good afternoon, and welcome to the first session todayat the festival of dangerous ideas. i'm ann mossop,from the sydney opera house. i'm one of the curatorsof the festival. and it's a great pleasureto see you here today. if any of you are going to be skivingoff to the grand final later on, we forgive you in advance but very gladthat you've made time to be here. today, we have a wonderful sessionahead of us with germaine greer,
the title - 'how many dangerous ideascan one person have?' last year, for the first time,we had a session along those lines with michael kirby, and i had initially thought,"this is gonna be quite difficult. "how do you make a whole lot of ideasfit into one session?" and having seen that session, we thought it wassuch an interesting thing to do that we wantedto do it this year. but, of course,when you're thinking about people
who have the ability to do that, to have that sense of so muchof a contribution to public debate on a range of issues,there are very few. and germaine greer, of course,is one of those and, you know, the best choice,i think, to be able to do that, as someone who's had a tremendouslylong and distinguished career, not only as a writer and thinkerand contributor to the world of ideas but as someone who has beenchallenging, polemical and fearless and who has not only writtenand thought and taught
but also never hesitated to bringideas to life in the public arena - you know, from all kinds of mediato stages like this - and somebody who hasthat real ability to communicate difficult ideasin a way that not only makes us think but also makes us laugh... ..laugh, cry, you know,argue with our neighbours, so i'm sure that's allgonna happen today. i feel like in some ways,to a hometown audience, germaine greer is somebodywho doesn't need an introduction,
but i think it's importantfor us to remember that she's somebody who has madesuch an extraordinary contribution to the world of ideasin a number of ways. obviously, a book like'the female eunuch' defined a whole era of feminism, and that was followed by a seriesof tremendously important books that perhapsare not as well known, from 'sex and destiny' to'the change' and 'the whole woman', books that look atnot only women's lived experiences
but the politics,all of the issues that affect different aspectsof women's lives. she's also written a lotabout art, artists - whether it's women artists in hersecond book, 'the obstacle course', women poets in a book,'slipshod sybils' - but also, of course, as a biographerof a woman like anne hathaway in her more recent book,'shakespeare's wife'. of course, she has hada distinguished academic career at the universities of warwick,at the university of tulsa, oklahoma,
at cambridge university... ..and in recent yearshas written on a number of things that are of particular interestand relevance in australia. her books...her essays, 'on rage' and other essays about theexperience of aboriginal australians, and there is a bookabout the rainforest where she currently spendsmuch of her time that will, hopefully,be coming out sometime next year. so...
germaine greer'sone of the few intellectuals of that kind of stature, who combines that contributionwith polemical public debate, the subjectof an unauthorised autobiography, appearing on film a couple of yearsago in fictionalised form, apparently disagreeably to her. but someone whose... we not only have a sense of her workbut of her life, that we've followed her careerfor such a long time,
so i'm very much looking forwardto finding out which of her many dangerous ideaswe're gonna hear about today, and there will be timeat the end of the session for questions and discussions...questions and discussion from you. as always, we have microphones placedin the auditorium. and at a certain point, i'll ask youto come down and ask those questions. as ever, we ask you to be considerateof your audience members and of our guest by making the questions short,to the point
and something that actuallymay have an answer. (laughter) so... i look forward... i must say, last night -those of you who were here - i have to say congratulations,audience. your questionswere absolutely brilliant. so the audiencesat the festival of dangerous ideas have turned me from somebodywho found discussion and interaction, you know,something where i thought,
"well, actually,i want to hear from the speaker" to somethingwhere i'm waiting, really, to find outwhat you're going to say. so please join me in welcomingto the stage germaine greer. (cheering and applause) well, thank you for that,and thank you, ann. i'm now going to be ungracious,which is exactly what you expect. it's ann who's convinced that i havea number of dangerous ideas. my instructions are to delivera socially explosive,
cerebrally seductive session in which i call the shotson everything. now, if i were to characterisethis guff as guff, i could be saidto be calling a shot. i think the expression'calling a shot' originally meantinstructing the artillery on the range that they should useto attack the enemy. i'm repelled by the very ideaof calling a shot, even supposingthat you were sitting there
behind anti-aircraft weaponsor something of the sort. the guff includes the assertion that i am a significant writer,thinker and agent provocateur. i'm certainly a writer. i write for a living.i'm a hack. i spend a lot of time thinking - a lot of it in circles,it seems to me - but i have never, everbeen an agent provocateur. it has never been my... you mustunderstand what the word means.
it doesn't mean 'to upset people'. agents provocateurdon't upset people. they actually inspireand organise riots. no riot anywhere in the worldhas ever been instigated by moi. no ambassador has been incineratedby my order. at a festival of dangerous ideas,you should at least recognise the most dangerous ideas. jihad is a truly dangerous idea. now, i've been instructed as wellto cover
some of the many dangerous ideasthat i have spoken and written about in the course of my career. now, ann clearly feels quite safein telling me to do this. so she obviously considers mea pussycat. i must address my dangerous ideaabout the beauty of boys. i would agree that the beauty of boyscan be dangerous, often to the boys themselves, but not that it is dangerousto point out that the female body was neverthe central object of beauty
in european graphic art. it's a question of art history. and as we grew up being toldthat the female body had been objectifiedand used in art, rather than the male,it was simply wrong - it's a mistake. it's not what happened. historyis more interesting than that. it's a bit like afghanistan,where the dancing girls are boys. when women of all ages, from 8 to 80,save up to go to a westlife concert and scream themselves hoarse,
the phenomenon is real -it's obvious - and louis walsh has madea pretty good fortune out of working onthat particular susceptibility. it's a real and interesting aspectof women's sexuality that when given the choice,they'll go for the boy. now, when it comes to rage, possibly the most painfuland difficult book i've ever done was 'on rage', but rage is not an idea.
