Any skilled bullshitter knows that, in order to effectively hoodwink people, you sneak the bullshit into a truth sandwich. Presumably Sydney Morning Herald columnist Parnell Palme McGuinness also knows this, because over the weekend she blamed “boomer feminists” for rape culture.
“Rape culture” (yes, in scare quotes) she says, “is a consequence of boomer failure to review the progress of the revolution.”
She got a couple of things right. We are in a transformational feminist moment. And it is entirely correct to point out that the spoils of female empowerment have not been evenly distributed. But those morsels of truth are not enough to disguise the rot within.
Let’s review.
Bullshit #1: It takes a special kind of internalised misogyny to blame boomer feminists for rape culture. As though feminism is some sort of corporation that failed to meet its KPIs.
Feminism was, and is, a work in progress — an ever-evolving movement that is railing against the status quo and rallying for change.
Saying that feminism didn’t save every woman is like blaming Luke Skywalker for Han Solo’s death without mentioning the Galactic Empire.
Bullshit #2: The next instalment of codswallop is McGuinness arguing that feminism meant some women “went from being chattels to commodities”.
It’s quite hard to digest that word salad. Did women go from being owned to being traded? Did they become fungible?
Bullshit #3: On we wade through the mire, to McGuinness’ claim that the sexual revolution “swept away … centuries of tradition about the right and wrong way for men and women to interact”.
It was a simpler time when those centuries of tradition made it legal for a man to rape his wife, when those centuries of tradition made it commonplace that a woman was considered responsible for her own rape, when those centuries of tradition made women chattels. Or commodities. Or whatever.
McGuinness did say she was “not sorry to see more of [these traditions] go”, but complains about the “void” left behind. Hm. It’s so all so complicated now that women (theoretically) get to say “no”!
Bullshit #4: “Thanks to the birth control pill, women and men can be free of the biological consequences of sex. But sex still has consequences we are looking for ways to express.”
Here’s one of the lovely things about today, thanks to feminism (and medical science): sex doesn’t have to have consequences. Sex can just be a frolic. Thanks to the birth control pill (and other devices) women can control their own fertility and can enjoy sex that is consciously uncoupled from procreation.
Sure, talking about consent can be complicated. But is it really more complicated than the “centuries of tradition” when no one talked about consent at all?
Bullshit #5: This is next-level steaming guano. McGuinness laments that once women had access to birth control, marriage rates dropped, and more women “forwent” children. And then lamented the lack of those children.
Let’s try the counterfactual. McGuinness suggests that giving women freedom, control over their ovaries, and the right to not get raped (even within marriage) meant that some women didn’t have as many kids as they might have liked.
What’s the other option? That women should be forced into marriage and procreation, denied birth control, and that somehow they would be happier?
Bullshit #6: McGuinness laments the backlash against the Me Too movement. She points to a US study that found some men are more reluctant to hire women because they fear false accusations of sexual assault. And another that found people are just as concerned about false accusations as they are about actual assaults.
Most people would interpret that as proof companies need more women in leadership, more education on consent, more breaking down of big swinging dick cultures. And they would point out the rarity of false allegations. But McGuinness sees it as an indictment on women.
Silly women, complaining about men raping them. Don’t they realise that other women have sons and might not like the suggestion that their sons might be rapey?
What a crock. Those studies show the need for more feminism, not less.
This abhorrent, multi-layered baloney has been served up just as tens of thousands of women prepare to take to the streets to voice their anger about all the ways in which women are infantilised, minimised, raped, assaulted, ignored, dismissed, gaslit and more.
There’s no hiding the fact it’s a shit sandwich.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit1800RESPECT.org.au.
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What can one say about Parnell. As a 70+ woman who has watched her on the ABC on Sunday mornings and The Drum, I can only concur that she is full of bull shit. My Methodist mother is turning in her grave at my language!
I often wonder how Parnel McGuiness gets any air or print time . She is really stupid
I just assumed that she inherited her father’s column?
And now much of her incessant print and TV output, is dedicated to whining about how conservative voices like hers, are being mercilessly silenced by cancel culture.
