Glenda Daniels
Body Language
Slavishly follow all trends in the United States, and you could become a blithering dithering fool especially if you’re a woman. Shut up and surrender to your man, tell him he’s wonderful even when he’s an idiot, and you will have the perfect relationship. This is what a new book The Surrendered Wife by newest self-help queen Laura Doyle, in the US, is preaching. And the book is flying off the shelves, with 100 000 copies sold in the first month, with millions of women and men engaging in talk shows, and Net talks flourishing on how to disempower yourself as a woman and, so, have a perfectly harmonious relationship. US women are falling for this by even forming “surrendered wife support groups”. This may be an appropriate resort as they will need the support if they surrender their sense of self, identity and honesty. If the rest of the world is determined to follow the US way in politics, economics, culture and technology, may women stop short of following the US’s obnoxious backlash against feminism. Today many US women are purporting to post-post-feminism because they believe that their having smashed the glass ceiling in some boardrooms means sexism has been eradicated. They believe, in other words, that they have won; that it’s time now to conquer personal relationships and to make marriages work. There’s nothing objectionable about making personal relationships work. But to surrender power is prostitution except that prostitution, the exchange of sex for money, has more integrity in that it is an open and above-board transaction. The backlash against feminism started in the early 1990s with men forming support groups (in the US again) using cave-man strategies to bond. They beat drums and chanted. And they cried about their modern-day oppression, their difficulties in being “new men”, in knowing what is expected of them, and in managing to be sensitive and manly at the same time.
Former feminist writers such as Fay Weldon have bought into this syndrome by empathising with the “dilemma” facing men today. Others, like Camille Paglia, have equally incensed by suggesting that they should not make an issue of date rape as they are themselves to blame! Now an even more dangerous pattern is emerging with stereotypes being promoted as a way forward. Be the subservient, Doyle says a sweet, smiling, serving type of woman who hangs on his every word, efficient in the kitchen, and an orgasmic sex fantasy come true in bed. In keeping with this disturbing trend towards stereotypes is the popularity of the waif-like, confused and desperately-seeking-a-man-in- order-to-be-whole character in the popular US television show Ally Mcbeal, which is about to begin another nauseating run in South Africa. Mcbeal has become a 21st-century icon, and yet she is indecisive and silly. Have you noticed how she almost never answers a question by saying yes or no; instead, her response is almost always a “Hmm, yes, no, maybe, eh, let me think about it …” sort of dithering.
Feminist consciousness, ironically enough, started in the US in the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. But what is this new warped, perverse and distorted “logic” of surrendering individuality by going back to anachronistic cave-man stuff, going to do to future generations of US women? Teaching them an ideology of surrender will ensure that girls will do less well at school so that their male counterparts can do better; and that they will value their looks (to catch a man) above academic performance and career. The result will be a workforce dominated by men.
These are just a few consequences of falsely propping up the male ego and pretending that a man’s every word is profound. The sad part is that there are many intelligent men who actually despise this behaviour in women. So, if you think all men are idiots and will buy into this, you’re mistaken.
Neo-liberal feminism, post-feminism? Actually no feminism. Women from the 1980s onwards in the US thought that capitalism would achieve equality between the genders. Capitalism has reached its heights, but political representation of women in Congress in the US is at a measly 14%. Women in South Africa are streets ahead at 27%. The most powerful nation in the world has never had a woman as a national leader. Yet India, a developing nation, has. So, too, has Sri Lanka. Don’t follow trends set by US women. Bring back Germaine Greer! In her latest book, The Whole Woman, she writes that feminism has lost its way. In her search for the whole woman she looked for a woman who did not exist to embody male sexual fantasies or rely upon a man to endow her with identity and social status, a woman who did not have to be beautiful, who could be clever, who would grow in authority as she aged. It’s time to get angry again, Greer says, in relation to the latest trends and developments.