rage is a phenomenon,and rage is dangerous. rage kills people. my essay 'on rage' got me calleda sexist and a racist by somebody whom i love dearlyand whom i respect, which was very painful, but it was another caseof the elephant in the room. i was trying to show howaboriginal men's rage is killing them and how it's being wrought on the women and childrenin their communities.
it was looking at the interventionfrom another angle. i was the messenger. it wasthe message that spoke of danger. and here we are stillunable to explain why so many young aboriginal peopleare rejecting whitefella values. it's called resistance. i've tried hard to showhow false conscience, denial and corrosive guilteat away at white australians. whitefellas need a treatyevery bit as badly as blackfellas do. -we are about...-(applause)
we are about to embarkon a very important exercise, which is the writingof a constitution. we have a chance now to fix this. but everything that we can see, apartfrom the devastating waste of time that goes on and on is that it will beanother compromise, another fudge, another pieceof official hypocrisy, and the grief and despairof aboriginal people and aboriginal men in particularwill be unassuaged.
there is... we have destroyedaboriginal languages. we have left aboriginal peoplestruggling to express themselves. they have no properpolitical platform. it's been only too easy to fragmentthe voices of aboriginal people so that they don't make sense. they become a tower of babelin their own right. we should have tried much harder. weshould have tried a lot longer ago. the saddest words in the languageare 'too late'. if it is already too lateto right the injustice
of the expropriationof aboriginal peoples, then we are allin serious trouble. the litany of crimes we havecommitted against aboriginal people will remain unexpiatedand unacknowledged. you realise that i'm very happyfor you to ask me questions about anything i'm saying now,partly because you are misinformed by the worst newspapersin the world, and a lot of you think... ..a lot of you think that i havesaid things that i have never said.
someone the other dayinformed me that i was in favourof honour killings, that i defended honour killings. the only thing i could think wasthat she had heard me speaking about the importance of izzat, theimportance of the concept of honour, to people who have nothing else and that if you trampleon that ideal, you can expect self-immolation. that is not the sameas defending honour killing,
but who would know what appearedin your newspapers? because they speaka language of their own which is expressed alwaysin terms of exaggeration. if you critici... 'criticise' has become a wordof immense aggression. if you actually disagreewith someone, you have attacked them. you have scathedand excoriated them. it's all just nonsenseand silliness. it makes me you thinkthat australia really is the land
where nothing really happens. i have only ever hadone truly, truly dangerous idea, and that is the ideaof women's liberation. if it became reality, it really would be the endof civilisation as we know it. the idea of women's liberation... it has to be an idea becauseit isn't real. it hasn't happened. human society everywhere dependson the subjugation of women. oh, i can see that some of youare thinking, "i'm not subjugated.
"no-one's subjugated me.i can have it all." today's women have been tricked intothinking that they can have it all, that they are mistresses of theirown fate and captains of their souls. they don't see the misogynyaround them. they don't registertheir own misogyny. they embark on a lifeof debt slavery, of hard workinside the home and out, of total responsibility for,and vulnerability to, their children, and they call it freedom.
they thinkthat they have chosen it. despite last night's lecture, i don't think that there isno element of choice, but i think there probably isan element of cooption and deception. every year, the proportion of womenwho realise that they've been conned grows higher. more and more women cut and runfrom the perfect life - the career, the marriage, thetwo children, the private school, the whatever, whatever.
they cut and run where? for a place wherethey're in charge of themselves, where they're not apologisingfor existence, where they're not findingtheir self-confidence undermined, where they're not beingconstantly evaluated, where they can actually followtheir own star. they enter a lifeof even greater hardship than before, of harder work, of loneliness,of poverty. they slip a couple of classesin the demographic.
they becomethe single-parent family. they do it, and that they do it,to me, is moving, extraordinary. they do it,and they never regret it. they never think,"i should have stayed where i was, "with the 2-car garage." they never go back on that bargain. and the price they pay is high. the patriarchal familyis in trouble. when the patriarchate tells methat i have destroyed the family -
"it's you and your talk.it's got these women dissatisfied. "they were satisfied before. "you come along and you say,'there's more to life than this. "'you don't have to haveone newspaper in the family "'and he takes it to work.'" "'you don't have to spend your lunchhours running around paying bills "'and then dash home at night tosort the house out and the kids out, "'all the while feeling guiltybecause you've skimped the tasks, "'because your desk wasn't clear,because the house isn't clean enough,
"'all the rest of the stuffthat you pile on yourself...'" brave womenare destroying the family. and at the same time,you must have noticed that 'family'has become a buzzword, a shibboleth. it doesn't matterwhether it's julia gillard or david camerontalking about the population, they always talk abouthardworking families. so those of us who are retired... ..are outside the pale.
