following on from yesterday; a serious discussion about gendered roles

I was anticipating enjoying the panel discussion "I am what I own" that was advertised as one of the highlights of late @ the museum - along with the delightful Sonic Musuem project. The panel, chaired by columnist Finlay McDonald, consisted of music journalist Nick Bollinger, designer Dean Poole, broadcaster Carole Hirschfield, Oxfam NZ CEO Barry Coates, and curator Jonathan Mane-Wheoki. What could have been an interesting discussion, with perspectives from a range of erudite and passionate people was redeemed from complete triviality by the presence of Coates, who brought developing world attitudes to possessions to the table AND offered the comment on the need for artefacts for institutions such as museums and art galleries that I had thought Mane-Wheoki would make, being a curator and all.

What ruined the panel discussion for me, and for those I was with (see my friend Anya's review) was the way Carole was 'cast' as the spendthrift consumer whose only real contribution to the discussion was a list of Prada bags she has owned . . . now, I like handbags as much as the next girl, and I really like Carole - she's a smart, gorgeous, down to earth woman whose made a great career for herself based on both the smarts and the gorgeousness. BUT I dislike intensely a puported intelligent discussion of the position "I am what I own" denigrating into a trivial female who likes stuff for stuff's sake pitted against five men, including her own husband, who were taking much loftier positions about the importance of stuff. Particularly annoying was the reverence with which the audience and panel treated Bollinger's discourse on music and the art of collecting - compared with the laughter that had greeted Hirschfield's claim to collect Prada handbags. Now, is that a gendered value judgement or what? Stuff men collect (music, computers, countries) is worthy of curating and writing about, while stuff women collect is laughable.

I'm not actually a harpy - this kind of public acceptance of gendered roles irritates me because it reduces human beings to cliches. If Carole was happy to take the role of consumer, that's fine - they needed, however, to include another woman who could take another view point too. And perhaps next time, Finlay and Carole could keep chat about the size of their mortgage to a minimum? We actually wanted more of a conversation that, at times, referenced everything from High Fidelity to Margaret Atwood's Payback, managing to keep a sizable crowd that seemed brimful of the intelligentsia engaged. We like panel discussions; we like Prada handbags; we like to think the two are not mutually exclusive - and most of all, we like to think that there is more than one way to be a woman in the twenty-first century.