Women are happy to let feminists get bashed by Hannah Betts

The Catholic writer Piers Paul Read is currently plugging his new novel, The Misogynist. I identify Read by way of his religion because it has a bearing on his thesis that feminism is a joke, inflicted on men by women, which is being played back on its perpetrator.

I have no objections to the book: fiction is as fiction does. Or rather, I object only inasmuch as it would have been stronger without the gynophobia regarding festering vaginas. What is shocking is that Read's own feminist-bashing should go unremarked.

In an appearance on Radio 4's Front Row, the author confessed to "grave misgivings" about the movement: "It's partly this feminist historicism, which I think is false, that women have been somehow oppressed by men throughout the ages. You don't find any evidence of women being dissatisfied with their condition before the 18th century and then it's just a few spoilt bluestockings and servants who get bored… I think women saw it as the natural order that the man should be head of the family – it's also Christian teaching – and that they played this domestic role. And I think the feminists stirred up a sense of resentment against men that persists today."

Mark Lawson, usually no slouch as interviewer, merely made the observation that a good many readers are women. And yet, Read retorted, the young women at his publishing house love the book.

I bet they do. For it is a lamentable idiosyncrasy of feminism that, unlike other rights movements – the campaigns against prejudice based on race, class, or sexuality – its beneficiaries take their emancipation and run. Many women will not even countenance the F-word, being prepared to concede only: "I wouldn't say I'm a feminist, but…" But what? That I like being paid an equal wage, having the right not to get raped in marriage?

If Read had argued that African Americans knew where they stood under slavery and were well looked after, there would – justifiably – be outrage. How is it that misogyny somehow fails to qualify as hatred? And why is it that women are prepared to be so passive in defence of their political interests?

The reason, perhaps, is that feminism is a movement that resists being confined to a canon. Instead of a Marx, it proposes a chorus, a sorority, an ongoing debate. It is ideologically accommodating, seeking not to exclude. "I am not your kind of feminist," I once heard Naomi Wolf inform a woman. "And we're not yours," eye-rolled the 70s sister next to me.

And, yet, this very inclusiveness can exclude those less attuned to the terms of the debate. Women don't know what they're signing up for, and what they don't feel part of they won't feel protective towards. So when a malicious misreader such as Read suggests that feminism is a bed trick to convince a "man… [to] grab her and her and tell her to shut up," both seem equally ho hum irrelevant.

Read's book may be comic in intent, but the real joke is that women are happy to enjoy the benefits of feminism without being prepared to own it, defend it, carry it forward. In this sense, at least, he is right: the joke is very much on us.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/...hing-piers-paul-read