it's not us.we're not hardworking families. and what about... the highest number of dwellings,even in australia, is occupied by single people. so they're all written outof the equation. they're not hardworking familieseither. so who are thesehardworking families? why not say hardworking wives? because that's usually the truthbehind the hardworking family.
most of you - i can seeyou're all young and beautiful - were born after the family wageceased to exist. there was a time,and perhaps there was never a time, but there was a timewhen it was reasonable to suggest that there was a breadwinner,and he was the man in the family. he went out to workand he brought home enough money to feed wife and kids. unfortunately, he probablynever brought home enough money to buy the whitegoods that becameessential to any kind of lifestyle.
so before second-wave feminismever came into existence, women were going out to work. and they were feelingguilty about it. they weren't supposedto have to do it. they were anxiousthat they weren't at home when their kidscame home from school. and the media poured iton their heads. their kids were latchkey kids.the kids were delinquent. the homes were dysfunctional.
and most of the jobs the womenwere doing were not worth doing. they were dead-end.they were badly paid. they were menial.they were humiliating. but the women had to do them,because otherwise, the kids had no shoesto go to school. the interesting thing is,of course, that the husbandgot his cigarette money. he got his pub money. he probably got his...his leisure money
for his football club subscriptionand all the rest of it. she never thought to take one pennyfor her own leisure. she never... never, even to this day,she doesn't know what leisure is. now, you can go and seeyour grandma, and she'll be sitting theredoing something. she's probablyknitting something - a garment that nobodywill want to wear. and she will say to you,"i keep busy." and you won't say to her, "why?"
"unravel it. put it down.go for a walk. get a dog. "go to a gym. have some fun." "no, no, no!" one of the things, of course,that she is doing is expressing her love for her familythrough this pointless toil, because there's almost no other waythat she can do it. she can't ring them upevery five minutes. hers is not the voiceanyone wants to hear on the phone. so it all goes into knitting,a great web of disappointment,
a great web of yearningto be closer to the people to whom she isutterly vulnerable and has been ever sinceher first child was born. this is how women live.it's who we are. so when second-wave feminismcame into existence, women were alreadyout of the house. they were already struggling to be all thingsto all men and all children, and they barelyhad time to consider
whether they had any of the thingsthey needed for themselves. it didn't occur to themthat they did need anything. self-sacrificewas the name of the game. one of the most important freedomsof the 21st century has got to befreedom from guilt. good enough is good enough. but women torment themselves, torment themselves with the factthat it doesn't work, that it isn't the satisfactionthey were told it would be,
they are not the person of importancein their children's lives that they had hoped to be. they have to come to terms,eventually, with the fact that they've been had. now, what is this creature,this woman? when i wrote 'the female eunuch',i talked about the woman as a creaturewho wasn't on earth yet because all the women we'd seenwere brutally conditioned, castrated to fulfiltheir domestic role.
what kind of thing is a womanwho hasn't undergone that process? we don't know. we can't know. now, what is a woman? what am i? what was i beforei was domesticated? now, you might thinkthat i'm not domesticated. that's mainly becauseyou don't know me. i knit. i knitted my wedding dress.there you are.
if i ever write a memoir, it could becalled 'i knitted my wedding dress'. it could also be called'i married a drunk'. i mean... it could beall of those classic things. how have i been modified to carry outmy curious and contradictory role in modern society? the questionswere disturbing then. they have becomeeven more disturbing now. the idea that women are different is now the heresycalled essentialism.
and it is reviledin the corridors of impotence. by that, of course,i mean academe. in which i have spentmost of my life. equality feminism is acceptable. liberation is not. women have not won freedom. they havewon the right to be the same as men. as angry and bitterand defeated as men. equality feminism to merepresents profound conservatism that would change nothing.
since i wrote 'the female eunuch', one reasonably influential schoolof feminist thought has concluded that not only gender but sex toois a cultural construct. now, i would agree that anatomyis not destiny. well, rather, i would agreethat anatomy is not destiny. i would not agreethat anatomy is not real. women have to deal with bodies.they deal with problematic bodies. and no-one has really been concernedto make them easier to manage. let me give you a little example ofhow things could have been different
if we'd thoughta completely different way. contraceptive steroids were developedin order to make it possible to have intravaginal intercoursewith women who would notthen get pregnant. it was troops for the use of. it was to facilitate sexual relationsbetween heterosexual people. it didn't solve a big problem, which is what do you dowith a menstrual cycle when you're only meant to be pregnantonce or twice or maximum thrice
in your life? when you actually menstruatetoo often, when you're hyper-oestrogenised, when you're actually goingto suffer from illnesses like myomas that are connected to repeatedstimulation of uterine tissue to no avail, and what you might argueis a lifetime shortage of othernaturally occurring steroids. if we'd startedfrom that end, imagine.
