Is feminism dead or just sleeping with the enemy?

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Feminism? said the 73-year-old woman, "well, it started off to mean the raising up of the standard of females and perhaps opening doors for them. Then it came to mean sex and lesbians."

A friend of mine in her 50s who was active in the women's movement through the 70s laughed like a drain when I told her that. The truth was, she said, that the women's movement was very sniffy about sex - unless it was with other women. "It wasn't done to sleep with the enemy."

Like any revolution in its infancy the women's movement had to have an enemy. If you can't identify your enemy you don't have anything to fight against. If you don't have an enemy, you don't, either, have anything to fight for.

Like any revolution, within its ranks are going to be factions fighting for power, for a right to define and drive the ideology. In New Zealand, as Sandra Coney writes with her eloquent wit (yes, even in the 70s feminists had a sense of humour), the collective movement was falling apart as early as the late 70s.

"There was no longer any feminism, but a multiplicity of isms: cultural feminism, lesbian feminism, reformism, anarchism, socialist feminism and Marxist feminism." She writes, with a keen eye for absurdity, about the Women's Liberation Movement Congress of 1978 where there was deadly serious decisive debate about whether the eating of olives provided by the organisers ought to be "condemned as middle class and bourgeois".

Chances are, if you believe what you read, it's now OK to eat olives as long as you recognise that in doing so your prime instinct is going to be to spit the pit at the woman sitting next to you. Accidentally, of course. But so that it leaves an oily olive stain on her size 10 Karen Walker suit.

Because, if you believe what you read, the new enemy of women is woman.

Actually, the old enemy of women is woman.

Recognising that women behave like this is supposed to be a sort of freedom. The shackles of having to pretend to be the fairer, gentler sex have finally been removed.

A quote about Martha Stewart, that perfectly coiffed all-American woman who turned perfect homemaking into a global empire: "She's a bitch. And a genius." So she's facing a little matter of alleged insider trading. But her greatest crime might prove to be that she took American women back to a time when you were judged on your table arrangements,

But still: a bitch. And a genius. A role model, surely.

Most of the women I like are capable of great feats of bitchy behaviour.

All of the women I know are competitive. Some of the women I know do that look you up and down thing to check out what you're wearing and how big your bum looks in it. (Don't like them.) Almost all the women I know have read Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, Camille Paglia. Almost all of the women I know have read Bridget Jones' Diary (the ones I like thought it was rubbish). Most like Sex and the City and we all loved Six Feet Under's Brenda (great legs) until she got all freaked out about marriage and started having sex with strange men. Insecure about the future? Who, us?

Almost all of the women I know would have once - and would possibly still - call themselves feminists. My partner likes to say to me "you used to be such a good feminist".

I don't think so. I used to be such a good parrot.

I once thought, without ever having actually thought at all, that saying "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" was very funny indeed. In my defence, there weren't too many jokes going around at a time when a lecturer at the university was abducted, tied to a tree and had his life destroyed by a (never substantiated) smear campaign labelling him a rapist.

"There is no longer a women's movement,"proclaimed an article in the Women's Studies Association newsletter of July.

When I read that I thought "Good. What a bloody relief."

Now we can own up.

We can own up to the fact that we thought The Vagina Monologues was about as empowering as chanting "bum" in the sandpit. We can own that we like men. We've made our peace with the enemy. We long ago went back to shaving our legs and putting on lipstick to go to meetings with other women. We are back in competition with each other.

Girls are hideous to each other, and it starts young. In the playground they start whispering campaigns about other girls; in the workplace they start whispering campaigns about other women. We have also been known to steal car parks and other women's boyfriends. Ho hum. Fay Weldon wrote about all that, in fact, she's seldom written about anything else. Odd how she was embraced as a feminist writer when the women in her books are universally awful to each other.

The best line about girls being horrible to girls comes from Seinfeld's Elaine: "We just tease somebody until they get an eating disorder."

Phyllis Chesler wrote about this in Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, the first of many books published this year which "expose" the kinder sex as being as mean, if not meaner, than men. Ho hum.

A friend of mine said, "If you're writing about bitches, can I be in it?" I think so. She once went shopping with another woman and talked her into buying a pair of boots that made her legs look fat. Then she told all her girlfriends about it. You think that's horrible? You should meet that other woman. She's a real bitch..

* * *

"Despite all your best efforts to convince me you are," an almost 30 friend emailed me when I asked her for opinions on feminism, "I actually don't think you are a bitch."

So much for being a role model.

Role models? The Prime Minister, the young things we spoke to for this series said. But they found Sex and the City vastly more entertaining.

God, really? said a bloke I know. "But it's just like the 1950s but with more clothes and better sex."

My almost 30 friend, who knows about brand names, says that feminism as a brand "has lost its cache". She makes the point that capitalism with all of its glittering prizes has triumphed over feminism: "The trick is to present a new face of feminism to young women that defies the old unflattering stereotype."

And it ain't, she says "girl power" in the form of female pop idols. I don't know that anyone ever claimed Britney as the pin-up girl for feminism for the 21st century, but she got a lot of young things very confused. Oh, she's a virgin. She's saving herself.

For what? And why is she wearing those strips of material posing as clothes? And why is she now not a virgin? Oh look, she's having sex and smoking cigarettes and saying "so what?" She blames her image-makers for the whole virgin as sex goddess act. Perhaps somebody should sue them.

One 20-year-old woman expressed dismay at the bombardment of messages; at the conflict involved in expressing her sexuality. "We are led to believe that we can do what we want, that there is a freedom in being a sexual creature and yet there is still a double standard. There is still a stigma attached to being a promiscuous woman." Promiscuous? Now there's a word straight out of the 1950s. I blame Martha Stewart.

