The seventies seemed to be a time of conferences – of inquiries and new problems.
This pooling of information and ideas provided the basis for many decisions and distilled into positions which will continue long into the eighties.
I wrote a novella called Conference-ville in 1977 and in that I saw the conference as a place of drama. This didn’t convince everyone.
The blurb-writer at Angus & Robertson annoyed me intensely. The blurb said, ‘The book shrewdly observes the pretensions and shifting allegiances in Conference-ville … [and] explores the limitations of Australian intellectual life’.
It expressed the common feeling that conferences are ‘pretentious’ and that intellectual life in Australia is, of course, ‘limited’.
I often find people in Australia who do not believe that there is such a thing as an intellectual or an intellectual way of life. It is impossible to use the word intelligentsia without explanation. I use it to describe those actively involved in forming public opinion.
But for some people there are only ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ and trendies. It is the attitude which comes from an oppressive egalitarianism and a refusal to grant credit to anything beyond a person’s own understanding, a refusal by some people to concede limits to their under standing which other people might not have. It is a refusal to recognise the possibility of a tutored sensibility. At best, this attitude is healthy scepticism and is a defence against the ‘bullshit artist’. It is also a correct attitude in so far as it refuses to concede that a person ‘who knows more’ is a superior type of human.
But at its worst and most common form, it is anti-intellectual and anti-art.
I am for conferences, however imperfect they are as a human activity.
Conference-ville was about the imperfections and discomfort of the intellectual life.
Conference Tactics – Writers at a Conference
(adapted, from Social Alternatives, November 1978)
Q. You attend many conferences but I believe you recently attended Writers’ Week in Adelaide – the most important writers’ conference held in Australia. How did it measure up, as a conference?
A. Outstanding. It included a few collector’s items.
Q. Did anyone in particular stand out as a conference-goer?
A. Oh yes – of course, there are many categories in which I award points – but at this conference above all, I rate Michael Wilding, a Sydney novelist and publisher.
Q. In what way did he stand out?
A. Michael pulled off two of the most difficult conference manoeuvres I know – only very experienced conference-goers should ever try them.
Q. I’m intrigued. What are these two manoeuvres?
A. The two manoeuvres I have in mind are the high Low Profile and the Premature Departure.
Q. Could you explain?
A. Well, there are four or five ways to participate in a conference effectively – that is, to be noticed and remembered. They include high Low Profile, High Profile, Premature Departure, Not Turning Up, and so on. One way of achieving High Profile is to make trouble. But what Michael did was to remain uncharacteristically silent and brooding. If you can get people to notice that you are remaining silent, we call that high Low Profile. If you can’t brood well, try remaining silent but write notes furiously. It excites gossip and speculation. A number of people very early in the conference said to me, ‘Michael’s very quiet’ and ‘What’s eating Michael?’ I knew then I was witnessing a perfectly executed high Low Profile manoeuvre. People wonder, for instance, whether the Low Profile is an implied criticism of the other conference-goers: is Michael saying ‘I can’t be bothered with this’? Maybe what we call the level of the conference was below him, and so on. It’s a good manoeuvre if you have nothing to say. But if you make just one contribution it is spoiled.
Q. What is this about Premature Departure?
A. Oh yes. Premature Departure is a tricky manoeuvre too but again Michael did it superbly. If this is done properly you get people to talk about you when you are, in fact, not at the conference. Everyone told me Michael had left the conference. He went home midway through. This excites gossip and speculation. Some say, for instance, that he was threatened with violence; some say a bomb threat was made.
Q. Why is this difficult to do, this Premature Departure?
A. You must leave just at the right time and you must have been noticed before you leave. If you leave too early people will not notice that you’ve even arrived. You can see that combining high Low Profile with Premature Departure requires great skill. Leaving prematurely can be done quietly in the dead of night, leaving bills unpaid, which excites useful scandal, or it can be done by sitting near a pile of luggage in the conference hotel lobby for a few hours until everyone has seen you departing.
But if it’s done well it’s as good as the manoeuvre of Not Turning Up.
Q. What is the manoeuvre of Not Turning Up?
A. Oh, that is where you agree to come but fail to arrive and have people say ‘So-and-so has not turned up’. By doing this you put across the message that you have been invited but that something Even More Important has kept you away.
