Accidental feminists, p.14
Accidental Feminists, page 14
It seems that because we all started life inside a woman’s body, we still feel we have some form of tenant’s rights. This cultural assumption of once-removed ownership has led to the complicated and conflicted way that women view their own bodies. We often spend a great deal of time trying to see ourselves as others see us. When we were beautiful, nubile and young, we gained power and acceptance by seeing our desirability reflected back to us through men’s admiring eyes. Yes, it could be confronting, even scary, but it was also exciting. And frankly, when my generation was young it was often the only sort of unequivocal approval we were going to get. Our currency, as we were often told quite unashamedly, was our attractiveness to men. The equation was simple: the more men who wanted us, the more valuable we were.
If a woman becomes pregnant, and most womb-owning women still do (only 24 per cent of women currently of child-bearing age will never have a baby), that is when the rubber really hits the road (if you’ll excuse the expression) as far as the peculiar attitude society has to women and their bodies. All of us who have ever got about in public with a prominently pregnant belly have experienced complete strangers feeling entitled to come up and give our tummy a pat—something they would never dream of doing when we were just ourselves, rather than a container for a baby. This idea that a woman stops being the sole owner of her body when she conceives a child may also be behind the heat that is generated by the abortion debate. What really seems to be at issue is whether the woman controls her body, or whether the rest of us do.
On 25 May 2018, Irish citizens voted in a second referendum on abortion rights. In the run-up to polling day, Irish author Anne Enright argued that the first referendum, passed in 1983, had invented a new kind of person or, as she put it, ‘a new category of rights-holder’. This was because the eighth amendment enshrined the ‘right to life of the unborn’ in the Irish Constitution. She also pointed out that as the amendment also acknowledged what it called the equal right to life of the mother, it had transformed the pregnant woman from an individual human being into one side of a relationship: a mother. Her view is that the 1983 amendment established an odd equivalence between woman and foetus. ‘Pregnancy was a binary state, in which two souls temporarily shared the same blood supply,’ she wrote. ‘The question of who had it first was neither here nor there and the fertilised egg was a grown adult, temporarily inconvenienced by being a few hundred cells large.’
This relegation of the original owner-occupier of a woman’s body to just a tenant-in-common during pregnancy is yet another way we make female bodies more complicated to own. The disapproving looks a pregnant woman will receive if she smokes a cigarette, orders a drink or even dares to sip coffee are all clear indications that she is no longer regarded as a free and equal adult entitled to make her own decisions (right or wrong) about her own body. When women fight for their right to choose whether they will take a pregnancy to term or not, they are really staking a claim about their prior right to their own sovereign territory—namely, their own flesh. For a society to take it upon itself to decide what a woman may or may not do when she becomes pregnant is quite literally to colonise her body. No wonder feminism understands that the first and most essential of a woman’s rights is to retain power and control over the body she occupies.
Women of my generation were taught to use our bodies to attract men. Then we were taught to use them to produce children. What we were not taught was to use our bodies for our own benefit, or even our own pleasure. As ten-year-olds in 1967 my best friend and I attended what was called a ‘Mother and Daughter Talk’. We knew it was about sex—whatever that was. What we were told blew my tiny mind. The woman who stood on the stage in the Frenchs Forest Public School assembly hall that evening is indelibly fixed in my mind. I can see her now. She is smallish and roundish, with tightly permed grey hair crushed under a woven raffia pillbox hat. She has the embellished cat’s-eye glasses so beloved by Australian suburban matrons in the 1960s that they have been mercilessly pilloried by Edna Everage ever since. She is also excruciatingly embarrassed by her mission, and so desperate not to give us permission for licentiousness that she manages to give us—well, me, anyway—totally the wrong impression. She informs her prepubescent audience that when a husband and wife love each other ‘very, very much’ (she can’t emphasise this enough), the man takes his penis and puts it in his wife’s vagina and rubs against her until the sperm comes out and then it mixes with the mummy’s (she becomes the tenant-in-common instantly, apparently) egg and makes a baby.
I was so shocked by this disgusting idea that I only half-believed it. The next morning at breakfast I confronted my parents. ‘You didn’t do that, did you? I asked them, pulling a face. My mother went bright red. ‘How do you think I got you lot?’ she replied. I had my answer.
What I now thought happened was this: sexual intercourse (as the woman had called it, forming the dangerous words as if she was holding them at arm’s length) was like an inoculation, and about as much fun. You did it once when you got married (holding your nose), and then the number of children you conceived after that—whether it was one or twenty-one—was entirely a matter of luck. I can remember my horror when I read the ‘Dear Del’ advice column in a women’s magazine and a reader inquired whether having sex ‘once a year’ was unnatural. Unnatural! Of course it was, ten-year-old me thought. Such unnatural frequency was deeply perverted. Indeed, it was only through persistent reading of Dear Del and her advice that I began to realise that people did this disgusting thing quite frequently, and often enjoyed it.
