The Australian, 15 November 2014

OF all the great isms of the 20th century, none has lost the plot as much as feminism. This movement started life 50-odd years ago as a glorious stab for emancipation, for the liberation of women’s previously trampled-upon promise and potential.

It had that L-word at its very heart. “Women’s libber” may have become a mocking term recently, but let’s not forget what “libber” stood for: liberation, which according to my dictionary means “to set free, release from bondage”.

But during the past decade, something has gone horribly wrong. This once liberatory movement has become intemperate, authoritarian, obsessed with controlling what it deems to be dangerous words and ideas.

A movement that once hollered proudly about women’s autonomy, insisting the so-called fairer sex was actually perfectly capable of hurling itself into the rough-and-tumble of public life, now cries about women’s vulnerability, claiming this sex is even fairer than we thought and needs protection from rude images and potty-mouthed men.

What a tragic turnaround. In the space of a couple of generations, feminism has gone from arguing that women were capable to depicting them as fragile; from agitating for increased liberty to demanding tough crackdowns on anyone who possesses sexist or bad or just old-fashioned ideas.

From aspiring to freedom to conspiring with the authorities to harry and censor alleged deviants — how did feminism’s star fall so hard? For a glimpse into feminism’s stunning shift, look at what feminists in the West have been hitting the headlines for during the past fortnight.

Here in Australia, a mob of intolerant feminists chased the silly pick-up artist Julien Blanc out of the country and got Immigration Minister Scott Morrison to revoke his visa. Morrison said Blanc, who advises sad men on how to cosy up to the opposite sex, said things that were “derogatory to women” and had “values (that are) abhorred in this country”.

Now you, like me, may think Blanc is a tosser, but think about the dangerous precedent being set here: the state has been empowered to say what kind of values it’s acceptable to hold in Australia. The state has been turned into the arbiter of what people may think and say, to such an extent that it potentially will now stop at the borders those who think and say the “wrong” things.

Blanc’s plane had barely lifted off before insatiably censorious feminists were turning their ire against another moral deviant: Redfoo, singer with LMFAO and a judge on The X Factor in Australia, whose new song feminists find offensive. So what do they want? His head on a platter: they want him sacked from TheX Factor on the basis that anyone who sings songs they don’t like has no place in the public realm.

Remember when feminists were all about throwing open the worlds of work and politics to women? Now they’re about shutting down culture they find annoying, policing the cultural realm in search of those who say risque or off-colour things and demanding their instant expulsion. These matriarchal McCarthyites won’t be happy until public life reflects their prejudices alone.

In Britain, feminists are campaigning for Blanc to be banned from entering the country later this month. At the time of writing 70,000 people have signed a petition demanding he be stopped at the border. So feminists want officialdom to erect a moral force field around Britain, to keep out not just criminals or terrorists but people whose views we find ­offensive. Like super-censors they want Britain kept morally pure, unpolluted by those who say shocking things. Such feminism is just authoritarianism in drag.

Last week in Britain, a furious feminist mob denounced a laddish comedian called Dapper Laughs, demanding he be denied the oxygen of publicity. They were successful: his television show was pulled, his national tour was cancelled and he was banned from university campuses, all on the basis that his sexist banter is ­offensive and dangerous.

When conservative Christian women demanded the censure of rude art and entertainment in the 1970s and 80s, they were roundly mocked by radicals. Now the same radicals, most notably feminists, are engaged in the exact same policing of morality and destruction of culture that offends their sensibilities. Other feminists in Britain are agitating for bans on “lads mags” and the removal of Page 3 girls from The Sun.

In the US, feminists have made waves during the past month with their scaremongering about sex on campus.

At the end of October, at universities across the US, feminist students came out in solidarity with a Columbia student who wanted a male student who she claimed raped her expelled from university — even though a disciplinary hearing found him not guilty and the police said there was no case.

In a creepy echo of Stalin’s favoured method of dealing with deviants, feminists want him thrown out of university on the basis of one woman’s accusations. This is genuinely shocking.

Other American campuses have instituted their own sexual-assault courts, which don’t comply with the rigorous rules of normal justice yet which have been used to expel students suspected of assault. As American civil libertarian Wendy Kaminer says: “Once, authoritarian, right-wing officials hunted down suspected communists on campus … Today, authoritarian, left-wing officials are targeting alleged sexual predators on campus, with similar disregard for civil liberty.”

Taken together, all these recent feminist ventures speak to a movement that has become deeply censorious and unjust, riding roughshod over free speech and due process. Feminism is no longer a women’s liberation movement — it’s a women’s authoritarianism movement. Under the new tyranny of feminism, anyone who possesses allegedly warped views or produces saucy culture could potentially find themselves cast out of public life.

What is most tragic is the argument put forward by feminists to justify their new intolerance: they say it’s all about protecting women from harmful images and ideas, from “raunch culture” or “rape culture”.

The campaigners against Page 3 sum it up: sexual images can have “a negative impact on the self-esteem of women and girls”, they say. In short, women are vulnerable, easily damaged by culture and ideology. Such paternalism towards women is surely the opposite of feminism. It takes us back to the Victorian view of women as wallflowers who have to be chaperoned through life lest they encounter a gruff man or a foul idea.

With its promotion of panic about sex, prudish censorship and urge to punish moral deviancy, feminism now comes across as a pastiche of the Victorian outlook that the early feminists challenged.

For the next episode of Counterpoint on Radio National, which I’m hosting while Amanda Vanstone is away, I’ve interviewed American libertarian feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. She tells me we need a new women’s liberation movement: this time women need liberation from modern feminism, she says, from this “very oppressive philosophy” that is “depressing, demoralising and the opposite of what feminism should be”. She’s right.

Published in The Australian on Saturday 14 November.