Yin Now On A Par With Yang

My good friend Matilda Hatt was in town recently, and, knowing the speaker, we attended a lecture given last night. The presenter, Nora House, was a noted feminist, and while I avoid those with "causes" like the plague, Nora always made her points with deftness and humour.

As an example of the above, she had titled her address, "Three Wise Men -- Are You Serious?"

Nora began her remarks with a quote from the playwright and film director, David Mamet: "The perfect girlfriend: one who makes love until two in the morning, and then turns into a pizza." She went on to stress that she is a good friend of Mr. Mamet, and that she had ripped his comment well out of context -- the line had been used as a 'straw man' to set up a defense of women in films.*

Nora went on to state, however, that girls and women had been viewed as objects for pleasure for millennia, and in all too many parts of the world still were. She wisely avoided a rant at this point, indicating that women such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Aung San Suu Kyi, and, more recently, the girl viciously attacked by the Taliban, Malala Yousafzai, could do a far better job of making the case for fairer treatment than she could.

No, Nora went on to indicate that real progress was being made. In the past, all too many eighteenth and nineteenth century best-selling novels featured frightened girls rushing down dark corridors shouting "O transport!"** Their only hope lay in the actions of a saviour, always a man.

In the current age, there is none of this; the terror-stricken heroine has been replaced with an arrow launched from the bow of Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games, for those living somewhere in a cave in the Gobi desert) or a powerful spell launched from the wand of Hermione Granger. (Harry Potter -- see parentheses above.) Add into this mix such wildly popular heroines
such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess and the 'Yin' begins to become equal to the 'Yang'.

Nora went on with further examples , but I think the point is made: at least in certain areas of the worlds, women are no more regarded as chattel, as objects there to be servants to the almighty man, and the media reflect this. The concept just needs, in Nora's word, "extension".

As for the concept of feminism, Nora ended her address with some words from Rebecca West: "I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."

Rimshot.

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*Mamet's words were allegedly inserted into a TV spot for a pizza delivery outfit. A lawsuit is pending. --Ed.

** Not all novels were so one-sided. Jane Austen's women act decisively (after a learning period) and Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's brilliant Middlemarch towers over the male protagonists in the novel. But it should be noted that the writer's real name was not George Eliot, but Mary Anne Evans, the publishing world being as it was then. -- L.S.S.