Q. Could you give an example?
A. Two years ago three American writers, including Tennessee Williams, used the manoeuvre. They said they were coming, received advance publicity, and then Didn’t Turn Up. It allows you to be a name on people’s lips without having to go to the conference. I learned about Not Turning Up from a conference a couple of years ago. Peter Coleman, then editor of Quadrant, later, for a time, leader of the NSW Opposition, and I didn’t turn up at a conference. I was sick; I don’t know why Peter didn’t turn up, but for some time after that conference people said to me, ‘You and Peter Coleman were the only two who didn’t turn up.’ What happens is that your conference satchel and name tag usually lie on a table in the conference centre for days and people look them over to see who Didn’t Turn Up. The nearest we had this time was the poet Les A. Murray, who was rumoured to have Refused To Come. But that is something else again.
Q. Does anyone else stand out in performance at this conference?
A. Yes, but in another category, I’m always interested in Phantom Speakers. Conferences have Hidden Agendas, Secret Themes and Phantom Speakers. A Phantom Speaker sometimes looks like a Question from the Floor but is in fact giving you a paper that he or she was not asked to give. Over five days of a conference a good Phantom Speaker can get across about thirty minutes of material concealed as something else; a few Phantom Speakers in conspiracy can intro duce Hidden Agendas and Secret Themes. One of the chief obstacles to Phantom Speakers is, of course, the relevancy rule. I saw a classic manoeuvre by Vincent Serventy at the Writers’ Week to get around the relevancy rule.
The discussion was on the mass media and, in particular, the feared demise of the magazine Nation Review and its possible re-birth as a magazine to be called the Ferret. Vincent rose to his feet from the audience and said that the magazine shouldn’t be called the Ferret; it was unnationalistic. The ferret was an imported animal. Vincent said it should be named after an indigenous animal with the same characteristics and he named a few. He then moved on to talk about conservation and wildlife and the discussion never returned to mass media. A remarkable diversion. I nearly rose to my feet and applauded.
Q. What do you look for when you first arrive at a conference?
A. The first thing I look for at a conference is Trouble. Where is the Trouble going to come from? I don’t mind Trouble. It usually brings out what the conference is really about. The Hidden Agenda.
Q. Was there Trouble at Writers’ Week?
A. I didn’t pick it at first, but yes. I thought the newly formed Poets’ Union might boycott, demonstrate, heckle, but they were quiet. I also kept an eye on the radical women’s movement, the radical lesbians – they can often throw a good spanner into the works. They’re good at Trouble. But because you’ve seen one sort of trouble at another conference doesn’t mean you can pick it the next time. I’ve seen communist trouble, anti-communist trouble, nazis, anti-elitists, the Festival of Light – you name it.
Q. And this time?
A. This time the Trouble came from the Oral Poets.
Q. Oral Poets?
A. Oral Poets believe that verse should be spoken or read and that it is corrupted by printing it on the page – by separating it from the voice and body language of the poet. I didn’t pick them. You can see that they had much to object to. Any reference to ‘Poetry’ on the printed page or to the ‘problems of being published’ was anathema to them. They booed and hissed. This was very exciting for me; I hadn’t struck this sort of Trouble before.
Q. What else do you look for at a conference?
A. Well, closely associated with Trouble is the Assassinating Allegation.
Q. What is an Assassinating Allegation?
A. Every conference has its Assassinating Allegation. It is an allegation, usually connected with a prevailing ideological fashion, which is meant to devastate an opponent, to put an opponent off the chess board. This time, being a writers’ conference, the assassinating words belonged to faction-fighting within literature. The words were ‘incestuous’ and ‘masturbatory’. People were accused of writing masturbatory verse or belonging to an incestuous group (Balmain, for instance). The implication was that you didn’t have a bona fide audience for your work, and other things about what is appropriate subject matter, appeal and so on. You only had to utter these words to destroy someone.
Q. Could you give examples from other conferences?
A. Yes. ‘Elitist’ has had a good run. You had only to shout ‘that’s elitist’ for a while to kill off a line of argument. The word ‘sexist’ is still strong. At my first conference, in 1959, a Communist Party peace conference, the assassinating allegation was to call something ‘divisive’ – certain proposals or lines of debate were stopped because they were, in the chairperson’s opinion, ‘divisive’, likely to create disagreement. This contrasts absolutely with those who feel that a good conference is one where there is ‘blood on the floor’.
