The fragility of feminist progress and why rage is a luxury we cant afford | Anne Summers
The fragility of feminist progress and why rage is a luxury we can’t afford
This article is more than 5 years oldAnne SummersDespite years of hard work women can still be rendered utterly powerless in the face of a torrent of raw male power. Anger is energising, rage is not
One morning a few weeks ago, I woke up feeling strangely disoriented. I was unsettled and restless. I was unable to concentrate on my work. I don’t think I did any work at all that day. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It is highly unusual for me to be so incapacitated. I did not, at first, know what was wrong.
But I soon realised that the reason I was feeling this way was that I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by rage.
It was an unfamiliar feeling. I know what it is like to be upset. I am no stranger to anger. But I was not accustomed to being engulfed by this all-consuming and – for a time – immobilising emotion that I would define as a 10 on the Richter Scale of Anger and which I recognised as Rage.
Why was I feeling this way?
You might understand when I say that the day was Friday 28 September, and that it was the day after both Dr Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh had given their testimonies before the US Senate judiciary committee.
This hearing, to determine whether Kavanaugh would be confirmed as suitable to ascend to the US supreme court, had reconvened on Thursday 27 September in order to hear testimony from Ford who alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh many years before when they were both in high school. Kavanaugh, who had already submitted to questioning from the committee two weeks earlier, returned to contest Ford’s allegations and to try to save his nomination.
Kavanaugh’s demeanour during this second hearing was shockingly aggressive. Previously he had been biddable and courteous, now he snarled and yelled and exhibited behaviour that was extraordinary from someone seeking to demonstrate he possessed the qualifications, including the temperament, to assume a lifelong position on America’s highest court.
We soon learned Kavanaugh’s anger was totally confected. He had been coached by the White House counsel to exhibit aggrieved fury that his path to glory could be, even temporarily, blind-sided by accusations of sexual misconduct from his distant past.
His anger and aggression swept away the empathy that many had felt towards Ford after her heartfelt testimony. Even Donald Trump had said later that day that he found her a “compelling” and “credible” witness. Yet her painful story was totally buried by the avalanche of anger unleashed by Kavanaugh.
Many of us watching him had found it utterly plausible that a man capable of this kind of aggression could attack a girl, but that consideration was not taken into account.
I realised there were three reasons for the feelings of rage that consumed me the next day.
First, I was thunderstruck at the sheer sense of entitlement exhibited by the man. Kavanaugh’s entire demeanour exuded not just confidence but the kind of prerogative conferred by privilege. His words reinforced this. “I went to Yale,” he said. “Yale.” How dare anyone question his suitability for the supreme court? Specially not a senator.
Second, I was totally gobsmacked at the arrogance and sheer rudeness that Kavanaugh exhibited towards Senator Amy Klobucher, who asked him if he had ever blacked out while drinking.
“I don’t know, have you?” was Kavanaugh’s scornful reply.
“Could you answer the question, judge?” Klobucher shot back at him.
He did not answer.
It was a stunning display of contempt towards a senator, one of the people empowered to deny him the nomination. The naked aggression towards her was astonishing. And I do not think it was irrelevant that it was directed towards a female senator.
The future of legal abortion … was what was at stake hereThe third reason for my rage was that I understood for the first time that the Trump administration was prepared to sacrifice its majority in the House of Representatives to ensure it controlled the supreme court for at least a generation. And a major reason for wanting this control was so they could end American women’s access to abortion.
The future of legal abortion, including the Roe v Wade decision of 1973, was what was at stake here.
Women have seen their rights to abortion progressively whittled away by state laws restricting access. It is more than possible that abortion in America could be severely restricted, if not banned outright, in many states, even if Roe v Wade remains technically in place.
So, my realisation of the ruthless calculation by the Republican party and the Trump administration that winning control of the supreme court would more than compensate for losing control of the House of Representatives was like a body blow.
These men – and I use the words advisedly since it has been almost exclusively men who are responsible for this political calculus – have suborned democracy. They have, in effect, said: It doesn’t matter what laws you pass in Congress because we can have the supreme court overturn them.
This is an extraordinary expression of contempt towards democratic processes but it is a particular expression of hostility towards women.
And when you realise this, Kavanaugh’s conduct – his display of entitlement, his contempt towards a female senator – takes on quite a sinister aspect. He is not even bothering to hide what is going on here. No sugar coating required. This was a naked display of misogyny.
It is no exaggeration to say that the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, something we once saw as a dystopian fiction, is now a distinct possibility in modern America.
