I want it all ...
By Hugh Mackay
Still wondering whether
the women's movement of the 1970s was a hiccup or an authentic social
revolution? You obviously haven't been paying attention. If you're not
convinced by the upheavals in our patterns of marriage and divorce, or by the
growing presence of women in the upper echelons of government, business and
the professions, or by the seismic shifts in the political landscape caused by
the emergence of "the women's vote", or by the fact that the
majority of university students are women, or by the plummeting birthrate, or
... do I really need to go on?
Even if you were not
convinced by all that, you'd have to be blind and deaf not to have noticed
that the rising generation of Australians inhabits a different planet from
that of their parents and grandparents when it comes to gender issues. And, by
the way, "issues" is not a word they'd use in this context, any more
than the new breed of liberated young women would want to describe themselves
as "feminists". For them, the revolution is history: they are about
"living" equality, not preaching it. In fact, one of the surest
signs that this was a real revolution is that, 35 years on, young women want
to distance themselves from the rhetoric of the revolution because such
language sounds outmoded to them. Life might be far from perfect in genderland,
but the battles are different now and they are sometimes between generations
of women.
Today's teens
andtwentysomethings are the daughters and granddaughters of the pioneers who
went to the barricades in the late '60s and early '70s. Fighting for the right
to first-class citizenship, those pioneers encouraged women to develop a sense
of their own identity, rather than rely on a second-hand identity borrowed
from some man. They fought for reforms in workplaces where women were
automatically paid less than men, or automatically restricted to the lower
rungs of the promotion ladder, or offered less generous superannuation
provisions than men, or obliged to resign from permanent positions when they
married.
Yes, we had to have a
revolution. Some ageing Australians may hanker after the peace and prosperity
of the 1950s, but recollections of fabulous economic growth and zero
unemployment can blind us to the ugly realities of a period in our cultural
history when women were actually oppressed; when they knew their place was in
the home, whether they liked it or not; when many of them tried to take the
edge off boredom or sullen resentment through the massive consumption of
analgesics such as Bex and Vincents APC powders. In the hothouse of feminist
fervour that drove the revolution, it was assumed that women needed economic
as well as emotional independence, in order to be truly liberated. That's why
paid work became the big symbol of liberation; why Supermum evolved through
the '80s, at least as an ideal; why stay-at-home mothers sometimes became the
object of opprobrium among their "working" sisters who thought they
were letting the side down: "How can you say you're liberated when you're
still a dependent wife?"
So how do contemporary
young women react to all that? Let's start with "liberation", a word
whose meaning has subtly changed in its transition from generation to
generation. Thirty-five years ago, liberation meant "free to have it all
and preferably all at once". To the rising generation that looks and
sounds like a form of self-inflicted cruelty: "My mother said her mother
was a slave to her family. There was no way she was going to be like that, but
then she ended up becoming a slave to her own liberation. When is she going to
get a life?"
"Have it all"
is still a popular goal, but "all at once" now seems unrealistic and
undesirable. The idea at the core of contemporary liberation is choice. To
these young women, liberation is about genuine freedom freedom to choose who I
want to be, how I want to look, what I want to do rather than responding to
the pressure to be a woman in some particular way. Feisty in their assertion
of what "true" liberation means, they are appalled by the suggestion
that make-up is a sop to men, or that dressing fashionably is a sign of
submissiveness. They are interested in having enjoyable sex, but it will be on
their terms. They are prepared to consider the idea of climbing the corporate
ladder, but they will want to do that on their own terms, too. And if it all
looks too demanding, or simply too silly, they may opt out and decide to do
something else entirely.
Many young women who move
sideways in an organisation, or out of the corporate world altogether, have
not necessarily done so because they've banged their heads against the
legendary glass ceiling; some of them are making a cool assessment of the
lives of "successful" men and deciding it's a bad joke: "Why
would I want to become a partner in my law firm when I look at what would be
expected of me? There's more to life than 80-hour weeks lived on the treadmill
of 'billable hours'. No, thanks." Marriage and children? Hey, wait a
minute; not so fast. Yes, they'll quite possibly want to have children (one,
anyway), but what's the rush? The median age of the mother at the birth of the
first child is already over 30 yet another sign of the gender revolution and
it will probably climb even higher. This is one reason why women hitting 30
are so keen to tell you that 30 is the new 20: "At 30, my parents were
married, had three kids, a mortgage, a full-time career for dad and a
part-time job for mum. Over-committed, if you ask me. At 30, I'm about where
they were at 20. Come back and ask me when I'm 40." Nevertheless, as the
leaders of this new breed of young women move into their thirties, they report
that whenever they hear of a woman having a baby, the first thing they want to
know is: "How old is she?" Keeping your options open has its limits,
and biology is one of them.