Q. What about speakers? What showed up there?
A. Oh the usual manoeuvres. Speakers who begin by saying ‘I haven’t had much time to prepare’. Those who say they finished their paper on the plane or last night in the motel. These sorts of remarks are in fact apologetic boasts. They say a number of things to an audience: I am a talented person who can work anywhere, under any conditions, on aircraft, in motel rooms; or, please don’t judge this paper too critically because it was finished under difficult conditions (this can be a way of lowering expectations) – but most of all, it has what the Italians call sprezzatura – the suggestion of effortless skill – the suggestion that you can dash off masterpieces. This suits some Australians who have a suspicion of swots, ‘conchies’, people who work hard for their effect.
Q. Of course, guest speakers can be irrelevant too …
A. Yes, they especially like to jettison the given title of a paper so that they can talk about something else. The English playwright Tom Stoppard says that you can determine who comes to hear a paper by carefully wording the title. ‘Give a paper a classy title,’ he says, ‘and you’ll get a classy audience.’ Stephen Knight from the University of Sydney, on the other hand, told me that he once wrote a paper on film criticism simply to use a title he’d thought up – ‘The Ealing Power of Humour’.
There are speakers who come along to a conference to bury a word. This happened at Writers’ Week. Melbourne poet Vincent Buckley came to bury a word or two. The speaker will usually say ‘I think it’s about time we stopped using such-and-such a word’. Or that such-and-such a word is over-used. They’re always tidying the language. Vincent said it was time we stopped using the words ‘confessional’ and ‘persona’ in literary criticism. I don’t know where they bury them. Some people, on the other hand, introduce new words to a conference. Or the conference will seize on a word and befriend it. At one conference the word ‘holistic’ was seized on and appeared in discussion and conversation over and over again.
Q. What about social issues? At Writers’ Week?
A. The poets still hate psychiatry, take-away food, muzak, the hours that bank clerks work, anything connected with cars like expressways or parking lots, and they hate hypocrisy.
They still love herons, most birds, unicorns, river rocks, ivory, islands, grains of sand, jetties, tinkers and gypsies.
Q. To end up, do you have any advice for the humble conference-goer, the simple participant?
A. Conference-going is something one learns, but yet I think there is one thing to remember.
One of the serious conference anxieties for a new conference-goer is the fear of being seen eating alone in public. This risk is obvious, you will be considered unimportant; you could be thought to not know anyone and therefore useless for introductions to important people; you could be accused of not mixing, or give the impression that you are thoroughly bad company. If you must eat alone, never read a book. If you are alone, write, but do not read. Write, even if it is only a letter to your mother. If you are alone and writing, your fellow conference goers will think that you are either working on a paper, meeting a publisher’s deadline, or perhaps drafting a key motion. Best of all, take a small portable typewriter to the restaurant. That’s a good way to start a high Low Profile. Also if you want to be alone, this stops people joining you.
Q. We must finish up now.
A. I was going to tell you about how to avoid admitting you haven’t read a certain book. Academics hate admitting they haven’t read something. If someone gives a paper and another academic gets up in discussion and says ‘You don’t mention the work of X’, the person who gave the paper will usually say ‘Naturally I had to restrict my reading’, or ‘That falls outside the scope of this paper’, or ‘Yes, I’m familiar with his work’. Being familiar with someone’s work means that somehow you know all about it without having read it, maybe by putting it under your pillow at night. Academics are never ‘reading’ a book; they are always ‘re-reading’ it.
Q. Thank you, but we must finish up now, time’s up.
Teddy Bears’ Picnic – Political Economists at a Conference
Frank Campbell
(abridged, from Arena, 43/1976)
My attendance at barely ten of the forty-odd papers of a conference isn’t the best guarantee of a well-based commentary on such a compressed binge of words, there being six or eight papers per session, but generalisations can be made with degrees of confidence.
Numerically, the conference was an embarrassing success, with over 1500 persons not only paying up, but turning up over the three days. The organisation held up well, in spite of such Left conscience-crises as diffident doormen struggling with the morals and politics of asking to see tickets. By the time these conflicts resolved themselves, the potential gatecrashers were seated.