I’d always known that it was good for men to admire women and think them beautiful. It was what all the midday movies told me, and every princess in fairytales was described that way, but it was only after that Mother and Daughter Talk and a good dose of Dear Del that I realised why. Little girls grow up knowing they are meant to be beautiful. Fecund young women enjoy a spurious kind of power. Pregnant women get an inkling that this power may be a con trick—but what happens to women when they get old? It is all very well for me to be chirpy about not getting periods anymore (though I stand by the absolute liberation of that), but how does it feel to go from vessel of temptation to vessel of repulsion in what is often a few short years? If—as so many women do—you have invested your self-worth in the physical appeal you have for men, the loss of it can feel terrifying.
No matter how annoying we may find the barrage of sexualised remarks and admiring noises that younger women routinely experience as they go about their business, for my generation (I am hoping it is different for the current one) the loss of it was sobering. Despite second-wave feminism, we had absorbed the idea that our value to men equalled our actual value. Once that was gone, once we began to experience the invisibility I wrote about in Chapter 2, we could feel literally devalued. Our value to our children, if we had any, might delay the realisation for a couple of decades, but once they had grown up and become independent (meaning we had successfully completed our job), we were—as far as society is concerned—past our use-by date. This is not simply a Western concept, either, or even the fault of a throwaway, consumerist society (though that certainly doesn’t help). The dismissal of older women seems endemic to many cultures. The more misogynistic a culture, the more theocratic, the worse the fate of older women can be.
Since the defeat of Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria, evidence of the attempted genocide of the Yazidi population has been uncovered in many mass graves. Most contain the bodies of Yazidi men and boys; however, at least two graves predominantly contain the bodies of older women aged between forty and sixty. Younger Yazidi women and girls (some horrifyingly young) had a value as sexual slaves, but their mothers and grandmothers had no value at all and so were simply and ruthlessly disposed of.
This is an extreme example of the attitude that sees women as existing only in relation to their sexual or reproductive value to men. A less extreme example is the revulsion that accompanies the idea of an older woman being the sexual partner of a younger man. No-one turns a hair when an older man—usually a rich and powerful one—trades in his ageing wife for a younger model (I’m looking at you, Rupert Murdoch; oh, and you too, Donald Trump), but when, very occasionally, it happens the other way around it is regarded at best as a curiosity, and at worst as revolting. President Emmanuel Macron of France is forty years old. His much older wife, Brigitte, triggers complicated responses, including Trump’s astonished ‘You’re in such good shape … beautiful’ exclamation when he met her in Paris. Trump was clearly amazed that he could (almost) fancy a woman who was only seven years his junior. Ah, if only men could see themselves the way we see them. Worse, it appears the US president genuinely felt that he was paying 65-year-old Madame Macron a compliment!
Indeed, when we admire older women who ‘look good for their age’ we are often incredibly and unconsciously patronising. Even elegant older women such as Helen Mirren and Judi Dench have their appearance dissected in tones of surprise. We can see the difference in attitudes to the sexuality of older men and older women in the way Hollywood casts its films. In 2015, Maggie Gyllenhaal revealed that she was turned down for a movie role because at thirty-seven she was deemed ‘too old’ to play the love interest for a 55-year-old man. US website GraphJoy has plotted the average age gaps between leading men and their female co-stars. The site found that since he turned thirty-five Denzel Washington has averaged an age gap with his leading ladies of over fifteen years, while Tom Cruise has averaged an almost thirteen-year difference. Apparently it is fine for men to continue being sexy into their dotage (Washington is sixty-three, Cruise is fifty-five and Harrison Ford—average age gap fourteen years—is seventy-five), but older women? Yuck! Indeed, as the male star starts getting older, the age gap between him and his female co-stars gets wider. In the 1999 film Entrapment, Sean Connery was forty years older than his romantic lead, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Whatever happened to Zeta-Jones, by the way? Oh, of course: she’s now closer to fifty than thirty—over the hill for a woman.
Is it any wonder, then, that older women also have a complex relationship with their sexuality? We are perfectly well aware that we have gone from being desirable to being repulsive. Yet many of us still enjoy and want sex. Young people may hate to think about their parents being sexually active—and let’s not mention their grandparents—but chances are many of them still are. In fact, once the exhaustion and lack of privacy that accompanies parenting small children is over, couples often get the opportunity to revive their sex life—a sex life that may continue for a very long time. A US study into the sex lives of over 3000 people aged between fifty-seven and eighty-five found that a quarter of 85-year-olds reported having sex at least once in the previous year. Those who continued having sex into their senior years were generally in better health. The bad news is that older women were less likely to remain sexually active than older men, but, according to the study, this was also because they were more likely to outlive their husband. In other words, they lost their partner rather than their interest.
Becoming a widow—something that is much more likely for women than men (42 per cent of men over eighty-five are widowed, compared to 77 per cent of women of the same age)—has an obvious, profound impact on your sex life. Women are also less likely than men to remarry after being widowed, even if they lose their husband relatively early. A French study found that a 65-year-old widower and a 45-year-old widow both have a 7 per cent chance of remarrying or, to put it more discouragingly, a 93 per cent chance of remaining single for the rest of their lives.
