Today feminism is about what you CAN’T do
WRITER and broadcaster Carol Sarler edited Honey magazine before launching current affairs programme Watch The Woman.
WHEN I was ten years old, I was lured by a stranger in the park. Once out of public sight, he held a knife to my neck, dragged me behind bushes and sexually assaulted me. Twenty years later, I was at a party when a senior male work colleague placed a paw on my thigh.
Can you imagine, now, how I feel about today’s prevailing message that there is no difference between those two crimes? That if you dare suggest otherwise, you’ll be met by outrage?
Last month, Hollywood actor Matt Damon felt the furies when, in the heights of Harvey Weinstein fever, he said, ‘There’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation’. Based on my own experience, I’d call that stating the obvious. But based on the instant condemnation, he’ll be lucky to work again.
No wonder so many women of my generation have reached their 60s not only unwilling to join that ridiculous MeToo brigade but even to call themselves feminists. There was a time when the emerging women’s movement was inspiring. We who had really known what oppression and inequality were really about marched to our anthem: ‘I am woman! Hear me roar!’
Yet how quickly it went downhill. That kind of feminism was all about what women could do; today’s ninny version is all about what women can’t do: they can’t stand up to a lecherous man, they can’t take sexual banter without suffering post-traumatic stress and they can’t understand that as long as we emphasise our weaknesses we can never assert our strengths or exercise our choices.
When I was ten, with the knife at my throat, I had no choice. I was a child. But 20 years later, with the paw on my thigh, I was a grown woman. Like all grown women I had a choice. And I exercised it.
The first time, I asked him, please, to stop touching me. The second time, there was no please. The third time I slapped his fat face, then back-slapped the other cheek for good measure. The room fell silent.
Then, to his eternal credit, the host — male and also junior to the nuisance — asked him, not me, to leave the party. A hundred people watched as, with cheeks flaming, he drooped down the stairs.
Nobody of my generation, reading that, will be surprised. Not because violence is to be applauded, but because they remember the days when we discovered the sublime pleasure of taking control of our lives: sisters, doing it for themselves.
When it came to unwanted attentions, we stood our ground without needing the support of hundreds of others, each clamouring for the fashionable status of ‘victim’. As a result, our individual but effective battles were a damn sight more life-affirming than anything achieved by raucous rabbles. One day at a time, one man at a time. Result.
While writing this, I’ve been trying to remember the name of the man who touched my thigh. Yet, for the life of me, I can’t. But I’ll bet you he hasn’t forgotten mine. And, more to the point, I’ll bet that he didn’t do it again.