Oh dear… it appears that birthday and greetings cards are sexist. This is, at least, the claim of a group of MPs who have submitted an EDM (Early Day Motion) calling for more representation of female footballers on such items by their manufacturers. The motion was tabled by Liberal Democrat MP for Epsom and Ewell, Helen Maguire, who told the BBC that the greeting card industry was ‘not moving with the times’.
Perhaps it is not the companies who are sexist then but the public? I certainly am
Poor Ms Maguire explained how she had been motivated by the trauma of searching for a card for her ‘massive football fan’ office manager and finding only those depicting male players. One can only imagine the distress this induced. Ms Maguire concluded that the ‘under-representation of female athletes… undermines efforts to promote gender equality in sport’. She is supported by 12 of her parliamentary colleagues.
Even the BBC, a tireless promoter of ‘gender equality’ in the sporting arena (see the new presenting line-ups for Match of the Day and Sports Personality of the Year) was moved to include in its report the question of whether such a motion was a good use of taxpayer’s money. EDMs are costly to print and distribute and, unlike birthday cards, don’t even bring fleeting joy to their recipients. The motions are rarely even debated.
Let’s be generous and assume that Ms Maguire and her chums are sincere in their efforts on this and not just attempting to nab a bit of publicity and justify their existence. I can well believe that it is difficult to find a birthday card featuring a female footballer. But what does this tell us? And what should we do about it?
It probably tells us that the greeting card industry, which is a business like any other, and a pretty ruthlessly competitive one I would suggest, will respond to demand and produce what sells. Presumably they have calculated that cards with depictions of female footballers don’t exactly fly off the shelves (except perhaps for Lib Dem MPs, but there are only 72 of them). So they understandably choose not to produce them in bulk (though such cards are available online).
It also tells us that despite a seemingly relentless push to popularise the women’s game, spearheaded by our gynocentric public broadcaster, the names and faces of female players or even the concept of female footballers has not penetrated the consciousness of the public to anything like the degree of the men’s game.
Perhaps it is not the companies who are sexist then but the public? I certainly am. I have done my best to correct myself but, sadly, to no avail. And I really have tried. I watched, quite intensely, the last women’s World Cup, partly for the sporting entertainment of it, but also to educate myself on a sphere of my favourite sport I have hitherto neglected.
It was pretty damn exciting in places, with a couple of classic games (Australia vs England in the semi-final was superb) and the general standard was far higher than I had expected. But at the end of it all, and racking my brains now, I simply cannot remember the names of any, any, of the players, except for that prodigiously annoying blue haired woke warrior Megan Rapinoe of the US, who so pleasingly skied a penalty in the shoot out against Sweden.
But aside from incorrigible old dinosaurs like me I suspect the women’s game will forever struggle to claim parity with the men’s game and equal representation on the racks of Cards Galore, however much the Beeb trumpets it and MPs like Helen Maguire demand it. This is simply because the men’s game is too entrenched, too plentiful in supply, and too damned exciting for any other version of the game to compete. The market is saturated, I’m afraid.
This may not be fair but it is probably irremediable. You cannot force people to watch a sport. Nor will Helen Maguire be able to induce people to buy more inclusive greetings cards even if she can pressure the manufacturers to produce them; any more than Victoria’s Secret won’t get people to buy underwear because it is advertised by ‘plus-sized’ models. The world just doesn’t work that way.
Which is a final lesson from this story that other parts of the world seem already to have learned. One day after the reinstalled US President Donald Trump was signing the death warrants of all manner of DEI policies in the US, to the raucous cheers of a majority of Americans, here in the UK at least some of our politicians are still obsessed with a woke mindset that is appearing increasingly redundant. Talk about not moving with the times.
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