Radical feminism meets biology, sex and gender in the age of #MeToo

Alongside Germaine Greer, Beatrice Faust paved the way for women’s liberation in Australia. Today’s young women might owe her a debt of gratitude, but they would be seriously shocked by some of her views.

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Beatrice Faust, the feminist who loved sex with men, who believed that not every rape was about power, that not all pornography was bad and that not every pedophile was a monster, wouldn’t last long in today’s cancel culture.

Or would she? Faust’s belief that gender was more about biology than choice and that women had to take responsibility for the sexual signals they sent certainly would put her offside with many 21st-century feminists. Yet Faust has something to say about sex in the age of #MeToo, consent laws and sexual assault prosecutions.

The Melbourne writer and commentator, who died in 2019 at the age of 80, is not so well-known today, but in her time she was the “Germaine Greer of feminist activism”, fighting for abortion law reform, the rights of women and sex education. Faust was an outspoken advocate for women, but she was also a contrarian, regarded with suspicion by some feminists. Parts of her 1991 book, Apprenticeship in Liberty, read like a handbook for challenging today’s orthodoxies on gender and sex. And her views on gender line up with this week’s UK court judgment that a woman is a biological female.

So it is that historian Judith Brett’s new biography of the founder of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972 lands at an interesting time, when “constrained public discourse” sits unhappily with “private sexual licence”.

Says Brett: “It’s not very open and public yet, but I certainly have noticed in more private conversations this disjunction between a degree of puritanism in aspects of the public discourse, combined with a great deal of licence in other aspects of life.

“People are puzzling about that and I think some of the things (Faust) is talking about connect with things that people are thinking about now. She’s a feminist, but she’s a non-ideological feminist.”

Beatrice Faust speaking at a Sydney abortion rally in December 1975. Picture: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW and courtesy SEARCH Foundation

Indeed she is. Faust’s books and newspaper columns, her television appearances and her public lectures across 30 years from the 1970s reveal a woman who was never “fully at ease with the sisterhood”. Faust preferred the company of men and was sceptical of feminist tactics such as radical separatism. She was no puritan.

Says Brett: “She’s of the generation like Germaine Greer, coming out of a fairly conventionally repressive 1950s into a much more sexually liberal 1960s. One of the things that’s historically interesting about her is that she’s prepared to talk openly in the 1960s and 1970s about things, like admitting she had an abortion, when the public discourse was still much more constrained.”

Faust never achieved the public profile of Greer – a fellow student at the University of Melbourne – but her controversial views, her intellectual bravery and her direct political impact are about to be rediscovered thanks to Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism & Body Politics (Text Publishing).

Researched across four years by Brett, who has written prize-winning books on the Liberal Party and Australia’s second prime minster, Alfred Deakin, it retrieves the life and work of a woman whose sexual confidence and political activism led people such as Helen Garner to remark that she “was not scared of anybody”, yet who suffered self-doubt, unhappiness and depression in her private life.

Faust was born on February 19, 1939. Her mother died in childbirth and she was reared by a grandmother, a succession of housekeepers, a stepmother and her father. It was a miserable childhood, but entry to the city’s famous Mac.Robertson Girls selective high school saved her and she went on to Melbourne University and the “elite” English honours stream.

The university might have been a “man’s world” when she began there in 1957, but Faust had a grand time at the residential Women’s College. She was enthusiastic about sex, found sex easy, never lacked sexual agency and was extremely happy to say no when she cared to. To Faust, sexual pleasure was a gift and a positive life force, Brett says.

On the cover of The Digger magazine. Courtesy Phillip Frazer

Brett brilliantly re-creates the almost incestuous campus life of Melbourne University when many students lived on or near the campus or in a college. Those enrolled in honours were tight-knit and felt they were special. The course was demanding and there was an intellectual and emotional intensity in their daily interactions. Says Brett: “They haven’t got jobs, they haven’t got phones, they haven’t got cars.”

Beatrice, who was already unabashed in talking about her experiences of orgasm, earned a reputation for “free love” in the years before the contraceptive pill was available.

She also gained notoriety through her marriage in 1959 at the age of 19 to an older student, Clive Faust, a tall, charismatic poet who was regarded in the tight university cohort of the time as a catch.

Bea was only in second year and Clive was a feather in her cap; they were a celebrity couple. The marriage lasted only a year, however, and in 1965 Faust had a son, Stephen, with another partner. In 1970 she married Shane McCarthy, with that marriage enduring until the late 1980s.