Faced with a barrage of names, I opted to hear the big ones – the quaintly termed ‘internationals’ – Bowles, Gintis, Gough and Nell, and the non-internationals Wheelwright and Connell.
Wheelwright’s address was an amiable ramble through the nodding heads of the physiocrats, neoclassicists, etc., interspersed with heavy jibes at his oppressors in the Economics Department. Though it was about introductory lecture level, it wouldn’t have mattered if Teddy had gargled for half an hour, as the audience was completely his.
But Ted at least had his Whitlamesque flair, which the dull and finally repetitive pedagogues Gough and Bowles lacked; the former inaudible, the latter mechanical. Gintis was voluble in a Mick Jaggerish way, while Connell, whose polite manner belied his threatening Rockerish appearance (the suppressed menace of the long cocked leg, embossed two-tone calf-length leather boots and ethnic belt, black stove-pipe pants …), looked like the Professor from the Olympic Village or as one Macquarie wit said, ‘O’Toole playing Jack Kerouac’. Against the odds the soft voice won over the nervous audience; they even became restive at his unwillingness to sink in the cortical bovver boot when asked, for example:
Q. ‘Why are so many workers apparently middle class?’
A. ‘Uuummmm, I don’t know … (walks away)… there are a lot of angles on that.’
For all these points of style, Connell was one of the few speakers who at least attempted a synthesis of the (mainly political) simplicities and the (mainly economic) unassimilable abstractions.
This criticism was the reaction not merely of sociologists, but students, Labor Party officials, academics and the one or two unionists that I found. It seems that they wanted comprehensible accounts of the relations between super-structural and economic elements in society. Gintis, Bowles and Connell gave it a whirl, but most others fell heavily on either side.
Many of the simplicities were banalities. D. Bhattacharya’s final remark after his paper on the ‘Economic Development of India and China’ was: ‘In Russia, China and Cuba it is impossible for the masses to suffer, because they control the means of production.’ His 300 listeners gave him a warm round of applause. Come to think of it, his account of China’s economic superiority over India omitted most available evidence in spite of the (now mandatory) opening statement ‘I am not a Maoist’.
The audiences were occasionally prone to similar effervescences. One quivering anarchist shrieked into the microphone that the masses were heinously oppressed ‘everywhere, in China, Russia, Poland, England, the United States, Nigeria …’ People around added Paddington and Tasmania.
That piece of rebellion was atypical. The audiences were uncritical, showed a rather humourless lack of discrimination, applauding the simplicities because everyone’s heart was in the right place and the abstractions because they must be right.
A feature of every reasonably stationary Left gathering is the Left sects who have more trestles than the CWA. A thin coating of books and pamphlets, with a brooding cadre sitting in a camp chair – the image is of a failing Lebanese stallholder. The ‘organisers’ of these groups wandered uncommunicatively among the academics and students, the latter seeming to regard them rather as Anglicans view Fundamentalists, with a mixture of guilt and hollow praise. The groups, on the other hand, as far as one could discover, thought of the academics and students as soft and evasive. Questions to stallholders or paper-sellers were likely to become conversations of dogged pursuit; one bearded face I recognised from a beaming electoral poster (in Dixon Street of all places) was asked: ‘What do you stand for?’ and replied: ‘Russia is a degenerate workers’ state but nevertheless should be defended …’
Who went to this conference? Well, the aforementioned ‘activists’, an ALP senator or two, some Canberra ALP whiz-kids (one of whom remarked ‘we’ve only come here to see what you people are saying’), a few union and ACTU officials (two of whom, Heffernan and Jolly, gave papers that were right out of tune with the conference: the former had to resort to claiming that of those present only he had a hotline to the horny-handed sons of toil, while Jolly spoke blithely of the heroic ACTU’s coping with the current machinations of Capital – his listeners weren’t believers), but apparently the great majority were students and academics, from most parts of the country.
It’s an understandable shame that the lines of communication between the middle-class Left intelligentsia and workers are so manifestly down (it’s an accidental joke: the only linesman present was Albert Langer). But again, the liberation of the Sydney University Economics Department wasn’t the appropriate clarion call. And that’s what the conference was really celebrating. It was a great time for meeting people, except at the deafening party, though one wonders whether the four ‘internationals’ were strictly necessary considering the expense. Perhaps they were; after all, the Australian ballet always dances around Fonteyn …
The End Of Anti-Communism – Anti-Communists at a Conference
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 29.9.73)
The thought crossed our minds, as we sat in the Association for Cultural Freedom’s conference on the decline of anti-communism, whether this would be the last meeting of the Association. If the finding of the conference was yes, and anti-communism was finished, was the Association (which depended so heavily on anti-communism as a reason for existence) also finished?