That she gets a seat on The Drum from time to time is indicative of how much the ABC has been cowed by the Illiberal and Country Parties.
She’s just another regular that won’t embarrass Baird and Fanning by contradicting them.
That predominance of conservative commentators and politicians : compared to those in this fields from the left is laughable – especially on the face of those alt-right charges to “ABC left bias” – they want to drown out all alternative opinion and critique (as the get from Stokes, Murdoch and Costello’s Nein News).
Murdoch only has ‘fluffers’ on to “balance” their bread and butter alt-right sales drives.
Don’t watch The Drum anymore, too they get stuck or stereotyped with often presenting sociocultural issues that then make them a target of the right (and guests include too many political PR grifters of the right).
However, at least Fanning could control or hold many guests to account while Baird (sister of former Lib NSW Premier) could not and they would interrupt and speak over her.
Wonderful. You really have to wonder why the 2 female editors of The Age and SMH chose to publish this ‘shit sandwich’. If they couldn’t see how ludicrous the arguments she was making it were really calls into question their competence as editors. Same goes for the ABC actually. How many more times do we have to suffer someone as far out of their depth on The Drum as Parnell?
I thought it was a pretty useful, acute and even-handed article from McGuinness. I think the issue may be that this is not what most progressives and, at least,,many women want right now.
Which kind of suggests that what many women want right now is somehow unreasonable. I dare you to spend the next week presenting that argument to every woman you meet. Do come back and tell us how warmly you were received.
I meant that measured debate is not what the moment is about. As for what women want, presumably it’s to be not killed, raped, sexually assaulted or harassed by men. Doubt anyone wouldn’t agree with that. But the hard bit isn’t the what, it’s the how. The underlying current of McGuinness’s arguments is just that: let’s update and rethink the program. She is IMO right to say that feminism has mostly benefited an extraordinarily narrow cast cohort of women. Relatively slim pickings in feminism for you if you happen (for example) to be socially conservative, religious, sexually abstemious, a homemaker, non-Western (especially Indigenous Oz), working class, employed by News Limited or named Bettina, Peta, Miranda, Rita, Amanda…or, self-evidently, Parnell.
She’s not the first to make that observation, but she didn’t have to posit a bunch of BS. Highlighting the material circumstances of women in non-Western nations and that there’s not been a huge amount of campaigning for them (or at least for their autonomy) would have made more sense. Those better acquainted with the history and practice of feminism can judge whether that’s true. For the same reason, I have nothing to say about a couple of your categories.
Not sure what you mean by socially conservative, but, as an example, no woman who believed in marriage or “the family” became less married or less able to support her family because others had different aspirations.
No woman was ever denied her religion because others chose to eschew it. Except maybe in those places where people are not free to worship as they choose, and that ain’t where the feminism McGuiness was complaining about resides.
No woman was ever forced to have sex because other women wanted to. On the other hand, women being forced put up with blokes’ bad behaviour, including sex they don’t want, is kind of what this has all been about, isn’t it?
No woman was ever denied homemaking because others had different aspirations. You might argue that those who suggested they were complicit in their own oppression were over-egging the pudding (see what I did there?), but even the latter weren’t raiding suburbia to pull those women out of it.
What a list! It’s time they checked their white privilege, except maybe Rita, whom I suspect is in for a rude shock when the white surpremacists she sucks up to no longer find her useful.
“…including sex they don’t want, is kind of what this has all been about, isn’t it?”
I agree, there is an unhealthy voyeurism would around a lot of the strongly religious, and conservative older males.
And obviously early middle aged conservative females. 😉
I think there’s a typo in there, but I suspect you might have some sympathy for the late Christopher HItchens’ attitude to the rabidly religious.
I agree with you.
Ethel I suspect you may be pre-feminist. So you didn’t mind that women weren’t allowed bank loans to buy a house even though they were the bread winner?
No. I really mind. It is just that the women many of the benefits have been targeted towards women who want to have a career.
Some women want to be wives and want to be mothers or even if they don’t want it, they are wives and mothers.
Many people who would love to protest, can’t do so because they are too busy looking after the children.
