If you’ve been reading the Fairfax press (or surfing social media) recently, you’re probably familiar with the debate about writer and activist Melinda Tankard Reist – and whether she has the right to call herself a feminist.
Tankard Reist is the author of two books by Melbourne feminist publisher Spinifex Press, Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls and Big Porn Inc. (edited with Abigail Bray). She runs an activist group, Collective Shout, that works against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls for commercial profit.
She’s also a conservative Christian who is anti-abortion (or ‘pro-life’) and spent twelve years working for Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine.
Melinda Tankard Reist
Tankard Reist has long been a controversial figure – particularly in feminist circles – but the current furore began with a front-cover profile in Sunday Life magazine on 8 January, nearly two weeks ago. The profile writer, left-wing feminist Rachel Hills, says she interviewed Melinda because she ‘thought it would be interesting’. She wrote on her website, ‘Like many journalists, I spend too much time thinking about what goes on in other people’s heads, and Melinda was a public figure I found particularly perplexing … I still didn’t “get” her. And I wanted to.’
This weekend, iconic Australian feminist Anne Summers argued that you need to sign onto certain principles in order to be a feminist – and abortion rights is one of them. ‘As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women’s ability to be independent. There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility … To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.’
She concluded of Tankard Reist, ‘Just because she says she is a feminist does not mean she is.’
In a past Wheeler Centre debate, Summers' contemporary Wendy McCarthy recalled abortion in the 1960s – before social pressure from feminists and others made it legal – as potentially fatal. ‘In my own experience, to get an abortion required furtive phone calls, 63 guineas (a large amount of money), cops patrolling up and down the road, hoping someone would give you advice when you left…’
Yesterday, Kate Gleeson said the most significant argument against Tankard Reist’s identification as a feminist is her involvement – through her work as Harradine’s adviser – in restricting the approval of the abortion drug RU486 and ushering in Australia’s adoption of the ‘global gag rule’ that dictates AusAID’s overseas family planning guidelines.
Gleeson said this had ‘profound implications for women’s access to contraception in our donor destination countries’, contributing to ‘the two-tier system in which Western women have mostly unfettered control over their reproduction, while those in the developing world are at the mercy of dangerous abortions’.
Today, Cathy Sherry takes issue with all those who’ve questioned Tankard Reist’s right to call herself a feminist. She says ‘I have long considered myself a feminist and been disturbed by the parts of the sisterhood who operate like the nasty in-group in primary school … I do not know Melinda Tankard Reist and I am not pro-life, but I defend her right to express her opinions, call herself a feminist and prosecute her own beliefs … The real test of tolerance is tolerating those with whom we strongly disagree. We will never have a right to express our own contested ideas if we do not defend others' rights to do the same.’
A somewhat baffled Rachel Hills (who says that the huge response to her profile – including five separate opinion pieces last weekend – has been both ‘a bit of a dream’ and ‘challenging’) reflected this week on what she’s learned from the experience. She concluded, ‘if you want people to listen to what you’re saying – whether you have a big platform or small one – you also have an obligation to engage in good faith’.
Hills’ approach to the profile was to avoid a hatchet job, but ‘to write something critical (in the sense of making analytic judgments) but still human’.
While perhaps not all the arguments being traded are useful (or indeed respectful), the broad debate is teasing out some big questions.
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Very well written. I found the initial piece on Tankard Reist in Sunday Life extremely thought-provoking.
In the past I have had, on occasion, very little time for those who would label themselves feminists as it usually centred around ridiculously minor issues gender battles at the expense of larger issues. Especially at university, it often boiled down to a gender battle rather than an attempt to reach equality or to address import feminist issues. As I've gotten older I have started to notice that there are significant issues that still exist, or have started to develop that very much need to be focused on.
It is in this arena that Tankard Reist has placed herself in. She appears to be a curious mixture of an intelligent crusader to protect the innocence of young girls, with some ridiculous media-friendly antics on the side. No one can argue that this battle is ill-founded, however targeting clothes manufacturers over inappropriate messages on underwear instead of focusing her complete energies on the larger problem of the sexualisation of children reveals a little more about her character than perhaps she intends to show.
How much of the real Tankard Reist is dedicated to feminist issues, and how much to media antics and personal agenda pushing?
Like many others I found her pro-life stance at stark odds with her claims to be a feminist. Actively striving to prevent women from having freedom of choice over their bodies is not an agenda I will ever be able to support. However - conversely - I cannot agree that pro-choice is necessarily a requirement of feminism. I would simply argue that freedom of choice in your own life, and active measures to it make possible for all females in the world have more freedom of choice rather than restrictions, is far more fitting than the definitions that are currently being argued.
