“..The funny side of feminism..”
“..Forty years on from The Female Eunuch, the pioneering sisterhood is still witty and wise
In 1975, American journalist Susan Brownmiller published a book about rape called Against Our Will.
I have it here beside me now and I’ll tell you this for nothing: it’s not an easy read.
Six pages in and Brownmiller has already made reference to Freud, Jung, Marx and Engels, and also to someone called Krafft-Ebing, whose name is unfamiliar to me, but who, she says, is the author of a famous study called Psychopathia Sexualis.
Apparently, Krafft-Ebing is good on frotteurs and fetishists, but terrible on rapists.
She concludes her first chapter by stating that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”.
Provocative, closely argued, exhaustively researched, Against Our Will is now considered a feminist classic.
Brownmiller is one of several famous feminists who appear in the first part of Vanessa Engle’s new documentary series, Womenon BBC4.
Do not miss it.
To mark the 40th birthdays of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Engle has gone out with her camera and asked first-generation feminists quite a few blunt questions.
The result is completely delicious.
She asks Ann Oakley, author of a rather serious book on housework and of the novel, The Men’s Room, about the nature of her orgasms.
She asks Brownmiller about her abortions.
And she asks Kate Millett, once a Time magazine cover star .. and now an irascible old lady in Crocs who makes a living selling Christmas trees ..
.. if the women’s movement drove her crazy.
“It drives everyone crazy,” says Millett, lighting another cigarette.
Naturally, Millett is just being mischievous ..
.. because what strikes you most forcefully about these women is how very sane they are..”
go to source/story>>The funny side of feminism | Rachel Cooke | Comment is free | The Observer