A LETTER WRITER to this paper recently was quite worked up about his freedom to read Playboy magazine. Sure he's welcome, as far as I'm concerned. I think that what research reviews show about non violent pornography is probably the case - that "it causes increased acceptance of rape myths, decreases feelings of satisfaction with and affection for sexual partners, and increases the likelihood of aggressive behaviour against women" (Itzin and Sweet, OUP, 1993). But maybe it doesn't. Either way - to propose the availability of Playboy magazine as a cornerstone of civil rights - gimme a break, boys.
The writer asserted: "Feminism has gone too far." Has it, now? I wouldn't know where to start detailing the pain and suffering inflicted on women and girls in the world just because they are women and girls - not because, like the men and boys who also suffer, they are poor or otherwise oppressed. I think of how the female body is used. The 80 million - and the number is rising - girls whose clitorises wilt be cut off this year, perhaps with a sharp stone, and whose labia will be sewn up, so that men will marry them sure of their "purity".
I think of the bedizened little girl prostitutes in their tens of thousands in the Far East and the men who use them, with respected wives at home in purdah. The girls are earning a living, of course, like the several hundred prostitutes working in Dublin, but when a brothel went on fire in Thailand not long ago, 17 prostitutes were burnt to death because they were shackled to the pallets which were their places of business.
Let that be a metaphor for the "freedom" with which girls (who have no other negotiable resource except their bodies) "choose" to earn their living. As for the rest in Ireland, twice as many women were murdered in 1996 as in 1995 or 1994. Only 1 per cent of all rape cases dealt with by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre in 1994 resulted in a conviction. In the US, a woman is beaten to death every 18 minutes. So it goes.
As for women's minds - has feminism gone too far in seeking equal opportunities for exercising them? Of the 960 million illiterate people in the world, two thirds are women. Only two of the top 1,000 corporations in the US are headed by women. Women's share of seats in the world's parliaments has fallen to 11 per cent.
In Ireland there's one Woman out of 35 serving at secretary level in the Civil Service (which is and always has been full of women at entry level) and 13 out of 165 at assistant secretary level. That statistic could stand for any other important Irish institution and outside institutions - well, every time we come on a golden circle you will note that women are not tipped the wink on golf courses about opportunities for getting richer quicker. They're not even paid fairly at the most humble level: women's average wage in Ireland as a proportion of men's has fallen from 70 to 68 per cent.
THESE are a few random pieces of information that come to hand. I'm not even trying, but statistics may not bring home the many urgencies that drive feminism. They may seen to conjure up a distant tragedy, such as Third World famine. So let me, to evoke unnecessarily crabbed and saddened lives lived by women: we all know, quote from a letter a (male) reader sent me.
He described the perfectly acceptable, unremarkable gender relationships around him in his - midlands - neighbourhood. I quote: "Family 1: Father professional/farmer, brilliant mind, mother highly intelligent housewife, nine children reached adulthood. Family 2: father wealthy farmer, several hundred plus acres, mother housewife, seven children reached adulthood. Family 3: Father businessman/farmer, mother housewife, seven children reached adulthood. Family 4: Father - teacher/farmer, mother housewife, eight children. Family 5: father factory owner/farmer, mother housewife, nine children.
"The wives had no money, ever. In family 1 the mother used to have the children praying that he would give her enough to buy a new outfit. She, literally speaking, had to ask him for grocery money for the local shop. The big shopping at the weekend was done by him in town, as was the case with the other families. By way of contradiction, the father put a few of the children through university and a son of the house told me that when he was at college his father sent him far more money than he actually needed while at home his mother was penniless.
"Farmer 2 was proud of the fact that he never made a cup of tea or gave his wife a ha'penny. He told her that if she wanted to educate her children she could do it herself, and she did, from endless labour for `hen money'. After four children she developed a small `female problem' that needed attention and was advised to go to hospital for minor surgery. She hadn't time and produced three more kids before she got the time. On one of the occasions when she had produced a child, he hadn't time to go and see her in the nursing home. On another, he decided that she could give birth at home in order to be able to stand at the bedroom window and keep an eye on the workmen in the farmyard. Never took a holiday.
"Farmer 3 married a woman with book keeping experience so he no longer needed an office girl. The wife became adept at cooking his books and hiving off a little at a time, thus having a spare few pounds. Farmer 4 sired eight children on his utterly obedient wife and was never known to take her on holiday or out for a meal. Farmer 5 had a wife that went through a period of 14 years without going to her local town. She was too busy doing farm work and producing more children. He went to town every Thursday and Saturday."
THERE was, of course, more to these marriages than outsiders ever saw. Nevertheless, in each of them the man had the run much larger world than the woman had access to, though the man and the woman were profoundly equal in the light of eternity. Even that inequality can be freely chosen. But did those women have free choice? As to alternatives to marriage? As to size of family? As to child care? As to enduring situations or getting out of them? Did they have choice? And if they had no choice, were they not in jail? And if they were in jail, who put them there?
These are some of the issues around which feminism turns. Squeaks from comfortable men, frightening themselves at the imaginary prospect of someone taking their Playboys away from them are immeasurably trivial, compared. Feminism has barely found a toehold in the first world, but I really do not doubt that it is the great project of our time and that it has very far to go before it will have gone too far.