The conference, brought together by Professor Owen Harries, had a great line-up of stars of stage and seminar – both goodies and baddies. Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, Professor Henry Mayer, Dennis Altman (Homosexual Oppression and Liberation) and Donald Horne were among our favourite performers, but the other speakers had their fans. Even the audience was filled with performers – Alex Carey and W. C. Wentworth, to name only two opposites – and visiting intellectual celebrity Norman Podhoretz (Making It).
Dr Knopfelmacher led off with an analysis of the types of anticommunist – a taxonomy – but said right at the beginning that he did not want people coming up afterwards asking him what category he placed them in. He had three general types and six sub-groups, which led him to some remarkable combinations, including ‘latent, pre-exilic, patriotic, conservative’ anti-communists.
He saw four key reasons for the decline of ‘sustained, rhetorical, moralistic, evangelical anti-communism’.
One reason was ‘polycentrism’ of communism – because there were now many different types of communist governments it was difficult to mount a single, generalised campaign. The persistence of communism was his second reason; the fact that it didn’t ‘go away’ had led the United States, for instance, into an acceptance of communism as a fact of life. The Catholic Church also had changed its attitude and accepted ‘dialogue with the communists’. Dr Knopfelmacher said that the catholics seemed to think that if anything lasted long enough it must be part of the human condition and have some good in it. He blamed, lastly, the acceptance of a theory that ‘change from within’ would occur in communist countries, that consumerism and other factors would make the communist countries closer to the west and thus more acceptable.
Dr Knopfelmacher disregarded these reasons and for him the communists remained ‘unmitigated bastards’. He saw no possibility of any change for the better in the USSR in the next twenty-five to thirty years. Any hope of change in the USSR was purely ‘theological assumption’ and not based on fact.
When Dennis Altman got up to speak as an anti-anti-communist, he said he felt a ‘distinctly unpleasant tone’ about the seminar, which confirmed his strong doubts about the Association. He had been tempted not to speak at all and criticised the Association for not having invited a communist to speak.
His strong doubts about the Association’s concept of ‘cultural freedom’ came from their not concerning themselves with the freedom of minorities in their own country; for instance, he asked, ‘As a homosexual, where do I fit in?’
He described the damage done to life in Australia by anti-communism of the type described by Dr Knopfelmacher. It had distorted reality; it had been used by conservatives to conceal an appalling lack of ideas and policies; it had led to the ignoring of marxists’ scholarship in many fields of inquiry; and it had to bear heavy responsibility for the degradation of political debate in Australia.
‘Anti-communism has a close resemblance to communism,’ he said. It had simplistic patterns of thought; it missed the complexity of human reality; it was puritanical; it distrusted hedonism, was highly manipulative, and was blind to the injustices in its own sphere of political influence. Anti-communism was a case of ‘selective indignation’.
We considered it a brave paper delivered to some explicitly hostile people.
By the end of the second day the right-wing anti-communists had sat through some heavy fire and uncomfortable self-analysis. Especially after Donald Horne traced the history of anti-communism back to 1906 (before there was a communist party). His analysis revealed it as anti-socialism dressed up as a foreign conspiracy. This went down like a prawn head.
The right-wing, hard-line anti-communists made something of a comeback at the end of the last session with a grand parade of classic anti-communist rhetoric.
‘Communism is a cancer living on the organism of democracy,’ said W. C. Wentworth, who was permitted a lengthy off-the-floor speech in which he said bitterly that ‘half the people in this room are apostates’ running away from their responsibilities. He castigated Donald Horne for saying that the Liberals had ever cynically used the expression ‘kicking the communist can’. Donald Horne in reply said that he’d heard it used by the former prime minister William McMahon.
The ALP, the trade unions, homosexuals, the women’s movement and even Lend Lease (for cooperating with the builders’ labourers union) were attacked by other speakers as cracks in the wall of anti-communism. Some of the language used and remarks made about, for instance, homosexuality were uncivil and insensitive.
