The original post that I am disputing, regarding the status of the women's movement in Australia:
I would like to
begin my reply by thanking the original author. At the shy age of sixteen he
has the profound and incisive ability to denigrate the suggestion of the
existence of ‘gender conditioning’, calling its active deconstruction ‘boring’
and ‘senseless’.
One would be
perfectly as ease with accepting such a rebuke if it were supported by any
research, footnotes, evidence, quotations, expert opinions, or a bibliography
of any kind. Instead, there are no annotations or external references. We are expected
to take his absurdist, generalised, universalistic and obtuse (or perhaps
revolutionary, but we cannot know without evidence) statements at ‘face value’.
I’m afraid for the more discerning readers who understand the fundamental
values of the women’s movement and its modern progress, that’s not good enough.
Firstly, it does
not appear that the author has any conceptualisation of what gender
conditioning actually is. It is fair to denigrate Germaine Greer, but only with
the support of some prior knowledge, for example actually having read ‘The
Female Eunuch.’ The argument about the gendered nature of thing like the colour
pink, which has devolved to denote femininity as weak and essentially a
dichotomous counter-product of more masculine, dominant colours, first arose in
the germinal texts of the movement, which the author doesn’t appear to have
read. In order to make any valuable or valid commentary on the women’s movement
or feminism as an egalitarian ideology, it is paramount that an author has read
‘The Female Eunuch’, ‘La Deuxieme Sexe’ ecrivé par Simone de Beauvoir, ‘The
Feminine Mystique’ by Betty Friedan, and the vast collections of essays
produced by intellectual giants Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Kristeva, a
pioneer of the post-structuralist school of cultural analysis, has been
entirely discounted in this article, as though her life’s work of
deconstructing the pervasive nature of patriarchy in society has been worth
nothing. Frankly, such an assertion is a disrespect to all the great women who
fought for women’s rights to evade the small devices of oppression. Women once
had to wear binding corsets to be accepted, or have their feet bound. They were
small cultural practices, acceptable at the time, much like girls’ toys today, that
we now look upon as being horrifically repressive.
Essentially, children’s
toys groom children for the kind of people they are to be. Listening to the
legendary neuroscientist and public intellectual Sam Harris speak yesterday at
the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, he made a spectacular argument against the
existence of ‘free will’. The concept of conditioning is hence more prevalent
than ever in the scientific and sociological worlds, and hence the discussion
of early upbringing and its trappings is also more pertinent to all debates –
feminism, racism, violent behaviors – than ever. ‘Grooming’ a child is no
longer paranoid psychobabble, and for the author to assume so is to have
missed/disregarded the best of academic progress in post-structuralist,
postmodernist, sociological and feminist discourse over the last century. If a
girl is told that she is to play with ovens and mime baking goods for hours
each day, while her brother plays with construction equipment, it is no
question that she grows assimilated to the domestic environment, while her
brother is exposed to industry, mechanics, production, business, and a world of
larger ideas than that of menial domestic exploits.
In any case, the
child should have been free to choose a wider array of toys, not necessarily
pink, or relating to domesticity. The early upbringing – and this is not at all
new; it is the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis - is absolutely integral to a
child’s psychological, emotional, egoistic and physical formation. There is
great consensus in the academic community about this, and for the original
author of this article to disregard that premise as ‘senseless’ and ‘boring’ is
inexcusably juvenile.
I will now address
the more specific assertions made in the article. The idea that the women’s
movement is stagnant because it clings to Germaine Greer is completely
disingenuous, and disregards the trailblazing feminists who are actively
writing, lecturing and advocating for women’s rights in the public sphere.
Caitlin Moran, Melinda Tankard Reist, Naomi Woolf and Ariel Levy come to mind;
Levy, the author will be pleased to discover, focuses on the over-sexualisation
of children and in fact, all women – as a product of gender conditioning, which
ironically the author claims doesn’t exist. After all, how could we fight the
sexualisation of children if women and girls now have complete free will and
conditioning doesn’t exist? In such a libertarian society, wouldn’t that
constitute an infringement on their right to be sexualised or sexualise
themselves?
Feminist enclaves
do exist, and they are more common than the cultural ghettoization you referred
to in your opening paragraph. Not only are they merely evident as broad
demographics throughout many families in contemporary Australian society, but
there is an active women’s collective at all major universities in the country.
They organise rallies and talks from feminist public intellectuals and advocate
for women’s rights in all areas of life, not just what men (like the author)
decide is ‘more important’. For these groups to ignore gender conditioning at a
young age, like in your Lego example, would be inconsistent with feminist and
universal sociological discourse, and a bizarre anomaly in their ideological
predisposition. Furthermore, it is done for the public advancement and good.
The ‘cohesive
message’ has remained largely static since the first wave of the suffragettes –
women want equality and equal opportunity. They do not yet have this equality.
And until we have it in all areas of life, and generations pass under such an
egalitarian world, patriarchal privilege will not be diminished. Though men are
often not informed enough to understand their roles as historical oppressors,
this does not discount the premise that they are in a broad societal sense
possessors of that patriarchal privilege. It will be a long time before
physical, economic and social inequalities are entirely diminished, and even
longer after that until the countless psychological inequalities may be.
However, to say the
feminist movement has no other advocates beside Germaine Greer is borderline
absurd. Many of the most vocal feminists in public life guard their ideology in
positions of power – the Governor General Quentin Bryce and the Australian Sex
Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, come to mind.
After having
furnished my argument with various feminists throughout history and active in
modern Australian and global society, I find it almost amusing that the
original author thinks he knows better, and that he can order the movement to
do what it ‘must do’. The imperative is misguided at best and sexist at worst.
The theoretical premise of this article would have been completely different if
the author had a basic understanding of the sociological constructs broadly
accepted by the academic community for decades – those of Freudian
psychoanalysis and the impact of early environment on the child,
post-structuralist analysis of accepted ‘feminine’ values like domesticity, and
the combination of these two disciplines to deconstruct sociological
conditioning – which exist at the fundamental level of feminist discourse. If
one is unaware of these concepts, one is at liberty to make expansive,
generalised comments and imperative statements about the women’s movement’s
future – but one shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously.