It is interesting to speculate about why it is so much harder for women to re-partner than it is for men. And this gap is characteristic whether the woman is single due to divorce or because her partner has died. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the remarriage rate for divorced men is fifty-four per 1000 such men in the population, but there are only forty-one remarriages for every 1000 divorced women. Is it because we regard older women as intrinsically less attractive and desirable than older men? Are men simply able to seek new partners from a much wider range of women than the other way around? Are they more likely to marry younger women who have never been married before because the men’s sexuality remains more acceptable than that of their female contemporaries? And, as they grow older, if they have managed to accrue more status and wealth than their female peers, does this also help to maintain their desirability as life partners? Divorced and widowed women are fishing in a much smaller pool: men who are older than they are. They are also routinely judged much more harshly for their appearance, and are more likely to have lost wealth and status as a result of losing their male partner than the other way around. Once again, the decks are stacked against women.
Nevertheless, it is also possible that once a woman finds herself single again, she may decide she is perfectly happy to remain that way. Many of the studies I quote in this book indicate that men get a lot more out of being married than women do. No doubt some women make a deliberate choice to stay single. Being a vessel of repulsion has its upsides.
Financially, however, women tend to do better if they are married, particularly if that gives them access to their husband’s (usually larger) superannuation. And for women with no superannuation or income, most often because they made caring for husband and children their entire occupation (hello again, Lord Byron), the widow’s pension offers very cold comfort indeed. It is means-tested, and the current maximum for a single woman with no children is $545.80 a fortnight, which is the same as the notorious Newstart comparable rate. If a widow remains single and gets the Widow Allowance (as it is rather condescendingly called) for nine months in a row, then it will rise to a princely $590.40 per fortnight.
The appallingly low rate of Newstart is apparently justified because (as its Orwellian name implies) it is meant to act, in the words of Coalition federal member for Goldstein Tim Wilson on ABC TV’s Q&A in May 2018, as a ‘trampoline’, not as a ‘hammock’. In other words, Newstart is kept deliberately low to act as an incentive to get people off welfare and into work. This may be arguable when you are twenty-five, thirty-five or even forty-five, but it starts getting awfully tough when you are fifty-five or above. How you can justify a widow’s pension at such a paltry rate is harder to fathom. Is it meant to act as a disincentive for her to stay unmarried and an incentive to force her back—at whatever age—onto the marriage market? It strikes me as yet another example of how we trap women in a sticky web of contradictory expectations. Conservative politicians and pundits thoroughly approve of women who make home and hearth the centre of their existence, yet I haven’t heard any of them raising any kind of fuss about the plight women who have done just that find themselves in once they are widowed. And, as we have seen from the stats, most women who stay married will become widows eventually. Five hundred and ninety dollars a fortnight is not much of a thank-you for a woman who has spent her whole life caring for others.
Most of the panel on that episode of Q&A were sympathetic to the idea that the Newstart rate ought to be raised, but, as so often happens in these discussions, people automatically assume that it is predominantly young people who find themselves on the dole. Of course this is true, up to a point. Youth unemployment is fright-eningly high, especially in disadvantaged areas and in the regions. However, the group that almost never rates a mention is women over fifty. I was in the middle of writing this book at the time that Q&A episode went to air, so the plight of my generation was very much at the front of my mind. I tweeted the following in direct response to Wilson’s ideologically doctrinaire comment about trampolines and hammocks: ‘Many women over 55 are stuck on Newstart, forced to apply for jobs they are never going to get & leaving them terrifyingly vulnerable to homelessness #QandA’. Seventeen hours later my words had been retweeted 598 times and liked 1236 times. What struck me forcibly, however, were the many heartfelt responses I received from older women, including widows. Here is a sample, reproduced with permission of the authors:
Yes, I am one of them. 64. 2 years ago I was a happy wife, respected employee of family business … Now, I’m the rubbish left over when the taxpayer died. Had to move 2.5 hours away from anyone familiar, just to get a house I could afford. 10 job apps a month in a country town (8/5/18 12.30 p.m.) @prudinx
From other responses I received, it seems some unscrupulous employers are using the few government incentive schemes that encourage them to hire older workers, such as Restart, to gain the subsidy but not commit to the worker:
My mother was put off the day before her 3 month trial and govt incentive to employ older ppl ran out. She was gutted. Always received high praise for her work. This sort of rorting must occur but ppl too embarrassed to report. (8/5/18, 2.38 p.m.) @percivalsmum
Here is another:
A single mum (54 years young) who spent quite a few years on a sole parent pension. I’ve got a decent job now, but will never own my own house, not much superannuation and a job loss away from being homeless. My future is frightening. (7/5/18 10.09 p.m.) @alicia_papp
And then this response to the one above:
I’m hearing you Alicia 100 per cent. My boys will go. My ex husband has a ripper of a life. I raised 3 sons, worked, studied, struggled a lot. No super (well barely any) renting forever. What do we do? (8/5/18 12.10 p.m.) @rachelQuayle08
Anyway, you get the picture. I received numerous responses to my initial tweet, all of them saying very much the same things. There is an entire cohort of older women out there living in a state of anxiety about what their future may hold. And their fears are entirely realistic.