Why did this trailblazer opt for marriage? Says Brett: “She comes to her girlhood in the 1950s; it’s a conservative period, it’s expected for women to marry and I think she likes the social stability of being one of a couple, and she enjoyed men’s company … Marriage was part of how you lived your life. When she decided (later) to become a freelance writer, the marriage gave her financial stability and it gave her son stability.”

In other ways, too, Faust did not fit the image of the 1970s feminist: “She liked clothes, was a good dressmaker, shaved her legs and armpits, and wore make-up … she even defended the Miss Australia contest.”

Faust had a sharp mind and had hoped for an academic career, but a relatively poor mark for her master’s thesis on Henry Handel Richardson put paid to those dreams and she spent several years teaching school before launching herself into a freelance career as columnist (including in the 1990s at The Australian), activist and television commentator, and author of five books, including Women, Sex and Pornography (1980) and Apprenticeship in Liberty (1991).

Again, Faust had hoped her work would give her the fame generated by Greer’s classic, The Female Eunuch. But Brett says she didn’t attract attention in the way Greer did “and she wasn’t as good a writer. She’s quite a good writer in her short pieces, but her books tend to be too weighed down with evidence and she didn’t have that capacity to cut through the way Germaine did.”

She was a highly intelligent woman, extraordinarily well read, and a hard worker, says Brett, but for most of her adult life she also battled various health issues as well as the psychological legacy of her mother’s death.

Beatrice Faust in her final year of school, in July 1956.

Greer might have got the academic career, but Faust’s contribution to practical change for women, through the Victorian Abortion Law Repeal Association, the Victorian Union of Civil Liberties and the WEL, marked her as a highly influential activist.

Brett unpacks the different intellectual strands in the 1970s women’s movement: “(The) WEL did not share the libertarian and utopian strands in Greer’s feminism or the revolutionary goals of the more radical end of women’s lib. It was a reformist project.

“It was not attempting to overthrow the patriarchy, revolutionise gender relations or advance socialism, but to position women’s concerns high on the mainstream political agenda and to achieve political progress.”

That willingness to stand outside the mainstream and argue the toss on issues such as biology did not help Faust when some in the Women’s Liberation Movement argued for the primacy of nurture and tried to “bring up their little boys to not ever want to pick up a gun or hit each other over the head with sticks”.

This balance between nature and nurture was at the core of Faust’s argument with second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Brett writes: “She argued the social constructions of gender are built on biological foundations. Some of the differences between men and women are grounded in biology and so cannot be explained purely as the manifestation of social roles and conditioning.”

Faust considered it was wrong to limit the importance of biology, and “when the women’s movement started mocking biology, she felt, in both her body and her mind, that it was wrong”, Brett says.

For Faust – whose own body gave her sexual pleasure from an early age (she claimed to have had an orgasm before the age of three) and who noticed as a child that other girls and women did not enjoy sex as much as she did – biology came first, culture second. Men and women, she believed, had different sexual responses based on biology, not social conditioning.

These are views that challenge many contemporary beliefs on gender fluidity and non-binary identities. What would Faust say about such concepts?

Brett argues Faust was committed to the idea of the “partial destiny of biology” and would not have tolerated the cancelling of people who questioned trans orthodoxy. “I think she would probably say that there is some sort of biological basis to people’s experience of gender dysmorphia, that it’s not just an idea or a feeling.”

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Beatrice Faust did not dismiss the seriousness of rape as a crime, but she also argued that all rapists are not the same.

f all of that is not enough to have Faust cancelled today, take a look at her views on rape and consent and sexual harassment.

Brett says: “She was sceptical that sexual relations between men and women were just or always about power. For men, she argued, sex could be just about sex. They may use power to get sex, but they do not always use sex to express power, though sometimes they do.

“She objected to feminist critiques of rape which denied there was any sexual element in the crime, and which interpreted it solely as an exercise in political violence.”

Faust distinguished between what she termed “date rape” and somebody being raped in a back alley by a stranger.

Says Brett: “She did not dismiss the seriousness of rape as a crime, but she also argued that all rapists are not the same. (She says) we have to think about difference in rapes, we’ve got to think about what’s going on in so-called date rapes, about what’s happening around consent and misunderstandings and whether or not these are best dealt with by the law.

“She wrote quite a bit about that sort of thing because she saw it as being caused by the failure of men and women, particularly when they’re young, to understand the nature of each other’s sexuality and sexual responses. She saw it as a sort of miscommunication and a failure of sexual education.

