The just-out results of the voluminous Australia Talks survey (probing the minds of a representative 60,000 of us) find that 51 per cent of Australians consider themselves to be feminists.
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That sounds promisingly like more than half of us, perhaps making Australia that rare and progressive creature, the MFC (Majority Feminist Country).
For a moment, just before more fully examining the data, my feminist bosom swelled with pride. Up on my bookshelf my copy of the new, updated edition of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch seemed to rustle its paperback pages with approval.
But then reading on, one finds that the 51 per cent figure is arrived at because, while 69 per cent of surveyed women say they are ("somewhat" or "strongly") feminist, just 34 per cent of men say they are (again "somewhat" or "strongly") feminist. Strongly feminist men, the category in which this columnist falls, seem to make up only about 10 per cent of the surveyed men.
In this same past week in which the Australia Talks data has emerged (the feminist findings reminding me that I am not a bit like Tarzan) my strong feminism has enabled me to take a special delight in a new piece in science magazine Nautilus, titled Tarzan Wasn't For Her.
History professor Erika Milam's essay is a celebration of the ideas of Elaine Morgan.
Morgan (1920-2013) was a Welsh writer and feminist, and the author of several entertaining books on evolutionary anthropology.
To appear to digress for a moment (when in fact I am still on track) I have sometimes, only half-jokingly, explained tragically landlocked Canberrans' hankerings for the beach as a sign that we may as a species have evolved in and beside water. Canberrans' terrible estrangement from the seaside, I have speculated, may help to explain why among Canberrans one finds such an unusually high ratio of melancholy miserabilists.
Now (rapture!) I find my notion that we evolved in and beside the water was gloriously supported by Elaine Morgan. One of her major claims to fame, Professor Milam rejoices, "was to advance a theory of aquatic adaptation that preceded life on the savannah".
"In semi-adaptation to a watery world, she imagined, humanity's ancestors may have lost their body hair, gained a layer of subcutaneous fat to keep them warm, learned to walk upright (keeping their heads above water while foraging for tasty snacks in the shallows), came to use stones and manufacture tools for breaking open shells, and developed the ability to control their breathing when diving beneath the surface - a precondition for true spoken language and an obvious boon to any individual trying to communicate with most of her body submerged.
"In short, Morgan suggested humans acquired precisely those traits that distinguish them from the rest of the animal world while living around water, not in the arid grasslands."
The great delight that Elaine Morgan's ideas and writings give a strong feminist is that, Milam explains, "Morgan derided male-centred theories of human evolution as 'Tarzanist'."
"Yes, the scientific facts used to buttress their [the overwhelmingly male scholars'] arguments were unassailable, Morgan insisted, but not the interpretations of those facts. She further noted that the term 'man' was ambiguous, denoting both the entire species and also the males of the species. The trick was not to confuse the two.
"Further, Morgan contended that based on the available evidence it was impossible to distinguish weapons from tools and impossible to know which sex invented them. 'A knife is a weapon or a tool according to whether you use it for disemboweling your enemy or for chopping parsley.'
"Why, then, were such assumptions about the importance of men to the evolutionary progress of humanity so widespread? Morgan chalked this up to a combination of male pride and egotism."
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Morgan extensively quoted Robert Ardrey's book Territorial Imperative, in which Ardrey characterises human men as being brutally, aggressively, fearlessly, forever-hunting-and-killing, just like admirable and dashing male baboons.
"Morgan imagined," Milam tells us, "that a male reader would naturally find this characterisation appealing. She pictured him polishing his glasses, thinking: 'Yeah, that's me all right.'
"The reason such theories continued to be popular was because Ardrey's typical [male] reader, like the [male] author, enjoyed the idea of 'all that power and passion and brutal virility ... seething within him, just below the skin'.
"It was high time, Morgan thought, to expose these arguments for what they really were - myths. Based on evidence from modern hunter-gatherer societies, she noted that the bulk of the total diet of early humans was probably the result of gathering vegetable matter, not hunting meat. Women were important to the evolutionary history of humanity, but had been ignored by the 'blood-and-thunder boys'."
Morgan's ideas have application over and beyond evolutionary anthropology. She knew and said this, arguing that it suited tarzanist male social and political agendas to characterise men as inventive, go-getting baboon/Tarzans and women as meek, useless, submissive, parsley-chopping Janes.
How insightful her diagnosis of male tarzanism! How useful her words "tarzanist" and "tarzanism" and the concepts they embrace, for those of us who have to describe contemporary Australian political life. How commonplace our political leaders' overt displays of baboon-like "brute virility".
How tarzanist prime minister John Howard was being when, beating the drum of his broad chest with his mighty fists, he made hay from the Tampa crisis (setting the tone for all subsequent party-political attitudes to refugees), his mighty bellow of "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come!" carrying clear across the Australian jungle.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist.