More female fuckwits at the top: the failure of feminism

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By Gabrielle Jackson

I went to the Opera House on a glorious Sydney spring day to hear Germaine Greer, Eva Cox, Tara Moss and Dannielle Miller discuss the topic All Women Hate Each Other.

In the first few minutes, as the topic was dismissed by Greer as a ‘non-topic’, ‘absurd’ by Moss and Cox asked how many men would be in the room if the topic were All Men Hate Each Other, I was pleased I’d forsaken the sunshine for the bad acoustics of the Concert Hall.

Men are mean to each other as well, Greer helpfully pointed out. Cox despaired the western need to stereotype all women as One, as though we were all the same because of our gender, and said of course some women hate other women. Just as some men hate other men, and – in classic Greer style – all men hate women but women don’t know that all men hate them.

Moss said she thought it was incredible the way female behaviour is demonised when male behaviour is so much more dangerous. Women may call each other fat, but we don’t – on a scale compared to men – assault each other or murder each other and we’re not committing suicide at anywhere near the same rates as young men and boys.

‘It’s a distraction as old as Eve,’ said Moss. The myth that the world was created perfect by an omniscient male (God) and it took a woman (Eve) to bring sin to it and mess it all up is still the premise on which our patriarchy is based.

Greer and Cox, in particular, were keen to point to the phenomenon of women being mean to each other as politics of the powerless.

‘We’re dealing with the psychopathology of the oppressed,’ said Greer. Because women have a fear of being abandoned by men, she said, they tend to express negative emotions to those they can hurt, that is their girlfriends, their mothers, their sisters. Those whose love they know is unconditional, in other words. Women can’t treat men this way because the men might leave them or hate them (not knowing that they already do).

It’s because of women’s powerlessness that they act as the police of broader society, said Cox.

Some talk was given to discussing the supportive and loving relationships shared by women, but not much, because – let’s face it – as women, we all know this.

Equality doesn’t mean we’re the same

It was about half way through that the talk took on a more interesting angle for me. It was around the time Cox recalled that a boss had once told her that the problem with equality was that you get just as many female fuckwits at the top as male ones.

‘It was a mistake,’ she said, ‘to think getting more women in top positions would change the workplace.’ 

Greer despaired that women in the corporate world had utterly failed to change it; that essentially they’d emulated and fit into the macho corporate structure, while at the same time failing to understand how it works.

Women get onto corporate boards and think decisions are made based on the strength of their ideas, Greer said. They don’t understand that all the power-broking happens outside the boardroom – at lunches, on the golf course or in the gym. What’s more, women tend to want to form emotional relationships, so that when they’re ‘done over’, or somebody takes credit for their work, they feel betrayed and hurt, most especially if the person doing it is female. Management is based on taking credit for other people’s work, she said, but women can’t do it. And, when they do, everybody is horrified.

What makes it worse for women in the male corporate world is that the rules aren’t the same. A woman in the workplace is expected to be the mother and sister to everyone, and when she isn’t, she’s a bitch.

Not all women are nice, Cox said, so let’s stop expecting them to be.

But, more importantly, let’s not try to fit into the corporate world. It’s a man’s world and we cannot change it from within. It’s time to re-think the women’s movement, Cox said.

This was a welcome concept to me. I’ve felt for most of my adult life that the concept of feminism was dead. I was sad, but it seemed that other women weren’t interested. I felt they’d been duped by the patriarchy into thinking that because we could go to university, vote and take the pill, we were equal. It was clear to me we weren’t.

So I blamed the feminist-deniers. But what I now realise is that maybe the way the debate was framed was to blame. It had become too academic, too framed in male talkshow ‘bra-burning’, man-hating’ terms and it took a long time to win the debate back.

It took the Slut Walks and, for me, it took two other things: Caitlin Moran’s book How To Be A Woman and Liz Fell’s theory that equality doesn’t equal assimilation.

Moran made it easy for young woman to call themselves feminists by resting the entire concept on something we all have: vaginas. Moran asks women two questions:

1. Do you have a vagina?

2. Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you answer yes to both of those questions, da-daaaa – you’re a feminist!

Such simple concepts were what feminist discourse had been missing.

It was around the time of the release of this book that I began to listen to Fell’s approach to the women’s movement more closely. Perhaps it was also because I’ve been living in London and she’s based in Sydney and we didn’t get to talk much. Our catch ups usually revolved around my tales of failed romances and other misadventures. But suddenly, I was incredibly energised by this debate and what she had to say about it.

I will paraphrase in my inelegant fashion, so please don’t blame Fell for that. What her argument comes down to is this:

·      Equality doesn’t mean we’re all the same

·      The idea of the women’s movement was not to assimilate women into the patriarchal society (or corporate world) but to integrate women into a new kind of society that values women’s contribution

What Greer and Cox were saying about the corporate world was very much what Fell has been banging on about for the past few years. For a woman to succeed in the corporate world does not mean we’ve reached equality, it means women have learnt to play by male rules, and this is certainly not what Fell had in mind when she formed the women’s co-operative at the ABC all those decades ago.

We have to change society, not adapt to it. We have to change the values of a society that has one version of success, one version of the workplace, one version of mother.

What I’ve come away with on this long weekend is the thought that we’re not all the same; we’re not all nice; we don’t all want to form loving and trusting relationships with every woman we meet.

But I think we all do want more control over our lives; to hear more female voices in the news, in parliament, at the cinema and in the workplace. I think we could agree that we want a society that values the unique contribution that both men and women can make.

Greer said that the greatest achievement of feminism will be freedom from guilt.

Come on, fellow feminists, how do we get there?