Kevin Myers: Like any other ideology, imposed regardless of reality, Malignant Feminism caused misery and chaos
Forty years on, this week, from the publication of Germaine Greers's 'The Female Eunuch' and you can take your pick of the headlines that tell you of TFE's consequences for women, or indeed, lack of them. "Stringfellows lap dancer was women's rights officer" is one deeply enjoyable example: "Padded bras for girls, 9, on the shelves at Asda" provides a different vision, one of a dis-infantalised and sexualised childhood-hell.
As a good little lefty and sympathiser of feminism, I once tried to read TFE: I found it trite, undergraduate bilge. My few proto-feminist braincells withered and died shortly afterwards when I was told by a young woman-television producer from Foxrock: "Being a female in Ireland is like being a black in Soweto."
Feminism is, of course, like socialism or Christianity -- an ideological piece of string that is as long as you want it to be. Most of what we might call the Benign Feminist agenda was already being implemented across Europe before TFE was published. Ireland, of course, was not yet in the EEC and barely in the 20th Century. Legal equality for women here was not really achieved by any political agitations of the Irish feminist movement, which seemed largely content to get headlines and celebrity for a couple of individuals. The famous condom train of 1971 was not followed up on by any further or riskier actions. Both the Labour Party and the trade union movement were, quite scandalously, opposed to equality of pay: it was finally imposed by the EEC Commissioner, Paddy Hillery.
So the BF agenda offers an irresistible moral and political case. It does not propose the dogmatic egalitarianism of Malignant Feminism, and nor does it conduct its debates in the depraved dialect of MF: a combination of aggressive victimhood, ad hominem abuse and selective fact-finding all enunciated in the nasty, unending jeer that became the characteristic of TFE-speak.
TFE-speak enabled Malignant Feminists to make wicked generalisations about men which would not be legally tolerated if they were made about ethnic minorities. The most common is this evil lie: "The most important thing for women to understand is how much men really do hate and despise us."
And whenever this malignant falsehood is uttered, most men present in radio and television studios to defend their sex have merely shifted uncomfortably in their seats because to refute such toxic fantasies with the mockery and ridicule that it deserves would, of itself, be seen as sexist and bullying. Yet the ancient truth is that unless you stand up to the bully, the bully will keep hitting you: and so this vile mantra has been repeated ceaselessly by the great she-bear of malignant feminism, Germaine Greer, and her Pooh-Bear followers.
MF ideologues employ another very simple technique when responding to what little criticism they get from male critics. This is to destroy a man's argument by quoting back his words at him, but saying that he had "harrumphed" them. Not even the most commonplace and self-evidently correct observation survives this treatment. Try it: "I'm Irish," he harrumphed. "It's raining," he harrumphed. (MF shrieks of gleeful disdain).
So, all an MF has to do to turn any man into a buffoon at the clubroom fender is to deploy the self-destruct verb. No wisdom survives this -- not even the words of the great she-bear herself, from her own TFE: "Whenever you see nail varnish, lipstick, brassieres and high heels, the Eunuch has set up her camp," he harrumphed.
Well, as it happens, the Eunuch has set up her camp, complete with bra, lipstick and thong, in both the feminist campus and the child's nursery. In 2005 Nadine Quashie was a paid-up full-time operative of the feminist thought-police on Thames Valley University campus -- "I was women's sabbatical officer, representing women and women's wellbeing in the university and their rights and making sure they were not underprivileged or anything like that." In 2007, she was dancing naked, all but for a g-string, on men's laps in Stringfellows in London.
Meanwhile, supermarkets sell 28AA padded bras to nine-year old children; and Tesco, God help us, has even been selling a little girl's pole-dancing kit in its toys-and-games department.
Moreover, the victimhood culture that was in large part created by TFE now means it is illegal for a state-financed medical school which charges no fees to ask applicants -- who are going to occupy a precious place, at the exclusion of someone else -- if they intend to continue practising should they become mothers. It means that armies have to deploy female soldiers even though the moment they go into the front-line a huge number will promptly get pregnant and, by law, must then be transferred to safer, rear-echelon duties. It means that women merchant bankers who take two years off to have a baby, and who don't get promoted in their absence, will often then sue, citing that dreary cliche "the glass ceiling".
Like any ideology, imposed regardless of reality, Malignant Feminism has caused misery, chaos and confusion, in which the law -- sensing the wind, as lawyers usually do -- has invariably taken the MF's side. Forty years of TFE is long enough: Time the Farce was Ended.
kmyers@independent.ie
- Kevin Myers
Irish Independent
