Karen Murphy may well be a talented journalist, but you wouldn’t know it from her screed on the ‘death’ of feminism in Tuesday’s Age. Her op-ed (you can read it here) is an embarrassing mish-mash of recycled platitudes, undergraduate sermonizing and hare-brained naiveté. According to Murphy, feminism is ‘dead’, and women are to blame:

The feminist revolution was serious, important, but now it’s just a joke… We just gave up, and now to describe yourself as a feminist has almost the same effect as if you had farted in a crowded lift… You would think that after millenniums [sic] of being treated as second-class citizens we could have put up a better fight.

But is feminism really ‘dead’? It depends what one means by the term. Murphy, for her part, seems confused. Straight away, the reader steps through the looking glass:

I feel like a slave released from a plantation after the American Civil War, who struggles to adjust to freedom only to see my fellow slaves creep back into servitude.

Slavery? Servitude? What is it about some feminists that so inures them to a sense of historical perspective? Australian women, especially middle-class Fairfax journalists, are amongst the freest women in recorded history – and any bona fide slave would be appalled at the comparison. In the 1960s and 1970s the feminist movement prompted legislative reforms that helped break down ingrained perceptions of which roles women should play in society. In 1970, there were three women in the federal Parliament; by 2004, there were 56. Julia Gillard has just been sworn in as Australia’s first female deputy prime minister, and since 2001 Victoria has had a woman – Christine Nixon – as Police Commissioner. Women now make up a clear majority of the Australian university population and roughly half of the students in many law and medical faculties. Undeniably, there are still battles to be won: Australia lags far behind most of the developed world in providing decent paid maternity leave, and pay parity between men and women is yet to be fully achieved. But nothing is to be gained by denying what feminism has achieved.

Murphy continues:

One by one [women] go back to what they know, because it’s easier and all the while claiming that it is not about greed or fear but the right to chose [sic].

But this is a false distinction. Whether individuals make their decisions out of fear, greed or stupidity does not invalidate their right to make them; nor does it detract from the inherent dignity in being able to make one’s own choices. More disturbing is the assumption that individual liberties (‘the right to choose’) are a smokescreen for a trans-historical capitalist conspiracy to keep women barefoot and pregnant:

Capitalism lurks somewhere behind it, of that there is no doubt, the notion that earning money is without a moral component. But it goes deeper than that, as if we have all been sold the emperor’s new clothes of sexual glamour. No, ladies, it’s not glamorous, it’s just naked.

Murphy is here parroting the radical feminist line – worn through repetition into stale orthodoxy – that we live in a ‘patriarchal’ society which, through hidden and devious means, institutionalises the ‘oppression’ of women. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf extended this critique to ideals of female beauty, which were seen as patriarchal constructs that shoehorned women into ‘acceptable’ gender roles. In this view, any woman who refused to accept the extent of her oppression was merely labouring under the ‘false consciousness’ of her gender socialization.

This perspective draws heavily on Rousseau’s idea of human nature, which sees the unborn child as an unblemished being, which, in the first years of life, is twisted and distorted out of its ‘natural’ state by the process of human socialization. For radical gender feminists, true ‘liberation’ no longer involves a fight for civil liberties and equal opportunity; it involves a return to an amorphous and vaguely-imagined state of pre-societal bliss: a world without war, prostitution, pornography, sexual harassment, strip clubs, stiletto heels or hierarchies of any sort – a genderless utopia such as that described by theorist Anne Ferguson. Equality of opportunity and freedom of choice is displaced by the idea of literal equality between the sexes, a wooly-headed notion that quickly runs aground on the rocks of biological difference.

Taken to its logical extreme, this strand of thinking contains within it an incipient totalitarianism, for if individuals don’t realise the extent of their oppression and persist in making wrong or damaging decisions, a reasonable response is to use the power of the state to correct them, to the supposed ‘betterment’ of society. This same impulse led radical feminists and far-right Christian conservatives into a bizarre anti-porn coalition in the 1980s. For feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, women who worked in the sex industry, despite their protestations to the contrary, did not make the decision freely; they were victims of a system which institutionalised sexual violence and were therefore, essentially, victims of rape. (This is undoubtedly true in some cases. But it’s questionable whether censorship would have made much difference: banning pornography would only have driven it underground, out of the reach of government regulation, where more women would be vulnerable to abuse. And whose definition of pornography was to be used as a benchmark?).

Such an austere form of feminism, forged in the vacuum of academia, has never appealed much to ordinary men and women. Equality feminism was popular amongst young people in the 1960s because it was common sense: basically, there was no good reason why women shouldn’t be offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts. But with this freedom came new responsibilities, and there was little hope that injustice, poverty and discrimination would evaporate overnight. Such a feminism based itself on principles of human dignity and fairness. It never promised Utopia.

But Murphy can’t quite let go. Using the patriarchal-capitalist complex as a crutch for her own moralising, she then points the finger at those women she blames for bringing the ‘revolution’ to a halt, running the gamut from strippers and ‘educated’ prostitutes to women ‘who claim stiletto heels are comfortable’ and those who ‘post tawdry “raunch” photos of themselves on the internet’. Apparently, these women have ‘offended’ her through their choice of lifestyle or livelihood. But when did choice become an enemy of women’s rights? From the perspective of equality feminism, these women are the revolution. It was the common-sense feminism of the 1960s that allowed them to follow their own impulses, whether they were to strip for money, practice law, watch porn or become nuns. In private, we can decry any of these decisions, but the choice is not ours – nor, in most cases, the state’s – to make. Feminism has become a dirty word because it no longer reflects the right of women to choose, instead being recognised as a code-word for prudery, judgmentalism and a form of obscure theorising, which, outside the hermetic confines of academia, is pretty much irrelevant. Murphy’s feminism constrains women as much as any religious or ‘patriarchal’ belief system, and nothing short of a police state could possibly enforce it.

As the American Constitution recognises, the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is a vital and universal right. In the words of V.S. Naipaul:

[It] is… an elastic idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

Equality feminism is based on this ideal. But as Dr. Malfi, the fictional psychiatrist in The Sopranos, observes, it is only the pursuit that is guaranteed. Murphy’s rant fails to make this distinction. It is the sound of somebody waking up from a decades-long utopian daydream, disappointed to find it unrealised. It is the sound of sexism’s counter-reformation.

Why does The Age print such fifth-rate material?