K Graham
25 January at 03:30PM
There was a great podcast by This American Life on pro-choice and anti-abortion women meeting after killings in an abortion clinic in Boston in the early 1990s. The meetings went on for a number of years - all in secret because fear from the communities they were part of. They found that talking to each other solidified opposing positions in both groups but changed the rhetoric - lambasting the other group, calling them names or encouraging intolerance was no longer acceptable to women on either side. It's worth listening to for its own sake, but particularly in the context of this article: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/453/nemeses
Libby
25 January at 06:15PM
Perhaps you would like to look at the piece written by the publishers at Spinifex Press, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein which clarifies some of the misinformation (eg this article's description of Melinda as a conservative Christian) that has been put about in the press.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/01/25/3415534.htm
Susan Hawthorne
30 January at 11:16PM
I wrote a long comment on this topic in response to Eva Cox's article in New Matilda. I have re-posted below:
Reply to Cox
The radical feminist argument concerning pornography is not reducible to a communitarian ethic regarding the pitfalls of capitalism.
Feminists, like Tankard Reist are concerned with the sex-industry because it seriously harms and exploits women and girls, not just because it makes billions of dollars. Commodification is central but harm is the real issue. In other words, Tankard Reist doesn’t exist simply because, as Cox says, there are “current anxieties about the dominance of markets over ethics in the public sphere”. She is part of a long feminist line of abolitionists of sexual slavery that began with the critique of coverture in the late eighteenth century and now concentrates on the last bastion of male sex-right: pornography and prostitution.
When women and increasingly girls are reduced to body parts and orifices, as they are in porn, and this is one of the most popular forms of pop-culture consumed by men (often in secret), we have a massive societal problem on our hands. Why is that position so hard to countenance? Why are those who espouse it howled down, harassed, belittled, caricatured and otherwise demonised? Surely because they’ve struck a nerve? I’m not suggesting Cox is doing this but she does imply that Tankard Reist has some murky religious background that disqualifies her from feminism. I wonder: what is the point of this?
Cox in part agrees with Tankard Reist’s arguments concerning pornography, but her dismissive use of the term “sexploitation”
fails to accord the abolitionist argument its due. It is thanks to feminists such as Tankard Reist (Dines, Jeffries and others) that the problem of porn, and the sex-industry more generally, is back on the agenda. This argument cannot be conflated with the right, and it cannot be reduced to a critique of capital by the left. It concerns as Caroline Norma says “the dominion of women by men”.
It’s not about making women victims, it is about acknowledging the society wide effects of a powerful, visceral form of media which depicts women as sex-objects to be used and brutalised. Even at its most benign pornography defines women’s worth in their looks and sexual value to men, and abstracts this from their humanity. Just because an individual woman defines her participation in the sex-industry as “empowering” does not mean that porn is not damaging to women as a sex class. Sociology 101 tells us that an individual’s experience is not the same thing as an institutional or structural impact. For example, one young woman may make a lot of money in porn and feel ok about it, but does that make it ok if ten other women have entered the industry because of homelessness, poverty, drug addiction, sexual abuse, or sex trafficking? And what about society at large and the impacts of pornification on male and female sexuality? What about the women and girls who find themselves pressured into – or worse, forced into – sex acts men have seen on porn? What about the partners of male users who are deeply distressed when they stumble across a gargantuan porn habit?
The issue here is over who can legitimately call themselves a feminist and, given the mutually exclusive criteria established by those in different camps, it seems there are some irreconcilable differences.
One has to live with the paradox both of (inevitably) subscribing to a position and accepting that there are a multiplicity of positions.
Melinda Tankard Reist is no less a feminist than Eva Cox, but she is a feminist with a different underlying philosophy and politics. Her religious perspective, and her putative “anti-abortion” stance is itself complex: rooted in a belief in the sanctity of life and a sense that women ought not to live in a society where single motherhood consigns them to poverty (as indeed it does). She is critical of the social context within which women make decisions about abortion. She is also critical of the termination of disabled or otherwise “imperfect” foetuses, which is an argument that deserves a hearing. I find it deeply problematic that she is not pro-choice, it is certainly incompatible with my own feminism, but this does not automatically disqualify her other arguments concerning pornography and the sexualisation of girls in popular culture. Here she has an important contribution to make.
The real question is not whether she is a feminist or not. Of course she is. The real question is why people are looking to derail her argument concerning the deleterious impact of porn. I would say – as a therapist – that we are in denial as a culture and very defended against the kinds of arguments that question male sex-right.
Petra Bueskens
01 February at 08:43AM