Paul Jump
posted 1 February 2007

A survey for international women's day a couple of years ago revealed that only 29% of British women would describe themselves as feminists. A recent survey by Cosmopolitan recorded a figure four percentage points lower still, and cultural commentators are queuing up to proclaim that we are living in a post-feminist age. But what exactly does that mean - and is it something to be welcomed?

One thing the post-feminist age is clearly not supposed to be is a return to the pre-feminist era when women lived sheltered lives consisting of housework, childcare and closed-eyed daydreaming of England once or twice a week. On the contrary, it is asserted that women are now as free as men, both economically and sexually, the 'post-feminist' label deriving from the fact that such a state of affairs can now be taken for granted.

After all, practically no one now believes that women should be paid less than men for doing the same job (96% of Cosmopolitan's readers thought men and women deserve equal pay, for instance). Likewise, no one flutters an eyelid if women initiate sexual encounters and admit to enjoying sex. Aside from the American Christian right and the Roman Catholic Church, everyone in the West believes that women should have birth control and make their own reproductive choices. If to be a feminist means to believe in these things, then just about everyone is a feminist. But labels which apply to everyone very quickly go out of circulation. Why, after all, would you bother to describe yourself as a carbon-based life-form - unless you were talking to a robot?

Individualism

This common perception that the traditional feminist battles have all been won has various cultural manifestations. For one thing, the feminist army is disbanding, not merely in the sense that few claim explicit allegiance to it anymore, but also in the sense that women's feelings of comradeship are also dying away. Today's female icons are not so much women who have gone beyond the call of duty in the battle of the sexes as women who have been successful in the gender-neutral modern scramble for fame and/or money. If they are set on a quasi-feminist pedestal at all, it is merely because they indicate a woman, as an individual, can be as successful as a man.

King's College London professor Alison Wolf claimed in a Prospect article last year that career-obsessed, go-getting women are bringing about 'the death of the sisterhood', while traditional feminist Catharine MacKinnon calls them 'traitors'. No doubt she would include the Spice Girls in that category: the cultural phenomenon of nineties Britain who talked endlessly about 'girl power' and yet conspicuously failed to donate any of their royalties to such obvious female-empowering institutions as rape crisis centres and family-planning clinics.

Nor did their notion of 'girl power' indicate any refusal to be served up by image consultants as the kind of sexually available masturbation fantasies to which traditional feminists so virulently objected. Quite the contrary, in fact: the Spice Girls' notion of power was connected to the fact that they were girls precisely in the sense that they were not ashamed to use their female sexuality to their personal advantage - by encouraging men (and the women who admired them) to buy their records and make them five very rich (and, therefore, powerful) individuals.

Raunch

Nor have women been slow to imitate their raunchy example. This is another aspect of the post-war loosening of feminist discipline. Much as a culture of sexual licence (marked by sexually explicit theatre - so-called Restoration Comedy - and poetry - such as that of the Earl of Rochester) succeeded the Puritanism of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth in English history, so another such period has succeeded what might fairly be called the Puritanism of High Feminism, whose high priestesses urged women to burn their bras and dress in dungarees in order to free themselves from the tyranny of male lust.

This vision of feminism, advocated by Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, still holds sway in the popular imagination. And this is why my point above about the feminist label falling out of circulation due to mass acceptance is not the whole story. It is not just that modern women don't feel the need to describe themselves as feminists - it is that they actively resist the label. Cosmopolitan editor Sam Baker thinks her readers see feminism as 'anti-fun, anti-men, anti-sex'. Today's women, on the contrary, get their kicks from flaunting their attractiveness and playing up to male lust via what some call a 'raunch' culture of thongs, breast enhancement surgery, pole dancing lessons and lap-dancing fitness videos.

Meanwhile, men's magazines such as Loaded sell in huge numbers on the strength of photographs of minor celebrities in various states of erotic undress. Traditional feminists like Catharine MacKinnon continue to insist that sexual equality is grossly undermined by such (soft) pornography. Nor is New York magazine editor Ariel Levy enamoured of raunch culture, calling it, in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs 'a tawdry, tarty, cartoon-like version of female sexuality.' However, there are even some avowed feminists who embrace it wholeheartedly.