if somebody had said, "god,it must be tough, being a woman, "feeling crookfor five days a month." there are quite a few womenwho don't feel crook, but there aremore women who do. we know, for example, that athletesare anovulatory usually, that they are takingcontraceptive steroids in order not to menstruateduring competitions. for some of them,it means years of not ovulating, and that means osteoporosis.
that meansthey're not depositing bone. that means that they're jeopardisingtheir health. do we care? apparently, all of thisgoes under the radar. we talk about drugs in sportall the time, and we never talkabout the steroids. they're ok. why are they ok? why don't we think more aboutthe health of the women involved? imagine if somebody had said, "all these women,losing all this blood..."
and especially when you considerlabouring women... you know,the world's female population is a 7-stone agricultural laboureron a low-protein diet. how much blood can she loseevery 28 days? did they startfrom that point of view? did they say, "can wetake this stress away from women? "could we maybe make it so theymenstruated...ovulated once a year?" that'd be groovy, wouldn't it? it wouldn't be if you had shares injohnson & johnson, i confess, but...
but it didn't start from there. the point was not to makeour lives easier. the point was to makeour sex relations easier for men. we went along with it. i'll say to you now that... you know, i belongto the first generation who took the firstcontraceptive pills, and they knocked us for six. we had blinding headaches,mood swings, swollen arms, legs...
..migraines. some people died. and since then... ..contraceptive steroid practiceand posology has changed completely. did we pay attention?do we know what happened? could we saywhat chemicals we used and when? did we keep a contraception diary?no, we didn't. if it had been a child,we would have been hawkish in seeing exactly what substanceswent into the child.
but it was us. we took themand we went and cleaned the toilet. we made the beds.we went to work. we went and paid the gas billin our lunch hour. those were our lives. so the argument that anatomy is notdestiny is one that one can accept because we can change it. but it is real,and we deal with it every day, and dealing with it is not easy,whether you're... ..a young womanapproaching the menarche,
whether you'rea woman of reproductive age, whether you'rea postmenopausal woman, the fact that you are a womanis brought home to you every day, and it's not somethingthat you can opt out of. even if you decide to havea hysterectomy, which is a very popular thing to do,you'll still have to remind yourself that you need oestrogenevery day. you become dependenton the medical establishment. being a woman is likebeing sick all the time.
but the new way of thinking said thatwomen were not necessarily anything. womanhood itself was contingent.it was made by cultural pressure. and the rest of the worldwas quick to agree. men could be women if they chose,and women could be men. although anatomy was not destiny, strangely, anatomical modificationwas thought to be necessary in changing a gender role. so we're arguing two contradictorysides of the question at once. now, some of you may knowthat i have never accepted
gender reassignment surgeryas ethical medicine. it's an argument that has to be madeand it has to be listened to, but it is, in fact, never made. so it is odd that though youwant to say anatomy is not destiny and, "i'm not my body," you still think that in orderto escape into a new identity, you need to change that body - you need to remove and modifyhealthy tissue. that's a curiouscontradictory position.
most people thought,and continue to think, that a man could not be a womanif he kept his penis. there are plenty of womenwho are born with outsized clitorises who are treated as women,live as women and are women. there are even more in our worldwho underwent surgery at birth to correct what was perceived asan anomaly when it was no such thing. some of those peopleshould have been men, and now, because of the pre-emptivesurgery when they were born, they can't be.
we keep trying to impose uniformpolarity on sexual difference, and we can't do it. and at the same time, you want topretend that it's interchangeable. the men who elect gender reassignmenthaven't lived their lives as women. nevertheless, they have decidedthat they are women in some intangible way. where does that notion of womanhoodcome from? i would say thatthat notion is man-made. women's difficulty is to decide
whether or notthey too are man-made. have they spent their livesconforming to male demand or, even stranger, conformingto their own notion of male demand? those of us who've raised young womenhave been driven to despair by their refusal to eat because they think if you haveany flesh on your thighs, you're headedfor obloquy and misery. they have a notion of femininitywhich is much tougher than anything that was aroundwhen i wrote 'the female eunuch'.
so have we been capitulatingto an imaginary male demand? or is what going on... ..is what's going onan attempt to deflect misogyny? to make myself acceptable,it is ironic that women's bodies are only acceptableif there's hardly anything of them. if they actually look like women,if they have hips, they're clearly deformedin some important way. the image of woman, as distinct fromgirl, was compromised in the '60s, when i was thinking about'the female eunuch'.
it is now vanished. you will not seethe image of womanhood. there is no shape for womanhood.there is only girlhood. ..if we think about women who aresuccessful in this new world of ours, in masculinist culture... ..have they gainedor have they lost? did they change the corporationsthat they joined? or did the corporationschange them? the most horrifying examplefor a woman like me is what happenswhen women join the army.
now, you may say,and i would say, that women have the rightto bear arms, because any citizenhas the right to bear arms in the defenceof the body politic, that in order to be full membersof any society, women should alsohave a duty to defend their culture, their civilisation,their territory. not only that,but if they didn't take part, how would they know what was wrong?
how would they knowwhat had to change? now we see that womenare fighting in armies whose commanders claimthat their mission is to free women from the tyrannyof islamic fundamentalism. we're supposed to be in afghanistanto protect the women of afghanistan. and yet the armies in afghanistanare like all other armies. they are attended by prostitutes. not just women from china andtajikistan and uganda and all over but by under-age prostitutes,girls and boys...