But, we told ourselves, this is more like the old hysteria of anti-communism as we knew it. The cool, often comic, analysis of the guest speakers was not.
Almost in the closing minutes of the conference John Russell of the Storeman and Packers Union rose and let another skunk into the room by reminding the hard-line anti-communists that democratic socialists were also anti-communist. This was fiercely applauded by some in the audience, which revealed yet another division.
We saw another effect of anti-communism which had not been listed by Dennis Altman: that the labelling of all dissent as pro-communist during the fifties and sixties drove rebellious youth – including ourselves for a while – to an emotional identification with the communists, not as a theory or political system but as a banner of nonconformity and as an ally against the oppressively conformist society.
Like the Communist Party, the anti-communists had discredited good causes and, not least of all, anti-communism itself.
The conference reminded us that, as libertarian anti-communists, we had nothing in common with many of the anti-communists in the room. That they had wildly different meanings for ‘cultural freedom’ to us. Most certainly they did not want anything to do with long-haired, homosexual anti-communists. In fact, we felt that some of the anti-communists were more of a threat to liberty because they held positions of power within the country.
All anti-communists are not necessarily friends and not necessarily even allies.
Developing a Dialogue – Feminists at a Conference
Glynn Huilgol
(from Nation Review, 29.8.75)
Two major issues, unrelated to the formal program, caused dissension and heart-searching at last weekend’s Canberra conference on Philosophical Aspects of Feminism.
The conference was held at the instigation of the philosophy students of ANU, and appeared to be primarily intended to allow members of that department a platform from which to offer reflections on this year’s issues. As well, the general philosophy department at Sydney University was quite well represented. Other speakers came from other places, but as individual representatives of their departments and schools.
Christine Pierce, from New York’s state university, was guest speaker and allocated two time slots. Evelyn Reid was billed as another star attraction but, although she attended some of the sessions, she unfortunately did not feel up to speaking: this was an especial disappointment since she had selected for her scrutiny a February assertion in the House of Reps by none other than W. Wentworth: ‘It is, unfortunately, physiologically irrefutable that a man’s sexual life is longer than that of a woman. This is one of the things that is in human nature …’ Some fun could have been had by all in the public contemplation of this particular lex biologica.
It was a three-day conference, Saturday to Monday. While Christine Pierce had the opening time slot at 11 o’clock on Saturday morning, after lunch intimations of disaster spread rapidly. Kim Lycos of ANU had taken the floor with a paper that purported to be a review of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism. He committed three major sins. First he omitted to take any cognisance of the fact that Mitchell’s book had been greeted by outcries of anguish by British feminists. Second, he never once mentioned penis envy, which is the lynchpin of Freudian theory on the biological, and therefore the inevitable and transcultural, deficiencies of the human female. Third, he was excruciatingly boring: the tedium of his exposition was matched only by the frustrations of his audience.
Thus arose the first major issue: should feminists, gathered from all over Australia to discuss feminist philosophical issues, spend time listening to a man? Carole Ferrier, Queensland’s editor of Hecate, hearing the murmurings of discontent, asked the chairperson to allow discussion on the program for Sunday. For two more men were scheduled to speak on Sunday morning and it seemed that, even at a conference of feminists, the men were obtaining prime time. Many people could not stay for the Monday sessions. Many would therefore have heard more men than women by the time they left for home.
Jennifer Bowen was not happy with the idea of changing the program. The time to have discussed the matter, she thought, was when the program was being drawn up. Nevertheless she yielded to pressure, and a rather acrimonious debate ensued. An hour of juggling time slots and speakers did at last produce a schedule acceptable to everyone. The conferees went to dinner happy in the thought that the two men had been relegated to Monday.
On Sunday Merle Thornton from Queensland and Anne Summers from Sydney took the freed time slots. On Sunday, therefore, we heard only women. So it was not till Monday that it became apparent that some of the conferees objected not just to men having the prime time, but to having men speak at all.
