DEMOS

Women's attitudes towards formal politics differ from men's in two ways. Evidence suggests that they care more about basic public services which directly effect their families - such as schools, hospitals, and childcare of course remains a big one. Secondly, women are turned off by the wider culture of our political system - the yah boo manner in which politicians spar with other and generally treat Parliament like a officers' mess. Research suggests a very different picture in the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies, where women make up a higher proportion of representatives and where the antiquated ways of Westminster are nowhere to be found (in Cardiff, Assembly Members address each other in the chamber by first names). Clearly emotional intelligence has something to do with it. Susie Orbach has been harping on about this for years, and there's a wealth of academic literature on how women do politics (and indeed leadership more generally) differently from men, linking this to the way girls are socialised and women's caring roles in the home. Critics of this approach usually have two words: Margaret Thatcher. But that just confirms the need for genuine diversity throughout our political culture - ie where everyone can succeed and make a contribution on their own terms, without having to assimilate to a perceived standard (and that goes for men who hate the yah boo style too). I'm ashamed when I turn on PMQ and see Blair and Howard bombasticly baying at each other to gales of laughter from their benches. One woman MP I spoke to said that she was shocked to catch herself joining in - such was the power of the institution to compel the newcomer to conform.

Interesting to see how culture got there first, and politics has yet to catch up. If we look at lifestyle television as a site of social and cultural change, then we can also see that it is an area where men have been encouraged to explore their feminine side. Thus the emphasis on cooking in Jamie Oliver's programme, where he is both a 'lad' and simultaneously femininised, through his hair, he loves to go shopping etc. Exploring this dynamic, Rachel Moseley looking at the 8-9 slot on British television has some interesting things to say: 'Two of the ways in which we might understand the shifts in the 8–9 slot which took place in the late 1990s, then, are through new representations around gender, and in relation to the democratization of old public service discourses. As Bondebjerg suggests, such hybrid genres point to the democratization of the public sphere, and still at stake in the programming I have looked at is the significance signalled by secondwave feminism of the personal as political. On 8–9, our lives as citizens are played out in the realm of the personal, and, as an examination of The Naked Chef suggests, in negotiations around gender roles, family and the well-being of the nation'. Culturally we have changed, yet the polarised gender culture of Westminster hasn't. How long will it be before it catches up, and thus better women in politics?

thus better engages women with the political process, that final sentence should read!

I think it's interesting to make that connection between lifestyle TV and feminist attempts to challenge the dichotomy of private/personal and public/political spheres. I can't say that I've ever felt that the lifestyle genre is particularly encouraging viewers to make connections between their gardens, kitchens, wallpaper choices etc and the wider social system. Wife Swap had huge potential for this sort of analysis - I would have loved to have seen each programme followed by a panel discussion on what it tells us about gender roles and the division of labour in the home. You might argue that viewers are left to make their own connections (and certainly these programmes can stimulate conversation in the pub), but I'm not convinced that this can happen in any significant way without a structured process or dedicated space for it. 'Message boards' on BBC/Channel 4 websites might partly do this job, I suppose...

no, you're right that lifestyle isn't encouraging people to make those connections.. but i would argue that in the way that lifestyle tv foregrounds the constructed nature of our identities (suggesting that through the advice of the 'expert' we can do reflexive work on ourselves and sort out our wardrobe, love lives, gardens etc), it also hints at the constructed nature of our social system. obviously with lifestyle tv, the fundamental purpose of this process of foregrounding our malleability is for the promotion of correct consumption... as we see in say 'What not to wear' with its crazed obsession with shopping. In the same way that bourdieu showed how crucial 'taste' is in reproducing the social order in 'Distinction' so too does lifestyle tv place huge importance on the acquisition of 'cultural capital', encouraging the creation of the ideal neo-liberal subject as consumer. but i think there is a potentially democratic dynamic within the genre too, in that by exposing the way that such cultural capital can be learnt, rather than just being something that you naturally inherit (through class, education etc), it could get people to think about how society could also be changed.... through denaturalisation. or perhaps i've just been watching too much bad tv...!