http://salisburyreview.com/
The latest edition of The Salisbury Review (Summer 2015) is out and here is my contribution:
As early as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, (who pimped young girls for her lover Jean-Paul Sartre) in her book The Second Sex touched on the problem of what we might call ‘liberal feminism’ versus ‘socialist feminism’. Being a Marxist of sorts, de Beauvoir wondered whether or not an individual woman achieving any kind of personal success in Late Capitalism struck a blow for the liberation of women in general, given that genuine human emancipation – for both men and women – would have to await the revolution and the founding of an international socialist community.
Rosemarie Tongs took up the
subject in her Feminist Thought (1989), differentiating
between what she classified as ‘liberal feminism’ and ‘radical feminism’. The
former emphasised the primacy of individual choice and political rights
including suffrage. Some liberal feminists disagreed with the concept of
affirmative action while others approved of it,
at least as a provisional measure. In either case, these liberal feminists do
not have a problem with individual choice and equal opportunity for all. What
they do have a problem with is radical ideologues who, in the name of women,
commandeer ‘feminism’ for their own bitter and divisive agenda.
Evidence for the bitterness
and divisiveness is everywhere. The radical Australian feminist Clementine
Ford, (‘Killjoy to the stars’) a regular columnist for the leftist Fairfax
press, (her articles bring to mind Jeeves’ advice to Bertie Wooster. ‘You would
not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.’) does not even begin to
hide her hatred for men. One recent piece was actually titled ‘Misandry Island’
and gleefully provides her vision of feminist utopia:
...to sail away on an
ocean of male tears and live on an island that recognised the inherent humanity
of women. Over cold cocktails, where the twizzle sticks are actually dehydrated
penises, we’d marvel at how much better it is to live in a society that doesn’t
see us as peripheral to the real experience of what it means to be human...
Free and easily accessible abortion clinics with exclusion zones out the front
which reach all the way to the sun.
Ford loudly decried as
sexist any criticism of Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard
(2010-13), but then produced and sold ‘F... Abbott’ T-shirts immediately
after Tony Abbott came to office. Ford defends her hypocrisy by arguing that
the vile T-shirts were ‘ethical’ since the proceeds would go to the victims of
social injustice, illustrating once again how the modern-day left disguises its
own bigotry with high- minded PC rectitude.
The anti-male crusade is
not confined to journalist vitriol but runs like a poisoned stream through every
aspect of Australian society, from the legal system to everyday prejudices that
– to paraphrase Clementine Ford – deny the inherent humanity of men. When the
female TV personality Chrissie Swan went away for six weeks, notes Herald
Sun journalist
Wendy Tuohy, she was attacked for leaving her children with their dad: ‘Swan’s
critics thought they were landing a punch on the polarising figure for being a
‘bad mother’ but they were really insulting her competent stay-at-home husband,
Chris Saville, and, by extension, all hands-on fathers.’
A more extreme example of the prejudice against male parents is the notorious Tommaso Vincenti case, in which a loving, kind and thoughtful father went through hell after his estranged wife, Laura Garrett, abducted his four daughters. The case has now been settled in court and the children returned to the custody of Vincenti, but not before he spent two years of his life and all his savings seeking restitution under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. As Australia’s National Parents Organisation acknowledges: ‘With never a phone call to Tommaso for his side of things, Australian television and newspapers channelled Laura’s allegations of violent abuse by Tommaso.’
A more extreme example of the prejudice against male parents is the notorious Tommaso Vincenti case, in which a loving, kind and thoughtful father went through hell after his estranged wife, Laura Garrett, abducted his four daughters. The case has now been settled in court and the children returned to the custody of Vincenti, but not before he spent two years of his life and all his savings seeking restitution under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. As Australia’s National Parents Organisation acknowledges: ‘With never a phone call to Tommaso for his side of things, Australian television and newspapers channelled Laura’s allegations of violent abuse by Tommaso.’
The two most powerful women
in Australian political history are the current Foreign Minister Julie Bishop
and previous Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard. At the time of her
resignation, in June 2013, Gillard claimed to be the casualty of a gender war.
Her victimhood, or so she suggested, went some of the way to explaining the
brevity of her tenure. In Gillard’s first year of power there had been little
talk of a so-called gender war. Once her administration’s popularity went into
terminal decline, however, criticism of her government’s ineptitude was
increasingly denounced as sexist. At her lowest point, Gillard attacked the
(male) Leader of the Opposition as misogynist for daring to censure one of her
government’s more ham-fisted decisions. Nevertheless, in her memoirs, My Story
(2014), Gillard
rejects as ‘dumb’ any suggestion ‘of playing the gender card, of playing the
victim’.