..and at the same time, the womenwho are in the armies themselves are being abusedby their comrades... ..routinely. it's curious, watching the gamethat the women have to play to survive in the army. a very funny film was madeabout women soldiers, british women in afghanistan, whose personal propertywas being cocked every day. what did that mean?
the guys would come inwith a texta and they'd draw cock and ballson everything. what did the girls have to do?they had to take it in good part. they had to showthat they were chaps. i don't think they wentand drew vaginas all over the men's toiletries. the men didn't seem to be terribly well endowedwith toiletries, to tell the truth. why? why did it have to besexualised?
why were the men so unwillingto accept women as comrades? it was too difficult. it was too difficultto deny the basic dynamic of the sexual and intersexualand friendly relations in the army. 15% of female veteransfrom iraq and afghanistan who have visiteda veterans administration facility have screened positivefor military sexual trauma. that's a fact.and it's not a fact that i made up. and the interesting thingis that the american authorities
have been trying to explain it,hide it, distort it, give different stories,but it comes back every time. it comes back every timethat if you fought in iraq, you were more likely to be rapedby one of your comrades than you were by the enemy. but it's worse than thatfrom my point of view. in iraq, women joinedin the making of war on civilians. all 20th-century warswere fought against civilians, and the 21st century bids fairto be even worse,
traumatising a generation,for example, of iraqi children in the shock and awe campaign, where the barrage was kept upfor nine days and nights, which is a long timein a child's life. did we really mean to rendera whole generation of iraqi children psychologically scarred forever? what was the point of that? it was a nasty warand it was badly fought, and we get evidence about
the atrocities that were committedevery day. what did we do it for? a secular regimethat we had kept in place for years was replaced by a shiah regimethat is even now at war with the displaced sunni elite. the battle is not over. the same women who made waron iraqi women and children now allege harassment and abuseby their colleagues. how did we get into such a mess? wasnobody thinking clearly about this?
if i argue that the armyis no place for a woman, i get myself in trouble,obviously, but i would argue, in fact,that an army in the 21st century is no place for a human being. we cannot do this anymore. the potential for destructionis too great. and there is no chanceof reconstruction. soldiers are made, not born. they are turned into psychopathsto be able to do this.
and they are badly damagedin the making. i said this on 'q&a' once,that our jails, our hospitals, our soup kitchens and crack housesand our cemeteries are full of returned servicemenwho have come back so badly damaged that they could not endurecivilian life. if feminists cannot seethat they must work to outlaw war, then in my view,there's not much point in feminism. (applause) equality feminismangrily refutes the notion
that womenare pacifists by nature. i like to say to them sometimes, "youknow, when the kids are fighting, "you don't go upstairs and say, 'stopthat or i'll torch your rooms.'" you spend a lot of your lifeas a mother negotiating peace. you develop a few skills. because you knowthat if you're just going to maximise the destruction ratio, nothing will be left standing. so we do learn to be pacifists.
equality demands, though,that women be as aggressive, as warlike and as competitive as men. to argue that menhave to spend their youth being trained up into this lifestyle,being made masculine, is no way out. even thoughit's painfully obvious that women are nowhere nearas violent as men, we are obliged to pretendthat they could be, and one day,when they finally escape
from the shacklesof their conditioning, they will be. won't that be grand? you obviously don't think those ideasare too terribly dangerous. but you haven't been in the gripof theoretic feminists who will tell youthat it's all completely wrong. now, my position is thatwomen's liberation has yet to happen. women had not yet wonthe right to paid work before they had a duty to work.
most of the work they got to do,as i said, is badly paid, poorly organised. collective bargaining was impossible,and it still is. now that women have becomemuch more visible in the workforce, labour...even in australia,labour keeps a bit of power. but it's interesting that it'sstill being kept and exercised by the elite male unions and the industries where there'sa predominance of female workers get kicked from pillar to post.
because women were cheap,submissive and reliable, there were plenty of jobs for themin service industries while their menfolkstruggled to keep a foothold in a changing world of work. and it's in that context that womenare told that they can have it all - a career and a family - and what they got was work. work outside the home,work inside the home. what they didn't getwere the same earnings as men,
not by the hour, not by the year,not by the lifetime. they also got guilt, guilt for short-changing the kids,their employer, their partners, guilt that the housewasn't clean enough, the whites white enough,the cooking good enough, the sex inventive enough, their deskclear at the end of the working day. too hard. simply too hard. and all the while, the most terribleof backlashes was gathering momentum. it is unfortunate for us all
that feminism is so closelyidentified with the united states, the great shaitan. the chief ideological exportof the united states is not democracy - as if - butpornography, massive amounts of it, in every conceivable medium. the more repressive the society, themore its menfolk are hooked on it, and at the same time,the more frantic they become to keep their sisters, wivesand daughters under control. you probably know that women werepresent throughout the arab spring
on the streets, in numbers,arguing for their liberation from the tyranniesof the secular rulers whom we set upand kept in place. when they gathered...these same women, gathered to manifesttheir own desire for freedom from the ruleof fathers, brothers and husbands, the male comradeswho'd fought alongside them told them to go homeand do the washing. the women detained by the policein tahrir square in cairo
were examined to seeif they were virgins by the police. if they weren't, they could have beentaken into custody as prostitutes. if they... the most likely winners of anyfree election in the new north africa are the muslim brotherhoods. even the rebellion in syria thatwe worry so much about is islamist, and the people who are terrifiedof the future are the christians, who will be mowed downin the final solution, as we call it. it's worth rememberingthat the man who...
