Do You Use The F-Word?
A few years ago I took part in a radio discussion about where all the feminists have gone. The woman I was arguing with, a lifelong activist called Julie Bindel, is actually a total and widely acknowledged dude, and if I'd met her in a bar rather than on the radio I would have been fawning all over her, not arguing with her. But, despite that, I still disagreed with her. She argued that young women, with all the drinking and the miniskirts and their 'Feminist? Me? No way!' attitudes, had let the sisterhood down.
But I countered that the older feminists, the ones that now head up the committees and unions, who'd cut their political teeth in the '80s and '90s, were the ones who let us down. They got into power then stopped talking about feminism altogether, which leaves the rest of us wondering where to look for inspiration. But since then I've started to wonder whether that debate started in the wrong corner. Maybe nobody's let feminism down – maybe we're all still as feminist as ever and we've got more to be triumphant about than we realise.
HAIRY AND LAIRY?
Every decade or so there's a rumour about the death of the F or at least the beginning of the end. Here's the evidence: as young women, we don't describe ourselves as feminists anymore. To be honest, I'm a bit of an anomaly – I've always admitted to being one. But, at 32, I'm not all that young. And for most other women the opposite is true. The vast majority of you believe in equal pay, in women being able to choose motherhood as well as a career, in the right to choose to have an abortion, and that 'our votes, our opinions and our voices count as much as any man's'. This is all feminists have ever fought for.
It would be pushing it a bit to claim that these battles were over; conditions are still, or can be, pretty woeful for working mothers, and the pay gap persists. But that's beside the point. We probably should admit that these are feminist ideas and if we agree with them then we're feminists. The question is why don't we?
One reason is that we think 'feminist' has certain implications about attitudes towards sex, notions of masculinity and femininity, dress codes and style tips that we can't sign up to. There's something joyless about the idea of an old-school campaigner. We have a mental image of a hoard of fairly humourless women chanting slogans like, 'I won't shave my
armpits! Hairy pits are a sign of my eternal womanliness!' It makes them sound like a bunch of people who think of sex as an insult to their precious body hair.
One woman I interviewed was Debbie Stoller, the editor of Bust, an American 'third-wave feminist' magazine (trust the Americans to find a trendy way of saying 'we're still here and we're still cool!'). She said they would road test vibrators for their readers, but wouldn't fill the pages with sexy lingerie because that was more about the man's pleasure than the woman's. I agreed with her about almost everything but stalled here – those who sneer at women who 'dress for men' aren't feminists, they just lack generosity. You think the person you're sleeping with looks good so you want to look good back; it's no more enslaved than giving someone a Christmas present because they gave you one. I don't even think Birkenstocks are as feminist as a pair of heels. Before we can admit the achievements of the movement and take collective pride in them, we need to get rid of the idea that this kind of feminist is the only kind there is. I don't even think I've met a woman like this. I just have an idea of her lodged in my mind and, like dry rot, she takes some shifting.
Really, though, when a woman says she's not a feminist, it's because she's got slutty boots and pink stuff in her wardrobe, and thinks: 'This political movement wouldn't be interested in a person like me.' Whereas, honey, you are feminism. You're the confidence, the skittishness, the opportunity, the boundless sense of liberation, self-determination and fun that the movement created.
Does it even matter what word we use to call ourselves? If we just go about our business, fighting for our rights to equal pay, tackling injustice, isn't that enough? Not really, no. There are always people looking to roll back rights that women have won. None of the advances made by the movement would have stuck without people who believe implicitly in the equality of the sexes. For every crank who says work is boring, equality is a myth or a let-down and she'd rather be at home doing the washing, there need to be 10 women saying 'l can't believe how great this is!' We should call ourselves feminists not only because there's more to achieve, but because so much has already been achieved that it would be a crime not to brag about it. And, most of all, we should call ourselves feminists because that's exactly what we are – killer heels, lipstick, credit cards and all.