Sisters Aren't Doing It For Themselves

Germaine freaking Greer. What a tosser. Once again she's made one of her notorious hit and run tours of the 'home country' and we're all left scratching our heads, putting our bras back on and researching ways to revoke her citizenship.

So I'll admit that back in my naive, neo-feminista, 'anti-everything my mother held dear and pro-everything she didn't' phase, I heralded Greer's name from on high. I mean, how great was that symbol of dissent for an Australian teenaged girl locked in constant battle with her ultra conservative family? Not just a ball busting, taboo breaking, intellectually erudite (forgive me - I was young) feminist pin up girl - but an Australian one! Anyway I had lots of fun debating very loudly and earnestly, the various merits of Germaine's radical philosophies... right up until the time I actually started reading her frighteningly illogical and patently one-sided rhetoric.

I will concede that she may have had something back there in the 70's with The Female Eunuch, but these days Greer's feminism merely constitutes one of the worst examples of Western indulgence. It's not so much what she says that matters - for it's all rather farcical these days - but what she (and many other so-called feminists) do not say that betrays how she (& feminism?) has lost her way. Actually now I think of it, retrospective readings of Greer's great manifesto have revealed she was never such a great feminist anyhow. She was almost exclusively interested in the sexual liberation of women and all those nitty-gritty details, such as the continued implementation of honour-killings in Muslim societies, kind of got pushed to the side. If we're honest about it, her writing hasn't evolved much, it's rather that we - her readers, her world - have transformed around her. Whilst her disjointed, dubiously researched, strategically vague and often contradictory ramblings certainly had a place in the raw, revolutionary atmosphere of the 70's – they’re irrelevant at very best in contemporary feminist dialogue.

Last week she told her audience: "The intellect is a little bit like sexual ability: use it or you lose it." True enough and nice work if you can get it, but hardly cutting-edge feminism at work. Back in Australia, the silence of the feminists and others on egregious cultural issues is having devastating consequences for women. Australian feminism has been hijacked by a soft Left loathing of Western culture, a romanticisation of 'other' (especially indigenous) cultures and a trend towards cultural relativism where it is just fine to use culture as an excuse. But criticise another culture? No way. Indeed, the "culture made me do it" defence is now an essential part of any lawyer's armoury. And you can hardly blame a bloke for trying it on. After all, our persisting cultural cringe about imposing our values on those who do not share them is such that these claims are often successful.

Personally I still find this a very difficult topic to discuss. As a white upper-middle class Australian woman, the tightrope I feel I’m walking between condescension, cultural insensitivity & common sense is often supremely stifling. It used to be an internal conflict I crudely resolved by staunchly adopting a far left, almost militantly liberal position, no matter what the argument. A few more years and a lot more life-experience however, and I find myself forced into an uncomfortable position between a fear of emulating the mistakes of my forebears and a terror of adding my voice to a disingenuous cultural discourse which is spiralling out of relevance, powered by empty politically correct sentiment. To tell you the truth I’m still feeling my way around – saying the wrong things to the wrong people, confusing my message, getting those ‘what the…?’ looks and regularly surprising myself with a complete about face on many of the issues and values I once thought to be non-negotiable. But that’s all a part of growing up right, and not the topic of the hour. What should concern us is that this Liberal loathing of Western culture has become an instrument of oppression and while feminists such as Greer are harping on about the irrelevant, our oppressed sisters continue to suffer - they need our support, not our silence.