Clementine Ford reveals the fragility behind 'toxic masculinity' in Boys Will Be Boys

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In Boys Will Be Boys, Australia’s most prominent contemporary feminist, Clementine Ford, works toward dismantling the idea that feminism is harming men. Instead, she proposes — as feminists have consistently maintained — that a patriarchal society can be as harmful and destructive for individual men as it can be for women.

Ford considers how “toxic masculinity” is shaped from the moment of a boy’s “gender reveal” to her closing chapter, which – simply and powerfully — lists the names of more than 50 famous men who have been publicly accused of sexual assault and their alleged criminal acts.

She traces how gendered inequalities in the way we socialise children at home and via pop culture directly shape harmful adult behaviours. These include “the embrace of online abuse, rape culture, men’s rights baloney and even the freezing out of women from government and leadership”. Ford sets out to demonstrate not only how “toxic male spaces and behaviours … codify male power and dominance” but also how they serve to protect men from any consequences.

In a chapter on domestic labour, A Woman’s Place, Ford shows how gendered division of housework and childcare informs assumptions about adult roles. In a claim that will no doubt be quoted by many “Angry Internet Men” (as Ford refers to them), she proposes that heterosexual women are better placed living alone and inviting men “into our houses as guests occasionally”.

Her point is not that there is no pleasure to be had for a woman cohabiting with a man. Instead she highlights that managing “the gendered conditions of domestic labour … takes a fuckton of work”. This work happens regardless of whether women are consistently fighting for help with washing the dishes or changing nappies, or have begrudgingly accepted that the unending cycle of housework is their burden to shoulder.

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Read more: Friday essay: talking, writing and fighting like girls

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Short of raising a child in the wilderness, far from an internet connection, television signal or cinema complex, children are inducted into gender norms by the popular culture they consume. In her chapter about Girls of Film, Ford reflects on the experience of a 1980s childhood in which the blockbuster films for young people all required girl viewers to imagine themselves in the place of active male heroes.

Unlike girls, boys are not conditioned to identify with girls and women on screen. This, Ford argues, results in the marginalisation of stories about girls, which “are considered niche and peripheral, in the same way stories about people of colour or stories about disability or queerness are”.

We only have to look to the dramatic online overreaction to the news of a female-lead Ghostbusters reboot, which resulted in the stars of the film receiving sexist and racist abuse. This suggests that many men’s inability to see value in “stories about anything other than themselves” is entwined with the devaluation of women themselves.

Clementine Ford

Inevitably, Ford must consider the men who lead these online crusades against the imagined oppression of men. She devotes significant attention to Milo Yiannopoulos, who has become a figurehead of the men’s rights movement. When Leslie Jones, the African-American actress who starred in Ghostbusters, shared some of the abuse she received at the hands of Yiannopoulos and his followers, he accused her of “playing the victim”.

And yet, as Ford identifies, Yiannopoulos resorted to framing himself as a victim when his Twitter account was removed in 2016. In a telling assessment, Ford argues that these men are not united in their “iron-clad fortitude but by extreme fragility, and this is what bonds them together beneath men like Yiannopoulous”.

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Read more: #MeToo is not enough: it has yet to shift the power imbalances that would bring about gender equality

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One of the most frustrating modern retorts to any attempt to discuss gendered violence, discrimination and outright sexism is that “#NotAllMen” are responsible for these acts and attitudes. However, as Ford cuttingly observes, women do not need a directive to “look for the goodness in men, because we try our damnedest to find it every day”.

Women already know that not all men are guilty of the brutal sexual assaults, for instance, that Ford details in her interrogation of rape culture. The difference for women is that “we know that any man could be [a threat]”. The magnitude of living with such a gendered power imbalance impacts every woman’s thoughts and movements.

While Ford writes with great humour about the abuse she has received and anti-feminist rhetoric more generally, the overwhelming gravity of a world overcome by toxic masculinity permeates this book.