Paul Thom, of ANU, was laying before us Aristotle’s theories concerning the biology of reproduction. A child was the consequence of the conjunction of menstrual blood and semen, said Aristotle, putting the imprimatur of his authority upon a notion that was held as a truism not only by ancient Greeks but by a considerable proportion of the population of modern Bengal. While in Bengal this theory was not linked with male supremacist arguments, in Aristotle we find it written that the child has but one parent, for it is the semen that gives shape to the passive menstrual blood. Women supply but the matter of the child; men supply the form and the spirit. Semen is produced from blood through the vital heat possessed only by men. The normal product of conception is a male child but if something goes wrong, a female is born. And so on. Thom’s dry presentation of these now extraordinary notions invited and obtained laughter.
Two students from Flinders irritated most of the roomful of people by carrying on a loudly whispered conversation. One rose to her feet to issue a challenge. Did people realise what was happening to them, she asked. Here was this man being very clever, no doubt, but intimidating into passivity all the audience. This was an object lesson, she said, in the techniques by which men bedazzled and confounded women. The audience, not liking to be characterised as passive, reacted with hostility. If you don’t like it, they said, then go out. Three women left the room. Paul Thom finished delivering his paper.
The discussion that followed suggested that the audience had been actively listening, rather than passively sitting, and that they found the content of the paper interesting and not threatening. The whole episode was rather frightening, all the same. For the objection to men was shifted from resentment at the male’s perceptual inadequacies, and therefore legitimate exclusion from the formulation of feminist issues, to the theory that men are too clever for women to deal with. The first objection is an intellectual objection; the second is anti-intellectual and expressive of extreme insecurity.
On Saturday the objection was to men having starring positions; on Monday the objection was to hearing anything a man had to say, no matter how pertinent or interesting, and no matter how agreeably he had acceded to the notion that he should speak to a half-size audience on the last day. If women can’t deal with men on an intellectual level, after the power and status symbols are gone, then they will be confined to a cultural ghetto and their impact on society at large will be zilch.
Those who had defended Paul Thom’s right to be heard were then thrown into doubt once more by a paper given in the afternoon by Bill Godfrey-Smith. The paper was entitled ‘The sovereignty of man – an historical perspective’. It transpired it was not satirical! Mr Godfrey-Smith was heard to make remarks like ‘women in civilised societies have never been the equal of men’, and that 18th-century France, with its salons and high culture, had in fact been an ‘age of debauchery’. Moreover, he said, ‘to understand the problems of women in our civilisation one should begin with John Stuart Mill rather than Freud’ – so much for women’s writings! It didn’t even occur to him that a male may be suspect as a guide to the plight of the female. (Furthermore, he gave no credence to the by now well-established judgement that The Subjection of Women is to be credited more to Harriet Taylor than to Mill.)
The second major issue confronted at the conference came out of the two papers on academic feminism. This issue had been central to a conference in Adelaide at the end of June. Essentially the proposition is that feminism has been ‘co-opted’ by the universities. The establishment of courses dealing with women’s issues in an academic context is perceived as a threat to the movement. Women who applaud courses in sex roles run by sociologists, who attend courses run by historians in the herstory of 17th-century women participants in the puritan revolution, who approve of work done in courses set up in biology or psychology departments on sex differences (or similarities), who participate in English department courses on women in literature – all such females are deluded. For only philosophy departments are capable of generating independent space for women’s studies. Courses in the women’s studies area should have as their primary outcome the commitment of the students who take them to the feminist cause. In fact it was said at another point that commitment to feminism ought to be a prerequisite for enrolment. So a course is not even to function like a novitiate.
This commitment to feminism is linked with a commitment to socialism, so that any woman who holds that the situation of women can be understood and combated independently of understanding and combating capitalism is automatically denied her ticket as a feminist. The solidarity of women is not the goal, but the solidarity of a revolutionary minority elite who hold the ‘right’ opinions. This ignores the fact that the potential solidarity of women is created not by their own commitment, but by the universality of the stigmatising stereotypes of women that are embedded in and pervade our culture. Members of the audience did not fail to draw the parallel with christian sectarianism, although the direct linkage seems more likely to be with left sectarianism.
Resentment at the speakers’ ‘holier than thou’ attitude and their willingness to sit in judgement on their fellow females was voiced, and it was argued from the floor that this exclusionist approach served to intimidate the vast majority of women from reconsidering their situation. If they must give up the little they have managed to salvage from a male supremacist society before they are allowed to work for the betterment of female self-images, social roles and public esteem, then courses with a feminist orientation become little more than converse among the converted, and mutual reinforcement among an ever-narrowing group. It was reported by others from Sydney University, who were less certain of their own possession of Absolute Feminist Truth, that quite a number of women had been obliged to drop the courses they had undertaken in general philosophy’s feminist offerings – because they were not toeing the party line with sufficient accuracy.
