This is the new backlash, and I am going to keep talking about it until we sit up and take notice. It’s the co-opting of feminist language and ideals to undermine the struggle for gender equality. It’s a world where Tony Abbott, whose own words and policies reflect if not a disdain for women, then a very particular idea about the place they should hold in society, can declare himself a feminist as if that solves the riddle of his relationship to 50% of the Australian population. This backlash is one in which men can derail discussions about the despicably high murder rate of women in intimate partner homicides with, ‘But men are victims too,’ when in fact men are not victimised by women to anywhere near the same extent or in the same ways. It’s a backlash which positions the perpetrators and beneficiaries of gender oppression as peripheral, a circumstance in which investment in changing society for the betterment of all can be reduced to clicking a button and deriding any further challenges as an assault on men. And all this succeeds by positioning outspoken feminists - feminists like Greer, whose work literally changed the world in significant ways - not only as liabilities to the cause but also the true face of oppression in regards to women. It is a marvellous trick, removing responsibility for change from the beneficiaries of structural power and placing it squarely on the shoulders of the people most invested in dismantling it.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 01:27:35 +0000
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