These women’s needs are ignored: housewives, victims of domestic violence and particularly low socio-economic, migrant, black and single mothers.
I think I agree with your useful and acute. She is not stupid and like PP McGuinness she does clever provocation. He began with Marxism and anarchism before moving sharply to the right. That’s why he could push buttons and serve up critique of the left. This is quite different to what is plied by the dullards and dolts of the Murdoch columns, who show no signs of any reading or critical engagement, for them it’s all just the usual prejudices reheated.
For example, when McGuinness talks about women going from chattels to commodities, she is riffing on a Marxist Feminist critique about the way the sexual revolution and women’s liberation were subverted to capitalist power structures, taboos on sexuality, and the binaries of decent women and whores were replaced with women’s bodies being converted into commodities and females’ sexuality was presented as either being really male or inclined to a desire to please males. Porn industry anyone? Of course, the conservative take on this turns liberation into being just this loss (for some women), rather than seeing it as one of the setbacks that subsequent waves of feminism are now taking on using the same logic that smashed through traditional patriarchy grounded in religion and other pre-modernities.
As a conservative would, McGuinness dwells on what has been lost without applying the lens that sees what was as deeply flawed. What was good in it, for example, some conceptual notion that men lacking self control around (some) women was bad (Mr Darcy take a bow) is actually not abandoned by feminism, Rather the feminist project replaces it with a stronger, universal norm, grounded in equality of respect, this is the point she is not elaborating. Yet this is the direction to go in, not a lamentation for the largely fictional 1950s.
Likewise, it is true that marriage and birth rates have dropped, a reflection of liberation in education and choice. But also in response to the persistent double burden on women and capitalism responding to women in the workforce through increases in costs and holding down wages. The idea that the single average wage would support a family is now a joke for most. The conservative laments what (some) women have lost and forgets the costs and power imbalance it was built on. The feminist perspective continues the logic of liberation to unveil and attack how capitalism and patriarchy have worked to co-opt and use women’s liberation against them.
In provoking such analysis McGuinness is useful.
Yes, but McGuiness would have been more useful if she’d made an analysis such as yours.
…Only if the feminist DOES continue the logic of liberation, though, AP7. I’m far from convinced ghats part of the project anymore. To me the narcissism of contemporary feminism seems to focus evermore intensely on the very narrow cohort that has driven/led it almost exclusively into the identity politics areas of personal gender equality and sexual crime. Like political engagement more broadly, Feminism now seems to be largely a leisure activity of the (relatively) well off, tertiary educated, upper middle class, Information Professions. I certainly see no real evidence that the women marching today are especially interested in, for example, racial equality, or economic equality (save for the transactional privilege of ‘pay equality’…important, legitimate, but NOT part of the project/logic of liberation. Unless you regard securing gender equality in obscene Executive or Hollywood pay packets a radical ambition.)
Me, I long for the day when those tens of thousands of angry, capable women we saw today turn their considerable firepower away from their own small scale narcissistic ends, and back onto the big political fights. It is, after all, in winning seismic change in the latter that we’ll best and profoundly secure seismic change in the former. You make the world fairer and safer for everyone by making it fairer and safer for the most vulnerable first and foremost. The cohorts marching today were a long, long, long way from being those.
Your own are brilliantly provocative insights too btw, AP7, chrs.
But women are probably sick of trying to save the world, and instead have decided to save themselves.
Yeah but it is hard saving yourself with five children at home and a wife beating husband. Sometimes a woman needs some help.
Thanks for the reply and the compliment Jack. I hear what you are saying and feel your anger but I think you are seeing it more negatively than it is. Yes, nearly all feminists from at least the second wave on, come from the tertiary educated middle classes, education is a road to liberation, enlightenment and empowerment after all. But I don’t know many feminists (or women who aren’t feminists for that matter) who don’t have concerns for women of colour, women in poverty, poor working conditions and other disadvantages based on, or compounded by, their gender.
There has always been the critique of middle class or bourgeois feminism and its limitations. Other equality movements, such such as those for blacks in America face similar criticisms. But often this criticism and splitting is of more use to, and given more prominence by, those who oppose the movement as a whole.
