In Sydney on Saturday evening, Monica Lewinsky said the pendulum on sex, consent, power and feminism was still swinging. She is certainly right that some think it has swung too far. One can only hope that she is also right that “it will probably eventually find its place, but wherever it stops, it will be different from where it was before”. Hope being the operative word here.
As the ABC’s Q&A feminist panel displayed a week earlier, feminism has lots of growing up to do before it is remotely of service to hundreds of millions of women outside a little clique of globetrotting barkers and blowhards.
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Lewinsky bore the brunt of that swinging pendulum in the late 1990s when she was mercilessly shamed as the randy intern who had an affair with US president Bill Clinton. It didn’t help that she kept her unwashed blue dress as a memento of oral sex in the Oval Office.
Watching the female show-offs on Q&A try to out-do each other with outlandish comments, no one in any real disagreement with one another, I recalled another group of big-talking women behaving equally foolishly two decades earlier. In late January 1998, 10 high-profile women met in a private room at the swank Le Bernardin restaurant in mid-town Manhattan where author Francine Prose moderated a discussion about the “guy who loves women too much”.
Among the highbrow women quaffing wine were Erica Jong, famous for her “zipless f..k”; author Nancy Friday; Saturday Night Live writer Patricia Marx; Elizabeth Benedict, who wrote The Joy of Writing Sex; another author, Katie Roiphe; and restaurant owner Maguy Le Coze.
Summing up their discussion, one headline announced that these “New York Supergals Love That Naughty Prez”. It should have said “Revolting Feminists Desert Lewinsky”. Here is a precis of what they said. Marx said she liked Clinton even more because of this scandal, adding that all her friends would be happy to have sex with Clinton and not talk about it.
Another wondered whether, given the stained dress, the president wore a condom because “I think that the President should be more or less ready”. Benedict said “no one is aggrieved here” — not Monica, not Bill, not Hillary. “The only person who cares is Ken Starr.”
This is “every girl’s dream”, she added. “You can be the President, but you can f..k the President too.”
Roiphe asked why feminists sided with Anita Hill, the young woman who made claims of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas because he made a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can, but have turned their backs on Lewinsky. The answer was all about politics: one said she “wanted Clarence Thomas out of there … whereas I don’t want Clinton out of there”.
These women, who symbolised modern feminism back then, laughed about “little Monica”, wondered aloud about her “third-stage gum disease”, sneered that “Monica Lewinsky’s not that pretty”, and made fun of “Monica’s 21-year-old-ness”.
Many noted that men were far tougher on Clinton than were women, with one woman deducing that men “feel guilty about their own behaviour, and so they project their own guilt on him”.
Two decades later, feminists have swung behind Lewinsky but feminism remains a movement for a small clique of attention-seekers, more performers than principled advocates for other women. Feminist dogma may have changed, but the cliquey in-crowd snobbery remains the same.
When the ABC’s Q&A program provided a platform for “high-profile feminists” it harked back to the Manhattan soiree 20 years earlier. In a performance every bit as attention-seeking as those New York women who salivated over dissing Lewinsky as a tramp in 1998, Egyptian-born author Mona Eltahawy relished spitting out the F-word over and over again while advocating violence against men.
Just as no one in that chic New York restaurant challenged the feminist orthodoxy that Clinton was just having a bit of harmless fun, no one disagreed with Eltahawy when she said: “How many rapists must we kill until men stop raping us?” Were they afraid to disagree, or did they agree? Either way, this is not feminism, it is women chasing celebrity.
A rational feminist, not to mention a well-prepared host, would have pushed back against Eltahawy’s rehearsed schtick taken from her latest book that women must harness “necessary sins” — of anger, attention, ambition, power, profanity, violence and lust.
The problem is not, as ABC managing director David Anderson said, that the show was “provocative in regard to the language used and some of the views presented”. The problem is that a program aimed at showcasing “high-profile feminists” was a chorus line-up of women agreeing with each other. It’s not just boring, it is puerile. And it certainly isn’t the kind of feminism that resonates with millions of women who don’t sit on a Q&A panel.
Given that Q&A host Fran Kelly admitted a week later that she should have pushed back while moderating the discussion, why didn’t she say something soon after the program aired? Why did Kelly — and ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose, who pulled the program from ABC platforms — act only after hundreds of people complained? Principled feminism is not being intimidated by a group of big-talking women, or men, and only standing up after complaints flood in.
And that’s the other telltale sign that modern feminism lacks maturity. While it has settled on a new orthodoxy that backs young women against powerful men, it remains as bossy and doctrinaire as it was in the 1990s. Back then anyone who criticised Clinton for abusing his power over a young intern must have been guilty about their own behaviour or else a political patsy for Starr, the man appointed to investigate whether Clinton perjured himself when he denied having sex with Lewinsky.
It was bad enough when men presumed to speak for women. Today’s feminists who brook no disagreement have become the new patriarchy, mimicking a far worse form of female narcissism and arrogance.
If you raise misgivings about #MeToo, you are a dubbed a dupe for men who abuse women. If you are Margaret Court, under no circumstances will you be celebrated for being the world’s best female tennis player — unless you toe the line on same-sex marriage, or at least keep your views on traditional marriage to yourself.
If you disagree with female quotas for women in the boardroom, expect to be met with seriously shallow claims that you must not like women very much. It points to the poor quality of reasoning behind quotas, and other feminist issues. It is not difficult to understand that women who oppose female quotas have enormous respect and admiration for women who don’t want or need special favours to succeed. But doctrinaire feminists pushing quotas are not interested in reasoned debate, let alone disagreement. It might explain why it is harder to find inspiration in domineering women clamouring daily for a leg-up based on their chromosomes. Their phony feminism doesn’t suit rational, freethinking women.
Is this really what suffragettes fought for? The right, in the 21st century, to be told what to think by feminists? The pendulum may have swung, but only between different, equally unbending, feminist dogma.