Just as Queensland has, at long last, voted to decriminalise abortion, removing it from the Crimes Act, the United States appears set to outlaw women from having ready access to abortion and, hence, their reproductive freedom.
I was forced to confront the fragility of our achievements and to ask myself whether it was futile to even continue the fightThe conservatives have achieved their long sought-after goal of gaining control of the supreme court. They will likely retain it for decades to come. Brett Kavanaugh is 53 years old, while Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s previous appointee, is just 51. There is no mandatory retirement age.
My lassitude that day was instructive. Because while anger can be energising, rage has the opposite effect. My rage was, I realised, an expression of impotence. The previous day’s hearing had shown me that despite more than 40 years of feminism, despite the progress we seem to have made, despite our many victories and our reasons for justifiable pride, we women are in fact still utterly powerless in the face of a torrent of raw male power.
And that was probably the worst part of that day because I was forced to confront the fragility of our achievements and to ask myself whether it was futile to even continue the fight.
Unlike anger, which is currently seen as energising and even liberating, rage seems to enfeeble us. Or is this just the case with women?
In my new book, Unfettered and Alive, I have a chapter called “The Getting of Anger”.
In it I set out a series of personal and political circumstances which in the mid 1990s produced in me an anger that I saw as justifiable and productive. It was meant to spur me – and those I could persuade – to resist what I described in the chapter. It was energising.
It was good.
My anger was prompted by two sets of circumstances.
Politically I was outraged by how the newly elected government of John Howard in 1996 began to systematically abolish or reverse so many of the reforms for women that had been enacted by the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments.
From abolishing agencies such as the Women’s Bureau, which had been established by the Menzies government to monitor women’s employment and, especially, equal pay, to cutting the guts out of the Human Rights Commission and curtailing the operation of the Sex Discrimination Act, to changing taxation, welfare and other policies to the detriment of working mothers, the Howard government seemed intent on reversing virtually all of the gains women had achieved in the previous three decades.
There are critical connections between Howard’s “white picket fence” view of women’s place, his support for Pauline Hanson and his welcoming, in a speech that changed Australian history, of the lifting of what he called “the pall of censorship” that enabled Hanson to express vile racist views about Aborigines or migrants, and just 20 years later, allowed people to subject the country’s first female prime minister to horrendous sexualised and pornographic abuse of a kind that had not previously been seen in our political discourse.
This was the political source of my anger.
The personal source of my anger was something that occurred in 1995 when I was editor of Good Weekend magazine.
In June that year, I learned from a friend who was also in the media, albeit at another news organisation, that there was widespread gossip in the industry that I had been, or was about to be, the subject of a sexual harassment complaint by a man who worked for me.
I was at first mystified because I had no idea what behaviour on my part could possibly be construed as meriting such a complaint. Then I learned that it was supposed to have taken place at Good Weekend’s Christmas party more than six months earlier.
“Christmas Party” is legendary in the sexual harassment lexicon, I learned from a lawyer friend, because people will believe that anything can – and does – happen at office Christmas parties, and that normally well-behaved people can turn into depraved monsters once they’ve had a few drinks under the mistletoe. So, this particular detail gave the story plausibility – and encouraged its wide dissemination. So much so that by the time my friend rang me, I was apparently the only person in the media who did not know about it.
Once I heard about it, I demanded that the company confront the man who was apparently going to make this complaint, to ascertain what it was I was supposed to have done. I needed information, I believed, if I was going to be able to contest this absurd claim.
When confronted by Fairfax, our employer, the man involved said he had no plans to make a complaint and that there was no grounds on which to make the complaint.
But the rumour mill had already done its damage. It was soon in the media and ran as a story for almost three months. The union became involved and there was industrial action against me not just by the Good Weekend staff but company-wide with all Fairfax journalists stopping work at one stage to protest my “management style”.
Even after it was made clear that there was no complaint going to be made against me, there was continuous lurid speculation and gossip about what I was supposed to have done.
And people believed it. That was hurtful. But the way it escalated into a full blown industrial dispute and became an excuse for all kinds of damaging things to be said about me, soon made it apparent – to me at least – that this was a calculated and orchestrated attack, meant to discredit me and drive me out of my job.
My attackers apparently thought that to spread a rumour that I was going to be charged with sexual harassment would be the perfect way to derail and disempower a feminist occupying a high-profile position.
I had no empathy, I was told, and this was because I did not have childrenI have to admit, it was pretty good.
