Misogyny doesn't die out with dinosaurs
International Women's Day calls for a revolution
Never has a women's revolution been so desperately needed. Right here. Right now.
Australian women kickstarted one 50 years ago. We need to crank it up again.
On this day, International Women's Day, 1975, prime minister Gough Whitlam called for a "revolution in people's heads".
This was straight out of the feminist manifesto of the Australian Women's Liberation Movement, with whom Whitlam wholeheartedly agreed.
The United Nations had declared '75 International Women's Year and called on every nation to step up. Whitlam was all in. He urged women to "give the world a shove in the right direction."
Appalled by media misogyny and overt sexism, Whitlam told his audience, "... our overriding task and challenge for this year is to strike out at the attitudes".
Female oppression was "deeply embedded ... in the psychology of the society", he said. That must change.
As Whitlam knew, driving real change - transformative social and cultural change, that attempts to take the nation with you - takes moral leadership. And political capital.
International Women's Day has a way of focusing our attention. For the past decade it has become performative, overtaken by purple ribbons and cupcakes. While we sit on our hands.
This year, listening to the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese's dreary words about "marching forward", reflecting on how far "Australia has come" and "the foundations we've laid", was like floating mindlessly inside the bubble of a parallel universe, disconnected to the real world that real women live in.
Albanese's IWD speech at the annual parliamentary breakfast, hosted by UN Women, did nothing to acknowledge, much less address, the almighty anti-woman sentiment and backlash whipping women around the globe right now. Including we meek sods sitting in front of him.
According to UN Women, one in four nations report backlash on women's rights. They report "higher levels of discrimination and weaker legal protections" across the world.
Fascist plutocracies are literally ripping up reproductive rights - exciting conservative men in places such as Queensland and South Australia, who sniff the changing winds of patriarchal power.
Others, such as misogynistic theocracies in Iran and Afghanistan, are playing the God card to justify dehumanising women and banning basic human rights and freedom of movement.
In Australia women's freedom of movement, voice and expression have all taken a serious hit, now that "radical anti-feminism" is an official thing. Research from Melbourne University shocked but confirmed what women can see for themselves - female hatred is coming out of the closet. The data found "20 per cent of Australian men believe that feminism should be violently resisted."
We know that men "frustrated out of their brain" because they can't "get a girlfriend", can hunt down women in a Bondi shopping mall stabbing spree, and yet still authorities don't call it "terrorism", because it wasn't "ideologically" motivated.
"Radical anti-feminism", as detailed by the Melbourne researchers, sounds like a dangerous ideology to me.
Albanese says we need to be "clear about where we still have a long way to go."
Well, two out of every five Australians are already clear. They think "women's equal rights have gone far enough", according to research out this week from the Global Institute of Women's Leadership. Young men think this most.
Misogyny doesn't die out with the old dinosaurs. It's new, hip, cool and likes a bet on bitcoin. It's all the rage in the US these days.
The death of DEI was swift. As if suffering battered wife syndrome, American institutions learnt quickly to shut up and submit. The US National Science Foundation is not the only research organisation to remove the words "woman", "female" and gender from its website.
So, what can we take from those revolutionaries of five decades ago? Those women who set about changing their world and themselves along the way? Women whose stated goal was not "equality", but "liberation!"
When Whitlam's Women's adviser, Elizabeth Reid, walked on stage at the inaugural UN World Conference on Women, in Mexico City, 1975, to mark International Women's Year, she had steel in her spine. Over 6000 women activists, 1300 government delegates from 133 nations, and 1000 media representatives had arrived. The UN called it the "greatest consciousness raising event in history".
The world was watching and Australia's representative was there to prize open the one subject the UN did not want on the agenda - sexism. Reid let rip.
"We live in societies ... ruled by men - our societies are patriarchal," she said, eyeballing world leaders.
"None of us live in, and it is impossible to imagine living in, a non-sexist society."
The word sexism had never been used in an official UN forum before. UN member states were squirming. Reid pushed on.
"The basis of racism, racial discrimination, colonialism and neo-colonialism ... is similar to that violence against women which we call sexism. It is based on the need ... for power over other human beings. Patriarchy is yet another form of colonizing people."
It is, she said, "a colonisation by mute consent".
The New York Times called Reid a "militant feminist". Historians call her an international "feminist rockstar". By the end of the UN conference, Australia was lauded for its bold, progressive approach to ending discrimination against women. Even the UN secretary-general praised Whitlam's International Women's Year program, with its focus on changing women's attitudes to themselves, and men's attitudes towards women.
But such transformative change demands nothing short of revolutionary thinking. Elizabeth Ried, her fellow femocrats and the Australian women's movement lit a feminist fire that burned bright, but now is fading from history. It worked for them. And we need it now.
In recent years, Reid asked a Canberra audience, "Why does such a movement seem so anachronistic today? What happened to this social movement? Don't women need liberating anymore?"
I asked ChatGPT. The computer said "yes".
Brava Virginia! I am appalled at the values I now see on crude display in international politics and alarmed at it being turbo charged by new tech. Need to keep messaging - not sure that deterrence works but I have my tools and will use them (mostly words, but words are powerful).