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Destination feminism: Are we there yet?
On a foul, sweltering day in the middle of a protracted heatwave, Germaine Greer spoke at Adelaide Writers Week. The session was set up in her honour: Germaines legacy: after The Female Eunuch. Despite the murderous heat, the tent was packed.
Throughout, Greer was modest about her own achievements. You owe me nothing; I owe you everything, she insisted. Yet when she finished, the audience gave her a standing ovation.
During question time a 15-year-old girl stood up to seek Greers advice. She lamented the fact that the girls in her generation were highly sexualised, yet they have nothing like The Female Eunuch, no book to inspire them. What was Greers advice? There was a pause; then, in a characteristic Greer move, she threw it back onto the questioner. Write your own book, she told the girl, for your own generation.
However modest she might have seemed in Adelaide, the truth is that Germaine dominates the feminist pantheon. With Betty Friedan dead, and Gloria Steinem relatively well behaved, she is the most visible feminist on the planet. She has been described as the queen of the soundbite, and it isnt hard to imagine that when shes gone her face will end up on T-shirts, Che Guevera-like, as a symbol of the feminist revolution.
But for those of us who believe in feminism as an evolving movement with a dynamic future, it is sobering that a book published more than thirty years ago is spoken of by a 15-year-old as if it was the beginning, and perhaps the end, of feminism. Much has happened to feminism and to women since then, yet it seems impossible to separate Greer from the way in which contemporary feminism is perceived. When we started researching our book we surveyed hundreds of women, asking them for their thoughts on contemporary feminism. In all their varied responses one name popped up again and again and again: Greer. Like it or not, she persists even though the wave on which she first rode is long gone.
Greer herself has spoken of her desire to hand the baton to the younger generation, and claims that her decision to write The Whole Woman, her sequel to Eunuch, was forced on her. She never wanted to write about feminism again, but looking at the world around her, she just had to.
This book isnt about Germaine Greer, yet throughout its writing we felt she was shadowing us. Or perhaps we were shadowing her. Like the good Christian who, when morally challenged, asks the question What would Jesus do?, we often found ourselves wondering What would Germaine do?
So, taking our cues from Greer, we started this book by looking around us, and asked: Where is feminism today? We looked for the feminism that was manifest in newspapers, scanned our bookshops and the internet, talked to women and men, young and old. But instead of coming away with a list of feminist achievements and goals, what we found was more like a criminal rap sheet. Feminism, it seemed, had been a very, very bad girl.
The assumption underlying much of this bad press is that we have arrived at the last stop on the feminist train. Were in a world where the feminists have won, where feminist ideals and attitudes are ingrained in everyday life, where the work is over and society is transformed. This final feminist destination is a sordid, sorry, selfish mess. All around us are poster-girls for feminism-gone-wrong: the deluded pole-dancer, a victim of false feminist empowerment; the thirty-something career woman who will miss out on babies because feminism told her she could have it all; shes the heiress without panties; the actress with an eating disorder; the pop-star with a shaved head; the oppressed Muslim woman whom feminism ignored and abandoned.
The villain in all these narratives is the feminist, she who continues to bleat out mixed messages about what women should or should not be doing, all the while supporting her pronouncements with ridiculous arguments that can be easily cut down with common sense or a refreshing dose of anti-feminism.
On this world view, feminism is the enemy of ordinary women. Rather than citing the problems faced by women as evidence that feminism is still necessary, the scriptwriters for the feminism-gone-wrong story use them to expound another version of contemporary life: one in which feminists have had their chance and have failed.
Like all good lies, the feminism-gone-wrong story is persuasive because it is partly true. In the last thirty to forty years womens lives really have been transformed, for better and for worse, and feminism has played a role in that transformation. The birthrate has gone down in affluent western countries, particularly among educated, white women. IVF and other fertility treatments are doing a roaring, if often futile, trade. Many women do find balancing work and family incredibly hard. Other mothers have opted out of paid work altogether. Women in Muslim countries have been forced to cover up and some have been killed in the name of family honour. Paris Hilton has made a porn video and lots of people have seen it. Empowerment and choice, words that have been elevated to mantra status in the feminist lexicon, have been emptied of real meaning and are used to sell everything from pubic-hair removal creams to thousand-dollar shoes.
Talking about any of these phenomena in feminist terms makes sense, especially when you take into account the fact that many women from feminisms core constituencythe white, educated, middle classreally are complaining that feminism has let them down, sold them lies and left them unhappy. Yet talking about little else other than biological clocks, pole-dancing classes and Islamic dressalong with the perennial media fodder, feminisms image problemis rather transparent.
Much of what were describing here can be understood in terms of a time-honoured anti-feminist tactic: straw feminist-bashing. Essentially, this involves setting up a caricature of feminism, built on half-truths, oversimplifications, generalisations and stereotypes, and then proceeding to beat the crap out of it. Consider this from arch-conservative US politician Pat Robertson: Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. Of course it is true that some feminists do want to destroy capitalism, have been inspired to leave their husbands, and happen to be lesbians, or perhaps even witches. But by caricaturing feminist lives in this way, reducing them to a string of stereotypes, then adding dead children as spice, Robertson manages to draw a portrait that is guaranteed to terrify any God-fearing American who might be thinking of taking The Female Eunuch to their next book club.
Straw feminist-bashing of this kind is the traditional weapon of avowed anti-feminists. When suffragists were agitating for the vote in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Bulletin cartoonists were kept busy producing images of housewives invading the parliamentary chamber armed with rolling pins. Things havent changed that much. Feminism still challenges the status quo, so it is not surprising that those with the most to lose from the advancement of womens rights have also been the most consistent in misrepresenting feminism, feminists and feminist arguments.
