I've recently been doing a lot of reading about Stereotypes, mainly as part of research for a presentation we had to give to a class of german schoolchildren. It's always a bit delicate dealing with Stereotypes, even when approaching it from a "scientific" or academic perspective. And I couldn't help but feel there was something a bit gratuitous about showing images depicting fat american tourists, lederhosen-clad beer-drinkers, or little slanty-eyed yellow people in pointy hats, even if it was all with the intention of pointing out how they appear in the various fora we looked up. The critical distinction between "using" and "mentioning" stereotypes is often tricky to pinpoint exactly, and sometimes either can leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Anyway, for the purposes of the presentation, we looked primarily at national stereotypes. But of course stereotypes don't stop at political geography, and I recently came across a beautiful illustration of another kind at work. According to Michael Pickering, possibly the most intractable and enduring stereotype about women centres around the madonna/whore dichotomy. The two impossibly unrealistic extremes are both given a nice reinforcing boost in this article, by the now notorious daily mail columnist Jan Moir (of course the only excuse for reading the Daily Mail is to read it like a sociologist, under the pretence of "phishing" for such perfect examples of discursive practices in action, and one seldom has to look very far).
So on the one hand we have the immaculately turned out perfect wives, who've never faltered in their lives, either in terms of their irreproachable behaviour or flawless appearance. They are the long-suffering mothers of the children, pure embodiments of goodness. And at the other end of the axis of female persona, we have the the cheap, classless, fame-hungry skanks, the inscrupulous home-wreckers and diabolical seductresses.
Moir then proceeds to drag her common thread through the lives of a series of celebrity couples, who all seem to fit this dichotomy, and makes her point by ramming the opposition down our throats over and over again, attributing to both breeds of women quite astonishing epithetes, free from any nuance or mitigating factors. Nowhere are Cheryl Cole's previous misdemeanous mentioned, such as the incident of violent assault. Here she is "a woman who millions regard as the nation’s sweetheart." Following a jaw-droppingly crude metaphore likening women to pieces of meat, she is the "prime organic" steak to the "battery hens" with whom Ashley Cole committed his numerous indiscretions. Continuing with the animal metaphore, they are "the kind of Premier League lemmings who would throw themselves off a cliff for the chance to be with a footballer."
Then there's "Princess Sandra", whose husband chose to consort with "the kind of girls whom you might expect to find raking the sawdust between acts at the circus" - whatever they look like. Tattooed, apparently.
And then there's the woman who inspired the whole article in the first place, Ronan Keating's recently revealed mistress, Francine who, "has none of Mrs Keating’s glacial beauty, nor her unmistakable air of a sophisticated, sorted woman. Instead, Francine is a faint echo of Yvonne. She is Yvonne-lite. She is the splash of cologne to Yvonne’s drop of eau du parfum."
Just to bring home her point one last time, Moir launches a final tirade of oppositions, directed at the "other women" frequented by the men in question - "almost without fail they appear to be a bargain-basement version of the wife left behind; the counterfeit alternative to the real thing, the Primark to her Prada, the pedalo to her magnificent, ocean-going yacht." Tellingly, now even the animal anaology has been dropped in favour of mere inanimate objects, or shopping and boat metaphores, to characterise these wretched characters.
For Moir it seems there are two kinds of women - the exemplary kind and the fallen kind. It is not clear how exactly one ends of up in either camp, perhaps some kind of genetic pre-disposition from birth. But there is only one kind of man - the kind that makes mistakes, and sometimes gets forgiven. The human kind.
