If you were asked to dream up an annual event to take the piss out of feminism, to infuse it with puffery and strip it of sincerity, then International Women’s Day is it. This year’s annual day for women advanced the profile and celebrity of a small coterie of privileged women, but did nothing to advance the cause of greater freedom, or equality, or choices for other women.
Consider the dreary line-up in the modern woman’s bible, Vogue, and at other women’s events during that week. How do other women benefit from hearing Liberal turncoat Julia Banks repeat, over and over again, the same gripes minus any evidence about her dreadful time as a Liberal MP? How does it advance other women to see another photo shoot from Julie Bishop parading her clothes and her indignation that her own colleagues rejected her as leader?
How does it serve women to hear another Labor politician, replete with schadenfreude, telling us what a difficult time it has been for Liberal women, being bullied and all? Evidence? Episodes? Dates? Names? None. Where is the value-add from Greens MP Sarah Hanson-Young telling us to “listen and support those speaking out and hold the bullies to account”? We have listened, ad nauseam. But women lose credibility when they provide no evidence to support their bullying claims.
Credibility nosedives further when these apparently strong women complain only after their careers have nosedived. Are these the best role models Vogue and other IWD groupies can muster for young women? IWD turned into international women’s week, with Bishop then engaging in schoolgirl pointscoring at Tony Abbott’s expense, taking aim at him about shirt-fronting Putin and climate change. Female advancement would get a terrific boost if women did more than jump in front of a camera to declare their moral virtue by poking fun at men.
Personal jibes might titillate Bishop’s audience, but turn the tables to check how far their humour reaches. If Abbott attended a blokey event and mocked Bishop’s tottering-heels diplomacy or her propensity for taking selfies with Hollywood starlets, would the same audience laugh along? Respect is a two-way street.
It says something about 21st-century feminism in Australia that IWD events are filled with women who make headlines for virtue-signalling and griping. Where, at those IWD events, are the brilliant scientists? Or the remarkable teachers who inspire their younger charges? What about a fine nurse who cares for the sick and the aged? Where is the small businesswoman who works tirelessly and has accrued lots of life lessons for other women who may choose that path? Where is the voice of a woman who can beautifully articulate why she paused her career for the complicated, delicious pleasure, and pull-your-hair-out reality, of caring for her children?
Where is the feminism that celebrates women’s choices? And where, for goodness sake, are the quiet-achieving female politicians? Those who do the hard policy work for other women, lobbying for example, for money, research and other real outcomes for women’s health?
Liberal politicians Nicolle Flint and Nola Marino are two. Real feminists, they have demanded improved policies for women’s health in the partyroom. In her October 2017 speech in parliament, Marino spoke in detail, every bit of it painful and personal, about her daughter’s terrible ordeal with endometriosis. Years of wrong diagnoses, worsening, shattering pain, surgery after surgery. Her daughter almost died.
This is gritty feminism. When Marino and Flint lobbied Health Minister Greg Hunt about the scourge of endometriosis, he said: “What can I do to help?”
Together, these two women and Hunt worked to secure tangible outcomes to raise awareness and provide programs to educate girls and women, so they do not suffer in silence. Money to better educate GPs too, because this serious clinical condition is often waved away as bad period pain. More money for research.
Flint again, this time with senator Jim Molan, worked assiduously to secure better outcomes for women around the tragic issue of stillbirths. There are 2200 stillbirths a year, more than the national road toll. Flint and Molan lobbied Hunt, and soon enough there was $3 million for programs to better educate women, a national action plan on still birth covering clinical management and care, and more than $4m for further research. This is real feminism.
And this too. Notice that it was a male health minister who, for the first time, developed substantial policies to help women with endometriosis. In fact, no minister, male or female, has done more for women’s health than Hunt, from breast cancer to ovarian cancer to eating disorders and a 10-year plan to improve women’s health.
Banks, challenging Hunt in his Victorian seat of Flinders, is the poster girl for a very different kind of feminism. Banks chairs an informal group, the Parliamentary Friends of Women’s Health, yet her record on tangible outcomes for women’s health is threadbare.
No, she was not the federal health minister. But neither are Flint or Marino, yet they secured real results for women. Banks is easily mistaken for a passenger politician, rising in parliament to commend the work of others rather than personally lobbying a minister about a pressing health issue for women. Banks says an awful lot but has done little on this front.
The measure of your conviction is what a woman in politics does for other women when she has the chance. “If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman,” Margaret Thatcher once said. The Iron Lady would not be welcome at IWD because she said so little about feminism. Instead, she lived women’s empowerment.
It is phony conviction too when high-profile women, only once they are out the door, signal their support for getting other women into politics. Malcolm Turnbull, this applies to you too. If you don’t do it when you’re there, there is no feminist cred proclaiming support when you’re gone.
IWD inflicts further brand damage on feminism by applying double standards to excoriate men. There was not a skerrick of intellectual rigour when a woke feminist at the online forum Mamamia went wild on IWD, accusing Scott Morrison of delivering the “worst International Women’s Day speech in the history of forever”. The Prime Minister said “we’re not about setting Australians against each other, trying to push some down to lift others up … That’s not in our values … you don’t push some people down to lift some people up.”
Woke women said nothing when women expressed similar sentiments. Speaking about gender equality, Minister for Women Kelly O’Dwyer rejected the idea that “girls doing well must mean that boys do badly”. Around IWD former PM Julia Gillard tweeted that “if we can talk about how gender equality gives everybody more choices and more options, then it can be more inclusive”.
IWD has become an annual reminder that limelight-seeking women are not always, or even often, the best role models for women. And the groupies around IWD are a modern-day version of the dullards in that Danish fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In our version, it is an empress, of course. But the plot remains the same. Whereas her obsequious subjects are too cowardly to speak the truth about the naked empress, in case they are cast out from court, it takes the honesty of a single child to shout out that the empress is wearing no clothes.
Some of us prefer our feminism straight up, on the rocks, so to speak. That means no sugary additives to hide the hypocrisy, no empty words to hide inaction, no special favours to advance those who can’t make it without a leg up, and no Julie-come-lately epiphanies about suddenly supporting women. And please God, none of those tedious navel-gazing panel sessions where whiny, privileged women talk about themselves while pretending to further the cause of other women.
Let March 8, 2020 come and go quietly with no grandstanding female politician to be seen.
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