When women's issues become soundbites

Fay Weldon always gave good soundbites. Her smart words - deft as her book titles: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Praxis, The President's Child - won her new television drama Big Women acres of positive coverage. Until this week. "Fay Weldon: My Disgrace" screamed broadsheet headlines on Thursday morning, the day Channel 4 had picked to premiere the series. Inside, even Weldon's wit couldn't backtrack well enough to get her off the hook after seriously tasteless soundbite suggestions she made about rape to the Radio Times. With a classical flourish, she finally admitted a qualified mea culpa. Her programme went ahead. The row Weldon started was altogether different from the one which almost sank her. The first would-be controversy had lurched along on the back of the World Cup, lad culture and that queasy sense of gender angst which seems to dog the British middle classes. Feminism had gone too far, she argued, notably against Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee: now, men were the oppressed, "frightened and defensive" victims as she saw it, and we all needed to help them - fast. Implied was the suggestion feminism was to blame. The culture was ready to listen.

"Men today are where women were 25 years ago," she told Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times. "They are abused and insulted so much they hardly notice anymore. I think Diana's death was the moment it happened."

Retro, prejudice and Diana - three perfectly topical themes sure to press buttons everywhere. But was it true? Just as the crunch came, Weldon blew her credibility. Rape was by no means the worst thing that could happen to a woman, she told Andrew Duncan in the Radio Times. We should "deglamorise" it, "downgrade it" legally to the offence of "aggravated assault." She spoke from some experience - years ago, a man had tried to rape her in the back of a taxi, and while it was an unpleasant sexual attention, it had not destroyed her life.

Weldon certainly lived to regret it since. Raped women queued up to condemn her remarks; women journalists accused her of "sucking up to men," of "trivialising rape" as a way of promoting herself and her new series. Small wonder she said "sorry."

But the "sorry" was qualified. Weldon's new spin used a contorted quasi-rhetoric which pleaded that death was worse than rape, and that anyone who thought it was not needed to think again. As if there was a choice. Thus evaporated any chance that her series would provoke a real discussion about feminism's achievements, and how such sound principles about human justice and equality had become a major media turnoff.

"Better dead than raped!" Weldon wrote in the Independent of London. "Twenty-five years ago, you would never have heard a woman saying this, let alone believing it . . . It couldn't be, could it, that the rape crisis people are anxious to make victims of women, and keep them victims, the better to make villains of men."

Changing the goalposts offered the kind of contest politics only St Maria Goretti and the Catholic Church ever took seriously - Maria Goretti chose death rather than rape, thereby becoming a role model for Catholic girls faced with unwelcome attentions.

Playing the game of victims and villains means more buttons get pushed, more sand thrown in our eyes. We take sides, we feel threatened, and meanwhile we stay stuck in an orthodoxy as restrictive as anything which went before: don't take responsibility, blame someone else, and if you can't find anyone in particular, blame feminism. With the culture so increasingly in love with science, and with new theories of biological determinism, such simplistic reasoning sounds warning bells.

Yet the feminism of Weldon's youth went on to change the culture, and not only for women. Until it became a mighty media yawn recognised more as whinge than as message, feminism was the anti-ideology with attitude which made ideas about power and authority open to challenge in a way they had never been before.

The culture was in dire need of change. Twenty-five years ago, women in Ireland had no statutory rights to their family home, unless they had paid cash for it. As the saying went, women were "chattels" - their husbands or fathers determined their right to credit, finance, status and domicile. Extraordinary to remember that now. Twenty-five years ago, rape was a considerably lesser crime: if many raped women could not help believing that it might be their own fault, then the law often shared that view. In Ireland, women could be raped by their husbands entirely within the law; girls were raped by fathers, uncles and family friends who prospered happily in the sure knowledge that they would never be prosecuted. Most were correct. But that did not make all men rapists, just as an IRA bomb did not make all Irish people terrorists.

Winning on principle made equality an issue in every Western society. Its political activity paved the way for other minority rights - people with disabilities, community-based groups, travellers, men who didn't fit received ideas of "manliness", to list a few examples. Difference was acknowledged and entitled to respect. New generations of sassy women with their photographs in the appointments pages can operate as post-feminists precisely because its principles eventually won through. That agenda takes on a whole new life in the years of post-feminism, influencing ideas about representation in all its guises, from advertising to the Belfast Agreement.

But it proved costly. Feminism's public image became trivialised, reduced to its least representative slogans and condemned for being a man-hating, supremacist ideology. No doubt a minority who claimed to be feminists were, but as the challenge switched to the kind of guilt-inducing nagging favoured by the extreme brands of political correctness, feminism itself became the first casualty. Almost overnight, a great popular movement was eventually accorded the status of a four-letter word - bore. Worse still, it made authentic gender relations suspect, as David Mamet picked up on in his drama Oleanna.

Did feminism go too far? Not in Ireland. The challenge is delivering such an agenda: the age of the soundbite - with great serendipity, also the age of post-feminism - does not encourage nuance, as Weldon well knew, yet nuance is tone of post-feminism.

Look at the evidence - only 14 women out of 108 members in the new Northern Ireland Assembly, and even there a better ratio than in the Republic; academics apparently discriminated against on grounds of gender in Irish thirdlevel colleges; a Constitution which pitches a mother against her foetus in a battle for human rights; a society so driven by economics that few women or men can afford to choose whether to work outside or inside the home. Tiresome, to be sure, but no less important for that.