COULD this be right? In the lead-up to this last parliamentary sitting week, the Prime Minister found time to pen a piece in Saturday's The Sydney Morning Herald condemning James Bond as sexist? Overlooking the byline, it sure read like a screed about sexism by Julia Gillard, or her clever minders who dream up and draft these tirades.
On closer inspection, the piece headed "Sexism is forever as Bond takes a backward step" wasn't written by the PM. But it may as well have been, because this is what happens when you recklessly toss around words like sexism and misogyny. Others will mimic you and before long even the fictional 007 will incur the wrath of some re-energised feminist who watched the PM on YouTube.
Let's get one thing straight. A liberated woman can like James Bond. Indeed, you can be very liberated and like 007 very much. Humourless feminists who mock those two positions as mutually exclusive will never understand the attraction, because being a malcontent about men is too often part of their job description.
Skyfall, the 23rd Bond movie, has broken debut records across the world. Released in Australian cinemas last week, the movie commemorates the 50th anniversary of the film franchise of Ian Fleming's 007.
That alone has drawn out members of the sisterhood to mouth off at 007's misogyny. In the SMH piece, author Louise Schwartzkoff says the "biggest casualty" of sexism in Skyfall is Berenice Marlohe, who plays Severine, "an old-fashioned Bond girl in the worst sense". A victim of the Macau sex trade, "she nonetheless makes no objection when 007 slips unannounced into her bathroom, removes his clothes and joins her in the shower".
What the grumpy writer fails to mention is that Severine, draped in a sexy robe, champagne and two glasses at the ready, eagerly awaits 007's arrival. When he doesn't show, she steps into the shower. When he joins her under the steamy water, she doesn't object. I'm betting that when it comes to Bond, more women are on the same page as Severine than Schwartzkoff.
More offended by Bond getting into Severine's shower unannounced than by the immoral Macau sex trade, Schwartzkoff represents feminism at it most trivial. Alas, in an era when the latest high-school English curriculum increasingly nudges aside the study of literature in favour of farcical "multimedia texts", university academics (male and female) will, of course, write tomes about the sexism of the Bond movies.
At least the feminist gobbledegook is as hilarious as the quips and clever retorts in a Bond movie. Except that the grim-faced academics are entirely serious when they write about "the Bondian standard of normative femininity" and a "new generation of adversarial women who invite consideration alongside the fraught discourses of post-feminism".
It's little wonder, then, that fewer young women call themselves feminists these days.
If feminist critics of Bond spent their energies on bigger issues than dissecting 007 for sexist urges they might turn feminism into a more meaningful movement again. And the female warriors who slay Bond in their academic treatises don't seem to understand the first thing about that other f-word. Fun.
Every one of the Bond movies since the franchise started 50 years ago with Dr No has been a few hours of unadulterated fun. Sure, the latest Bond is open to plenty of analysis. For instance, Britain's once great past is alluded to when, hauled before a parliamentary inquiry to defend an MI6 under siege, M quotes Tennyson: "We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven."
And British historian Simon Schama has done a fine job of describing Skyfall as so "full of memories that watching it almost feels like experiencing the whole cycle of films from the time when JFK (predictably an Ian Fleming fan) and Harold Macmillan were in power, through the death pangs of the Cold War and into the age of cyber-terrorism".
But, in the end, our affection for Bond movies is simple. Men want to be Bond and women want to bed him. For a few hours we get edge-of-your-seat action, impossible glamour, stunning scenery, clever lines, wicked humour, beautiful women, flash, fast cars, bad men, not-so-bad men and, more recently and most importantly, Daniel Craig. The latest 007 exudes more raw masculinity than even his predecessors, which is something when your predecessors include Sean Connery and Roger Moore.
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that those grouchy women who deride Bond would secretly love to be a sultry Bond girl for just a while at least. Before settling down to a life of academic introspection, who wouldn't like to strap a Beretta 70 to the inside of their thigh, dress up in hopelessly tight-fitting gowns and, yes, have a naked Bond slip unannounced into their steamy shower? Come on, girls. 'Fess up. Your fantasies can't all be about being the first female chief justice of the High Court or the first female driver of a large piece of mining machinery in the Pilbara.
In any case, don't underrate the Bond girls. Full of humour, they radiate a delightfully modern mix of confidence, arrogance and sexual liberation. Who can forget Pussy Galore, the lesbian pilot, or Plenty O'Toole and Holly Goodhead? Pick any Bond girl and I'll find something more legitimately feminist about her than the Moaning Myrtles who cry sexism each time the latest Bond movie hits our screens. And then there's that Bond woman M, head of MI6, who routinely puts 007 in his place. As other women my age have remarked, when you grew up in the late 1970s watching repeats of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, the Bond girls were a refreshing break from Samantha and Jeannie.
Instead of whining that the latest Bond movie is sexist, spare a thought for the poor blokes who could air a bigger grievance. They can never hope to be Bond. Not in the 21st century, where revealing even the smallest hint of the alpha male is pounced on by puritanical feminists as a sign of uncontrolled machismo and sexism. Maybe women like me love 007 because he is the antithesis of the metrosexual men who surround us.
In fact, if Bond is sexist and millions of modern, liberated women are still being seduced by the sexy spy, maybe the sisterhood should ask whether it is somehow to blame for making him so damn alluring.
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