WHEN STEINEM GOT WEIRD

There is a lot that Gloria Steinem has to offer the world and, in particular, young women. But one gets the sense the 81- year- old feminist icon is still trying to figure out exactly what that is.

Steinem seems to have emerged from the mists of time unscathed, appearing like a retro vision on late- night television, talk shows, newspaper interviews and lecture circuits — all to promote her latest book, My Life on the Road. So it was less surprising than it once would have been to see her pop up on International Women’s Day at the University of Calgary to rally a crowd of 1,000 reverent attendees, almost all women.

Her message was a difficult thing to keep a bead on: she was full of warmth and practical advice, but offered a heavy dose of dopey mythology that is of little practical use to modern feminists.

Her first point was crucial — and although it is not a new concept, it’s probably one worth re-iterating: patriarchy is inextricably linked to the control of female reproduction. When an entity — whether it be a tribe, a state, or a church — can determine access to legitimate sex and procreation, that institution holds the levers of society itself. This is the basis for her lifelong defence of abortion, a position pro-life activists have condemned. They continued to do so again Tuesday, waving gory dead fetus posters outside the lecture hall where she spoke.

So Steinem was quick to make this vital point. And then stuff got weird.

She has long espoused the myth of prehistoric matriarchy. If you’ve spent much time with Neo- Pagans or New Age spiritualists, the theory will seem familiar. That is, in the time before recorded civilization, humans were goddess- worshipping nature lovers who lived in non-hierarchical little communities at one with the earth.

Much of this myth is based on archeological finds of ancient busty statues. It conveniently ignores the concurrent discoveries of mass human graves filled with tiny skulls embedded with flinty shards. But Steinem goes on to narrow the disease of humanity more narrowly: patriarchy, of course, which, she tells us, was invented in Europe.

Here in the land of reality, the thesis seems hard to jibe with myriad patriarchy cameos in such disparate locations as ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, Japan, the Middle East, the Kingdoms of Korea, the Empire of Mali, the civilizations of the Inca, the Aztec and the Maya, and nomadic desert tribes. I could go on, but won’t.

She, on the other hand, did. According to Steinem: Aboriginal tribes were egalitarian and democratic. Females held power — largely because, for most of our forgotten herstory, women had access to herbs and methods that served as effective contraceptives and abortifacients.

Reality: any actual study of pre-modern herb lore will turn up thousands of folk remedies that were, almost without exception, utterly useless except for one fact — most of them did less harm than what passed for “medicine” before our understanding of germ theory.

Steinem: the evil European patriarchy killed six million “witches,” or female healers, who had access to these ancient and highly effective contraceptive weeds.

Reality: methods believed to terminate pregnancy have been prevalent in all societies since the dawn of time. Among the most common; awkward jumping jacks and beating or restricting the abdomen until the womb bled. Further, many deeply patriarchal cultures saw no particular sin in the matter. And as an aside, if Steinem has knowledge about cheap, easily available herbal abortifacients that could withstand a double- blind trial and a safety review — please, please — there are entire U. S. states filled with desperate women eager for that particular cure. Personally, I’d be reluctant to opt for pennyroyal and black cohosh over, say, Plan B or a nice, patriarchally supervised dose of mifepristone, but you do you, sister.

Steinem: the loss of these female- possessed methods of nat- ural birth control led to over-population, which led to colonialism, which caused racism.

Listening to the pop- sociological version of the Paleo Diet, I really began to understand why this brand of feminism stopped being useful to women who are struggling with real problems: unwanted pregnancy, pay inequity, disparity in child care and housework duties, absent partners, racism, social pressures to conform to gender roles.

Even if this ahistorical, scientifically illiterate nonsense weren’t so easy to debunk — what practical use does any of it serve? Is throwing a Venus of Willendorf statue going to help me secure a raise or encourage my husband to pick up the vacuum cleaner for once?

I can’t help but notice that, generally speaking, the further back in history we go, the worse the world seemed to be for women. Admittedly, certainty seems to drop off right around the beginning of records, but even then — ever watched a documentary about chimpanzees, our nearest genetic cousins? Bonobos aside, there seems to be an awful lot of rape, tribal warfare and the murder and consumption of rival gangs’ offspring.

Or perhaps we might marvel at the marked and obvious disparity in upper- body strength between men and women even in modern humans — it almost seems to suggest that for most of human history, and most to the point, our prehistory, the genes most likely to be passed along were those for strong men and ( comparatively) weaker women. Hmmm.

It’s a dangerous gambit for us women to model some idyllic human society on the ancient past and I’m not sure why we would feel the need to. If history and anthropology have failed to dig up much evidence of a prehistoric gynocentric earth cult, it does offer us this beacon: human societies are dynamic, adaptable and diverse. We have the power to change our circumstances. We don’t need to appeal to mystical hokum to demand our rights, nor to imagine a better future.

I don’t mean to be needlessly harsh with Steinem, although I’m sure she would resent the quiet, uncritical deference we give to the ravings of the very young and the very old. She did offer some generous advice when asked directly to give some. Perhaps the most useful was this: “Don’t listen to me. Listen to yourself. Listen to the voice inside yourself.”

ON A VISIT TO CALGARY, THE FEMINIST ICON MIXED GREAT ADVICE WITH SOME … AWFULLY ODD THEORIES.