New attitudes to marriage
are shaped by an inherent sense of liberation and independence. Their
automatic response to the idea of marriage is to ask "why?" For many
of them, a shared mortgage is more symbolic of a commitment than a marriage
certificate particularly when they know that 45 per cent of contemporary
marriages will end in divorce, but a mortgage is not so easily abandoned. They
might marry for love; they might marry for convenience; they might marry for
the sake of their children but at least one-third of them are unlikely to
marry at all.
In any case, when they
think about marriage, they're thinking about a relationship, not an
institution. If their relationship is strong and healthy and they can see a
reason to marry (or even if they just like the idea of dressing up and being a
star for a day, in their own reality-TV show, video cameras and all), then
they'll marry. And if the relationship sours or becomes pointless, they'll
split.
Underlying all these
attitudes is one, simple, fundamental idea, bred into them by their mothers
and teachers from an early age: Girls can do anything. They can't imagine how
anyone could ever have thought otherwise. They expect boys to know it, too,
and they're impatient with those who don't: "Equality means exactly what
it says, OK? Not the same, but absolutely equal. Get it?" (And the boys,
in growing numbers, do get it, but we'll come to them in a moment.)
What they are saying is
that, in any situation, the significance of a woman's agenda will be
absolutely equal to the significance of a man's agenda. This doesn't mean that
women will want to do all the same things as men: in fact, that sounds to them
like a throwback to the pre-revolutionary proposition that men and women are
really the same. It doesn't necessarily mean that, in a partnership, her job
will have to be taken as seriously as his job, or that the housework will have
to be divided down the middle. It means that each person's agenda will be
respected. Given all this, it's easy to understand why young women are
outraged when they come across a relic, a dinosaur who doesn't get it. Many
young women, born after the revolutionary dust had settled, have proceeded
through school in a state of blithe acceptance of their equality with boys,
only to encounter older men at university or in the workplace who think they
are entitled to patronise them, ridicule them, fondle them or ignore them
"What planet do these men come from?" asked a young woman, actually
more bewildered than outraged, in one of my recent research projects.
Still, today's young
post-revolutionaries love being female and feel more in control of their lives
than their mothers did at the same age. They sense that they and their mothers
are on the same side. There are still plenty of inter-generational strains, of
course arguments over hectic social lives and failure to help with the
housework seem to have supplanted the old arguments over sex, alcohol and
fashion in the battle for independence: "She thinks that because she's a
girl, she can do what she likes, and that means going out with whoever she
likes, whenever she likes. It also means not doing any housework I think
that's a way of trying to avoid the stereotype. Not that the boys help
either."
Teenage quibbles aside,
however, the rising generation of young women have truly found their feet.
They are bursting with a sense of their own potential: they feel strong,
optimistic and confident. They relish their freedom to choose who they'll be,
now and later, and they're determined to achieve the balance they believe is
missing from their mothers' lives. And are they grateful to the pioneering
women who brought them to this magical space? Hello? This is simply the way is
should be, the way it should always have been. Any other possibility is
unimaginable.
If young women are
remaking the revolution in their own image, where does this leave young men?
Welcome to the world of the New Bloke. We're beginning to see the long-term
effects of the women's movement on the male of the species and, let's be
clear, it had to be a women's movement: men were never entitled to a movement
of their own; their job was to react to a legitimate revolution wrought by
women. Initially, legions of Australian males silently enlisted in the
underground resistance movement. They quickly learned how to adopt the
camouflage of feminist slogans, but they rarely backed them up with behaviour
change. The big test was to see what they could get away with: help with the
dishes, maybe, but then spoil it all by bragging about it; look after the kids
while your wife went out, but then betray your fundamental lack of
understanding by describing this as "babysitting". (What mother ever
"babysat" her own kids?) Once men began to realise that marriage
itself was at stake, some of them started to concentrate. But even then, it
was hard for them to know how to respond, and women were often unhelpful in
giving directions: "He should just realise what's expected of him I
shouldn't have to spell it out for him."
