After Trump’s win, what’s the point of feminism?
The pressures are more insidious than on my generation
What does feminism look like in November 2016? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. I’m really asking, because I don’t know.
Is it Emma Watson insisting that Belle, her character in Disney’s new live-action Beauty and the
Beast, be given a career to reflect the growing economic independence of impossibly waspwaisted fairytale princesses?
Maybe it’s Hillary Clinton, admitting the bitter personal toll of defeat, valiantly taking to the stage without the mask – the shield – of warpaint, eyes red from crying.
Or it could be a load of female celebrities exercising their personal freedom to take skimpily clad showers in the Australian jungle.
And what of Jo Cox, the petite Labour MP and mother-of-two whose harrowing – heroic – last moments were revealed in court this week?
Even as she lay bleeding, she urged others to flee to safety. Too badly hurt to move and in fear for her life, she continued to protect her staff.
“Let him hurt me. Don’t let him hurt you,” she shouted to her aides.
I’ve written before about how I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the “ism” in feminism. But as I’ve tried and failed to come up with a fresher title, it will do for now.
If you ask my 14-year-old, she will claim all these women and their actions to be “feminist”, feminism being, in her eyes, bound up with assertiveness, courage, being true to yourself.
“It’s a shame feminism has to exist,” she sighed as we watched I’m A Celebrity, Get Me A Tinier Bikini Than Hers. “It sounds really old-fashioned. But until we get rid of all those pervy cameramen zooming in on women’s bodies, I think we have to have it.”
Quite so. My own feminist sensibilities were forged by shoulder pads and kick-ass portrayals of steely career women beating men at their own game – albeit by adopting the same macho methods of play.
The world my daughter is growing up in is different. In some respects, it is more egalitarian; how else to explain the meritocratic rise of Merkel, Sturgeon and May?
A quarter of board members at the FTSE 100 companies are now female – not nearly enough, but double that of 2012. Just seven are CEOs, and, yes, it’s a shock to be told there are still twice as many men named John who are CEOs or chairmen as there are women. But I believe that will change.
What concerns me more than the ascent of the few is the denigration of the many. In some respects, the pressures on girls and young women are more insidious and oppressive than anything my generation had to face. The hollow aesthetic values and pervy teen camerawork of social media, the supplanting of tentative puppy love by smartphone porn and the rise of fratboy culture at universities are the new battles.
Now that the term “post-truth” has this week entered the Oxford Dictionary and become A Thing, I can’t help wondering when “postTrump” might make an appearance and, of course, be an even bigger Thing.
That a boorish sexual predator is now president-elect and soon-tobe leader of the free world sends out a message to women everywhere that their rights are no longer inalienable.
“It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified first lady in the White House. I’m tired of seeing an ape in heels,” one Facebook poster in the West Virginia town of Clay, wrote this week, of Michelle Obama. The town’s mayor responded with the quip: “Just made my day.” Chillingly, both were women; the mayor was subsequently fired.
In her recent – stunning – oration, Mrs Obama claimed that a society’s civilisation would always be judged on how it treated women and girls. Perhaps the first tenet of 21st-century feminism, then, is to lead by example and be civilised to one another. Hillary Clinton’s decision to go without make-up in her first public appearance since the Trump victory was met with consternation in some quarters. With her “civilian” face, she looked the way anyone would after a gruelling presidential campaign, ignominious defeat and an avalanche of criticism.
Because she is a woman, she has been pilloried not just about letting down voters in general, but female voters in particular. Big fat failure is a feminist issue.
But not all struggles take place on the stump. English actress Emma Watson took on the might of Disney when, during filming of
Beauty and the Beast, she insisted on having input into her character Belle’s back story and outfits. In the original animated cartoon, Belle’s father is a crackpot inventor, while she spends her days buried in her beloved books. Watson wanted the peasant girl to be more empowered, so the heroine is portrayed as the inventor of a washing machine, thus affording her time to read.
It doesn’t sound like much (because it wasn’t much), but the headlines branding this a “feminist” retelling of the story – one whose trailer was viewed a record number of times in its first day – demonstrate that there’s still a way to go in the push for equality.
“Huh?” comes the verdict from my in-house gender equality spokeswoman. “Giving a fictional character a job and calling it ‘a victory for women’ is wierd. I mean, it’s not a big deal.”
Pause. “Or maybe the fact there’s such a fuss means it is a big deal? That’s even weirder. Feminism is really confusing, I hope we can get rid of it soon and just be normal.” There we have it. Feminism: old-fashioned and confusing, but still very much necessary. It is the face of every little girl on the planet.