Ultimately, it would seem that if the university is said to be irretrievably tainted as the purveyor of bourgeois accommodations to an anti-feminist capitalist society, then women will have opted out of the only institution capable at this point of time of generating an intellectual comprehension of the situation of women. Propagation of the movement will depend entirely upon small cells of converts who are willing to devote the whole of their lives to the movement. The success of such a strategy will depend heavily upon the number of women in the community who have sufficient independence of situation to be able to devote their energies almost exclusively to designing and implementing a social revolution.
If any objective judgement were to be made of this program, it would be difficult to exempt it from the charge of being yet another example of how deeply masochism has been embedded in the psyche of the female. For its hopes of success cannot be rated much above zero. And once more we have the spectacle of a number of women dedicating themselves to a hopeless cause with total selflessness, while the mass of women continue to lead their lives within the prison bars of male-defined cultural norms.
Sexism is Insidious
(a letter to Nation Review, 5.9.1975)
As one of the three women who walked out of Paul Thom’s paper at the recent Canberra conference on philosophical aspects of feminism, I would like to comment on Glynn Huilgol’s remarks.
I am not sure whether I found Paul too clever to deal with, as she suggests. Perhaps I did. I think I did have the fear that if I stayed I would sit back and laugh with the rest. Certainly his sexism was very insidious. Even so, I would not have had the courage to walk out if one of the Flinders women had not made the first move.
Her interruption of the speaker, and the hostile reaction it produced, made my action possible.
My main interest here is with Glynn’s comment that the walking out was, ‘expressive of extreme insecurity’ – as though this were somehow a bad thing. Apparently our feminism is to be intellectual only – we can talk about oppressive structures but we mustn’t feel oppressed by them, because if we do we might challenge them, and we couldn’t have that.
The scene I rejected was very oppressive. It was academic, and therefore authoritarian, competitive and elitist; it was structured in the traditional way with the expert out front lecturing to the audience (a method of communication that many feminists reject), and the speaker was a male of considerable charisma and acting ability entertaining his audience as much by his eye-rolling, eyebrow-raising, voice inflections and facial expressions as by what he actually said.
It was a male exerting his psychological power over women, i.e. being sexist, in the very act of giving an intellectual rejection of sexism. I found the contradiction painful.
Not so long ago I would have felt pretty secure in that kind of scene, pretty much ‘able to handle it maturely’. But now I think that handling it maturely consisted in submitting to it, without noticing very much what it was doing. It consisted in living my life (as Glynn put it) ‘within the prison bars of male-defined cultural norms’. As long as you do that, you can feel nice and secure. But as long as you feel so secure in your prison, able to think and act rationally and maturely within it, there is no way you are ever going to get out of it. Getting out of it is painful – it involves feeling angry and confused, acting irrationally, doubting the validity of your own perception. It involves rejecting the accepted ways of relating to men and at the same time having to go on relating to them at all sorts of levels – social, professional, business, emotional and, for me, sexual. It isn’t surprising that women who are still comfortable in prison react angrily to women who are trying to break free of it. Put-downs like ‘you must feel very insecure to act like that’ are an expression of their own fear of being confronted with the reality of the iron bars.
I felt a bit schizophrenic at the conference. On the one hand, we need to talk to men about feminism – in fact, from just talking to men, we need to love them. And what better way of talking to men about feminism than at that kind of conference? On the other hand, the conference was a reinforcement of oppressive male values, and the danger is that in participating in these events we become what we practise.
Two other things (briefly) from Glynn’s article. Firstly, the papers on academic feminism did not say that only philosophy departments could give ‘good’ feminism courses. They were on the contrary very critical of such philosophy courses. Secondly, I do not at all understand how the potential solidarity of women can be created by ‘the universality of the stigmatising stereotypes of women that are embedded in and pervade our culture’, rather than by women’s commitment to change. The stereotypes themselves don’t create sisterhood; they create suspicion, antagonism and competitiveness. It is the discovery of the stereotypes as oppressive, together with the growth of commitment to changing them, that can create solidarity and sisterhood.