Many years ago, I interviewed Doris Lessing, and this is what she said: “It was a different attitude then. We just got on with it.” She was referring to a section of Walking in the Shade, the second volume of her autobiography, in which after cataloguing the tough things she’d gone through as a young woman, she upbraided young women of today, who, as she put it, “scream or swoon at the sight of a penis they have not been introduced to, feel demeaned by a suggestive remark, and send for a lawyer if a man pays them a compliment”.
Variants of this remark have been circulating for weeks in response to #MeToo, most recently from Germaine Greer, who dismissed aspects of the current movement as “whingeing”. Back in the day, said Greer, a leering man was considered by all sensible women to be less of a threat than a fool: “We weren’t afraid of him and we weren’t afraid to slap him down.”
And of course, one understands what she means. “We just got on with it,” has about it the hard, bright ring of a moral imperative, but it is as much a question of style as of principle. Stop fussing; buck up; pull yourself together; soldier on – admonitions that amount to a cultural aesthetic, particularly among the English, who have always posited themselves as the antidote to those terrible Americans, going on endlessly about themselves and their woes. It is also right and proper that young women be taught that resilience is good; that an unpleasant experience might be downplayed without being entirely denied.
The problem I have with Greer’s remarks and those like them is that they are almost always framed as a comment on “victimhood”. At the heart of the conflict between women who are ostensibly on the same side, are definitions of what it is to have agency. Is it, for example, an expression of agency for a woman to brush off a grabby, entitled date and never refer to it again? Or does a woman manifest her agency by calling attention to such behaviour? Is it a greater show of strength to shrug off a vulnerability or admit to it?
Ten years ago I would have said the former. Now I’m not so sure. To say “chin up” is a piece of crisis management, a response that for millennia has worked for women in the absence of alternatives. If the only control you have in a situation is over your individual response, then buck up and move on makes good sense.
But for what feels like the first time in history, we are not in that place. “I want the woman on a train who feels a man’s hand where it shouldn’t be … to be able to say quite clearly, ‘Stop,’” says Greer. Quite so. But there is more than one way to say stop and it is not, perhaps, an assertion of victimhood to yell it so loudly it becomes the stop heard around the world. I’m all for blitz spirit, but it would be nice – wouldn’t it, Germaine? – if the blitz came to an end one of these days.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
