Catherine Mayer - Attack of the fifty foot women

To sisters, mine especially.

And in memory of Sara Burns, Sarah Smith, Michael Elliott and Ed Victor.

Charles: The Heart of a King

Amortality: The Perils and Pleasures of Living Agelessly

If we were socially ambisexual, if men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in self esteem, then society would be a very different thing. What our problems might be, God knows. I only know we would have them. But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth.

URSULA LE GUIN

Is Gender Necessary?, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1976.

A COLOSSAL ZOMBIE Scarlett Johansson commandeered Londons red buses a few years ago. She sprawled across the upper deck of a fleet of vehicles, face slack with simulated desire, mouth gaping wide enough to swallow a small terrier, breasts threatening to smother passengers seated in the lower tier.

Dolce & Gabbanas advertising campaign intended to evoke Marilyn Monroes heyday, and it succeeded. The apparition recalled Nancy, the title character of a 1958 film, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. Nancys encounter with a space alien transforms her into a giant (Incredibly Huge, with Incredible Desires for Love and Vengeance). The patriarchal authorities doctors, police, spouse chain her, but she breaks free and, naked but for an arrangement of bed sheets, embarks on a murderous rampage. Behold the dreadful power of woman unleashed (The Most Grotesque Monstrosity of All)!

Zombie Johansson captured the inadvertent humour of the B-movie, but she was properly scary too. In her human incarnation she is the only woman to break through Hollywoods diamond ceiling to claim a place among the ten top-grossing actors of all time. She chooses intelligent roles and has more than once pushed back against the chauvinism of Hollywood and its media ecosystems. Her dead-eyed alter ego belonged to the monstrous regiment of billboard women in perpetual march across the world. Nancy gained agency as she grew. Todays 50-footers, hypersexualised and supine, promote a retrograde ideology alongside brands and products.

Were so marinated in this imagery that we seldom stand back to parse its meaning and impact. It is all-pervasive, not just on hoardings and print and broadcast but metastasised into myriad digital forms. The underlying messaging is little different to the drumbeat that helped return women to pliant domesticity after World War II. From earliest childhood, girls are taught to value themselves for their abilities: desirability, marriageability, tractability.

There are, of course, other role models, women of stature and astonishing achievement, but still they break through against the odds. Globally women own less and earn less than men, often in the worst and worst regulated jobs, undertake the lionesses share of caregiving and unpaid domestic labour, and are subject to discrimination, harassment and sexual violence.

Every woman navigates a world fashioned by and for men. Some pharmaceuticals fail us because they are tested on male animals to avoid having to account for hormonal cycles. We shiver at our workplaces because thermostats are set to temperatures that suit male metabolisms.

Were left in the cold in other ways too. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) logs the gap between womens earnings and mens at 17.48 per cent in the UK, 17.91 per cent in the US and 18 per cent in Australia. Women have long been blamed for this gap. We dont ask for raises often enough or we dont ask right. Studies identify the real culprits: job segregation and discrimination.

Jobs traditionally performed by men attract higher wages than those held by women. The paradigm of the husband as the head of the household remains firmly lodged in the public imagination. One reason some employers pay men better may be that they think the men have greater need of the money. In the US, men in nursing are vastly outnumbered by their female colleagues, by nine to one, yet earn $5,100 more on average per year than female nurses. These disparities are echoed across the world.

The response to this epidemic is muted and muddled.

US prosecutors ask a judge to send a college athlete to prison for six years for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman; the judge decides on six months, concerned a longer period of incarceration will have a severe impact on the perpetrator. He is freed halfway through his sentence. In India, a woman is gang-raped to death; one of her rapists says: A decent girl wont roam around at nine oclock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. The majority of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by terrorists in northern Nigeria are still missing; those who escape bearing tales of mass rape and slavery find themselves social outcasts. Egyptian lawmakers finally approve a draft bill that would dole out five- to seven-year jail terms for people carrying out female genital mutilation (FGM), an operation to remove part or all of the clitoris. The procedure often called circumcision by those trying to minimise its brutality has been inflicted on more than 90 per cent of the countrys women and girls. We are a population whose men suffer from sexual weakness, which is evident because Egypt is among the biggest consumers of sexual stimulants, an MP protests. If we stopped circumcising we will need strong men, and we dont have those. Up to 1,000 women are sexually assaulted on the streets of the German cathedral city of Cologne on New Years Eve 2015; the attacks trigger condemnation not of womens oppression but of migration, reinforcing the false narrative that sexual violence is imported, rather than native to white European society.

And on 8 November 2016, US voters choose their President. The front-runners are a female candidate and a man who has been recorded boasting of assaulting women. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything, After the recording emerges, ten women come forward to accuse him of assault. He insists that they are lying. After all, two of them were too ugly to grope.

Many other aspects of his candidacy should also repel any voter who values equality. The candidate appears to believe only in himself, but panders to Christian social conservatives by promising to roll back womens reproductive rights. He pledges to ban Muslims from the country and force Mexico to build a wall to keep its own citizens from crossing the border into the US. He refuses to condemn his supporters for racist violence. He publicly invites the Russian secret service to hack US government emails to damage his opponent and announces he will unpick years of international negotiations to limit climate change which he calls a hoax.

He is the worst would-be President we have seen in our lifetimes or read about in history books dangerous, incoherent and vain.

He wins the election.

A majority of men votes for him, by 53 per cent to 41 per cent.

A majority of white people votes for him, by 58 per cent to 37 per cent.

Eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals and born-again Christians vote for him.

Women vote against him, by 54 per cent to 42 per cent. Yet a majority of white women supports him: 53 per cent.

A dual US and UK national, I cast a ballot in my home state of Wisconsin. I am not one of the white women who helped Donald Trump into the White House, but like all white American women, I am implicated. Through researching this book, I also understand the mechanisms that encourage turkeys to vote for Christmas.