Still Life With Cat has an excellent post up about the Mad Monk who has his eye on the throne and the potential to seriously fuck with the lives and freedom of women.

This guy has a profound hatred of women and I ask that you not only circulate this article among your radical feminist and other activist networks but among every woman you know. We need to talk about this guy, about his past, about his ideology and about the depth of his hideousness – we need to consciousness-raise.

Go forth!

Isn’t it always the way? Kristina Keneally is the first woman premier of NSW. Um, ok.

WHOOPITY DOO!

Now misogynists and other patriarchy-deniers will be able to say “See? We do let teh wimminzez have teh power sometimes!” Right, so long as those wimminz are straight, white, married, christian, right-wing, middle-class, conventionally-attractive mothers of two.

In other words, one of patriarchy’s cheerleaders.

I think it’s unfair to label her a ‘puppet’ because in a patriarchy all women are puppets to some degree or another, but fuck, is anyone else deeply disturbed by this? Tony Abbott has been the federal opposition leader for five minutes and already evil stuff is happening. The right are lording it over State Labor and now when they fail to win the next election they’ll have the convenient excuse that it must have been because people don’t want female leaders.

Now Australian Feminists will be in that no win situation where if we criticise her political ideology we’ll be accused of being Anti-Feminist, but at the same time when we defend her from all the misogynist shit that will no doubt be coming her way soon we’ll still be accused of being Anti-Feminist because it will mean defending a woman whose beliefs are in fact Anti-Feminist. Much the same dilemma that American Feminists have had regarding Sarah Palin. Can’t wait!

Either way, whatever happens, you can be sure it will be all the fault of feminists.

Keneally says she’s a Feminist – (sigh) – she says that as a ‘working mother’ she is familiar with the issues that working mothers face. Huh? Sure she is! If that were true then she wouldn’t have referred to ‘working mothers’ because she would know that ALL women work whether they have kids or not. They just don’t necessarily get paid for it. She might be familiar with the issues of working mums who are Just Like Her, straight, white, married, middle-class, religious, home-owning mums. But I think it’s safe to assume that she absolutely is NOT familiar with my issues as a working mother. Has she experienced being at risk of homelessness for example? Has she had the demeaning experience of dealing with Centrelink? Has she ever worn the Irresponsible Slut or Welfare Queen tag of the single mother? I’m going to recklessly move out on a limb and suggest that she probably has not.

Some people are hoping this will give the Left some incentives to team up with the Greens and hey wouldn’t that be great? But my fear is that it will all end in tears with the Liberals bulldozing their way through next election while the notion of female political leadership becomes roadkill in the collective Australian consciousness.

…and it’s not a life free of violence and abuse from men, it’s flawless skin!

I guess it’s never too early to educate girls about how hideous they are and how in order to succeed scrape by in life, they must be skillful in the practice of covering up all those ugly flaws that are characteristic of being biologically female. This process involves disguising grotesque physical abnormalities such as an undefined lip line, non-luscious lashes and of course all those shameful pores.

Some of you might recall the 2008 report by Dr Michael Flood et al. which turned up the shocking news that girls are vulnerable to sexual assault and boys think that’s pretty cool. You might also recall that COAG have committed to halving homelessness by the year 2020 and that one of the issues to be addressed to reduce homelessness is domestic violence.

Therefore it would seem to me just off the top of my head that the best response to this from the state gov might have been to continue funding for programs that empower young girls to not sign up for a life-time of men’s shit, yeah?

No, think again. The state gov decided to simultaneously can all that malarkey whilst giving the green light to this dog’s dinner!

Yep. That’s right. Girls don’t need a heads up on how NOT to fall into the trap of abusive relationships- they just need disempowerment programs to keep them insecure about their human worth!

One of the NAHA strategies to reduce homelessness is create more safe, stable, long-term housing options for women escaping men who have been violent and abusive toward them and their children. These violent relationships often begin with low-grade abuse and controlling behaviour – first he starts to find fault with all your friends, he might start complaining about spending time with them or pick arguments with them, alienating them. Then he starts finding fault with you, he might blow up at you a couple of times over something trivial. He doesn’t like you talking to some people, he thought he saw you looking at some guy the wrong way. Then he’s texting you twenty times a day to see where you are, what you’re doing etc. Then to make matters worse, popular culture sends you a bunch of messages saying that male attention is essential to your wellbeing and that this kind of behaviour is really hot and romantic – he must really love you!

Combine this shit with the macro forces of structural and institutional disadvantage experienced by women in a patriarchy, which ensure women are socially, politically and economically subordinate to men, and your path to a violent relationship from which an escape will be difficult, is well and truly mapped out for you.

And governments know this! They’ve said they know this! Because combating domestic violence is high up on their list of plans to reduce homelessness.