A case is point is Periel Aschenbrand. She describes herself as a feminist because of her concerns about domestic violence, abortion rights, rape conviction rates, sexist advertising and the pressure on young girls to be thin. However, she openly confesses to frequenting lap-dancing clubs and watching pornography. She also sells (expensive) t-shirts with quasi-feminist slogans printed on the 'prime advertising space' of the bosom. One such slogan reads 'the only bush I trust is my own': a phrase which she also uses as the title of her latest book, whose dust jacket sports a photograph of her completely naked save for a plastic fig leaf velcroed to said bush.

Kate Taylor, author of A Woman's Guide to Sex, also embraces raunch culure. In a recent Guardian article, she said: 'true feminism should celebrate femininity, and make you feel wonderful to be born a woman. Women are rediscovering the joy of being loved for their bodies, not just their minds. Today's girls are playing with the old-fashioned notion of being seen as sex objects. This is not terrible news. In fact, to me, this is the ultimate feminist ideal.' As the subsequent flood of hostile letters from the rump sisterhood attests, however, that is a pretty radical redefinition of the feminist ideal. One might almost be tempted to say that Taylor's use of the word 'feminism' is a figleaf covering her naked rejection of the traditional concerns of the women's liberation movement.

Language and stereotypes

Incidentally, the headline of Taylor's article was 'Today's ultimate feminists are the chicks in crop tops'. Such language is indicative of another post-feminist-war phenomenon: the falling away of the rigid political correctness which used to govern the way women are referred to. Nor is it merely Loaded-reading men whose linguistic discipline has collapsed. The last time I was in Urban Outfitters, a T-shirt bearing the word 'babe' was flying off the shelf in the women's department. The other day I saw a pair of mugs in a trendy gift shop (the kind that attracts mostly women), one with 'bloke' painted on it, the other, more significantly, with 'bird'. And thinking back to last winter, remember how the first cultural effect of bird flu was to provoke a pandemic of lame jokes about women feeling under the weather. Even Ariel Levy is at it, admitting in her book that 'it's only been a few years since I graduated from a place where you could pretty much get expelled for saying girl instead of woman, but somewhere along the line I've started saying chick.'

The revival of such 'sexist' terms, it seems to me, is also connected with a sense that it is OK to be the kind of woman traditional feminists would have seen of as traitors: the kind interested in such archetypally female pursuits as shopping, gossiping and match-making; looking after children, following fashion and pursuing luxury.

Indeed, a whole literary genre has grown up around this phenomenon. The London tube is plastered with pastel-pink posters for the latest 'chick lit' must-read, while American subways are similarly cluttered with adverts for romantic 'chick-flicks'. When I lived there a few years ago, practically every American woman over the age of twenty also seemed to be obsessed by the idea of getting married - not to mention learning to knit, like the various female Hollywood icons who had made it bizarrely fashionable.

Meanwhile, the ever-growing number of women's magazines churn out celebrity lifestyle stories, amazing new diets and it'll-drive-him-wild sex secrets. One such magazine, the fashionable Grazia, recently ran a TV advert whose slogan was: 'Pomegranate or blueberries? A lot can change in a week'. It is well known that advertising works by creating an attractive image of the kind of person who supposedly buys the particular product: an image to which viewers are likely to aspire. So if Grazia is depicting its readers as frivolously fashion-consciousness and diet-obsessed, that probably says something about the kind of person its readers aspire to be. And the same could also be said for L'Oreal's ubiquitous 'because I'm worth it' appeal to female self-indulgence.

This embrace of what you might call 'girliness' marks a retreat from the traditional feminist urge to underplay physical and psychological differences between men and women. That urge derived from the conviction that an admission of female difference would be seized on by male chauvinists as an admission of women's unsuitableness to enter the male world of work. Now that women have broken into that world in their millions, they are ready to accept that, in the words of John Gray's mega-selling book, they are from Venus, whereas men are from Mars.