A strong contender to be
the second female prime minister of Australia is the aforementioned Julie
Bishop. She declared very publicly at the National Press Club in October 2014
that she refused to define herself as a feminist: ‘I’m a female politician, I’m
a female foreign minister...get over it.’ Pointedly, Foreign Minister Bishop
insisted that she would never ‘blame the fact that I’m a woman’ for any disappointments
or setbacks in her political career. Numerous feminist commentators, including
Jane Caro, blasted Julie Bishop for her ingratitude to the feminist movement:
‘Women who benefit from feminism and then refuse to embrace the term is not a
position I have any respect for.’
Around the same time Julie
Bishop was rejecting the feminist moniker, a social media trend titled
WomenAgainstFeminism started in Australia. (See
http://womenagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/). It has since become a worldwide
phenomenon. Every day women post photographs of themselves holding contrarian
messages, ranging from ‘I don’t need modern ‘feminism’ because I don’t need
others to fight my battles for me’ to ‘I don’t need something that demonises
men’ and ‘I don’t need feminism because my son should not be made to feel less
of a person simply because of his gender’. One of the original self-proclaimed
anti-feminists, Danielle Gieger, has reported receiving death threats for
posting her missive: ‘My self worth is not directly tied to the size of my
victim complex!’
The vast majority of those
posting at the WomenAgainstFeminism site are not asking to be
subjugated in a brave new world of patriarchy. Rather, they are expressing
sentiments that, à la Rosemary Tong’s Feminist Thought, might be called ‘liberal
feminist’. However, as the American writer Christina Hoff Sommers has been
arguing since at least 1994, the radical feminists long ago won the culture war
with the moderate or liberal feminists and thereafter the term ‘feminism’ has
become synonymous with the hatred of men and extreme politics: ‘So colleges are
now full of gender scholars who instruct students on the ravages of the
capitalist, hetero-patriarchal system and its ‘rape culture’...It’s as if
George Orwell’s Anti-sex League has occupied feminism.’
According to those of the
radical feminist sisterhood, the current wave of beheadings and bombings by
Islamists is triggered not by the fact that they follow ISIS, but that they are
men. In the aftermath of Sydney’s December 2014 Lindt Café outrage, Ruby Hamad,
a Sydney-based writer and filmmaker, posted the following op-ed on The Drum, a high-profile Internet
site run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): ‘While it is true
that this gunman put Islam front and centre by utilising that flag, let’s put
the emphasis where it belongs. He may have made it about religion, but the
operative word here is ‘he’, and not ‘religion’’. The two deaths in Sydney, in
other words, have nothing to do with Islamic jihadism and everything to do with
traditional Aussie male entitlement and domestic violence. The problem for
Australians, then, is not the danger of being taken hostage or shot or
decapitated to the cry of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ but Australia’s ‘reluctance to
confront its own violent tendencies’ and ‘the history of our attitude to
Muslims’.
Along the same lines,
‘postcolonial feminists’, such as Sahar Amer, Chair of Arab and Islamic Studies
at the University of Sydney, argues in her book What is Veiling? (2014) that Westerners
often ignore the fact that Muslim women want to wear the niqab or burqa.
Modern-day feminist Julia Gillard frequently repeated the mantra that ‘sexism
should always be unacceptable’ but when, in the final throes of her prime
ministership, an Islamic group insisted on the segregation of women in one of
its ‘information sessions’ at Melbourne University, Gillard remained
conspicuously silent. It was up to the conservative Tony Abbott to brand the
demands of the Muslim organisers as a ‘leap back to the dark ages’.
In April 2015, Foreign
Minister Julie Bishop visited the Islamic Republic of Iran ostensibly to
discuss the people-smuggling business and the return of Iranian asylum seekers.
Australia, unlike the United States, has always maintained full diplomatic
relations with Iran and so the trip also offered the possibility of official
state-to-state discussions about the ongoing war against the Islamic State in
neighbouring Iraq. Prior to the foreign minister’s arrival in Tehran, Masih Alinejad,
an Iranian political journalist who runs the site My Stealthy Freedom, called
on Julie Bishop to eschew the mandatory headscarf to demonstrate support for
the subjugated women of Iran: ‘This is the time for her to ask the Iranian
government about the compulsory hijab and human dignity.’
Some in Australia criticise Julie Bishop for
sporting a fashionable hat in Tehran, and yet Masih Alinejad was gracious
enough to acknowledge as ‘quite good’ the foreign minister’s avoidance of ‘a
proper hijab’. Had an Iranian woman been caught in public wearing Julie
Bishop’s apparel she would have been ‘definitely arrested’ and eventually
‘deprived of her right to education’ or ‘to find a job’. As the latest posting
on WomenAgainstFeminism says: ‘I don’t need feminism because equality does not
have a gender.’
This article was first published in The
Salisbury Review, Summer 2015