..made the ridiculous trailerfor the absurd video that is got us into all the troublewe're in at the moment is a copt. one of the first things that happenedin cairo after tahrir square was the burningof the major coptic church. no-one tells you that when theytell you the story of this piece... this is beingan agent provocateur. that's what that filmwas meant to do. it was meant to displayto the americans
that they cannot do businesswith these people. it's disastrous. it's terrible. it's a dreadful revengefor the burning of a church. but we have to understandthe complexity of the situationwe've got ourselves into. and the really sad thing isthat feminism has no authority here. it was an extraordinary moment for mewhen young women in syria sent me an email askingwhat i would charge them for the rightsto 'the female eunuch'.
that was just two months ago. now, can you imaginewhat that felt like? i thought, "you've gotta be nuts.you've got to be crazy." i wanted to say, "don't do it.for god's sake, don't do it." but, of course, i didn't. i said, "do it. "my concern is that we want to makesure that it's in very good arabic." arabic is a verymultifarious language. "i would like it to be classic arabicand not too vulgar."
i don't know what they'd doabout the abuse chapter. but arabic is full of appallingabuses for women, i have to say, so they'll probably just harvesta few of them. when islamic fundamentalist partieswin elections, it's partly becausewomen are voting for them, and you have tothink about that. can we safely assume that it's theirmenfolk who are making them do this? or is that itself anti-feminist, tosuppose that even in a secret ballot, women haven't got the gumptionto vote their own way?
do we need to considerthe possibility that the womenin the muslim world are rejectingwestern-style liberation? and i, as a western feministfrom a permissive background who herself has madepornographic images of her own body, where do i stand,at this painful interface? what does the future hold? will fundamentalism,the return of the veiled woman, will it overrun the world?
every time a young british womanopts for the veil, and it happens every day, a very important rubiconhas been crossed, and we need to bepaying attention. i can understand why a woman in north africawould decide that the pornographic culture ofthe united states and its adherents has no place in her family,no place in her bed, no place in her relationships,
and why she would optfor freedom behind the veil. it sounds like a contradiction,but this is the world we live in, and it's on the pointsof these contradictions that we are impaling ourselves. we must be awareof what is involved. we must be awareof how we need a new statement, a new leader,a new position, and we need to showthat we're serious. i got into a terrible fightwith salman rushdie when i said,
"muslims at leasttake themselves seriously, "and people don't dareoffend them." they offend me every day. and they don't care. because they knowi'm not going to smash any windows, i'm not going to... i'm not goingto do anything bad. i'm basicallya good, submissive, obedient girl, and i have given you my best accountof my dangerous idea.
thank you. it's time now,after that wonderful talk, which... ..i feel very satisfiedthat it included many dan... ..sufficient...quite sufficientdangerous ideas for me, and you could always,of course, consider, if you want to validateour view of things, if you want to validate germaine asan agent provocateur on our behalf, you could always considera minor riot outside. this is a festivalof dangerous ideas, after all.
there are four microphones herein the audience for you to come and askyour questions. i'm just going to start offwhile you're gathering your brilliantand witty thoughts... can i just say, i don't takethe first question from a man. -ok, sure.-(laughter) i want to startby asking germaine a question about equality feminismand women's liberation. i think it was very interestingfor all of us to go back to that...
..that very important distinctionbetween different kinds of feminism. i think many women would feelthat they had fought very hard for what the...you know,ambiguous gains sometimes that equality feminismhad achieved. if women were really lookingfor liberation, where do you think they would bestarting in this day and age? well... you'd probably have to start,where everything starts, with the little girl,with the baby girl.
and that's really tough to do. we know from doing studies inthe attitudes people have to babies that they treat themdifferently according to what they thinktheir sex is. so boys are fed for longer.they don't cry for as long. little girls are meant to bemore patient, more long-suffering. they're not meant to eat as much. andthat starts when they're newborns. and the way they didthose experiments was that the babieswere wrapped up tight.
they didn't knowwhat kind of baby they had. but you knew what kind of babythey thought they had. so we've got to startthinking about that, you know. we've also got...to think about... ..how, for example... boys learn to be boysin an absolutely rigorous fashion. you know, they join... they play a sport,they learn to play the sport, they learn to take orders,they learn to give orders,
they learn to submit, they learntheir place in the pecking order, all of that, and it's costly. i'm not saying... i think it's very toughfor lots of boys, and lots of boysdon't make it, obviously. do girls have to gothe same way? for example, girls wantequal participation in sport. but all the sports they playwere invented by men. that's funny, to start with,but then it turns out
that they're actually not equal. the hurdlesare not the same height. you think, "what's going on here?" actually makingwomen's inferiority... you're institutionalising it. you can't jump over as high a hurdle.you can't do this. then along comes caster semenyaand everything goes for a burton. nobody knows whether...who's what sex anymore. all of whichis got to be good -
i mean, in the senseit's quite good not to know, but it's not so goodnot to know if it's you. i await all the time for... ..a new kind of woman. i mean, ellen degeneres, youcould say, is a new kind of woman, but can she remake the templatethat relationships are made of, or will she just be treated as another kindof heterosexual relationship? is there actually a new wayof interacting? what would...
