When women and men understand that working to eradicate patriarchal domination is a struggle rooted in the longing to make a world where everyone can live fully and freely, then we know our work to be a gesture of love. Let us draw upon that love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage, and strengthen our commitment.
bell hooks, Talking Back1
If men and women, girls and boys, are to avoid having their lives overly determined by gender fictions, the story needs changing, as does the balance of storytellers.
We need girls and women to share ‘half the sandbox’, as Geena Davis puts it. We need to ‘heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion’, as bell hooks explains, and see that as much as we’d like gender, race, class and sexuality not to matter, they still do. To change the story, we must look beyond the fairy tales and storytellers of the past towards a future that is more balanced and inclusive, more representative of the diverse world in which we live.
Call me an optimist, but I believe we can, in fact, change the dominant narrative one story at a time. We have no more need for the limited fictional archetypes of the Virgin, Temptress and Witch. A woman can be someone else now, a thousand diverse someone elses, as strong, complex and multi-dimensional as her male colleagues, no more or less in need of saving, no more or less human, no more or less flawed.
We must resist when statistics, research, lived experiences and vividly demonstrated examples are swept aside with the most inane and cosy logic – ‘Yeah, but everything is equal and just fine, and that thing you mentioned? The low pay? My wife makes more than me. And politics? It’s not about gender, it’s about the best person for the job. It’s about merit.’ – happily overlooking the fact that a startling percentage of the time, year after year, the ‘best person’ just happens to be from the same demographic – the one that has been dominant for centuries.
The idea that only white straight men from one socio-economic background have the skills and capabilities for leadership is simply wrong.
Nareen Young, CEO, Diversity Council Australia2
It would be easy to blame the aggressive denial of inequality on the very same sexism it allows, to assume that the motivation for excusing racism is racism, and the motivation for excusing sexism is sexism. This may be a significant part of the underlying cause of much of the pushback, but there is another important factor that bears mentioning. I’ve saved it for this last chapter, not as an afterthought, but as an important parting one: Accepting that the world is not entirely fair is hard to do. It is not comfortable. It is anything but cosy.
I believe this is one reason why discussions of any of the realities of various inequalities in the world are met so frequently with discomfort and, ultimately, the desire to dismiss, to derail, to turn away.
In order for a segregated class system, feudal system or caste system to exist, the masses have to believe that their position in the world is logical and fair, or at the very least enough of the masses have to accept their circumstances as part of the ‘natural’ order. It was taught that those who were born into power and wealth had a divine right to their positions. It was their birth right. The privileged needed the myth to feel superior and deserving of their position and the poor had to be made to believe the myth so they would not rebel against it (which nonetheless did happen from time to time; the illusion was not always infallible). The lie of divine, God-given superiority is much harder to pass off now. Few in our culture would believe any royal family was literally chosen by an omnipotent god on high. Today, the more common myth is one of a flawless meritocracy – that merit and hard work win every time and there is no cultural bias or inequality in our society.
A central part of the notion of freedom in the context of what we regard as the ‘free world’ is that anyone can do or achieve anything, and that all achievement is deserved, based on ‘merit’. (It follows that any hardships experienced are also deserved.) This may be the ideal, but it is not the reality. I am not suggesting that people who go to work and earn their salary have not done so fairly, but rather that the system, as much as it may be argued to be the best system, is nonetheless flawed. Any look through the history books can show us a list of reasons why the imperfections in the system so frequently take the same forms. On a structural and foundational level, some are more privileged than others. I am privileged as a white person, as middle class, as able-bodied. To acknowledge that some people are born ‘more equal than others’ (to reference George Orwell’s Animal Farm) is simply jarring. To question the idea of a perfectly functioning meritocracy is deeply uncomfortable for me, because I am doing okay now. I can pay my mortgage and provide for my family, while others cannot. By recognising that I am lucky in a certain way that others are not, I am recognising that I owe some of what I have to the goodwill and sacrifices of others, and giving back some of that ‘luck’ or opportunity or material wealth is in my social contract. It requires questioning one’s own privilege. This means that any discussion of inequality automatically aggravates.
