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Shades of Grey

June 2013

  • Patrick Allington

The Quarterly Essay turns 50 with an outstanding contribution from Anna Goldsworthy



“I suspect,” Anna Goldsworthy tells me, “that my recent motherhood memoir is considered more ‘niche’ than any book about male experience would be.” The memoir Goldsworthy speaks of, Welcome to Your New Life (Black Inc.) is a sharp, often bemused account of pregnancy and motherhood: “I had not known of the mucous plug, nor that you were supposed to keep it as a pet.” As a beautifully written and funny book about life and new life, it should appeal to women and men, parents and non-parents — not only to twenty-first century mothers. But Goldsworthy’s aside — more speculation than complaint — rings disconcertingly true.

After 17 years away, Goldsworthy recently returned to Adelaide, where she’s now a Research Fellow at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. But when we speak about her new Quarterly Essay, Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny, Goldsworthy is in Brisbane rehearsing for a regional run of the stage adaption of her first memoir, Piano Lessons. Not content with carving out dual careers as a writer and classical pianist (she’s a member of the Seraphim Trio), Goldsworthy acts in the play. Reflecting on the layers of selfhood she’s tangled up in — she plays a version of ‘Anna’ based on her memoir that in turn is based on her actual life — she laughingly admits to sometimes being sick of “the smell of myself on my work”. But she also maintains — correctly — that her two books of memoirs are outward-looking: that is, they are about learning and teaching music and about motherhood more than they are ‘about’ Anna Goldsworthy.

Unfinished Business appears at a time when the national conversation around issues of sexism and misogyny — the artlessly named ‘gender wars’ — is becoming increasingly polarised, strident and, too often, brutal. Given that much of this messiness is coalescing in the debate over Julia Gillard’s prime ministership (and in assessments of her body parts), it’s apt that Goldsworthy’s essay begins with a careful appraisal of Gillard’s now-famous misogyny speech.

Goldsworthy identifies two very different reactions to the speech. Even as the press gallery gave Gillard a resounding fail, her words took flight via YouTube. “In this version of the speech,” Goldsworthy writes, “the territory being contested was not Labor versus the Coalition, not Gillard versus Abbott, but Woman versus Misogyny. It was not quite I had a dream, but nor was it ‘essentially about herself,’ as the political correspondent Paul Kelly described it.”

“Gillard’s prime ministership has been a sort of litmus test of sexism, revealing social attitudes many of us hoped we had moved beyond,” Goldsworthy says. She rejects the premise that Gillard routinely plays the so-called ‘gender card’, arguing against the notion “that you’re not allowed to call out any sexism, you’re not allowed to call out any misogyny, and by doing so you’re violating a code of conduct or fair play.”

Still, Goldsworthy doesn’t suggest that Gillard is perfect. Like many commentators, she sees the PM’s recent comment about “men in blue ties” as “over-reach”, unhelpfully pitching women and men against each other. More broadly, in Unfinished Business she summarises Gillard’s approach to politics as “getting on with it”. While this seems admirable (it’s what so many of us claim to want from politicians), Goldsworthy suggests that “Leadership is not only about doing, but also about being”. She contrasts Gillard with Barack Obama, whose “virtuosity” stems from balancing rhetoric and pragmatism. While I’d argue that Obama pushes too far the other way, as if rhetoric is action, Goldsworthy’s analysis of Gillard’s flaws is convincing. Still, it’s a brief portrait, one I’d love to see Goldsworthy expand upon.

“Despite everything I’ve said in this essay,” Goldsworthy says, “today is the best time to be a woman, clearly.” But the very fact that feminism has made inroads, that it has endured and endures still, has prompted a backlash (as well as the surfacing of residual sexism and misogyny). Unfinished Business ranges far and wide as it charts various aspects of this cluttered terrain, including reflections on beauty and on shame; the singer Pink’s reclamation of the word ‘slut’; the deeper meaning of the television show Girls; and more.

Goldsworthy offers ‘cautionary tales’ about high-achieving women, including miner Gina Rinehart, novelist Hilary Mantel and classical scholar Mary Beard, who declined to cower when she found herself the subject of a misogynistic internet campaign. “It is a curious thing, our need to cast these eminent women as failures,” Goldsworthy writes. But Unfinished Business also ponders prominent women who seem to embrace feminism even as they disavow it: “I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women,” as the singer Katy Perry puts it. “Feminism is seen as unsexy, or scary,” Goldsworthy says, “thanks partly to the efforts of anti-feminist propagandists.” Perhaps the male equivalent of such equivocation is the man who expresses vocal support for feminism but in his behaviour resists the implications of that support.

Unfinished Business is particularly fascinating when discussing contemporary porn stars, both male and female, who, as Goldsworthy says, have tagged an increase in misogynistic-themed porn as “representing some sort of backlash or some sort of revenge upon women, who they feel are — and clearly are — much more empowered in society than they used to be.” In contrast, Goldsworthy offers a partially positive take on E.L. James’s bestselling and much mocked Fifty Shades of Grey: “It’s not a book I especially admired,” she tells me, “but it is significant, I think, because it allowed many women to own up to the fact of female desire.”

Unfinished Business is a far less personal piece of writing than Piano Lessons or Welcome to Your New Life. “I think women probably feel it most sharply in their teens or early twenties – I certainly did – as a type of condescension,” she says when I ask her to reflect on how her own day-to-day experiences sit with the themes of Unfinished Business. “Although I see sexism all around me, I no longer feel I’m on the receiving end of it in a daily way – perhaps because of the people and situations I surround myself with. Getting older and achieving a degree of professional competence offers a liberation from the imperative of being – as indeed does the enforced hyper-competence of motherhood. The problems then become more structural, to do with division of labour.”

To me, Unfinished Business is a plea for more nuanced thinking, a plea for more civil and generous debates, and a plea for accommodating more shades of grey (in a non-E.L. James sense). That’s not to say that Goldsworthy’s conclusions are wishy-washy or that she prevaricates: her prose is forceful and plain speaking but it’s also calm. She doesn’t claim talismanic qualities.

Still, Unfinished Business is not a call for false unity, as if all differences can or should be imagined away. Goldsworthy makes it clear that feminism’s work is not yet complete, and her essay offers ample evidence that further progress will encounter active (and sometimes ferocious) resistance  — as well as silent disapproval and apathy. Goldsworthy writes that “A resilient feminism, surely, is a broad church”, one that “has much to offer our daughters”. And, I would add, our sons.


Quarterly Essay 50, Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny by Anna Goldsworthy is out now, RRP $19.99.

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