And that's becoming an ambition which people share for their daughters as well as their sons. But the problem is, as I hope I've been saying, that it's much more difficult for women. Yes. Hi, my name is Vivian Zims and I work in the field of mental health and psychoanalysis. Sorry, you're pointing, do you want me to continue? Yes please. What I was going to say was that I do think that there has been quite a lot in changes when we're thinking about masculinity and femininity and how those concepts have loosened up. For example, if you look at research into the brain, a recently published book by I think called Delia Fine, challenges the idea that these changes aren't that significant. You were talking about, somebody was talking about clothes and men. Pressures on men have changed enormously. I was reading an article last week about now 10% of men particularly working in the city are undergoing botox on a regular basis because they are worried about their appearance. So I'm thinking that whilst I agree with everything you're saying, there are also changes too. And looking at some of the voices, the way that women can speak out and can respond. Watching a man last week coming down the road with his baby singing and dancing. That would have never happened when I was growing up. So whilst I agree with everything you're saying, I do think there have been some very important and significant changes. I would not deny those changes and I hoped I was paying to say that I think there are those kinds of changes taking place. The problem with it is exactly in other discourses about the welfare sponge, the extent to which we dramatise those instances and generalise them. That's the question. The Daily Mail has only got to find one family that isn't quite doing rights as far as benefits is concerned to label whole groups of people as spongers. And I think it's the same problem with changing expectations about gender. You've only got to read one newspaper article that says, you know, I'm a stay-at-home dad and we've reorganised our family life in ways that are not traditional. To think, oh well, things are changing. Of course things are changing, but there is some very remarkable literature written by women in both this country and the United States in the 1920s, which suggested that that was exactly what was going on there, that forms of dress and family life were also changing. And I think what we always have to do is to measure, to look at those dramatic, important, individually really, really important moments and compare them with the general picture. You know, they are probably very important instances and certainly I think those instances of the father with the baby is something which is general, that's probably happened across the culture and across classes. But you still have to look at those patterns and that's where the sociologist in me starts saying, yes, but how general is that? You know, does that, where is the evidence to suggest that that generally happens? I mean, I'm all for these individual changes, fantastic, yes please, in many cases and in many instances, but how many people are doing that? And how many people as well do they have the opportunity to do that? I think that's the other part of the question we have to ask. There's somebody in the middle here and then somebody at the front, yes. Hi, my name's James. Thanks very much for your lecture. I was wondering about modern theories of gender and kind of the idea of gender fluidity and kind of the mainstream acceptance of transgender rights as kind of part of that and kind of viewing your lecture through that lens if you had any reflections on what you said, how it might change or what you think? I think it's a form of choice which has to be recognised, endorsed, allowed, celebrated, et cetera. But I also think I do wonder about the social implications for people not making that choice. In what sense are we increasing and enlarging in ways which may be very important and very positive, our sense of how we become what we are as human beings? So I am not suggesting that this moves in either one direction or another direction, it's not negative, it's not positive. But what I am suggesting is that we have to think about the ways in which our perceptions of ourselves are enlarged through that particular shift which has now become possible and it's always been possible but it's become medically possible and it's become possible in certain parts of the world through wider acceptance of that particular shift. But at the same time, why do we seem to cling so much to other much more traditional versions of gender? So I think we have to think about that question in the light of these other issues and situations. Thank you, yes. Hi Andrew, I did my master's at LSE last year and I worked for a charity. My question is stating from Sarah Ahmed's work because she talks about how violence against women is continuous because we kind of remain silent about it and basically we have a legal system that only convicts 6% of rapes and those people who come forward. So can you give any ideas on how we can maybe change legal system or change police culture or help people who are remaining silent still for the violence that they've had because of their gender? Okay, well, I mean, it's a considerable, it's a very topical question. I think you help it by doing actually what we're doing here and what I'm sure many people here are doing in other contexts which is to talk endlessly and constantly about issues of gender and not accepting gender as a given situation in which tradition should be how it is and we should not depart from that tradition and those conventions. So what I think is always important and what is only going to make those things change is the greater intervention in those kinds of situations but we also have to think about the ways in which it is often so difficult to actually not just make changes but also to take forward the condemnation if you like the prosecution of those who have committed the violence. What do you do in those kinds of cases? It's very, very difficult very often for the CPS to bring cases to court. There's always a terror that a case is going to be thrown out. There's always a terror that is something or other is not going to be accepted in court and so on and so forth in cases of rape and sexual assault, in cases of abuse on Twitter or any of the other forms of media. Again, it's really difficult for people to bring successful prosecutions to identify the person who is causing those abusive remarks or whatever else. I think there what you have to do is actually create situations where it is much easier to shame. I talked in my lecture about the ways in which women have been shamed and I think shame should be also very much more about the shame of people who commit those kinds of abuse, whether it's on women or whether it's on sexual minorities or either it's on people of different races and ethnicities. I think shame is actually a really important social weapon. I think it's been misused in horrible and damaging ways in the past and I never think it is a powerful weapon and I think it's one that should be used. What kind of person are you exactly that you think it's acceptable to do this? People don't like being shamed. I'm a great fan of detective fiction and I have to tell you that one of the two of the motives in detective fiction, as you probably all know, are sex and money. The other one is shame. People hate being shamed into being revealed to be shown to be what they are not. I think that detective fiction really hits on this idea of being unmasked, being shamed, being shown to be something other than the person that you want to present to the social world is actually a really important weapon and sometimes much more powerful than the very ponderous workings of the legal system. OK, this person here. Valerie Hay. The University of Sussex Centre for Research into Equity and Higher Education. Thank you very much, Mary. It was a great stimulating lecture. I'm going to move it to the parochial in the sense in boundarying it by the UK. How confident are you that a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party is sensitive to your analysis and some lines of your policy ideas? I was going to say, unfortunately, this has to be the last question. It probably is the last question. Of course, there is an opportunity to meet with Mary outside with the book, but anyway, sorry. Thank you. We've known each other for a very long time and lived through many hopes and disappointments together. So I hope my answer will actually also suggest to you that I am equally prepared to live through more hope and more disappointment. One of the things that I would most hope about Jeremy Corbyn and a future Labour Government is that they can actually think seriously about this difference between good jobs and bad jobs because I think this is such a pernicious form of organisation of the labour market and it's a particularly pernicious form which impacts upon women. So that's one thing. It's a very simple slogan. We want all jobs to be good jobs. You only need a sentence to say it, but I think it's very powerful and it's very important and it's got, as I say, all these very important gendered implications. The second thing that I would say is to go back to what I was talking about in answer to the previous question, which is to say, misogyny, the abuse of women is shameful, full stop, another straightforward sentence. Politicians are looking for signs that sound by it, so there are two, which I hope they'll be able to take forward. But as I say, I'm prepared for disappointment. So thank you. Well, I think on that note, I think we do have to say thank you very much to Mary, not only for a stimulating lecture, but a contact with the question.


