'Selfish' post-feminist women want to stay at home and have servants, sneers 'trend forecaster' Marian Salzman. Susie Steiner takes issue with her
Women are being selfish again. In fact, "self-centred" was the specific phrase. A report issued on Tuesday in Britain identified a new breed of women - "domestic divas" - who don't wish to work and who want to get out of doing the household chores too. They want to "play a role", apparently - a role which sees them mimic the Victorian matriarch, with servants to do their bidding and a husband's income to support their luxurious lifestyle.
These women, warned the author of the report, are attracting "rage and disdain" from their put-upon husbands, who hadn't realised women's liberation would amount to a free lunch.
The resulting coverage had one gleeful message: the daughters of the feminist revolution have their feet up on the living-room pouffe. But who are these women? Surely not the people I know who are hugely grateful to be able to afford a visit from a cleaner once a week.
And where did this caricature come from? The report's author is Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer for New York-based Euro RSCG Worldwide, the world's fifth-largest advertising agency. She is better described as a "trend forecaster"; she is credited with the term "metrosexuals" (straight men who care about fashion and food); and she predicted the "Bridget Jones phenomenon", which came to define single, professional women in their 30s. Like all trend spotters, she creates ingenious stereotypes out of vast groups of individuals.
The actual statistics behind the survey include some potentially interesting ones (though they would take careful analysis). None of its results, however, can be traced to an epidemic of female selfishness.
One of the report's few pin-downable findings, for example, is that 69 per cent of women think it is fine for a female to be a homemaker and not get paid. In contrast, only 48 per cent of men felt the same. There are all sorts of conclusions which could be drawn from such a statistic, but "women are layabouts" is not the obvious one.
It is interesting that this report, with its bald findings and surrounding spin, was taken up and used so enthusiastically to condemn a whole raft of women's life choices. Again and again, commentary on people having choices - and, more particularly, getting help in order to enjoy them - is whipped up into a moralistic climate of disapproval.
Of course, not everyone enjoys the resources to afford to make such choices. But, where it's taken, the decision to get help - in the form of a nanny, a home help, an osteopath or therapist - is easy to caricature, and it has its attackers on all fronts.
The standard-bearers of the right can caricature a profligate "nanny culture", where people are incapable of maintaining their stiff upper lips, so dependent are they on their personal trainers and life coaches. There must have been many satisfied viewers tuning in to see The New Servants on BBC2 last week, tutting as they saw the over-helped, impossibly posh Jo complain about not having enough "me time" while juggling a raft of domestic helpers. The extremes are easy to find.
On the left, the issue of getting help can be equally mired in concerns about exploitation and a return to a culture of masters and servants. But caricature is in play here too. There is not, as many who employ or are employed in the domestic sphere will testify, an inevitable relation between help and exploitation, just as there is not an inevitable link between concern for the self and selfishness. It is possible to have a generous and productive relationship with someone who works for you in the home.
But getting help, and the attendant pleasure of being free, is often most cruelly criticised by an envious attacker much closer to home, who is prone to glamorise a harassed kind of unhappiness. One can often detect the halo of martyrdom over discussions about how women "juggle" - a kind of satisfaction creeping into the despair at being stretched on all fronts.
Another report, also published on Tuesday, received next to no coverage. It calculated, from a smaller sample of 500 parents, that out of 7.95 million mothers in the UK with children below the age of 18, 4.6 million are in full-time employment.
The survey, by Sainsbury's bank, found that working mothers have just over five-and-a-half hours a week to themselves. This falls to four hours for those in full-time work. It found that working women spend an average of 64 hours a week on housework, worth around €679 if you paid someone else to do it.
Is it really helpful to demonise those who would like more than four hours a week to themselves? Does it assist anyone - children in particular - to idealise a state of harassment? Or is it simply another opportunity to moralise about women's access to choice?
Ms Salzman complains: "Today, women's lib means wanting to be liberated from the intense pressures of the modern-day working mum." Well, who wouldn't want that?