Letter From the UK (To Julia Gillard)

 

Julia Gillard needs to man up

Brendan O'Neill
The Telegraph
Brendan O'Neill is the editor of spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.

 

YouTube sensation (and Prime Minister of Australia) Julia Gillard has been called a “badass motherf–––––” for her speech on sexism. The video of her laying into the Oz opposition leader Tony Abbott over his allegedly misogynistic views has gone wildly viral, being lapped up by bloggers and tweeters the world over, effectively making Gillard into the Susan Boyle of the feminist lobby.
But what did Gillard actually say in her 15-minute excoriation of Abbott? In essence, she just said one thing, over and over and over again: “I am offended.”

In what was essentially a gratuitously ostentatious display of Gillard’s own emotional sensitivity to certain words and ideas, the Aussie PM continually played the offence card. “I was very offended” by something Abbott said about abortion, she said. “I was very personally offended by those comments”, she said about something else. “I was also very offended on behalf of the women of Australia”, she said, in relation to a comment Abbott made about housewives. It goes on and on. “I was offended too by the sexism… I was offended by those things… I am offended by their content… I am always offended by sexism… I am always offended by statements that are anti-women… I am offended by those things… I am offended by things.”
The speech was basically a big, massive offence-fest, a public display of Gillard’s ability and willingness to take offence, both personal offence and proxy offence on behalf of “the women of Australia”, at every slight or slur that she overhears.

That this speech has become a huge hit among web-based feminists says a lot about the state of modern feminism. Once, feminism was about giving offence; now it is about taking it. There was a time when feminists self-consciously and sometimes gloriously offended against everything from family values to Fifties-style morality to religious views of what women should be like. Now, feminists spend most of their time taking offence, and trumpeting their wounded, offended feelings from the rooftops: they’re offended by certain words, by gangsta rap, by Page 3, by porn, by sexist T-shirts, by pretty much everything.

The transformation of feminism from an assertive, offence-giving form of politics into a passive, offence-taking form of therapy reflects a change that has taken place across the political sphere. Feeling offended is the lingua franca of modern politics. Politics used to be about saying, “I believe in something and I am going to make it happen”. Now it is about saying, “I am offended by something and I am going to make it disappear”. From gay-rights groups that fight to have offensive adverts removed from buses right through to hot-headed Islamists in the East who make a fiery, often violent display of their feelings of offence over anti-Muslim movies and cartoons, everyone is playing the offended game; everyone is taking to a soapbox, not to tell the world what they think, but to tell us how they feel.

This promiscuous and weirdly proud offence-taking – where saying “I am offended” is now basically another way of saying “I am a good, moral person with high-level sensitivities” – is a very bad thing. It implicitly demands an end to offensiveness, to anything that certain people or groups might find upsetting. But some of the greatest gains in history were only made possible by people’s willingness to offend against cultural norms or accepted wisdoms – from Copernicus’s offensive suggestion that the earth orbited the Sun to Sylvia Pankhurst’s offensive proposal that women should be equal to men. In contrast, what was ever gained through trying to stamp out offensiveness and make everyone polite and sedate and samey? Nothing but conformism and a stultified public sphere.

So, Madam Prime Minister Gillard, please man up. You are one of the most powerful women in the Southern Hemisphere. You should be bigger than this.