Reflections on the plight of women in Australia

I went to an all-boys secondary school where I excelled at sport, writing poetry and making a nuisance of myself. During that time, and for a number of years after, it never occurred to me that women in Australia or anywhere, were in a plight. Women and girls were mysterious creatures who seemed to have all the power: We boys wanted them desperately and they had the power of saying "Yes" or "No." In those days it was just "Yes" or "No" to going out and maybe to kissing.

My first close sexual encounter was narrowly escaping being raped by the school's Divinity master. I was a virgin until I was twenty-one. Then for the next few years I continued frenziedly and mindlessly trying to induce those elusive girls/women to sleep with me. It was a kind of late onset adolescence. But it always seemed that women had the power.

This all changed in the late 60s and early 70s. It changed for women because the onset of sexual liberation and the arrival of the contraceptive pill, meant they could no longer plausibly say "No." And once they stopped saying "No" they realised that this was the only power they'd ever had, and that men had been lording it over them in every other respect for millennia.

The majority of women quickly realised that what people like Mary Wolstonecraft and Vida Goldstein had been saying over the years was right: they were indeed in a plight. It changed for me at roughly the same time, as a number of critical experiences made me aware of the plight that women found themselves in.

When I went to New York in 1971 one of my hosts, Ellie, was a member of a high powered, New York feminist conscious raising group and while I was there, her partner Bobby and I (together with other significant males of the group members), were invited to attend one of their meetings for "dialogue."

This was one of the scariest encounters in my life. But although many initially unpalatable home truths were hammered home forcefully, we got out with our balls intact and the self-examination that the experience provoked was life changing and made me a feminist too.

If there was room for improvement in female-male relations in the US, I soon realised when I got back here that the plight of women in Australia was even worse. This was not just my view. When Ellie and Bobby visited me in Australia they were appalled and thought that Australian women were one of the most oppressed groups in the world, on a par with blacks in the US.

This was confirmed a few years later when a visiting UK feminist told me that women in Europe couldn't understand why Australian feminists seemed so angry, until they came here and saw with their own eyes, how much they had to be angry about.

Looking back on the last forty years, has anything changed? Have women in Australia extricated themselves from their plight?

Obviously there have been some gains. We now have a female Governor General and a female Prime Minister. Overt sexism is frowned upon in the public arena. But gross in equalities still persist in most areas of society, especially as measured by access to power and money, and the few exceptions do not amount to a rebuttal.

It seems to me that the endemic misogyny of Australian male culture has not been banished but has simply gone underground. Recent events in the military and in football demonstrate how fragile any respect women have gained remains.

One of the areas that the latent Australian male fear and hatred of women is most evident in is the realm of pornography. In olden days a glimpse of nakedness was looked on as the pinnacle of porn. Even such bondage was legitimised by classical mythology – Andromeda in chains, always with her pudenda twisted around to face the male gaze – a favourite subject of Victorian painters.

These days pornography portrays women not as objects of desire but as receptacles for male sexual release. And women are represented as enjoying being so treated. Pornography is both addictive and habituating; you need more and more extreme depictions to get the same buzz. It should not be banned as prohibition has never worked, but it's dehumanising effects on both women and men must be confronted and emasculated.

Part of the ongoing plight of women, as Germaine Greer has pointed out, is due to the fact that the success achieved by feminists in the past forty years, has not involved acceptance of a balance between 'feminine' and 'masculine' values. Rather it has involved an acceptance by women of the dominant 'masculine' values; the women have become like men.

Greer argues with characteristic forthrightness: "The notion of equality takes the male status quo as the condition to which women aspire. Men live and work in a frighteningly unfree and tyrannical society . . . As soon as a woman enters a male preserve … she finds herself in an alien and repellent world which changes her fundamentally even as she is struggling to exert the smallest influence on it. As these masculine realms have been constructed to withstand outsiders and have grown stronger and more effective in doing so over many generations, they are virtually incapable of transformation. Aspirants to rank in such groups have to learn the ropes and then bounce their rivals on to them."

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In parallel with this acceptance of the 'masculine,' the nineties saw a subtle move away from, and denial of, the 'feminine.' Fashion models lost hips and breasts, and no longer looked like women but young boys. (Ironically, the "boys" still bought magazines called Knockers and Big Boobs!) 'Feminine' values were seen as soft and ineffective, especially in politics, business and the market place.

According to Greer, the only aspect of the 'feminine' that is permitted to flourish in this masculinist world is the part that relates to sexual attraction, to women as sex objects for men. The 'feminine' is reduced to 'femininity.'

The deceptive and illusory worlds of fashion, cosmetics, dieting and cosmetic surgery, convey unrealisable fantasies to women, making them anxious about their bodies, which have been alienated from them and objectified by the mass media. This flourishes now as never before.

Once only available to a small elite, these techniques for enhancing female attractiveness to men are now mass marketed to whole generations of colonised women. The logic of such embellishments is quite insidious - once just one woman uses such things, the rest are virtually compelled to follow suit, or look shabby by comparison.

So women in modern 'non-sexist' society are being pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand trying to be like men in order to compete in a men's world, and on the other, trying not to lose their identity as women, which they can only claim by expressing their sexual persona.

This is symbolised by the young female execs and lawyers in Martin Place and Queen Street every lunchtime, dressed in dark business suits but with mini-skirts, sheer stockings and high heels. To quote Greer again: "The high heeled shoe is in itself a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a women up to a man's height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him."

At the other end of the cultural continuum, like in Pop Music, it used to be enough to have a good voice and be able to put over a song. But today, if you're a female, to get the boys to part with their cash for your CD your video needs to be as raunchy as the censors will allow. Like porn, raunchiness needs to get more and more extreme to keep the consumers' dander up and make them reach into their pockets for money to buy the CD.

It seems to me that contemporary expressions of female "power" such as "raunch culture" and "slut walks" are spooky echoes of the pre-feminist past. The former reasserts the traditional female role of provoking desire in men and the latter reasserts her power to say "No."

Before writing this, I re-read Greer's earlier seminal work The Female Eunuch. I thought a real test of how much women are still in a plight today would be to see how much of this book is still true. The appalling reality is: far too much.