Why should teens worry about women’s Cabinet roles when they have a pop icon to dream of?
THE TWO public figures I heard most about this week have the same initials in common, and at first glance, precious little else. One, Justin Bieber, is a 17-year-old Canadian with millions in the bank and millions of fans. The other, Joan Burton, is a senior Irish politician who just got shafted.
No prizes for guessing which one the adolescent females of this country were paying more attention to this week. For a middle-aged woman, I know an unhealthy amount about Bieber. I can’t help it. I teach teenage girls.
I know his favourite colour is purple. I know his mom was 18 when she gave birth to him, and that she raised him as a single parent. I know he set up a link for fans to donate money to clean water projects if they wanted to make a gesture to celebrate his birthday. I know he is small and incredibly skinny. (That last one was from a pupil who met him before one of his concerts.)
In short, any of his adoring fans whom I teach could happily shine in a Mastermind quiz if the Bieber boy was her specialist subject.
Alas, the same could not be said about their knowledge of Joan Burton. Many of them would probably not recognise her name, and fewer still would recognise the significance of the fact that instead of having a finance portfolio, she is now Minister for Social Protection.
Before the election, there was a lot of talk about how to increase the numbers of women in politics, including the use of quotas. Joan Burton has been in politics since 1992. She is a tenacious and capable politician. She was trusted enough to be part of the Labour negotiating team for the formation of the government.
In the end she did not get a finance portfolio, despite having been the spokeswoman for finance for many years. So now we know why there are so few women in Irish politics. When push comes to shove, it is women who will get the shove.
Róisín Shortall is another highly capable politician, but she was passed over for a Cabinet post, although she did receive a junior ministry. Labour is allegedly the party of equality, but do they have some problem with strong women? Or does Irish society have an issue with them?
Not that women are immune to making mistakes. Joan Burton did not cover herself in glory on the now infamous Tonight with Vincent Browneouting where she barracked Joe Higgins.
Yet the reaction to her performance was much more extreme than would have greeted a man. Tweets and internet comments implied she was having some kind of public meltdown and being extremely aggressive.
Aside from the irony of the idea of anyone bullying Vincent Browne, if you watch the programme, you just see Joan doing a very good job of making life as difficult as possible for a constituency rival, Joe Higgins.
The same Joe is no slouch at soaking up airtime and preventing other panellists from making the points they wish to make. In short, she was acting in a way that would not raise an eyebrow if she were male.
It is amazing how often a woman acting in that way gets accused of being shrill, while a man doing the same is just, well, being a man.
Róisín Shortall also gets accused of being abrasive. Her male party colleagues are scarcely a collection of sensitive shrinking violets, yet they don’t receive the same negative commentary.
Ironically, the boy with the same initials as Joan Burton has the opposite problem. He gets accused all the time of being a girly boy. There are at least 10 Facebook groups on the theme of “voting Justin Bieber out of the male gender”. Not to mention the Facebook groups with titles like “Nice voice, Justin, does it come in men’s?” This guy has a gazillion fans, but sometimes it seems like he has an equal amount of people who hate him.
He was spotted first, at least according to legend, when his current manager accidentally clicked on one of the Youtube videos that Justin’s adoring mom had posted. Justin Bieber is probably the first true star of the internet generation.
He receives a disproportionate amount of abuse from the trolls online whose mission in life is to be relentlessly negative. Some of the material about him on the internet is so vile and hateful, it is hard to imagine what would motivate anyone to post it. Some milder claims suggest he has syphilis, or that he impregnated his own mother.
The internet distinguishes him from teen crushes of previous generations. Adoration of teen idols goes back beyond even the Beatles. Might be funny to think it now, but his fellow Canadian Paul Anka caused fainting fits back in the 1950s. My generation might have, God help us, swooned over Donny Osmond or David Cassidy, but aside from buying magazines, we pined alone, or with a friend, as we gazed at posters on our bedroom walls.
But every move Bieber makes is recorded and breathlessly analysed to death on the web. The internet magnifies things to an unbelievable degree, including, in this case, hormones and hysteria. It is like a vast amplification device, where the merest whisper becomes a reverberating roar.
Joan Burton could have expected the Tonight with Vincent Browneprogramme to go viral. She uses the internet reasonably effectively herself, with a website, Facebook page and Twitter account.
Every politician now has to cope with the fact that every misjudged utterance will echo around the internet for years.
Funny, though, Pat Rabbitte’s attack on Pat Carey, or indeed, his comments about Micheál Martin running around Grafton Street finding a few good-looking women don’t seem to have done the same amount of damage.
A lot of teenage girls may have their heads stuffed with lovely, unthreatening Justin, and long may they enjoy him. However, they might be better off giving some attention to Joan Burton, if only for the painful lesson that many of the battles faced by women are far from won.