Gillian Triggs, Julia Gillard and Christine Nixon.

 

Meet the pussy feminists of the 21st century, the whiny second-wave feminists — mostly over 50, more often in their 60s and 70s — who long ago forgot what feminism is about. Instead of championing female empowerment as they rose to the top of their professions, they will be remembered for blame-shifting and, worse, choosing to play the girlie victim whenever things went wrong.

As much as they cried foul when critiqued by others, history will record that pussy feminists were damned and humiliated by their own words.

First up is the pussy feminist whose stint as president of the Australian Human Rights Commission ended this week. Gillian Triggs signed up as a member of this cohort of disgruntled women by claiming she was attacked because she was a woman.

“I am coming to the view that they have been able to say things about me, and attack me, in a way that never would have happened to a man,” Triggs said in an address at the Melbourne Town Hall in May.

Alas, her actions, not her gender, explain why she has attracted so much criticism and her woe-is-me victimhood ploy cannot hide the many black marks against her career at the AHRC. If you mislead the Senate estimates committee about the circumstances of a delayed inquiry into kids in detention, expect to be critiqued about it by an intellectually curious media outlet. If you accuse a journalist of misquoting you when they didn’t, expect to hear about that, too. When you make wild assertions that MPs are too stupid to understand human rights, that won’t go unchallenged either. And your sex is simply irrelevant when questions are asked and judgments made about your poor performance.

Julia Gillard ‘made asinine claims of sexism and misogyny to hide her faults’. Picture: Kelly Barnes

Sadly, it has become the price of entry into pussy feminism to shift blame to others and then raise the gender card to try to deflect criticisms. Rather than taking responsibility for her own mistakes, Triggs has ended her career with a flourish of hyperbole so demented that she has become a caricature of absurdity.

In an exit interview with her favourite journalist, Fran Kelly, on ABC radio, more comedy than career wrap-up, Triggs said human rights in Australia had regressed on every front during her tenure, then added that as human rights boss she had no regrets. In fact, she thought she and her fellow commissioners had done a terrific job. Wait. What?

If you claim human rights have regressed on your watch, grace in leadership requires admitting that you could have done something, even one thing, better. The blanket “no regrets” assertion is not just deluded, it’s pathological.

Not even the tiniest concession that she could have better handled the timing of the inquiry into kids in detention, or been more honest about her reasons for the delay. No word that the AHRC could have done a better job of handling section 18C complaints against Queensland University of Technology students or the late Bill Leak. Instead of admitting any error or accepting any blame, Triggs blamed the government and this newspaper for controversies during her time as human rights boss.

The non sequiturs don’t stop there. Speaking with Kelly on Wednesday, Triggs said the Turnbull government was “ideologically opposed to human rights”, then added that she had “absolutely no interest in political partisanship”.

If none of this is making sense, it’s because it doesn’t. As boss of the AHRC, Triggs played politics under cover of her regular wide-eyed girlie denial that she wasn’t playing politics. She claimed to be an innocent international lawyer unpractised in politics. Yet her actions and words betrayed her constant political games.

Beyond the laughs she gave us this week, Triggs will be remembered as the pussy feminist whose career effectively encouraged women (some of whom hardly need encouragement) to make spurious claims of sexism and discrimination when a performance review doesn’t go well.

When Triggs played the faux victim in confected gender games and Penny Wong and Sarah Hanson-Young chipped in with politically motivated claims that the poor woman was bullied, they infantilised women. Their cry-baby antics have helped make female victim­hood the new norm, and that risks reprising old stereotypes about women as the weaker, not to mention dumber, sex. Meanwhile, episodes of real gender bias risk being lost in this ­miasma of girls who cry wolf.

It was the same with another prominent pussy feminist. As new prime minister, Julia Gillard said she wasn’t interested in gender games. Then, when her leadership went off the rails with broken promises about no carbon taxes, poor policies and even worse political management, Gillard put on the victim cloak and made asinine claims of sexism and misogyny to hide her faults.

Her biggest supporters were fellow pussy feminists of a certain age, women such as Anne Summers, and younger women who have fallen lock, stock and barrel for the same faux victimhood. Years after she was replaced by Kevin Rudd, Gillard was still at it, claiming in the 2015 ABC documentary The Killing Season that Rudd bullied her while they were in opposition.

Christine Nixon is another old girl of pussy feminism whose chorus is “I am woman, hear me whine”. Earlier this month the former Victorian top cop ripped into the misogyny of former premier Jeff Kennett when spruiking her book on, wait for it, female leadership. Nixon claimed that soon after her appointment, Kennett told her: “I never would have hired you”, which she attributed to her gender.

How does she know that it was about gender? Perhaps it was purely about competence or lack thereof? After all, Kennett’s criticisms of her following the Black Saturday bushfires were entirely about judgment and competence: “The fact that she withdrew from the battle, that she went and had her hair done, spoke to a person re her memoirs and then went out for dinner with friends is unacceptable and she should have been dismissed on the spot by the government of the day.”

If pussy feminists such as Triggs (age 71), Gillard (55) and Nixon (64) could be relegated to a sociological zoo of old-style feminists, they could be happily disregarded as harmless and irrele­vant. Sadly, they are deliberately fuelling a modern era of identity politics and competitive victimhood where different groups vie for the mantle of loudest victim.

Rather than encouraging young women to be empowered and resilient human beings strong enough to take responsibility for their own actions, these kinds of pussy feminists who are vociferous the world over are role models for a feeble disempowering feminism.

Just look at how pop star Taylor Swift, once an all-American sweetheart, became the princess of millennial victimhood in recent years. When her fans tweaked to how she was playing the victim to deflect criticism of her own sooky behaviour, she doubled down by claiming she was an unwitting victim of victimhood politics. “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of.”

The other flaw common to pussy feminists is that their politics trump principles.

In her final months as AHRC boss, Triggs complained about “clear evidence” of mounting sexist attacks on women in the media. “It’s very sad for Australian democracy and for enlightened liberal debate in this country,” she said in May. A human rights tsar should know that robust debate is the essence of a liberal democracy and challenging the views of someone who happens to be female is not sexism.

In any case, her claim of sexist attacks was more political than principled.

While she defended Muslim commentator Yassmin Abdel-Magied, claiming opponents were trying to constrain her right to free speech, Triggs didn’t show much concern for the way Margaret Court was pilloried in the media. But, then, Court is a white Christian woman who believes that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.

That’s the problem with pussy feminists: it’s a cosy little clique that prescribes free speech in differing doses depending on where you’re placed on the merit board of identity politics. If you’re female, Muslim and left-wing you will get access to full-strength free speech fed on a taxpayer-funded IV drip. Abdel-Magied was feted by the ABC for her gender, her religion and her left-wing views, yet those of us who focused solely on what she said — the substance of her ideas — were accused of sexism or Islamophobia or both if you’re a bloke. Go figure.

While pussy feminists attract the headlines and know how to use the media — Triggs this week and Nixon the week before — it pays to remember there is another cohort of women. They are feminists who seek no special favours and reject gender quotas. They don’t wear feminist labels on their sleeves or use confected feminist fury to prop up their careers. These women get on with their lives, raise children, love and adore men, work hard and never use words like sexism, discrimination or misogyny to avoid responsibility for their actions. Their principled, empowering feminism is based on individual choice rather than collective gender-based victimhood. And, happily, these quiet feminists outnumber the noisy pussy feminists.

janeta@bigpond.net.au