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Reflections on the plight of women in Australia

By Ian Robinson - posted Friday, 1 July 2011


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.

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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.

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About the Author

Ian Robinson is a freelance writer and editor based in Kyneton, Victoria. He has an Honours Degree in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne and was subsequently a tutor there in Political Philosophy.He later taught Philosophy of Education at Coburg Teachers College then worked for many years in the curriculum and teacher development areas of the Victorian Ministry of Education.Ian was Buckley in the cabaret group "Buckley, Hope and Nun", and has acted in and directed plays at La Mama and elsewhere. He has a long list of educational and general publications. He is Immediate Past President of the Rationalist Society of Australia and a former editor of their journal, the Australian Rationalist.

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