When it comes to the tragedies of others, we have to believe they could never happen to us, that somehow the victims deserved their lot. As for the inequalities still manifest in social, economic and political differences between the genders, hanging on to the idea that ‘women are their own worst enemies’ feels better, because it implies that the relative lack of female participation and privilege is deserved – a natural state, even.
There is also, I believe, a very human tendency to regard any consistent pattern as evidence of a ‘natural state’ of some kind. ‘It’s always been this way’ is a reason given not to question the way it is, overlooking the fact that the way it is may only have been in effect for as long as we have been alive – or not even that long. The idea that women were mentally inferior was based on skewed ideas of the ‘biological’, put forward by a few privileged men whose ideas became regarded as a ‘natural’ way of thinking. Social privilege was considered ‘natural’. White people decided that white people were a superior race, conveniently enough, and that it was quite okay to kidnap people from other lands or cultures and force them to work. Slavery was considered ‘natural’. So now, when someone says that black people are just naturally lazy, or women are not naturally ambitious, it reveals a lazy logic which seeks to persuade us that the marginalisation of women and people of colour is natural.
It’s all fine. The way it should be and all. Forget history.
And so now, in contemporary times, we examine the numbers of women in parliament, in positions of power and influence, in well-paid versus poorly paid jobs, in positions of authority, winning critical acclaim, prestigious awards or other public recognition for their work, and it is all too easy to regard the imbalances those numbers illustrate as a mere reflection of what is natural. It is easier to fall back on the idea that what exists is what is natural, rather than consider a far more troubling possibility: that we do not, in fact, live in a flawless meritocracy.
This is why we need to question, listen, consider, care and act.
None of us can single-handedly make the world fair and balanced, but that should not dissuade us from actions, both large and small. We can be sensitive to bias, and work to lessen it. We can practice inclusion. We can actively seek out facts to challenge our assumptions and the assumptions of others. We can pull back from the smaller outrages, the individual bodies and images and statements, to connect the dots and see the bigger pictures. We can stop viewing activism, and feminism, as radical.
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead3
Acting with new knowledge, we change the world, one decision, one action or word at a time, because for all the formidable influence that money and privilege creates – and that is significant – there is still the matter of people. There are those who see a problem and will not give up until they have found a solution. There are those who fight for others. Throughout history we have those incredible stories and the possibilities still remain. This is to our great advantage in the ‘free world’. We live in a democracy and we should work to make it still more democratic, more representative, and less biased and prejudiced.
If history has taught us anything it is that we all have more in common than we think. The divide can be crossed. And conquered. After all, most people want the same things – safety, acceptance, love, good health, people to share our lives with. Progressives and conservatives, atheists and people of religion all want the world to be a better place. We only disagree on how to achieve it. Understanding that our essential differences are not so great is the way to bridge that divide. It allows us to see and to hear others. It allows us to be heard. So be part of the conversation. We need you.
Accept that equality is not yet here, not across gender lines, race or class, and it is not ‘privileged whining’ to point that out. Just because a certain reality exists does not mean it must remain a reality. History shows us that. So if you care about making the world a more equitable place for everyone, keep caring and do not give up.
You can effect change, even if that means finding one person in your life and helping them. Even one. It can be a small, simple gesture, or something more life-changing – like journalist Emma Tom (now academic Dr Emma Jane, who not so coincidentally has won the Women’s Electoral Lobby Edna Ryan Humour Award for ‘using wit to promote women’s interests’) when she gave me the opportunity to take a polygraph test to poke fun at the rumours about me, and show just how ridiculous they were. By giving me the opportunity and presenting me with that challenge, Emma changed the narrative of my career, and exposed one significant public fiction about me.
Now I have laid my own truths bare in The Fictional Woman, because today I can afford to tell my story, emotionally, but also financially, without worrying about where my next meal will come from, as I once did. I don’t need to be ‘Teflon Tara’ anymore, as my friend put it. I am no longer a fictional woman.
The next chapter is yours.