i mean, we've seen... poor naomi wolfhas tried to get you to believe that your vagina is powerful. i tried the same thingin 'the female eunuch'. i talked about, you know, our vaginascould have an effect and a will - they could suck,they could draw, they could pull - then along came naomiand turned it into multimillion-dollarmedical set of procedures, which i'd ratheryou didn't have, really.
we do, though... at the same time, we have to try andgive female sexuality a substance, so you want to see... ..women writing love poetry, great love poetry, not necessarily'sonnets from the portuguese', which is pretty creepy, but... and what will it be like? we know the important contributionthat lesbian women make.
but even lesbians find it toughto recast the mould of relationship. so... it's all for grabs, really. i keep waiting for the young womanwho will change it all, and she just might bein africa right now, because the whole pointabout the situation they're in is it's life-and-death, and for us,it was lifestyle-or-death, and that's actually different. i know that...we've started a little bit late.
so those of you who had to dashto something to 1:00...at 1:00, do go ahead, but we will go...we'll go for,you know, another 5, 10 minutes to make sure that we have timefor some questions. can we just take the second questionfrom microphone three, please? -come on. your turn.-man: hi. germaine: jump to it, lad! just so you all know, i did offerthe lady to go first, but... i've got in trouble for thatin the past. but anyway.
you might have sort ofactually answered the question in what you just said, but... my question is kind of twofold,but it's actually the same, and what i want to know is... ..basically, how do we activatethe people that aren't here... you began by talking aboutaboriginal people, and i dare say everyone inthe audience is mostly open-minded. how do we activate the peopleto think differently? the ones that don't come to thisfestival. what would you say to that?
and at the same time, how do weget young men to think differently? well, lots of young menare thinking differently. the current assessmentis that 10% of... ..which, i don't knowwhere these figures come from, but someone was saying,10% of australian men are gay. now, to me, that meansthey've adopted a gay lifestyle. they've opted out of heterosex. i've never thought of it as a diseaseor some kind of special destiny. it's always struck meas basically a lifestyle choice
that takes a bit ofworking into as well. it's not easy either. and especially when marriageenters the equation. i mean, marriage is drivinghalf my gay friends crazy. because it wasa transgressive lifestyle. now they're trying to make itinto a suburban lifestyle. just stop! stop! now, they, obviously,have changed something. they've changedthe way they're allowed to walk,
the way they're allowed to talk,what they're allowed to do, and the way it's freedtheir creativity is pretty bloody obviousas well. and this was a thing that alwaysstruck me about women's liberation, that as soon as gay liberationjoined the parade, we disappeared. i mean, these guysjust had it, you know. it was a big image, and it wasup-front and it was out there, and there we all were trudging alongwith our plaits and our headscarf and our...and ourraffia earrings and...
(laughter and applause) ..and being terribly earnestabout the vietnam war and so on, and they were shaking their bootiesin everybody's face. and so... maybe we need to... we want women to come out in that wayand be more exhibitionist. you know, the 'guardian' isthe nastiest newspaper in the world, and i should know,because i wrote for them, but... as soon as the slutwalks happened,the piety of the fucking 'guardian'.
they said, oh, you know, "this isnot the right thing. this is not... "you're capitulatingto sexism and..." and you're thinking, "it's the firstcreative thing they've done. "it's the firstfor years and years and years. "it looks like it's fun." it actually looked likea tarts-and-vicars party. but you... you thought it would get better, they would think ofmore daring and fun things to do, and there are plenty of up-frontwomen who are doing crazy stuff,
and you think,"is this gonna mean "that the womenare just gonna come up here "and show usincredible creativity?" but they probably had to go homeand clean the toilet. because the really important thingabout the slutwalks is it's about dirt and the terrible blackmail of womenby the threat of being dirty, whether you're dirty in yourselfor your house or your relationship, and it terrorises women.
they're still trying to say,"look, i'm a nice girl." so they clean clean houses. for me, it would bea big breakthrough if women suddenly looked up and said,"i'm not cleaning this house anymore. "i'm going to clean itonce a month." that would be huge. it would also mean you'd savea huge amount of money and the environment would breathea sigh of relief. -(laughs)-(applause)
we'll go over to a question.over here. hello. thank you, germaine,for your passion. i had grown up thinking that... ..feminists werejust a bunch of angry women. thank you for your intelligence in being able to articulatethe inequality the way you have, and thank you for your courage. it takes great courage, i think,to be the person that you are and to do what you do.
you speak for many people. we recognise the inequality, but in addressing it, you're dealing with powerand power relationships, and our livesare about inclusion. well, at least, i think,culturally, i... ..i try to be including. you desperately trynot to leave people out. you feel for the orphansin this world. so thank you.