Therefore it would make sense to continue funding for programs to raise the consciousness of 14 and 15 year old girls so that when this guy comes along, they have his number. They’re a wake up to his shit. This will automatically reduce domestic violence and the chronic need for safe housing for women escaping it.

But no – the state gov seems to think a better option than preventing you from experiencing domestic violence in the first place would be to have housing ready for you so that in ten or fifteen years when you’re running from violence and hiding out in a women’s refuge with your kids, some human service worker will know exactly how to find you an affordable new home AND you’ll have the invaluable skill of being able camouflage the bruises on your face thanks to all those expert make-up classes you did back in highschool.

Score!

I just wasted about half an hour on this site

Heer iz mai fav:

Thanks to Hellon for the heads up.

“I’ve been waiting for you women to get here all my life”
~ Bessie Guthrie

Today’s post is inspired by the event which is to take place at 11am at Parliament House in Canberra, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will deliver a formal apology to the Forgotten Australians.

If you don’t know who the Forgotten Australians are well that’s because they have been, in fact, forgotten, which is kind of the whole point of the apology.

They are people who experienced child abuse whilst in state care; they include Indigenous children, child migrants and children charged with ‘neglect’ or being ‘uncontrollable’ or ‘in moral danger’ under The Child Welfare Act 1939.

Unsurprisingly, girls and young women were particularly vulnerable to being deemed ‘at moral risk’ which quite often simply meant being sexually active or living life the way they chose. Many of them were gender role deviants, demonstrating reckless disregard for societal ideals of ‘femininity’. Many of them were runaways, escaping domestic violence and/or abuse at home.

In any case, they were incarcerated and punished for non-criminal behaviour, on the grounds that they were in need of state protection. People my age and older who grew up here in NSW will no doubt have heard of ‘Minda’. I recall being in highschool with girls who had been in Minda, not that it was openly talked about but there were whispered rumours and I myself was threatened with ‘boarding school’ a few times. Given my ‘uncontrollable’ behaviour at that time which was considered serious enough for me to need ‘child guidance counselling’ I understand that I was lucky never to have seen the inside of one of these places. Had I been born a few years earlier, no doubt I would have.

This terrorist campaign that the state waged over girls and young women was all part of patriarchy’s broader plan for total control over women in general, and of women’s sexuality in particular. I have on my desk here a copy of “A Report on the Girl’s Industrial School Parramatta, N.S.W“, 1945, Melbourne University Press. This contains the data of a survey conducted between December 1941 and November 1942 of the 175 girls and young women who were at the time incarcerated there.

On page 3 under reasons for admission it states that,

“Girls were admitted on charges of being neglected, uncontrollable or absconding in 153 (out of the 175) cases”

“98 were committed [to the institution] on the first appearance in court. This proportion seems high and may be partly accounted for by the policy of committing girls with venereal disease…”

“On medical examination it was found that 131 had had frequent sex experience, 33 infrequent or possible and 11 had none”

Are we getting the picture here? In case you missed it earlier, this was punishment for non-criminal behaviour. Radfems will recognise this as state-mandated slut-shaming. This probably stemmed from the “Damned Whore” stereotype, a handy tag used by the male pigs who colonised this continent specifically to aid their control over women (see Anne Summers’ “Damned Whores and God’s Police”).

Parra Girls estimates that around 40 000 girls and young women were processed through these places over several decades. The Parramatta Industrial School, which was originally The Female Factory for convict women and children, then The Parramatta Women’s Asylum before it morphed into the Girls Industrial School, Parramatta Girls Training School, then later Kamballa, was still operating into the 1980s. After the 1961 riots over the appalling conditions, the state created The Hay Institution as a high security prison to send girls and young women who back-answered the scum who presided over the gross violations of human rights at Parramatta.

Stories of the lived experiences of these women will move you to tears. The physical, sexual and psychological abuse, the dehumanising, misogynistic regulations and policies, like compulsory head-shaving, being forced to march everywhere, not being permitted to speak to each other, compulsory virginity and pregnancy checks…but these are not my lived experiences to talk about.

It was Feminist activists of the Second Wave who forced the closure of both Parramatta and Hay. This campaign was led by awesome sister, Bessie Guthrie, who knew how to use the media and somehow managed to persuade a journalist to fly a helicopter over the Hay gaol, publicising the injustice and brutality that went on behind the brick walls.

Organisations such as CLAN and AFA have long been asking for reparations for the people who survived abuse while in state care, and a formal apology is just the first step in the process and hopefully recognising the ongoing intergenerational effects will be a part of that.

As we know, KRudd is pretty keen to formally apologise to victims of human rights violations – not so keen on doing much else for them, though.

It makes me so fucking angry, sisters. Why is there no national holiday to acknowledge these injustices and the awesome women who fought against them? Why is the state so keen to have us remember human rights violations that occur in the services of the state, but not those which occurred at the hands of the state against it’s own citizens?