Margaret Atwood’s famous comment that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, while women are afraid that men will kill them, is no more painfully examined than in discussion of the brutal rape and murder of Aboriginal woman Lynette Daley. One of the killers, in his explanation of events to police, stated: “These things happen … girls will be girls, boys will be boys.”

As Ford rallies us to understand, being a boy need not pose a danger to women nor encompass the harms that patriarchy enacts on men, such as increased risk of suicide or the impact of violence.
With an epilogue comprised of a loving letter to her young son, Ford asks us to imagine a different definition of boyhood, in which being sensitive, soft, kind, gentle, respectful, accountable, expressive, loving and nurturing are no longer framed as incompatible with being a man.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Television interview: The Royal Wedding and the Princess Myth

Feminism Today talk, 'We are the 50%' seminar series

This is more rightly a talk about anti-feminism, and the challenges faced by feminists in light of the insidious forms that anti-feminism now takes. It was delivered as part of Deakin University's 'We are the 50%' series on 17 August 2015.


Feminism Today - 'We are the 50%' seminar series talk by Dr Michelle Smith, Deakin University from Michelle Smith on Vimeo.

Actually, women, you do need feminism

The following article was originally published at The Conversation and was republished at the Washington Post and New Statesman.

Australian university campuses last week marked Bluestocking Week, a celebration that remembers the first women who entered English universities in the late 19th century.

Women in lecture halls were pioneering. Yet these trailblazers couldn’t sit exams or expect to graduate with an actual degree. Newnham College for women at Cambridge University was established in 1871, but it was not until 1948 that women could hold a full Cambridge degree.

This is merely one area of discrimination that restricted what women could do with their lives. The reality of how little choice women had only a century ago is nevertheless absent in contemporary manifestations of anti-feminism, such as “Women Against Feminism”.

The phenomenon began on Tumblr, with women taking photographs of themselves holding signs that explain their reasons for opposing feminism. The site has been online since July 2013, but it’s only in the last month that it’s really started to generate heat online. Women’s statements range from claims that men are now the true victims of discrimination, to homophobic categorisations of feminists as “man-haters” and “lesbians”.

Any social justice movement with a long history and diverse adherents will exhibit contradictions and problematic ideas. However, Women Against Feminism is not only ahistorical, but fundamentally misreads the nature of feminism and the current status of women.

Let’s work through some of the common assumptions made in these anti-feminist declarations.
(1) “Men and women already have equal rights where I live.”
It is indeed true that in many Western nations women enjoy formal equality, but substantive equality remains elusive. Any of these rights also has the potential to be revoked at any time. Abortion rights, in particular, are continually challenged and overturned. We cannot simply say that feminism has done its work and that women will enjoy the rights and freedoms it has helped to achieve indefinitely.

Also, people regularly travel and migrate. Things might be better “where you live”, but what if you want to go somewhere where women aren’t allowed to drive, gain an education, or report a rape?

(2) “I was raised to be an independent woman not a victim of anything.”
Prior to feminist activism, it would have been impossible for most women to be “independent”, regardless of their parents' intentions. At various points in history, women couldn’t inherit property, work outside the home, learn to read, or even walk down the street unaccompanied. The efforts of generations of feminists helped to give women a say in government, the right to be educated, and social and sexual freedoms.

An independent woman would want to pursue any path in life that she wishes. She’s the kind of woman who would speak up when informed that her job has been made redundant because she’s pregnant, or who would get angry when told that she can’t walk home alone because otherwise she’d be inviting sexual assault. Independence and refusal to be a victim are feminist qualities.

(3) “I am an abomination to feminists” (because I am a stay-at-home mother).
Many Women Against Feminism believe that feminism opposes women’s work at home and denigrates those who don’t pursue careers. Historically, most women had no choice but to remain within the home and care for their children. Until as late as 1966, Australian women had to resign from the public service as soon as they married.

Feminism has always sought rights for women as mothers. Early Australian feminists, for example, campaigned for the government to provide an income to all mothers to recognise that parenting was the equivalent of a job and that it benefited the country. Feminism did challenge the expectation that women have no vocation of her own and be solely focused on cleaning and cooking for her family. This does not mean that feminism derides women who choose to focus on raising children and maintain a traditional division of labour. Though feminists would argue that the reverse situation, in which a male partner cares for the home and children, should be equally possible.

(4) “Men have rights too.”
As the vast majority of the world’s government and business leaders and holders of its wealth, it’s bizarre to suggest that men now lack social and political power. Women Against Feminism, however, often propose that men’s rights have been eroded because they usually have less access to their children after separation or divorce.

The continuing perception in courts and the general community that women are better suited to raise children, while men are better equipped to be in the workforce, is not a “right” that women enjoy. In dozens of ways, this belief restricts and hampers women’s rights and capacity to earn. The one drawback that affects men is the only one that anti-feminists mention.

(5) “I don’t need feminism because…”
It is impossible to extricate yourself from collective rights relating to gender, race, or sexuality. Unless you wish to withdraw from society, you will both benefit and suffer from political and social changes to what women can and cannot do. You may not want to need feminism, but you will benefit from its continued work toward maintaining basic rights and eliminating the kinds of sexism that cannot be legislated against regardless. It’s very easy for Women Against Feminism to declare that they don’t need feminism using the voice and powers that feminism made possible and which it continues to fight for.

Miley Cyrus, Sinéad O’Connor and the future of feminism

This article was published at The Conversation on 8 October 2013.

Since her tongue-poking and “twerk”-filled performance at the American Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus has been the subject of intense media discussion. This has only magnified in the past week, after Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor wrote an open letter to Cyrus, imploring her to “refuse to exploit your body or your sexuality in order for men to make money from you".

Cyrus did not react well to being chided by one of her idols andher tweets in response have provoked two further open letters by O’Connor. Fellow musician Amanda Palmer has appointed herself as intergenerational umpire, offering an open letter to O’Connor in which she maintains that Cyrus has orchestrated her own plan to be a “raging, naked, twerking sexpot".

Some people have been left wondering why one young, white American female pop singer is generating this much attention. Certainly, Madonna deliberately pushed the boundaries with controversial video clips and an erotic photo book, Sex, before Billy Ray Cyrus’s “achy breaky heart” had even settled on Miley’s mother, Leticia.

One of the tensions driving the international debate about Cyrus is the now-entrenched difference between second- and third-wave feminisms. In 1963, prominent feminist activist Gloria Steinem went undercover to work as a Playboy Bunny. The resulting exposé of the harmful aspects of women’s work in the New York club exemplified how feminists once largely agreed that there were exploitative practices inherent in women’s employment in industries connected with sex.

The movement fractured as some women came to disagree with views of pornography and sex work as oppressive. From the 1990s, third-wave feminist rhetoric about “choice” has challenged the idea that stripping, pole dancing, or posing naked are enforced by a male-led – or patriarchal – society.

Michaele L. Ferguson, a political scientist, explains that “choice feminists” see anything a woman says she has chosen to do as “an expression of her liberation". It does not matter whether a woman elects to run for parliament or to ride naked on a wrecking ball — as does Cyrus in her video for her most recent single — as a woman cannot freely choose to be oppressed.

Third-wave – or choice – feminists have been critical of O’Connor’s initial letter. They have suggested that it exhibits“slut-shaming”, which refers to the denigration of women who transgress sexual expectations for their gender. Like Amanda Palmer, third-wave opinions contend that O’Connor denies Cyrus’s “agency” or control over her career. Finally, they also criticise what they see as O’Connor’s misguided assumption that she can judge what is and what is not “empowering” for another woman.

In contrast, women who uphold second-wave feminist ideals haveexpressed admiration for the way in which O’Connor’s letter draws on her own experience as a successful female musician to caution against the workings of male-controlled music industry that markets sex appeal. This week, former Eurthymics singer Annie Lennox has also highlighted the impact on young girls of an industry “peddling highly styled pornography with musical accompaniment".

Second-wave responses also agree with O’Connor’s questioning of the long-term effects of Cyrus’s “choice” to cultivate a highly sexual persona. O’Connor emphasised that at 46 years old, she has not found herself “on the proverbial rag heap” as do many middle-aged female artists “who have based their image around their sexuality". Shaping a career around sexual desirability in a culture that fetishises the appeal of young women means accepting a built-in expiry date.

The third-wave perspective that lauds Cyrus’s choice to be a “raging, naked, twerking sex-pot” rests on the problematic idea that gender equality has been achieved and that women are already fully liberated. Can we really say that the career choices available to female musicians are equivalent or comparable to those available to male musicians?

In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, American journalist Ariel Levy proposes that women’s “choices” to express their sexuality through exhibiting their bodies for men are created by selling them an extremely limited model of sexuality in the guise of sexual liberation. Levy’s view is approximated by O’Connor’s plea to Cyrus:

They [the music industry] will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its [sic] what YOU wanted.

Third-wave feminists would argue that O’Connor’s statement suggests Cyrus possesses a false consciousness. Cyrus only thinks she wants to lick sledgehammers and simulate masturbation with a foam finger because she has internalised patriarchal ideas about women. However, a second-wave orientation would counter that it’s impossible to talk about free choices in a world where gender inequality persists and women’s options are overtly and unwittingly constrained.

A war of words among privileged entertainers seems a trivial story in comparison with the major political and social upheavals of the present moment. Nevertheless, the stoush between Cyrus and O’Connor attracts page views, not only because of our thirst for gossip. We are also interested in this debate because we remain uncertain about the rights and freedoms of women and how best to foster them.

The 10 Most Influential All-Girl Bands

With the exception of groups of handsome teenage boys who sing bubblegum pop, we don't use the terms "boy" or "man band". After all, so many rock bands are made up of men only that we don't need see the need to distinguish them. While there is no shortage of amazing female singers in rock bands, there are far fewer female instrumentalists who have been part of mixed sex bands. For drummers, think Maureen Tucker in The Velvet Underground, Cindy Blackman who played with Lenny Kravitz, and Meg White in the White Stripes. On guitar, there's Poison Ivy from The Cramps, Gillian Gilbert from New Order, Bilinda Butcher from My Bloody Valentine and Kelley Deal from The Breeders. You'll find a few more women on bass, such as D'arcy Wretzky of The Smashing Pumpkins, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Debbie Googe of My Bloody Valentine and Kim Deal of The Pixies.

In such a male-dominated art-form, it hasn't been easy for bands comprised of women to find an audience and success. This post celebrates some of the pioneering women who have broken through perceptions that females can't rock by forming bands with only female members. To qualify as an all-girl band, the primary members must all be women, therefore ruling out bands such as Hole, where a male member was integral to songwriting and performance across a significant period. I've also focused on rock primarily, so you won't find country bands like The Dixie Chicks or classical ensembles like The Medieval Babes on this list. (And I appreciate that the term "girl" can be seen as infantilising when applied to women, but as I think the rest of this blog suggests, "girl" ought not be a derogatory or insulting term.)

10. Jem and the Holograms/The Misfits
Now this isn't like when an Australian publication listed a horse as Australian sportswoman of the year in 2012. There are countless female musicians, and indeed hundreds of all-girl bands across the past ninety or so years, but for girls growing up in the 1980s, the relative lack of female musicians on MTV was countered by the morning cartoon Jem and the Holograms (1985-1988) in which girls could play instruments and form their own bands. (Not that I'd recalled it, but Ken and the blonde-mulleted Derek butted in to Barbie and the Rockers.) And to top it all off, Jem had to overcome the schemes of rival all-girl band, The Misfits. Not one, but two, bands to show young girls dressed in their nighties that girls could not only sing, but play bass, guitar and drums.

