Feminism is dead, along with Marxism, the British literary novel, history, family meals and God. We're all post-feminists now. You can hear the sighs of relief all round. We don't have to be angry or sisterly or internationalist or socialist any more.
Equality with men having been achieved, we can all ignore gender, which no longer matters when it comes to anything serious, and get on with trying to make money, being confident and charming, and not whingeing. Feminism, for many young women, is irrelevant, a movement dedicated to man-hating. Feminism is equated with puritanism, repression and denial. All the characteristics that used to define patriarchal authority figures have slipped over and become slapped on to feminists.
This is partly a problem of naming, of using simplistic either/or thinking. Rigid distinctions between goodies and baddies may console us with the certainties they seem to offer, but they prevent us moving forward. We may live in a post-Christian culture, most of us, but we can still feel seduced by the sinner/saint split. So feminism is distinguished from post-feminism, one now seen as bad and the other as good, as though they are utterly separate. But are they really?
In a complex and fragmented culture like ours, which lacks one over-arching myth to unite us all (and perhaps those myths are dangerous anyway), we may still search for stories that can act like glue, sticking all the disparate bits of us together. I listened last week to Seamus Heaney reading, at London's South Bank, from his magisterial new translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. This is a saga of male heroism, in which the lives of noble warriors, the wealth and reputation of their halls and settlements, are threatened not just by one monster but by two. These uncanny predators, the children of Cain, are terrifying, bloodthirsty creatures arising from the swampy mere in the twilight world beyond civilisation, beyond the stockade. Beowulf has to slay both these evil beasts: first Grendel, then Grendel's avenging mother. The monsters are fatherless, which makes them, as offspring of single mothers, even more scary and potentially harmful.
Feminism, repudiated by our collective common sense, understood to threaten our culture, has become that second monster, a figure out of fairytale, a huge bad mother. Rather than get to know this creature, learn her language and laugh at her jokes, we engage her in a fight to the death. If the monster currently stands for feminism, and for the fantasy memory of the powerful mother we experienced in infancy, she also becomes a screen on to which we can project everything that threatens us. Post-feminism gets set up in opposition, invoking rescue and safety, the return to the familiar, to the old rules. Post-feminism comes to mean unthreatening, nice. Less a politics than a behaviour.
Perhaps it is time to jiggle the Beowulf story around again. Just as when you watch conventional pornographic movies, you can identify with both male and female protagonists, and simultaneously enjoy the delights of both sexual activity and sexual passivity, so ancient feminists like me can refuse to lie down and die but instead enjoy playing monsters, throwing on our disguises of nice ladies, sneaking into the embattled homesteads, settling down in the shadows by the fire (or the TV), swigging from the cup of wine as it goes round and eavesdropping on the talk of the young women warriors.
For they are warriors still, for all that their body paint is dismissed as lipstick, for all that they may have to repudiate the explicit struggles of their Amazon mothers and conceal their collapsible spears in their handbags. There are still battles to be fought around equal pay, decent childcare, the treatment of rape and assault in the courts, the feminisation of poverty. Perhaps the positive side of post-feminism has grown out of feminism, as daughters learn finally to cherish the strengths and gifts of their mothers, and perhaps it draws strategically on what we can newly imagine from fairy tales and sagas: the ranks of warriors include women alongside men, inside each of us there's a hero, a heroine and a monster desperate to speak.