Last year an American study found that 97 per cent of adolescent girls believe that women should be paid equally. American demographers predict that upward of 90 per cent of young women will eventually marry. That's a rate on par with their grandmothers. As is the number who choose to identify themselves as feminists: a scant quarter.

There is, of course, no point in youth without having something to rebel against - and it's usually against whatever your parents held dear. Young women talk about watching their feminism-embracing "Superwomen" mothers try to have it all. It's not a model they're keen on replicating.

Gloria Steinem - who coined that fish without a bicycle joke - got married in 2000. At 66, she said, "it seems rebellious".

* * *

You have to wonder whether the reported death of the women's movement matters.

Rae Julian, the executive director of the Council for International Development and author of that Women's Studies article, writes that at a recent focus group for the "women's sector" carried out for a Strengthening the Community/ Voluntary Welfare Sector, the younger women involved were unable to arrive at any causes they felt would inspire wide support. And none that were unifying. "We old-timers," she writes, "felt that many of the battles had not yet been won, but it was hard to suggest a channel by which they could be promoted."

It is. But a woman in her early 20s told me that it wasn't that young women weren't talking about the "issues" long associated with feminism: they were, but in small, intimate groups. "It's not like a movement," she said, "mainly because there isn't one. We wouldn't know where to go to join."

Some of the younger women interviewed for this series said they were talking more quietly because of a perceived "backlash" against the F word. One said: "Men are sick of hearing about it - and I don't blame them."

What's there to bang on about anyway? We all know - or all men know - that women run the country. Count 'em, starting with the Prime Minister. So, did we win?

Not everyone thinks so.

There is a concern among some (female) political observers in Britain that the so-called new feminism's weakness is that in celebrating women at the top there is an automatic assumption that is better for women at the bottom. Girls can grow up to be prime ministers but can they (except if they do become prime minister) count on getting equal pay for equal work?

What on earth are we doing still asking this question?

We've had letters from men angry that we're even doing this series.

But not as angry as we got writing and researching it.

My colleague John Roughan wrote on day one of this series: "The sad thing about feminism that is locked in a 1970s pursuit of statistical equality is that it forces women into male attitudes to work."

Well, I hate to reduce a debate to the level of the toilet but if statistics tell me that women clean the bathroom, and men don't, then I find myself arguing that the pursuit of statistical equality is still valid. Funny that that pursuit hasn't forced men into female attitudes to cleaning - which, last time I looked, still amounts to work.

It's easy to make statistics look silly and trivial. Until you look at them standing on your head.

If I was a bloke, newly out in the workforce, working alongside a female colleague who had graduated at the same time, was the same age, had the same responsibilities in the workforce and I discovered that she was getting paid more than $5000 a year than me, I'd be pretty damn mad. That happens. That's what we found out doing the research for this series.

That's not just a statistic; that's a reality of the workplaces we have all fought so long and hard to make family friendly places of equal opportunity.

Has your workplace got a creche yet? Many of the young women I spoke to for this series talked about the knowledge that they would have to put their careers on hold if they were to have the children they wanted. They simply wanted to at least start off on an equal footing. After that they will shrug and, as a depressed woman demographer said, "shrug and accept that biology is destiny".

Tick, tock. So many choices, we thought; so much time. Feminism didn't prepare us for this. It's been called The Bridget Jones Syndrome. "In their prehistoric hearts," writes Professor James Tooley, author of The Mis-education of Women, "what women really want are babies and husbands."

Actually, says Dr Janet Sceats, the demographer, what women want is the "burden of family and family-building to be shared equally". And if they want their careers too, "they think 'my career's on hold and I've made the choice to do that'. Yes, they do have the choice now, and they go into it with that sort of understanding. My reaction to that is: men are not actually asked to do that." Feminism, she says, has not grappled with the issue.

We wondered what issues feminism is grappling with - because although organised feminism has been deader than the dodo for almost as long, most women we spoke to were still interested in its relevance.

Not much has changed: it's still about choice. A woman in her early 40s said: "Feminism is the right for women to make choices and the fight to make sure women's life, experiences and choices count just as much and are as authentic as men's.

"A woman should be free to choose to wear big boots and a cloak or a bikini, or dye her hair purple, or have no children, or six children, or have a serious career, or be prime minister, or dance until 3am, or pose naked in a magazine, or have sex with a different man or woman every night.

"Feminism should allow women and men freedom: not narrow our experiences. Feminism in its liberal version rather than its dictatorial version is a great philosophy delivering freedom to men and women. I think it has improved the world significantly and dramatically for men and women."

There, that wasn't too threatening now was it?

Women long ago made peace with the enemy. If we are to go by the response to our women's series a strange sea-change has taken place: some men regard all women as the enemy. Men are treated as second-class citizens, wrote one. Women have been blaming men for everything since time began, wrote another.

It's difficult to figure how drawing a picture of the status of women denigrates men - or blames them. "Even some of the male writers on the Herald are women," said a bloke on the radio. How utterly dreary it is that this is still the worst insult you can throw at a man. How dreary that we are reduced to setting out the statistics, still.

Far worse than dreary are the balaclava-wearing Australian Blackshirts who describe themselves as defenders of moral values and who stake out women's houses and shout through megaphones. These women, say the Blackshirts, are destroyers of the family, unfit mothers and, of all terrible insults, probably lesbians to boot. These women are their ex-wives and partners.

Coming our way soon, said one of them on the telly. How silly. It wouldn't do here. We'd just chase them up the street with our broomsticks, laughing.

We are not your enemy. Are you ours?

Read the rest of this series:
nzherald.co.nz/nzwomen