When we look back at the allegedly radical women of that era, what a sad shower they seem; Jane Fonda, complaining in her autobiography how she would indulge in sexy threesomes with her husband Roger Vadim not out of any sense of rompiness — Lord forfend — but because, as she told a slobbering Vogue: “I think it shows how deep my fear of being without a man was, that I could convince myself of things that really hurt me.”
Even weirder was Fonda’s fellow thespian Vanessa Redgrave, with her strange attraction to all things Muslim, be they of the Palestinian or Chechen variety — the most oppressive, anti-socialist, anti-feminist, anti-freedom system of belief and government that the world has ever known, with the arguable exception of the Nazis.
Redgrave’s similarly confused comrade Leila Khaled, who struggled against the liberation of her own people — women — under the guise of fighting for the liberation of her own, the Palestinians. Ulrike Meinhof — mmm, just what the world needed one generation after the Second World War, a mad German bint with a gun trying to overthrow democratically elected governments! Bernadette Devlin, vociferous supporter of the Irish republican movement, at the root of which stands the supremely hypocritical, rabidly gynophobic Catholic Church. The dignified and clever Black Panther Angela Davis, struggling to make sense of her involvement in a movement which openly declared that the position of women in the revolution was “prone”. Our own dear Germaine Greer, decrying sexism while posing starkers for a magazine.
Among this tragic parade of nuts and bum-suckers, Patty Hearst fitted in well. She began as the empty-headed scion of one of America’s richest families, but it took only a brutal kidnapping and a fast shag in a broom closet to turn her into “Tania”, the dead-eyed, machinegun-toting moll of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
In Robert Stone’s excellent film Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, the self-deluding ridiculousness of this supposedly revolutionary group is best demonstrated by two things: the Peter Pannish, Robin Hoodish substitution of “exotic” names for those of standard domestic issue (Donald became “Cinque”, Willy “Cujo”, Nancy “Fahziah” and Russ, for some reason, “Osceola”) and the fact that the SLA’s first victim was Marcus Foster, one of the first black high school superintendents in California, for the dreadful Crime Against The People of attempting to introduce ID cards for students.
White people of middle-class origin murdering a black man of working-class origin — very revolutionary! As one bemused radical says in the film: “At first when we heard of the SLA, and that they killed Marcus Foster, we thought they were some bunch of right-wingers. Why would you kill a black guy? There were black guys being killed all over the place!” This first crime was typical of the level of delusion and dishonesty that characterised the SLA, who in their “communiqués” talked endlessly of their love of the People and during their bank-raids routinely kicked innocent bystanders in the head, eventually murdering one of them, Myrna Opsahl — a nurse, mother of two young children, the wife of an emergency room surgeon who found himself in the unspeakable position of attempting to save her life when she was brought to his hospital dying of shotgun wounds. This good, useful woman died, basically, so that the brats of the SLA could get their kicks.
Women acting as the dupes of men in pursuit of some addled idea of heaven-on-earth is still with us, of course; all those self-loathing chumps in burkas blowing themselves and innocent people up in order to achieve systems of government which will delight in grinding the faces of themselves and their daughters into the dirt by stripping them of any civil rights they may have.
These freaks who run around looking like parrot cages with the covers on may seem a world away from “Tania” in her skin-tight trews taunting Mom’n’Dad about having it away with her SLA comrades, but they are sisters under the skin in that to them politics was/is little more than a souped-up sock-hop at which gaining approval from whatever passed as the alpha males of the time was all-important.
For all the talk of the New Conformism, how blessed we are with so many of the political female campaigners of today.
Off the top of my head I think of Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali daring to do what so many allegedly radical men have been too cowardly to do when it comes to naming the great threat that lunatic Islam poses to civilisation and modernity in our time. There’s Ann Cryer, MP, who speaks up so fearlessly for the rights of terrorised young women; Ann Clwyd, MP, who stood by the brave Kurds of Iraq when what seemed like the rest of the world was kissing ass to Saddam Hussein; and, of course, Dr Condoleezza Rice herself, so endlessly patient and elegant and beautifully dressed as she explains ONE MORE TIME why all the people in the world — not just the white ones, France! — deserve the chance to choose freedom and democracy.
Among such clear-eyed, straightforward political femmes, the odd blast from the past, when politics were used by the sexually dysfunctional in order to get off — be it in the shape of Patty Hearst or others — seems like a reminder of a time when lunacy gripped the world, and “strong women” demonstrated their worth by showing that they could be as mad as men.
It was no wonder that the light-hearted sexist John McCririck, while in the Big Brother house, adored Germaine Greer and hated Caprice — Greer seemed every bit as confused and needy as he did, whereas Caprice was never less than exquisitely self-possessed and contemptuous of him. And compare the way the glorious Jordan explains her own threesomes with breathtaking ease and honesty compared with Fonda’s griping: “I don’t mind — a minge is a minge.”
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again — if I had a daughter, I would far rather that she took Caprice Bourret or Katie Price as her role models than Jane Fonda or Germaine Greer. For to change your face and body, all above board, because being beautiful is your business, is one thing; to contort your sexuality and pervert your politics speaks far more of a broken spirit and a dead soul. And this — how not to do things — is all that the lost rebel ghost-girls of the Sixties and Seventies can teach us.
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst is on general release
julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk
