Taking On The Boys

Clementine Ford is one of the boldest and most influential voices in fourth-wave feminism. Samantha Trenoweth meets a woman who wants to incite schoolgirls to revolution and create a world that will not destroy her son.

- Samantha Trenoweth

Meet Clementine Ford: public enemy number one. There are men who believe she is building a rocket launcher in the desert with which to catapult them into the sun. There are men who believe she is raising an army of shrews in Melbourne to murder a man a day. She is the most prominent Australian voice among the young-guns of this new hashtag-driven incarnation of the women’s movement. At 37, she is an author, a columnist, a mother, a rollerskater and a woman on a mission to change the world. If you want to understand 21st century feminism, you need to get to know Clementine Ford.

She has a devoted following among women under 30. On reading her first book, Fight Like A Girl, a 15-year-old wrote to her: “Now I am ready to stand up and create havoc and unapologetically disrupt the system”. When she read that, Clementine decided that her mission would be, “to tell 15-year-old girls that they have the right to lead their own revolution”. Older feminists are also fans. Tracey Spicer says that her writing, “makes me want to chain myself to a barricade”.

Unsurprisingly, however, Clementine really upsets conservative men, young and old. She has made an enemy of right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt, who criticises her for “hypocrisy” and for “making a career” out of being a “victim-martyr”. When she released Fight Like A Girl, bookstores’ social media pages were inundated with obscene taunts. Her new book, Boys Will Be Boys, was vilified online before she’d even written it. There are men who spend a great deal of time tracking her whereabouts, threatening her with physical violence and even recommending that the authorities remove her child (he’s two, she adores him and refers to him as F.J.).