Good morning YouTube hikers, Tom and Julie here We're at the Pine Creek Trailhead in the beautiful eastern Sierra Nevada, which are Up here. Oh, I can't see them right there There they are It's October 18th 2019. We're going through the Pine Creek pack station to get to our trail We're headed up towards Pine Lake today Mostly hiking today, although this is mine country, so you never know we may run across the mine We'll just have to wait and see The boy what a beautiful area. Look at the mountains here There they are That noisy here is the Pine Creek flowing. It's got a pretty good flow up here It's pretty crisp this morning. It's right at 32 degrees Little after nine o'clock What nice tree already Wow what a trophy day not a cloud in the sky No wind this is a pretty big old tree and What a gnarly specimen that is it's dead Pretty wild. We're still motoring up the trail. We started in an elevation of 73 20 I'm guessing we've already come up a few hundred feet Here's another little creek crossing Beautiful little creek Well, this is the view going the other way on the switchbacks here This is back the canyon that we came from This is looking down over the Owens Valley and then Across the Owens Valley the white mountains Don't know that you can see them very well. Weren't you guys just going the other way? I thought I just saw you going that way Good morning. Are you guys out outfitting for somebody? But I mean do you have people out here somewhere? The lichens in this rock is a cool shade of green Almost fluorescent It's a huge wall too. You don't really get a scale of it until you see Julie So we're still plugging away. We must have gone up I don't know 1200 feet or so on Well, I have two miles There's a nice series of waterfalls here Here we are deviating from the trail Because We spotted a mine And I must say it looks rather intriguing. It's like the lower working is formed shot The lower portal I should say But up higher and there are a couple. I don't think you can get up there. You might have to be a mountain goer You probably can't get up there, but they look cool from here, don't they? Well, here's the Portal I'm guessing to the brownstone mine got the dreaded foam on there There's another hole above me here. It's kind of straight up though Tempting to try but I don't know Well, we came across an awesome looking bench for looks like for four With A custom built fireplace And another chair over here But this is a easy chair Yeah, easy chair out of it. That's pretty cool, isn't it? Yeah So let me spend some time making that so trying to get up here to these things They're proven to be a little difficult So I don't think I'm gonna be able to do it Really looks interesting though up there. I want to blow it too I don't know exactly what I'm looking at here It smells like a hoist room because there's a lot of grease smell coming out of there I hear some strange noises coming from in there Into you Huh? Oh, here comes a wind colder and heck up here right now My fingertips almost frozen. I was climbing the side of that mountain Looks like some major workings we're going on here though, doesn't it? What a jumble that is You see these big slabs hanging on the side of the hill Some of these have come down and completely crushed out this Whatever it was here these timbers So that's a little unstable to say the least I'm up here at the top of a tram It's pretty collapsed But this is the rail the tram rail you see I hear Here's a bucket tram bucket Here's another one Let a different look at it Here's the rest of the Upper tram terminal This is the turnaround This is the operators station I'm assuming this is some kind of a A brake control or something Here's a Control Maybe a rheostat Or a signaling device That's a whole bank of some kind of something. I don't know what this is This is Oh, that's G. Yeah, look at the big G. So this is all electrical stuff here Looks like Look at the huge motor up there. Let me see if I can get up there I'm in a pretty solid room right here. This is all carved out of solid rock Look at all this stuff in here Jump up under this platform here. Look at the old cans Looks like a huge carbide can Here's The motor Looks like two motors And here's the big bull wheel See if I can reach you on the corner There's some water that can even do the back of this Here's the other way Use this side That's where the water is coming in Gear down here And a nice little valley The waterfall coming out of it Just about back to where we started Well, here we are back to the Pine Creek Trailhead where we started this little adventure We walked about Four and a half five and a half miles With a total of scent of about 1900 feet. It took us about four and a half hours and we Did try and visit the brownstone mine and we saw the tram and all that stuff But we couldn't get in the mine because they got it foamed off Anyway from Julie and myself we thank you for watching and We appreciate it and I hope you will watch us again on another adventure