9. Pussy Riot


I can't say much for Pussy Riot's musical influence and the group considers itself as a feminist collective of performance artists rather than a traditional band (the members have rebuffed offers to play with the likes of Madonna because they oppose capitalism and paying gigs). Nevertheless, a group of female musicians has perhaps never had such a significant impact on world politics. Five members of the collective created the video "Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!" by performing in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February 2012. Within weeks three of the group had been arrested and were later convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". Two members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were sent to prison labour camps in October 2012. The women are not scheduled to be freed until October 2014, despite the fact that both are mothers to small children.

8. The Ingenues

We're still dismayed that women rarely succeed in the performing arts unless they also happen to be spectacularly beautiful, and so it was from 1925 to 1937 that the promotion for successful Chicago all-girl jazz band, The Ingenues, often emphasised the women's physical appeal, though most of the members were talented multi-instrumentalists. The women's visual appeal encouraged a career in film shorts, including the unbeatably titled "Syncopated Sweeties". Despite the giant entourage of 22 performers, The Ingenues were sufficiently popular to mount tours of Australia, South Africa, Asia and Australia.

7. The Slits


When most people imagine the classic era of British punk, they inevitably picture the likes of The Sex Pistols and other groups disaffected working-class young men. The Slits formed in 1976, around the time that key bands like The Buzzcocks and The Pistols emerged. While other phenomenal female performers like Siouxsie Sioux (of the Banshees)  arose out of the punk scene, The Slits were the only all-female band to attain notoriety . Their debut album, Cut, released in 1979 when singer Ari Up was still only seventeen years old, unsurprisingly attracted attention for its cover, on which the band appeared topless but for a light covering of mud. Yet, though their biting feminist critique was somewhat overlooked at the time (the song "Typical Girl" asks cynically: "Who invented the typical girl?/ Who's bringing out the new improved model?/ And there's another marketing ploy/Typical girl gets the typical boy"), The Slits have since acquired legendary status and Cut's influence has been acknowledged in lists of the most important albums in rock.

6. The Runaways


The Runaways was not the first girl rock band to be signed to a major label in the United States (that honour belongs to Goldie and the Gingerbreads at number 1), but the band did find mainstream success, most especially in Japan, and influenced succeeding generations of female musicians. The Runaways launched Joan Jett to stardom and also created an inauspicious beginning to the career of The Bangles' eventual bassist Michael (Micki) Steele who was fired from the group. The band crossed a number of gender barriers in the music industry:  bands such as Van Halen and Cheap Trick opened for The Runaways headline shows  and the group took to hanging out with The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Damned and Generation X. The Runaways' signature song 'Cherry Bomb', from their first album in 1976, is shown in this clip from their sold-out Japanese tour of 1977.

5. The Go-Go's
While 'We Got the Beat' and 'Our Lips are Sealed' have little punk or feminist fire, The Go Go's are the one of the most important girl groups by virtue their debut album Beauty and the Beast (1982) being the first ever album by a female group who played their own instruments and wrote their own material to top the US charts. Though it might be hard to imagine 'Leave a Light on For Me'-era Belinda Carlisle being on the musical edge, the band developed out of the Californian punk scene. The Go Go's began to establish a following in their home city and in  England when they supported Madness on a substantial run of dates in 1980. Though the band did have subsequent gold albums and top ten singles, The Go Go's were not able to replicate the phenomenal success of their first album, which topped the charts for six weeks, and disbanded in 1985 after the release of a third album.

