I don’t think housewives or stay at home mothers are prostitutes, okay? After all, I have looked after a house and stayed home to look after kids. I don’t think married women are prostitutes, I don’t think they ever were. I have been married – very happily – for 39 years. My eldest daughter got married in April with my heartfelt blessing.
I do, however, think that the way marriage was constituted in the past – when conjugal rights existed, and women often lost their jobs on marrying because it was assumed their husband would support them – pushed marriage perilously close to being an economic transaction. That is the only point I was trying to make on Australia’s most dangerous (particularly to appear on) program; the ABC’s Q&A where I was part of an all female panel from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I am not by any means the first person to make this comparison, either. Indeed, the founder of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft was the first to do so in 1792! And, back in her day, the comparison was much more accurate – married women had no right to their own earnings or property, their own children or their own body.
These days, thanks to feminism, marriage is not an economic transaction because women have much more agency, freedom and economic alternatives than they once did. Now, thank whatever deity you believe in, two free and equal people can come together and choose marriage purely because they want to spend their life together. Far from feminism being the enemy of marriage, as so many imagine, it has arguably been its greatest friend.
So, if that is what I believe, why am I being castigated up hill and down dale for making a rather unexceptional and old fashioned historical comparison?
Part of it is the nature of Q&A, which is why it is such an exciting program. It is one of the few panel shows where you do not know the questions in advance and so you are always flying by the seat of your pants. Sometimes, your pants rip. On Monday night I was expecting Tony Jones to throw the question about sex workers to the expert on the panel, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, who has written a book on the subject. Instead, he threw it to me and, frankly, I fumbled the pass. I did not make it clear in my first few sentences that I was talking about marriage from an historical perspective and that was my mistake. I clarified it thereafter but my initial words are out there and I have to live with them.
Do I think I am being piled on now because I am a woman? Not really. After all, a few week’s ago it was Clive Palmer and his remarks about the Chinese on the same program that triggered the media storm. And before that it was Mike Carlton who copped the beating for his column on the conflict in Gaza in the SMH.
I am not privy to the responses Palmer and Carlton received when they were in the eye of the storm, however Carlton found them so offensive that his responses to them eventually cost him his column. I do wonder, however, if they were quite as sexualized as some of the comments I have received. Now, I was talking about prostitution so maybe that is why I have attracted some vulgarity, but it is fairly common for women who are seen as having stepped out of line to cop such attacks. I am old enough not to let it worry me too much but, more importantly, I have a loving and supportive husband who not only makes me feel better about everything but his mere presence means I do not have to face the barrage alone. My heart goes out to younger, single women who must face the storm in isolation. That would be really terrifying.
And that is what worries me about the trial by social and mainstream media that follows unscripted or unpopular remarks. I worry that people are becoming very wary of saying anything spontaneous at all. We can see it in the careful and sanitized remarks from our politicians who are clearly terrified of a misplaced word being taken at face value and resulting in the sort of storm I have been experiencing. The outrage that follows what are often mistakes or just rather too boldly expressed opinions has the effect of silencing risky ideas and shutting down debate. This is chilling and very dangerous.
Within a day or two of these firestorms, the fury dies down and the world moves on until the next unfortunate opens their mouth and says something not quite as carefully as they might have liked. But, forget whether it is me or some poor kid who took an insensitive selfie in Auschwitz who are at the centre of the contretemps, each such event means all of us will watch our words more carefully and take fewer risks.
Sadly, that’s the very opposite of what the Festival of Dangerous Ideas seeks to encourage.