Indeed, there almost seems to be a cultural pressure these days towards the exaggeration of gender differences, to the point of absurd stereotyping. A good example is the recent television series Beauty and the Geek, which depicted men as intelligent and knowledgeable yet ugly and awkward, and women as socially adept and pleasing on the eye yet ignorant and trivial. Inevitably the programme's makers would claim that it was supposed to be 'postmodern' and 'ironic', but I'm still rather surprised that it appears to have offended so few. Not so many years ago sexual stereotyping - particularly of women - was as much of a cultural third-rail (touch it and you get zapped) as racial stereotyping remains today.

Of course, the reason the latter remains taboo is that precious few people think the battle for racial equality has yet been won. But is there, perhaps, the danger that the fighting in the feminist war has stopped before it has been fully won?

Does the battle go on?

In terms of the battle for sexual equality, traditional feminists have pointed to the recent criticism of Scarlett Johansson for admitting she has an AIDS test every six months (and, thereby, implying that she has a lot of sexual partners) as evidence that double standards remain in society's estimation of the sexual conduct of men and women. Others also insist that financial equality has not yet been achieved either, pointing to the report of the British government's Women & Work Commission which showed, thirty years after the Sex Discrimination Act, women's hourly pay is still, on average, 17% lower than men's.

On the other hand, the UK Office for National Statistics more recently found that the gap between men and women's average hourly pay rate was at a record low of 12.6% and falling, with women in their twenties actually earning a fraction more than men. Alison Wolf declared in her Prospect article: 'The statistics are clear: among young, educated, full-time professionals, being female is no longer a drag on earnings or progress.' And while some activists such as the Equal Opportunity Commission's Jenny Watson respond to the gap by demanding new laws to force employers to deliver even greater equality, most observers accept that much of the remaining discrepancy is due to women taking career breaks to have children and tending to choose lower-paying jobs such as the caring professions.

In response to the latter, many commentators, as well as the Commission itself, suggested that active measures ought to be taken to attract more women into higher-paying professions such as banking. I personally was rather surprised by that line of argument since if we really are ready to accept that men are from Mars and women from Venus then surely it follows that men and women will tend to be better suited to different kinds of jobs - in terms of the pleasure those jobs give them as much as their aptitude for them.

In as much as the sexual pay disparity is perceived as a problem at all - and not just a fact of life in a capitalist society in which the market decides that some characteristics (such as aggression and brashness) are worth more than others - I would have thought a post-feminist society would seek to address it by seeking a rise in pay levels in the professions women favour - and the part-time jobs generally filled by women with children.

In fact, though, there seems to be something of a cultural battle still going on in this area. Never mind Harvard president Larry Summers and his inevitably controversial suggestion that men might tend to be better at science than women. A far more striking case is that of the Cambridge biologist Peter Lawrence, who recently attracted a huge amount of criticism in the popular press for publishing an academic paper about the gender imbalance in the number of academic scientists.

Drawing on research about 'male' and 'female' brains (which backs up the Mars and Venus idea), Lawrence suggested that even if there were no active discrimination whatsoever in university science departments, men would probably still outnumber women in science academia because more men tend to have the kind of single-minded quasi-autistic personalities necessary to successful scientific research. He also suggested that the way the scientific profession is currently run favours typically male characteristics in a way which may not always result in the best research, and advocated it should, in various ways, become more female friendly. However, such subtleties were lost in the ensuing media storm, in which he was lumped in with Summers as an unreconstructed male chauvinist.

Interestingly, his article had already been withdrawn at the last minute by the (male) chief editor of another high-profile journal which has previously accepted it, and Lawrence had been warned by numerous colleagues to steer well clear of the issue. The feminist war may be over, but it seems that there is still at least one battlefield where anyone venturing to poke their heads above the trenches is likely to perish in No Man's Land.