On Friday, I made a joke that, even as I wrote it, concerned me. It was a cheap gag — although that wasn’t what worried me, given that cheap gags are the mainstay of my life. The joke involved a paparazzi picture taken of Peter Andre , the well-meaning Australian-Cypriot pop star who recently split from his wife, the Zeppelin-breasted model, Jordan.
In the background of the picture of Andre is a sign that reads: Half Price Bikes! I made a very silly joke to my friends about how the sign could be read in a couple of ways. The issue isn’t whether the joke was funny — although I would say, in mitigation, that everything seems roughly 60 per cent funnier on Friday than it does on Monday, and that I was on my sixth cup of coffee. And I was wearing different shoes.
No — the issue is that, while I was saying it, I was fretting myself into borderline paralysis about whether I was being anti-feminist. “You’re implying one of the sisterhood is a slag!” the feminist in me moued, horrified. “You are, by impliction, inadvertantly equating her former career as a glamour model with sexual promiscuity — despite the fact she has, by all accounts, been totally faithful throughout her marriage!”
“Yeah, but” some secondary feminist in me argued back, “just because Jordan is a woman, doesn’t mean that she’s immune from a cheap gag. That would be an absurd rendering of feminism. After all, it’s not as if Jordan is a feminist — she flogs lingerie and romantic novels while dressed like a sex-worker from the Ukraine. That’s a highly successful capitalist, not a feminist. And, besides, I hate her.”
Of course now, with the benefit of three days’ hindsight, I don’t know why I wasted an ounce of concern on the issue, really. Let’s face it — no one else in the Western world cares about betraying feminism.
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“I’m not a feminist, no,” most women will say — accompanied by an exquisitely pained face, as if you’d just asked them if they’d put on weight. When I was younger and angrier, when women told me that they weren’t feminists, I used to say sarcastically : “So, you don’t want the vote, then?”
That was until I realised that the women who say, “I’m not a feminist!” are also invariably politically apathetic, and have never voted because it clashes with Big Brother. So I stopped being sarcastic, and went and did something more productive; such as boiling my head.
Of course last week, the rejection of feminism became an even more pertinent issue, after the publication of a report entitled The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. This report was seized on by the Daily Mail, who summed up their feelings on the matter in their first sentence: “Women are less happy nowadays, despite 40 years of feminism, a new study claims.” Well. If we’ve got to the point where, of all the things that have happened in the last 40 years, it is feminism — a movement designed to make women equal in status to men; the only movement in the last 2,000 years specifically and solely dedicated to making women happy — that is being blamed for making women unhappy, one thing is very clear: we’re going to have to do the most extreme thing in the 21st-century Western world. We’re going to have to do some serious rebranding.
So where to start? “New Feminism” would just make everyone think of New Labour’s busted flush. Feminism ’09 is a bit Euro 96. Feminism 2.0 has a nice tech-y edge — but when you consider how quickly software moves, by the time we’d had three time-wasting national debates on what the “correct feminist shoes” consist off, we’d be on version 2.4.8, which probably wouldn’t be compatible with Feminism 2.0, and would lead to lots of people frustratedly binning the whole thing, and simply going back to a typewriter, and wife-beating, instead.
It looks, then, as if we might need a wholly new word to replace. It needs to have some etymological precedent — something to do with oestrogen or gynaecology or tights, or something. Except that no woman will throw themselves behind something containing “oestrus” or “gyno” — they have bad associations with rubber gloves, stirrups and cramping Some play on XX — the female chromosome — could be neat. It’s got a razzy X-Men edge, and those double Xs would look amazing on the layout of posters and banners. Typography is very important in a new political movement. But then, of course, if you put one more X on it, it’s also a bit hard-core sex film, and another X takes it into the territory of Castlemaine XXXX. So we must sadly abandon that.
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I came up with the word “sheconomics” yesterday, and I was very excited until I realised that it was already the title of a book by Karen Pine and Simonne Gnessen. But we could still use it! Let’s face it — if the aim of sheconomists is to re-engineer economic equality around the needs of men and women, that would be a much simpler manifesto than feminism, with all it’s time-wasting side-debates on sex and body-image. Let women have an equal slice of the world’s cash, and all those worries about status, sexism, childcare, etc, would just disappear. After all, it’s very hard to oppress someone who is flying around in a helicopter.
But then I got tetchy all over again about losing the word feminism in the first place. If you are a half-way sentient woman who loves language, the loss of the word feminist is appalling. We shouldn’t have to reinvent the only word we have to describe making the world equal for men and women. That sends out a really bad signal. Imagine if, in the 1960s, it had become inexplicably unfashionable for black people to say they were into civil rights.
“No! I’m not in to civil rights! That Martin Luther King was too strident.”
No. If “feminist” has become a derogatory term, then I would like to purposely start using it for its shock value — in the same way rappers use “n*****”. I’d like to sit in a bar, shouting: “You go, you bad-ass strident feminist!” at my friends, while other people nodded admiringly over how edgy and real we are. I’m literally pro-“feminist”.