I would also like to see the energy that comes from the the relative freedom, capability and wealth of the “knowledge class” brought to bear on the bigger political issues of inequality. But I also think, what could be bigger for women than the constant occurrence of sexual assault, rape and murder because they are women. And the indifference men (especially men in power) show to this. In my view that is at the heart of the current protest and who could argue against it? Apart from Scotty and the Coalition of course. Who don’t so much argue as deny and deflect.
Yes.
I haven’t read it, because I don’t read the Australian, but I do know that when women fought for certain things they were fighting for things they wanted.
The mothers were too busy at home looking after the children.
As a result there is no respect for having children or being a wife anymore. Childbirth, child rearing has lost all importance. There is no gravitas given to mothers and wives are mocked.
Hopefully one day, maybe after we stop being killed and beaten at home by our husbands, mothers will be included in the gains.
Julia Gillard did a great misogyny speech. But also cancelled the sole parent pension for thousands of women who had been grandfathered when the Liberal government cancelled it for applicants with a child over 6, regardless how many children you have, forcing them on to JOBSEEKER which is half the amount and has job seeking requirements. I would have thought she would have brought it back. Not jumped on the coattails of LNP men who would rather give all our money to people with investment properties.
Is it true that the last person willing to help a woman with children is a childless career woman? Is the attitude: Why should they pay for those idiots who won’t just get an abortion?
A bit sad.
I think we should admit that many gains did not help women from religious and low socio-economic groups with children. After all, women die and get beaten every day. And the police probably say the same thing to them that Scott Morrison said to the protesters: “well you are lucky we didn’t shoot you all!” In other words: you should be grateful.. things were much worse before! Geez.
Yes, I’ll always find it hard to treat the ‘misogyny’ speech with much respect. It wasn’t even a particularly good piece of rhetoric, but stripping away single mothers’ practical independence like that at more or less the same time completely hollowed it out.
I’m not so sure motherhood has been devalued by the feminist revolution. Being ‘just’ a wife and homemaker I think definitely has. But what feminism has done to motherhood is make it more stratified and class delineated than it’s ever been. If you are in the professional, tertiary educated, working mum Info Class cohorts I mentioned above – the women who have driven the modern feminist focus on violence, rape, gender parity – then I think motherhood is far more different now in comparison to other women than in the past.
I was a stay at home dad for five years and then I spent eight years as a nightshift disability carer. There are no ‘gender pay gap’ or ‘identity-focussed ’ issues in those ends of the workforce spectrum (everyone is paid crap and treated like lower beings, no one has any power or increasingly any representation or recourse, as atomised, casual work becomes the norm). It’s a very female dominated sector…so a speech like Gillard’s, or even to some degree the fuss lately over how ‘horrific’ it is for women who have to suffer the ‘terrible sexual harassment landscape’ of the Parliament in which she gave it, can just seem totally disconnected. I once saw my shift co-worker throw a coffee cup at a TV, when there was a news item on about an MP breast-feeding in Parliament. She wasn’t primarily p*ssed off about the usual grumpy old male discomfort (though that too). What she was truly angry at was the huge disparity in modern motherhood privileges, and the talking heads consensus that this was the cutting edge of the modern feminist struggle.
Agreed. Gillard’s cancellation of the pension was appalling. It is the children that suffer, not the budget.
Even worse than backstabbing Wilke.
Not as many kids as they might have liked? How about those who had no control over their ovaries and ended up with more kids than they liked? (Some of whom died or starved.)
I’m going to risk being flamed by saying I’m starting to believe that giving or adopting non-names (“ABCD”), surnames (“Parnell”, “Sharman”, “Tucker”) and misspelled names (“Michaelia”) out of a desire that your children be “different” confers on them a special kind of stupid.
I’m with you on this one.
The number of times I have been introduced to children with “her/his name is Glambags, its spelled with a “q”” and kept a straight face, I would dread to count. 😉
I take it you were the one (trying to?) keep a straight face.
At least Frank Zappa had a sense of humour about it!