Media: Managing the Subconscious

Posted Sunday, September 14, 2003; 13.05BS
If these ingrained norms are to be changed by legislative fiat, quotas are not going to do it. Laws that delve into the core of gender inequities are messy, invasive, ill-defined and hard to enforce — not unlike the recent European Commission proposal to outlaw sexist stereotypes in the media and remove gender from insurance-premium calculations. By trying to regulate media, the E.U. isn't just courting censorship; it's confronting deep-seated national attitudes that are still enshrined in local law. In Italy, for example, the regional government of Campania recently decided to use European funds to finance a course to train veline, the half-naked dancing girls who adorn Italian quiz shows. The E.U. wants to bury that sort of thing once and for all.

In 2001, Anna Diamantopoulou, the gutsy if tone-deaf Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, started crafting a plan to fight "discrimination of all types," as called for by the 1999 Amsterdam treaty. "The idea of our discussion was to say, initially, 'How far can we go with this?'" says Barbara Helfferich, a cabinet member at the European Commission who led the drafting of the proposal. They seized upon insurance premiums as a realm where they might legally be able to act. "We started questioning the whole system," she says. "Should the fact that you have an X or a Y chromosome be the best criteria for how much insurance you pay? We don't think so." Never mind that insurance relies fundamentally on the statistics of risk — and the extra X chromosome that women have correlates with fewer car accidents and a longer life. Language was added calling for an end to insurance premiums priced by gender.

To insurers, it's fair to charge men and women different premiums because, statistically, they run different risks. So actuaries were baffled by the leaked draft of the directive. "It's fairly ridiculous," says Ian Maidens, a principal at the London office of Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, a worldwide actuarial and consulting firm. One of Diamantopoulou's arguments is that people can't help what sex they are — so it would be unfair to penalize them for it. But by this logic, it would also be unfair to charge the elderly higher premiums since people can't prevent themselves from getting old. If insurers were not allowed to take gender and other differences into account, everybody would end up being discriminated against — by paying higher premiums.

The draft's attack on the media also sparked panic. It targeted no less than "all stereotypical portrayals of women and men as well as any projection of unacceptable images of men and women affecting human dignity and decency in advertisements." The proposals were meant to awaken a dormant public consciousness of sexism by targeting degrading images. Diamantopoulou sees this as a natural role for the E.U. "The way that the media makes use of women's bodies is a real political problem," she says.

When someone leaked the 26-page document to the Financial Times in June, "all hell broke loose," says Helfferich. Lobbyists and other E.U. officials called the proposal "lunatic" and "preposterous." If that wasn't alarming enough, Britain's tabloid the Sun warned, "Saucy bra adverts face ban under the latest nonsense from Brussels." And, tidily demonstrating that old-school patriarchy is still alive and well, the tabs turned Diamantopoulou, 42, into a pinup girl. The Daily Mail ran a digitally altered collage of Diamantopoulou in a bikini.

Was Diamantopoulou's stance a study in political ineptitude or a brilliant tactic to shift the debate to the left and then pass something less frightening? People who know her say she is no fool. Certainly, to rise out of Greek politics with such idealism intact demands a certain stamina. And Diamantopoulou is now making the rounds with insurance and media lobbyists to try to clean up the draft. "We will examine business, political and legislative practices all over Europe to determine areas where there is discrimination, and where something has to be done," she said last week in testimony before the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities. This included the insurance industry, she said, but she admitted that "we have no legal basis to act on stereotypes in the media." Diamantopoulou will make a final decision next week on whether to propose a formal directive. Until then, she urges patience. "We don't know yet what the exact wording will be," she says. "But we do know that men and women should be treated the same way in society." She may know that, but the rest of the E.U. is not so sure. In Norway, even lad-magazine editor Svein Hildonen supports boardroom quotas; in Italy, it was only this summer that a court finally struck down the right of men to slap women's bottoms.

Politicians have been writing laws to combat sexism for nearly a century, never without controversy. But now that the more obvious injustices have been ameliorated, and Europe is trying to operate in concert, the task may have gotten even harder. However differently men and women are treated, in insurance or in the media or at work, many Europeans seem far too fond of those differences to give them up without a brutal fight. Diamantopoulou has a long road ahead, strewn, inevitably, with bikini collages.

With reporting by Abi Daruvalla/Amsterdam, Helen Gibson and Elinor Shields/London, Walter Gibbs/Oslo, Emily Brady and Alexandra Hartman/Paris, John Miller/Brussels, Mimi Murphy/Rome, Ulla Plon/ Copenhagen, Charles P. Wallace/Stockholm and Regine Wosnitza/Berlin

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