Stephanie Smith: It takes courage to stand up against misogyny

Those familiar with this now-common style of body-scrutinising news/entertainment story will suspect this was not a well-meaning observation. And, as Garai told a newspaper on Sunday, it was one that depressed her, because she had felt under pressure to lose weight and had struggled to do so. She said: “It makes me very sad that women are constantly made to feel they have to be ashamed or that there is something wrong with them.”

This sort of obsession with body weight is confirmation of the media’s “inherent sexism”, and Garai has decided to speak out. Sporting a T-shirt with the logo “Sexism – Every lads mag helps”, she lent her support to a campaign to encourage Tesco to clear its shelves of so-called lads’ magazines, such as Zoo and Nuts, whose pages prominently feature skimpily-clad young women.

Garai is a brave woman. So too is Charlotte Church, who used the annual John Peel lecture this week to call on the music industry to take responsibility for promoting artists who rely on “soft porn” to boost their profile, admitting she regretted wearing skimpy clothes herself as a teenage star.

Some young artists, said Church, “are encouraged to present themselves as hyper-sexualised, unrealistic, cartoonish”, adding: “The culture of demeaning women has become so ingrained as to be routine.”

She branded the music world “a male-dominated industry, with a juvenile perspective on gender and sexuality”. Many will agree, adding that the worlds of media, business, politics and many others are no different.

Yet surely there is much that women themselves can do to end this culture? Stop endorsing it, for a start. It’s up to female commentators to stop demeaning members of their own sex, to stop serving up the touch-typed equivalent of female naked wrestling. Stop the cellulite encircling of celebrity thighs, the pre-baby stories under the disingenuous headline “You’re looking swell”.

It takes courage to speak out against an ingrained culture of misogyny, as many women, in all types of workplace, have found. It can prove humiliating, sometimes distressing, so all power to Romola Garai and Charlotte Church for doing so. They deserve support.

But, as important as it is to clear female nudity and disturbing over-sexualisation from our supermarket shelves and pop videos, it’s even more important that all women learn first to respect themselves, and each other.

Twitter: @yorkshirefashQ