penises
Brenda Atkinson
The grand declarations by Judge Nigel Willis and the majority of the court – a savage mix of patriarchal gospel and capitalist economic imperatives – were appalling enough. But the clincher came from advocate Martin Brassey, SC, representing Woolworths, who, in a stunning display of updated Victorian misogyny, compared a pregnant woman applying for a job to a male porn star with erectile dysfunction applying for a role in a porn film.
The layered Freudian logic of Brassey’s statement is as exquisite as its implications are sickening. What we have here is confirmation of the second post- feminist backlash, an ideological world- view in which men are measured by the hardness of their cocks, and women by subservience to and acceptance of what might be called cock-logic.
In this scenario, pregnant women bear the mark of phallic penetration, something which imprints their bodies, minds, and souls (if indeed women have souls – another issue disputed in the canonical wisdom of the world’s philosophical fathers). The result is a “condition” that renders women mute, stupid, inferior, and above all, economically unproductive (witness the majority view of the court that it would be “economically irrational” for employers to discount the child-bearing status of a prospective employee).
The Labour Appeal Court ruling and the justifications advanced in its support might seem as isolated as they are anachronistic: we all like to believe that the turn of this century has discarded the gender atrocities of the centuries that refused women the right to vote, govern, lead church services or simply work; that declared women “hysterical” due to “wandering wombs”; that later refused women positions of professional seniority because that other feminine “condition”, menstruation, would render them irrational on a monthly basis.
Such theories – advanced by religious and political orthodoxy and supported by Western medical models that saw men alone as able to supercede their biological destiny in grand Cartesian style – have in the 20th century clothed themselves in the indisputable, indifferent garb of economic necessity.
In an article for Manhattan newspaper The Village Voice (October 26 1999), Richard Goldstein calls this “the crisis of masculinity 1990s style.” It is, he writes, “a market-driven trend with enormous resonance for every man who feels the hot breath of change … a crisis of status rather than substance [in which] the cybercrat is as likely as the working stiff to feel under siege.”
On this point, American writer Susan Faludi has come full circle in her analysis of society’s sex wars in just 10 years. In 1991, Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women meticulously charted the symptomatic signs of that war in, among other cultural formations, contemporary popular media, from films such as Fatal Attraction to articles on the failure of feminism in the New York Times.
Last year, Faludi published Shafted, a new tome in which she turns her attention to the symbolic shafting of the American male, a violation enacted in part by the declining importance of manual labour in an increasingly cybercratic society (interestingly, Beverly Whitehead’s application was for a position in cyber- management, as part of Woolworths’ information technology department).
Popular culture is still serving us dollops of backlash ideology, in the form of films such as Fight Club – a howling protest against the emasculation of the ordinary guy – and men’s magazines (GQ, FHM, Loaded, and so forth), which boldly champion men’s right to regard women with invidious disregard to their status as human beings.
Despite 30 years of feminist education – or perhaps because of it – men continue to use whatever media they have at their disposal to reduce women to pussy on the one hand, or incubator-Madonnas on the other.
Which brings us back to Brassey and the eminent Judge Willis, who both apparently attended the Camille Paglia School of Biodeterminism. In his statements regarding Whitehead’s case, Judge Willis suggests that women in Western culture take a leaf from the books of religions that hold sacred the bonding between mother and child – religions which, incidentally, have in practice, if not in principle, been responsible for some of the most heinous oppression of women the world has known. And let’s face it, Christianity has not exactly smiled kindly on the empowerment of women.
It’s extraordinary, but perhaps predictable, that in this Age of Aquarius, this moment pregnant with technological, social and cultural possibility, there exist men who cannot see the wood for the penises. Clearly Judge Willis and Brassey have failed to understand that, whether they like it or not, a new social order is upon us, one in which machines will take the sting out of the gender wars, in which people will increasingly work from home because their physical bodies will not be required in their offices, in which intelligence will be measured by one’s intellectual capital rather than by one’s physical form or condition.
In this new order, even men will be freed from the bondage of cock-logic, a logic which rules that if you’re not hard, you’re not strong.