“She is much more inclined to think people should sort this stuff out for themselves and they shouldn’t go to the law – which I think a lot of younger feminists wouldn’t agree with.”

Faust was no puritan, but she argued that women had to take more responsibility for their behaviour.

Says Brett: “The idea a woman could lie naked in bed with a male and be shocked (if he were sexually aroused) was to her a sign of ignorance and miscommunication.

“I think she would say that women have got to take a lot more responsibility for the sexual signals that they send; that women have to realise this is a two-way thing, and they have to take some responsibility. That’s something which, like her views on rape, sits a bit uneasily with the position of some contemporary, younger feminists.

Author Judith Brett.

“One of the things Faust argues in Women, Sex and Pornography is that men are visually sexually aroused in a way that women aren’t, so that the way women dress … has an impact on men, that it sends out signals about sexual arousal. So it is about women taking some sexual responsibility.”

Not surprisingly, such views left Faust vulnerable to the charge that she blamed the victim and put her offside with feminists whose priority was violence against women.

So, too, did her views on pedophilia. Faust knew sex between adults and children often harmed the child, but wanted a public discussion on pedophilia based on evidence rather than what she saw as prejudice and moral panic.

She drew a distinction between protecting prepubescent children and sex involving pubescent and post-puberty children, particularly if the age gap between adult and child was not great.

Says Brett: “She’s not talking about prepubescent children, but she says you have to be able to make distinctions within this generalised category (of pedophilia) into which a lot of different types of non-consensual and consensual sexual relationships have been bundled.”

This is the most controversial area of Faust’s work and Brett says she found it very difficult to write about her subject’s reluctance to condemn pedophilia. She rewrote the chapter several times. Brett questions Faust’s use, as evidence, of her own experience of happy memories of sex at the age of 16 with a much older man. Faust was a schoolgirl and the encounters occurred in the man’s car. They did not have penetrative sex, but Faust wrote she achieved orgasm in these meetings.

Judith Brett’s new biography of Beatrice Faust.

Brett notes Faust’s lack of attention to power imbalances. “She airbrushed her image of pedophilia, generally ignoring child pornography and never fully confronting questions about the imbalance of power between children and adults … In the contest between the suffering child and the oppressed pedophile, why was she more interested in the pedophile? It was a question she never asked herself.”

Faust’s work on abortion in the 1960s and 1970s sit more happily with today’s feminists, even though she argued for legalised abortion on the basis of health rather than today’s more complex advocacy of “my body, my choice”.

Abortion reform was driven by her own experience of an abortion and her horror at the health risks, particularly for poorer women. It was an equity and access issue: even in the 1960s, if you had money you could get a safe abortion.

Fast-forward to her 1980 book, Women, Sex and Pornography, and Faust once again was the contrarian. When feminists were dismayed at how pornography degraded women and encouraged sexual violence, she was more interested in why most women didn’t like porn – and what that said about the differences in male and female sexuality.

Says Brett: “It’s one of the things she was trying to write about … the nature of women’s sexual arousal compared with men’s sexual arousal from pornography. She comes out of the generation of the 60s where we can’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where there’s a lot of censorship.

“(Her) biggest argument against pornography is that if it becomes a tool of sex education it gives boys the wrong view of women’s sexuality. She was thinking of (porn) more in terms of private use by adults, which is a very difficult subject, I think, to write about publicly.”

Brett says much of Faust’s world view seems not only old-fashioned but morally dubious to contemporary thinking. Faust, who got on well with men and enjoyed sex with them, was “too quick to ­forgive the sexual transgressions of men – may not always even have seen them as transgressions”.

Faust experienced difficult episodes in her life and her confident, authoritative demeanour in public hid a much more tortured and sometime unhappy personality.

“She had quite severe bouts of illness and for several years was ­addicted to the antidepressant ­Ativan,” says Brett. But she was proactive in her effort to address periodic depression with transactional analysis, yoga and Transcendental Meditation.

Despite her somewhat intimidating personality, Faust was kind and recognised the need to connect with people in her role as a public intellectual. For many years she was on the speakers circuit, talking to groups, including Rotary clubs, about sex education, abortion and homosexuality.

Says Brett: “She was careful to dress fairly conservatively and not say anything that would be too shocking. She’s actually interested in ­trying to communicate well and to meet people where they are.”

Fearless Beatrice Faust is published by Text Publishing on April 23.