Not only was I a feminist and thus automatically guilty of gross hypocrisy if it could be established that I had sexually molested a man who worked for me but also, in a delicious twist, I’d actually had a hand in strengthening the sexual harassment provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act when I’d worked for the then-prime minister Paul Keating in 1992.
I’d really be hoist with the petard I had helped bring into being. Exquisite.
And although perhaps it didn’t go to plan inasmuch as no complaint was ever laid, nor was there any conduct on my part that could have justified it, my reputation suffered. As they say, mud sticks. There must have been something to it, people would of course say. These things don’t come from nowhere.
And then, I learned, there was another complaint. A real one, this time. From some of my staff at the magazine. I was informed that I had a problem with male staff. I was told that I could not get along with men. I had no empathy, I was told, and this was because I did not have children.
I now found myself in a very familiar situation. I had written a whole book about it some 20 years earlier! In Australia, women were – perhaps still are – either madonnas or whores. Or, as I had put it with my book title Damned Whores or God’s Police.
And here was I learning that, in the eyes of some of my staff – in the media, at the so-called leftwing Fairfax, in the sophisticated city of Sydney – since I was not a mother, I must be a sexual predator. (I guess if I hadn’t been the boss I would have been accused of screwing my way to the top!)
How did I react to all this?
I became angry.
I was angry to have been put through this ordeal of rumours and gossip.
I was angry that I – and my partner Chip Rolley – were forced to endure constant speculation and innuendo about my behaviour and our relationship.
But most of all I was angry that my performance in the job was being reduced to these sexual categories.
I was not accused of being incompetent, or lazy or tyrannical or any of the other performance failures that might be levelled against a boss.
Instead, I was being called to account because of my sex, my gender, because I did not, in the eyes of some, measure up to what a woman should be. And this judgment was based on assumptions – I would say prejudices – about not just how a woman should behave but about what a woman actually is.
We – still! – judge women by their maternal status. If a woman is not a mother, and especially if she is “deliberately barren” to quote the disgusting phrase former Senator Bill Heffernan used to describe then deputy prime minister Julia Gillard, then she is fair game for all kinds of sexual slander.
It seemed to me that if we can reduce a woman to her sexual being we can disregard everything else about her.
We can judge her and condemn her and not take her seriously.
We can say she is bad at her job of magazine editor.
We can say she is no good at being prime minister.
We can discount her testimony against a man who she says tried to rape her.
At the same time, by reducing her to her sexual being, we are discounting and undervaluing her sexual integrity. A woman has every right, as do men, to be a sexual being in addition to whatever else she is or does. She does not surrender her sexual being, or her sexual integrity, because of choices she has made about motherhood, employment or whatever else she does with her life.
These thoughts, from my book – and from my life – were swirling around in my consciousness while I watched the testimony before the Senate judiciary committee.
I was prepared to be angry.
I knew the likelihood of this man being confirmed, of this man becoming the one to tip the balance on the supreme court away from its former pro-choice majority, to denying women the right to choose.
I knew all that and I was angry about it.
What I was not prepared for was that it would bring forth in me a rage that I never knew was there.
A rage that was nothing to do with having some of my own sexual history triggered – although that certainly happened.
I did not – and do not – think I suffered long-term damage from the many sexual assaults I endured as a teenager.
Back then, in the early 1960s, before the term “date rape” was coined and we thought that rape was something done to you by a stranger, sexual predation was something many of us had to endure every time we went out on a date. Sometimes, you weren’t even on a date. A boy was merely giving you a ride home from a party, but he still expected sex as payment.
“He wouldn’t take no for an answer” was the way we girls used to put it when we shared our stories. This was normal. This was what happened. This was just life – before feminism gave us the tools to understand the power involved in relations between women and men, and how so often that power was abused by men. He “took advantage of me”, was how we’d put it.
Twenty years later, because of feminism, 15-year-old Christine Blasey Ford had the language to describe what happened to her. When a man pins you down, on a bed, puts his hand over your mouth to stop you screaming, and tries to remove your clothes, it’s attempted rape. Even if you know him.
But on hearing Kavanaugh’s testimony I realised that my rage was due not to the sexual attack he was accused of. It was due to his sense of entitlement, to his swagger, to his utter expectation that he be given a job on America’s highest court despite his lying, his drinking and his likely sexual attack on Ford.
These were no reason to deny him appointment to the most prestigious judicial post the United States has to offer.
And that enraged me.
It got worse.
Just days afterwards, when I had calmed down, forced myself to understand, even if I did not accept, the new given, Trump, the president of the United States (as unbelievable as that is), publicly mocked and ridiculed Ford at one of his political rallies.
