Who cares about the sisterhood when you look cute in a keffiyeh!

Feminist author Clementine Ford speaks at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne. Picture : NCA NewsWire / Valeriu Campan

A lot can happen in nine months. In some countries (definitely not Australia) you could build a small house. A baby can go from crawling and curious to teetering around on two small feet, suddenly and terrifyingly mobile. A gangly teenage boy can become, seemingly before his parents’ eyes, a young man.

And, the most obvious of all, a woman can become pregnant and give birth.

There are five young Israeli women in their late teens who have been hostage for this length of time.

I want to remind you that in a highly disturbing video released a few months ago, their captors were filmed saying these chilling words: “These are the women who can get pregnant. These are the Zionists.” And then: “You are very beautiful.”

We don’t know if these young women are pregnant but people fear that is what has happened.

Don’t like to think about it? Neither do their parents. Neither do their siblings and friends. Neither do I. But I’m going to insist we do because somehow it feels like much of Australia and the world has become shamefully comfortable with the fact these young women are still being held hostage.

We’ve been comfortable with the obfuscation and the whataboutism that says look the other way. Well, I’m not comfortable with it. And I want to make you as uncomfortable as I can.

We know if any of these young women were an Australian citizen they’d be collateral damage. That much is clear. If Australian women were being kept hostage in Gaza, being sexually abused and paraded around for the world to see like bargaining chips, Hamas would be in receipt of a very stern word salad.

Israeli hostage Naama Levy at an unknown location during the early days of Hamas captivity.

Australia’s current government wouldn’t have the international clout or the ticker to rescue our own. It’s easy indeed to call for calm and suggest a two-state solution (that is, a reward for effort to the terrorists) when you’re safe and uninvested on the other side of the planet.

Few here outside the Jewish community speak of these young women and the other hostages any more. In the context of the ongoing dialogue about women’s safety and broader gendered violence, the most complicit in their silence are Australia’s feminists. They’ve lost their tongue when it comes to these young women. When it comes to the sexual violence of October 7 last year, the weaponisation of sex during this conflict, they’ve had nothing to say except attempting to legitimise the regime that perpetrated this evil.

Is modern feminism dead? And if not yet, why not? Surely it’s time to end the charade that is third-wave feminism. It is nothing but a frenemy at best to women.

Modern feminists in Australia and elsewhere are, by their silence and invisibility, OK with young female hostages in Gaza. They are, for the most part, invisible on Iran.

They shout “From the river to the sea” without so much of a word about what life is like for women under Hamas’s strict sharia law.

I wrote about those inconvenient truths back in December. Under sharia, and in Gaza under Hamas, a woman’s testimony is legally worth half a man’s. If she can get a divorce, she has to pay her ex-husband for it. Intra-family sexual violence is legal and justified.

As I said back then: feminists, when you’re throwing your fist in the air and yelling “From the river to the sea”, you’re championing a regime that says it’s OK for a father to rape or beat his daughter. A son is legally permitted to abuse his mother.

But none of this matters if you look cute in a keffiyeh.

Melania Trump, for example, is fair game. Her choice in husband is none of my concern but the feminist, leftist narrative around her and her marriage is laughable.

Third-wave feminists have had nothing to say on the butchering of Christian women in the Plateau region of Nigeria. And, closer to home, where have they all gone since the voice to parliament was rejected by most Australians?

The plague of family and domestic violence. Terrible, systemic disadvantage that disproportionately affects Indigenous women hasn’t gone anywhere. It has not magically disappeared because the government threw its hands up after the failed referendum. The problems are still there. The lack of virtue to signal seems directly proportional to the silence of modern feminists when it comes to all of these issues.

They pick and choose their causes and their champions. The right kind of woman versus the wrong kind.

Melania Trump, for example, is fair game. Her choice in husband is none of my concern but the feminist, leftist narrative around her and her marriage is laughable. Compare this with how Hillary Clinton is feted and adored as some kind of icon for empowered women. As if her husband weren’t caught bonking the intern in the Oval Office behind his wife’s back, then lying about it to America and the world.

One of the worst things about that whole grubby situation was that Monica Lewinsky’s life suffered the most. Where were the feminists then? Talk about a power imbalance. Bill Clinton should never have been able to show his face again. Hillary was never judged for staying in that marriage.

Gosh, it must be exhausting being consistently caught in your own hypocrisy. I could write reams about this subject. Truly, I could.

I’ve shared before that the world I grew up in was gender blind. As a child, my Nonna worked full time. My Zia too. My mum went back to work when my brother and I were closer to high school, but that wasn’t a choice made out of victimhood, it was about purpose over preference. Nobody needed to tell me women could do anything. I saw it every day. Nobody needed to tell me that choosing to be a mum for a while, then go back to work (if the circumstances of life allowed it) was a beautiful and worthy sacrifice. I saw that in my mother.

That being said, I was well aware of the huge gender and opportunity pay disparity because we spoke about it at home and as a family more broadly.

I’ve experienced that too in my previous career and have shared openly about that. I say all of that by way of context and to say gently that, to me, modern feminism has lost sight of the sacrifices women in previous generations made. It has conveniently forgotten that we ladies today, of all ages, are standing on the shoulder pads of giants. Women who went before us and fought for things of substance.

That’s not to say, well gals, this is as good as it gets. What I am definitely saying is that we must not lose sight of the fact feminism was never about picking and choosing which women were supported, heard and fought for. It was always about women being empowered to live the lives of their choosing. About saying no woman should be taken and held hostage. Not being judged for the men they marry or divorce or choose not to marry. And I will say this until I’m blue in the face. Men are not the enemy. We are better together, always.

Those young women chained up in Gaza, suffering god knows what. They are being kept prisoner. They have been held for close to a year and modern feminists at the UN, in Australia and elsewhere have shamefully turned the other way. Have become OK with it. They can protest all they like but their silence betrays them.

Modern feminism is a cheap imitation of the real thing. It’s not about equality, it’s about revenge. It’s not about women for women. It’s what infatuation is to love, what a one-night stand is to a healthy marriage. If it’s not dead yet, the sooner and the significantly better off we’ll be.