4. L7


It's a long way from 'Summer Rain' to throwing a used tampon from the stage*, but though L7 may have never had the chart success of fellow Californians The Go-Go's, the band is emblematic of an important swathe of American girl bands who preferred to get angry than to co-ordinate their jumpers and perms. (I could have equally included any number of Riot Grrrl bands that rocked out from the early to mid-'90s, most notably Bikini Kill.) There is perhaps no better example of expressing anger rather than feminine insecurity and self-loathing than L7's track 'Shitlist': "When I get mad/ And I get pissed/ I grab my pen/ And I write out a list/ Of all the people/ That won't be missed/ You've made my shitlist." The band was also politically active for women's rights causes. In 1991, L7 organised and played at Rock for Choice, a pro-choice benefit concert. L7 had their roots firmly in punk, but successfully adapted their sound during the explosion of grunge with the single 'Pretend We're Dead' put on high rotation in 1992.
*At the Reading Festival in 1992, the crowd erupted angrily and started slinging mud when L7 was affected by sound problems. Donita Sparks removed a tampon from her vagina and hurled it into the crowd, with the following cry: "Eat my used tampon, f***ers!"

3. The Pleasure Seekers/Cradle

Now I've got to admit that, as a child, I was only aware of two pieces of information about Suzi Quatro: (1) she often performed on the "golden oldies" circuit in Australia and (2) she played Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days. I probably thought that Leather Tuscadero was a real musician, as the show clearly conveyed that somehow this character was famous beyond the set of Al's Diner. Not only did Quatro become a rocker and celebrity in her own right, but she was a founding member and singer of Detroit's The Pleasure Seekers, one of the first girl bands to be signed to a major label. As with The Slits, the band was formed when its members were still girls; when their first single 'Never Through You'd Leave Me' b/w 'What a Way to Die' was released, Suzi was only fifteen and her guitarist sister Patti was seventeen. Not only did both of the band's singles chart, but the group managed to change direction from the comparative restraint of The Pleasure Seekers to become the heavier outfit Cradle in 1969 and toured the United States and Vietnam.


2. The Bangles 
The Bangles might not be everyone's idea of one of the most significant female bands, but the band certainly impacted on me as a girl. Beyond cartoon images of female musicians, The Bangles were the first live women I saw on television who played instruments. There were no shortage of female singers, but I was soon aware that playing guitar or drums was not something that women typically did. But here were four exceedingly attractive women, who not only were fashionable and pretty, but who could wield a guitar. The band emerged from the West-Coast "Paisley Underground" scene in the early 1980s, in which bands paid homage to 1960s pop such as The Mama's and the Papa's, the influence of which remained evident in The Bangles' emphasis on vocal harmonies. The band's story, like that of many other female artists, is coloured by both elements of triumph and constraint in a male-controlled industry. The Bangles wrote the vast majority of their own material, but the three most successful singles, 'Walk Like an Egyptian', 'Manic Monday' (penned by Prince) and 'Eternal Flame', were written by men (though singer Susannah Hoffs was a co-writer on the latter single). Purportedly significant parts of hit album Different Light (1986) were overdubbed by no-doubt male session musicians, with the exception of the bass of Michael Steele (formerly of The Runaways). Internal division was sown as the sexy Hoffs was gradually promoted as the central figure in a band that actually shared lead vocals and through the intervention of executives who sought to extricate Hoffs from the group and promote her as a solo artist. Steele was similarly promised a solo contract to encourage the dissolution of the band, but unsurprisingly, the less marketable Steele never received a solo record deal.

1. Goldie and the Gingerbreads


Without Goldie and the Gingerbreads, however tame their songs, such as 'Can You Hear My Heartbeat' which hit number 25 in the UK singles chart in 1965, there might never have been a riot grrrl movement. The band of four (a drummer, organist, guitarist and vocalist) was the first all-girl "rock" group to be signed to a major American label (Decca) in 1963. Goldie and the Gingerbreads faced general apathy toward female performers, or alternately promotion that situated them as a "novelty" act because of the members' gender. Though various circumstances, including the difficult conditions for women artists, forced the band's demise in 1968, the band had already made monumental strides for women musicians by touring with The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Beatles and The Yardbirds in the United Kingdom.