Shelley Bridgeman: Male-dominated Madonna turns back the clock

Madonna has revealed that her new husband advises her on how to dress. It's the only revealing she will be doing these days since Guy Ritchie's main aim seems to be keeping his wife's famous body covered.

But hang on a minute. This is Madonna - pop icon, the woman who transformed herself every album, invited cameras into her bedroom, thumbed her nose at convention and never gave a toss what anyone else thought.

And now hubby is calling the shots.

What does this tell us? That no matter how independent and successful a woman is, you can be sure she will bow to her husband's demands once she is married. Suddenly she will know her place and that place is three steps behind the man of the household.

Madonna's confession sets a bad example. When one of the All Blacks displays antisocial and damaging behaviour, the experts are quick to point out that it could have a harmful impact on the youth of today.

And, in a similar way, this latest news from the gossip columns gives a poor and weak role model to the average young woman. If Madonna of all people can allow her husband to boss her around, what hope is there for the rest of us?

And, yes, we all know that wives have long instructed their husbands on how to dress. But that's different. "Darling, you know you're not supposed to tuck that shirt in" and "the blue tie goes best with that suit" is only to help to prevent our men from looking a few decades out of date. It's about keeping them current, not about oppressing them by denying them their freedom to express themselves.

These days the younger generation laugh and snigger at such concepts as female oppression. To them the whole feminist thing is considered to be a good fight well won many moons ago but they don't want to discuss it. And they definitely don't want to hear any war stories of battles along the way.

And you can see why they think it is irrelevant to them. Women today can get a good education, a great job, earn big bucks, drive fast cars and party hard. They think they've made it. That they have got it all. No one's oppressing them. Right?

Wrong. This naive complacency is dangerous to young women. They have a sense that they are bullet-proof, but they have no concept of the small signs they should be attuned to that compromise their autonomy and emancipation.

If a lecherous, middle-aged man places a hand on their backside, these liberated women simply put up with it. They are so nonchalant and so in charge that they cannot be bothered with such low-level fights. And, anyway, knowing that they probably earn more than this hapless guy helps them to take it less seriously and makes it seem less sinister than it really is.

These are the same women who decide to take their husband's surname upon marriage - not, mind you, because it is a societal prescription but because it is such a romantic gesture. In their eyes it's okay to choose to do it.

They argue that it is different from their mother's day when women literally had no option but to take their husband's name.

The latest twisted logic seems to be that its doubly cool and devil-may-care to resort voluntarily to tradition and not to exercise the freedom to keep maiden surnames.

But what these young women do not realise (and probably could not care less about) is that by refusing to exercise their rights in the minutiae of life - by not slapping off unwanted advances, by not keeping their own name and identity - these rights to choose how we act will eventually disappear, become extinct.

Once more, women will find themselves without options. And in a few years we will doubtless be fighting again for women's rights which we would never have lost in the first place if the younger generation had not spurned them and casually taken them for granted.

We have to be eternally vigilant for beliefs and opinions that try to prescribe roles for women based on their gender. And the warped attitudes are still there.

Take, for example, last Saturday's letter to the editor which proclaimed that if a woman wanted to have a baby, she should quit work and that it was a woman's role to stay home with her family.

What is truly scary is that such a view would have been quite at home in a newspaper 50 years ago. The old adage that children and babies are women's work fails to acknowledge that men are just as responsible as women for bringing a child into the world.

We must fight outdated notions and question anyone who wants one sex to be treated differently to the other.

We will not countenance one race being treated differently from another. Why do we still tolerate discrimination along the gender divide?

And if Madonna is happy to allow Guy Ritchie to censor her clothing, she should at least have the decency to keep it to herself, rather than propagate the myth that the little wife ought to do exactly what hubby tells her.

* Shelley Bridgeman is an Auckland writer.