Initially, he had described her testimony as credible. Now he said, to a jeering crowd in Mississippi: “I had one beer. Well, you think it was, nope! It was one beer. Oh good. How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know … I don’t know …”
Then, he said, that because of Ford’s allegations: “It’s a really scary time to be a man.”
Women are Jezebels, is what he effectively said. All women are potentially liars, intent on destroying the reputations of good men. Against all evidence – the numbers of false accusations of sexual assault remain low – the president of the United States gave credence to the idea that men are victims, and women are predators.
Sound familiar?
In an interview with 60 Minutes on 15 October, just two weeks later, Trump justified this attack on Ford by saying: “If I had not made that speech, we would not have won,” meaning that it was pivotal to having Kavanaugh confirmed.
As was the White House preventing the FBI from interviewing Kavanaugh when doing its report on Ford’s allegations. They knew that Kavanaugh could not withstand an investigation into that incident, so the White House counsel instructed the FBI not to interview Kavanaugh or Ford, reportedly arguing, according to the New York Times, that doing so could imperil Kavanaugh’s nomination.
So it is crystal clear that the woman, Ford, had to be discredited – sacrificed would be another way of putting it – so that the man, Kavanaugh, could “win”.
A man’s life could have been ruined, Trump also said.
What he did not say was that a woman’s life was ruined.
Ford said she felt it was her civic duty when she first learned Kavanaugh was on a shortlist for consideration for the supreme court to make it known what he had done to her when they were both teenagers. She initially tried to remain out of the public eye but her name was leaked – and her life changed forever. She received death threats, she has had to leave her home, her husband and children are living separately from her.
Donald Trump’s response to questions from Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter, about the damage done to Ford: “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We won.”
Which brings me to #MeToo.
Over the past year, since the initial allegations of sexual harassment and grave charges of rape and other forms of sexual assault were made publicly by famous Hollywood actors against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, more than 100 prominent American men have lost their jobs as a result of proven accusations of sexual harassment.
And already there is a backlash.
See what’s happening here? Men are being cast as victims ... their lives destroyed by vengeful womenThe #MeToo hashtag now has its male counterpart: #HimToo. As described by Wired magazine, “The hashtag and its associated memes are #MeToo’s first major inversion, popularised during Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court confirmation. It’s become the #AllLivesMatter of sexual assault: The hashtag identifies accused men as victims, using the same power-in-numbers technique that made #MeToo a force to recast the movement as a widespread feminist witch hunt, forcing men to walk on eggshells”.
(And in case anyone here is not aware of this, #AllLivesMatter was created as a response, and a rejoinder, principally by police and their families, to #BlackLivesMatter, the hashtag created to draw attention the large number of police killings of unarmed black men in the United States).
So #MeToo is being recast as Jezebel behavior: evil predatory women intent on destroying good men.
Sound familiar?
Will it work? It already has to the extent that people – including women – are starting to say that #MeToo has “gone too far”, that sexual harassment is often “not that bad” (“It’s not like it’s rape or something”), and that men’s lives are being ruined.
See what’s happening here? Men are being cast as victims, able to be torn down and their lives destroyed by vengeful women. The tables are turned: the predator is now the victim.
This is a stunning tactic.
It is an attempt to change the narrative, from one that describes the sense of entitlement that some men feel to lay their hands or other body parts on the women who work for them, and which attacks this behavior, to one that portrays that man as a victim.
Now these men are saying they can’t be in the same room as a woman. They can’t take a meeting with a woman lest she accuse him of sexual harassment. Women would not be able to work in anything other than subservient roles if this rule were to be widely enforced.
The misogyny exhibited by the president of the United States is neither random nor accidental. It is central to his politics and it is terrifying how much support he has for this sentiments.
We saw a good sample of it in the way he treated Christine Blasey Ford. We have a foretaste in what he has in mind for the women of America in the supreme court he has assembled that will remove women’s right to abortion. His personal behaviour towards individual women deserves an entire chapter in the history of the #MeToo movement.
Now those of us who don’t just disagree with him but are actually terrified of what he is attempting will have to do a lot more than become enraged. I learned from that one day back in September, that raging about this is a luxury we can’t afford. This is not a time for impotent emotions, this is a time for determined action.
We need the power and the energy and the focus that comes with anger. That is the only way we can save ourselves.
This is an edited version of Anne Summers’ Griffith Lecture delivered in Brisbane on 23 October
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