The most absurd of the
early male responses was the SNAG (the so-called "sensitive New Age
guy"). This was a pathetic creature homo flaccidus created by feminists
and almost immediately despised by them. "I wish I could be pregnant so
I'd know what it really feels like" was not the radical response
liberated women were hoping for, and the SNAG was soon written off as being
too limp for words. The metrosexual, similarly, came and went in a cloud of
aftershave. Largely a figment of the imagination of a New York advertising
executive (female, as it happens), the metrosexual was supposed to be a more
enlightened, more masculine response to feminism than the SNAG, but there have
only been about six confirmed sightings of Australian metrosexuals.
What women have been
waiting for is robust engagement with gender issues by men who are both
comfortable with their own masculinity and serious about the idea of equality
with women. Rather than either a cave-in or a caveman, what women wanted all
along was the New Bloke and, 35 years after the revolution began, he's just
beginning to arrive on the scene in serious numbers (though it's still safe to
describe him as a sub-species).
The New Bloke is no wimp
but he is no male chauvinist either, though he gets a laugh out of pretending
to be: mock chauvinism is one of his party tricks and he enjoys satirising his
unenlightened comrades. He's typically in his twenties, relaxed and confident
about his masculinity, attractively blokey in style. To borrow the key word
from the women's movement, the New Bloke is liberated. Try to get him talking
about politics and he'll steer the conversation to girls, jobs, girls, sport,
girls, the internet, girls, movies and drugs (of the legal and illegal
variety). He is as interested in having a good time as any bloke ever was, but
the big difference is that he knows women are equal. He accepts that a serious
relationship with a woman involves taking her identity and her needs
seriously, and that the woman's agenda is just as important as the man's.
(Some of his best mates are women, by the way.)
The New Bloke despises
"old" blokes who pretend to be in love so they can get a woman to
sleep with them. The New Bloke is explicit about the difference between
uncommitted and committed sex, and he knows plenty of girls who are equally
clear about that distinction. Often posing as a traditional larrikin, he
wouldn't want you to know he's reshaping the world, but that's his agenda: he
wants us all to have more fun, to lighten up, to accept that the pathway to
good relationships between the sexes lies in an acceptance of genuine
equality. Any other way of operating strikes him as being unfair,
unsustainable and just plain silly.
Hearing all this, his
grandmother beams with pride. And his girlfriends? Many of them are still not
entirely sure the New Bloke exists. They wonder whether the larrikin style and
the sexist jokes are a clever smokescreen for some vestiges of old-style male
chauvinism. They're waiting to be convinced that when it comes to the crunch,
the alleged New Bloke really will give the woman's agenda equal weight.
But the signs are
certainly promising and the women who believe they've found a genuine specimen
are ready to celebrate this evolutionary leap. For him, there's also a
lingering doubt. While he's all for equality, he sometimes wonders whether the
current crop of young women are secretly (or not-so-secretly) convinced they
are actually superior to him; many of them seem to assume that their agenda
will prevail in rather the way a man's used to. "Are we still paying for
our fathers' and grandfathers' sins?" asks the New Bloke, ruefully.
Perhaps that helps to
explain why so many New Blokes are gung-ho for fatherhood, but still wary of
marriage. The popular folklore that suggests women are having trouble finding
men who will commit to fatherhood might be missing the mark. The way New
Blokes tell it, it's not fatherhood they're scared of so much as young women
who are so assertive, so independent and so feisty that even a fully authentic
New Bloke will sometimes blanch at the prospect of being committed to them.
"I'd love to be a dad, but some of these women, mate, I dunno."
Like every revolution,
this one has had its share of over-corrections. The New Bloke is a promising
sign but he, too, is a pioneer: just like his feminist grandmother 35 years
ago, he'll have to serve his time. That means his fate is to be mistrusted and
misunderstood for a while yet.
Hugh Mackay is a
social researcher and author.