-thank you.-(applause) just... let me just sayabout inclusion. i have been known to ask,"what's so bad about a recession?" in england... you haven't got...well, you have got one here. but you keep pretendingthat you haven't, which makes lifea bit difficult. but one of the things that has got tohappen, and it's got to happen soon, is that instead ofbehind every door, somebody making a mealfor a small family,
or, in the case ofway we live now, five meals, because nobody in the housewill eat the same as anybody else and somebody's got togo to football and... so it's all, you know,into the microwave and a single portionof blah-de-blah. just stop it. make it one meal at the end ofthe street. you're hungry, go eat it. hi there. i'd start out by saying thank youfor all your great work as well,
and that i couldn't agree more thanwhat the previous person had to say. germaine: thank you. ok, in your introduction,you...you mentioned that you find our newspapersto be the worst in the world, or you sort of...more or less were saying that, a sentiment i couldn'tagree with more. i'm just wondering... i don't know if you've noticed latelythat the press here seem to be havingquite a big influence
on the way our...our culture is moving, and... there was a developmentwith this... ..a new tax that the government triedto introduce which was shut down which justhighlights the fact that the governmentdoesn't seem to be in... ..in control of the directionthe country is moving in. my question is... sorry. germaine: come on. how do we get over this sort ofconflictedness in australian society
surrounding issues of media...independent media and at the same time, the factthat the media is an industry with...with sort of...self-interest and... ..you know, or...its own agenda, if you like, supportingthe business community? so...how do we get better media? -no, no, no.-no? -man: i'll leave that to you.-(applause) no, i think...i think i understandwhat the question is basically about,
and that... first of all, don't worry too muchabout the newspapers, because their days are numbered. young people don't read them. and... the interesting thing to me isthey're still selling advertising. in england, newspapers are selling noadvertising whatsoever. so they're... and they're collapsing. the 'guardian' probably won't lastvery much longer. it has a million readers onlinein america,
because it looks to themlike free media, independent media. it isn't. it's just as dishonestas any other. but... they've got a million readersin america, but they can't make any moneyout of them, so it's all a bit hopeless. so i think... you don't have to worrytoo much about the right-wing press. the 'australian' is a caution. it's extraordinarily right-wing,i think, for a country that hasthe historic past that we have.
i mean, australia invented labourpolitics. don't you ever forget that. but australia also invented the wayto neutralise labour politics, which is called superannuationand compulsory investment. and they are now gonnatake it off you. they're going to steal it from you,because they can't bear the thought that it's all sitting there andthey haven't got their hands in it. australians are gonna have todo something about this, and this is massive injustice. you always had this tensionbetween the media,
which tended to be ownedby oligarchs, and australia now is underthe cosh of the oligarchs more than it ever was. i mean, it is ludicrousthat someone like gina rinehart is listened to by anybody. -(cheering and applause)-(laughs) we... so... i think it's importantnot to worry too much about that. the thing that concerns me
is that the social mediaare so irresponsible. they have a job to do, butthey choose to do a different job, which is abusing peopleand venting cheap spleen, nastiness, sectarianism and so on. there is a possibility... you could do it now. you could set up genuinely freesocial media, where it's not harvestedfor the benefit of advertisers, where people are supporting it...
..much as we dowith subscription radio, where people are payingfor their wall newspaper. but what you would hope is that...just as you would think twice before you put something up ona newspaper on a wall in your street, that you would think twicebefore you put something up on your own online newspaper. we have more potential to mobiliseand to inform each other than we have ever had in the historyof mankind - personkind - but we're not using it.
and we're not using it properly. we use it to do things like gatecrashpeople's 21st birthday party. which is a bit hopeless.so... it depends. people turn round to me at 74and say, you know, "why don't you dothis, that and the other?" and i say, "i've got my feet up. "i'm building the rainforest.do you mind?" we've got about two seconds,literally, left, so i must apologiseto the second questioner.
but we're just gonna take one veryquick question from this lady here. thank you, germaine.i just wanted to ask you quickly. you mentionedthe halls of impotence - academia. as a young womanwho is banging on the halls but still finding it impotent,do you have any advice, please? -oh, dear.-(laughter) i've only gota couple of seconds. look. one piece of advice isdon't do all the work. don't...
woman: thank you. remember that if you want toget ahead in academe, don't teach. ok. get out of teaching. publish. get grants. throw your weight around. get powerwithin the establishment. then you... well, i mean, at the moment,what's happened is... gender studies, gone.feminist studies, gone. why? because other peoplebuilt different empires on campus.
and because nowhereis a bigger sucker for the latestfashionable buzzword than academe, and they're prepared to talk completenonsense if it catches the attention and if it gets themtheir funding. so the first thing is,don't do anybody else's work for him. don't cover for anybody else. don't take on extra student contacthours because you love your students. which is the cheapest formof blackmail, and they will use it.
understand that it's a bearpitand you're a big old bear. woman: thank you very much. i'd like to thank germaine very much,and i'd like to thank you. don't make me cry.
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