The new feminist war: young women vs old women

The #MeToo movement began, I thought, primarily to allow women to speak out about harassment from men, which they had previously found too intimidating to declare openly. What is striking is how quickly it has turned into a row between women. Social media is crackling with barely concealed inter-generational rage between feminists of different vintages. Younger feminists are very keen on ‘calling out’ slut-shaming, victim-shaming and fat-shaming. They’re less vocal about age-shaming, though, because they’re quite often doing it themselves.

The combative 78-year-old Germaine Greer, for example, has long been deemed philosophically flawed by younger feminists because of her view that trans women are not ‘real’ women. This week she compounded that status by arguing that women must react immediately to harassment rather than ‘whingeing’ later on, because — crudely referring to #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein — ‘if you spread your legs because he said “be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie” then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent’. Her interview contained more nuanced points, but she has been derided on Twitter as an old-school ‘second-wave feminist’ who has ‘lost her marbles’. A number of posts called on her to ‘retire’.

A more surprising villain of the piece, for many ‘fourth-wave feminists’, is the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, until so recently regarded as a female icon beyond reproach — indeed, with the recent Emmy-laden US TV adaptation of her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, her international profile has rarely been higher. Atwood’s perceived crime, common to successful writers, is that she dared to depart from the most recent approved feminist script — in this case, the one stating that all women accusing men of ‘sexual misconduct’ are automatically to be believed, rather than given a full hearing in the context of an investigation.

In an incisive article entitled ‘Am I a Bad Feminist?’ Atwood observed that ‘women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviour that entails, including criminal ones’.