It probably comes down to the fact that in a patriarchy, human rights violations against women don’t really count, because in a patriarchy women don’t count as human. Wars are seen as the sacrifice of many brave men and so nobody minds (least of all me) when we observe national symbolism to remember them on a regular basis – nobody says “Oh tell them to get over it it was all in the past”.

Edit: Fuck Politeness has a great takedown of concern troll Hugh Mackay’s criticism of the apology in which he manages to miss the point spectacularly, blur the distinction between SG and FA and weave some slimy covert racism in as well! What’s the point in apologising to these whingers, thinks Mackay, when we apologised to those ungrateful blackfellas and they still haven’t adequately appeased my privileged white conscience over that petty genocide stuff!!

I have to wonder, are some of these wankers made of nuts and bolts or something?

I know most of the people who read this blog are familiar with the concept of concern trolling. For those who are not Wiki has a definition albeit a rather convoluted one. Urban dictionary has a slightly better one.

In the context of online feminism, concern trolls are dudes (and sometimes women) who obfuscate issues and incrementally derail and shut down discussion with circular arguments and “concerns” about the way issues are being framed. For example, in a discussion about gendered violence and sexual assault, the male concern troll might allow it to be assumed that he is very worried about this issue but that if feminists fail to pay attention to the way men experience violence too, then they’re in danger of discrediting their own arguments, which will then only serve to help perpetuate violence against women. He is therefore only doing the decent thing by bestowing upon us his fresh manly wisdom and pointing out how our arguments and activism are well-intentioned yet misguided. He does this under the guise of ally. Sneaky bastards are they not?

Anti-feminist concern trolls are actually just MRAs ( see this earlier post about male rights activists) who are more invested in appearing to be Nice Guys than is typical of anti-feminist males. They actually use MRAs as a bench- mark from which to measure themselves as morally superior and hence more deserving of getting laid. So invested are they that they go to a lot of trouble to over-complicate issues and frame their arguments in an intellectual way. What an MRA would say in twenty words, a concern troll will need about five hundred, but it still ends up meaning the samething.

Some MRAs/ anti-feminist concern trolls have their heads so far up their arses that they create entire websites dedicated to being concerned allies. This particularly odious breed refer to themselves as feminist critics. I ask you, what business do men have busying themselves criticising feminism in their spare time, if it were not for foul purposes? Feminism is not a majority political voice. There is no Feminist political party, no Feminist-owned media, no Feminist corporate entity, no Feminist-dominated mainstream religious institution, no Feminist State, and certainly no Feminist army. Women still perform an estimated two thirds of the world’s labour and produce 45% of the world’s food while owning 1% of the world’s property and earning 10% of the world’s income. In this society the word of a man still carries more weight than that of a woman.

So why devote time to critiquing feminist ideology when it’s already so marginalised? Why not use that energy to critique patriarchy?

We could assume that this is the result of men having statistically a hell of a lot more time on their hands for navel-gazing.

My assertion is that “feminist critics” are so blinded by their own cushy membership of certain social divisions that they can not in fact see the structurally-unequal forest for the Privilege Trees.

If these men are so worried about male victims of violence and other ways in which men are oppressed by patriarchy, then would it not make more sense to launch an attack on patriarchy? Or is that gonna be too much trouble? Or is it that any attempt to challenge patriarchal structures would necessarily involve the de-privileging of males? Perhaps it’s just easier to pick on people who are even more marginalised and oppressed than they are.

Some of them say that feminism is all about creating a more equal society for everyone male and female and this is of course true. However – when we’re discussing how that will be done, when we’re talking and thinking about ways to disrupt patriarchal structures, the first point of reference is not going to be the views and perspectives of those who are the most privileged in the current set-up! Is it?

Because that would result in another patriarchy!
So those people get to take a ticket and go to the back of the queue because their interests have had priority for long enough now. And if not being first in the queue anymore feels like a crap deal to them, well welcome to the world of non-white male people – if you’re serious about an equal world then you’ll use it to work on your capacity for empathy-an important quality and your first step toward learning that a challenge to your social privilege is NOT the same as social oppression.

To Daran et al (and any other of you smarmy concern trolls who have built an entire cottage industry out of legitimising your rampant misogyny) who have been lurking here lately:

Get a real job.

And tigtog, not that you owe me any favours but I would appreciate it if you did not direct these tossers to my blog, in the future. I consider it a deliberate anti-feminist act to direct anti-feminist men to a feminist blog.

And Daran, rushing to justify your lurking without acknowledging that said lurking could well be experienced as creepiness AND seeking to exploit existing divisions between women – probably not the best way to advance your feminist ally creds – just so you know that. There’s a been a lot of traffic from your site just lately so don’t do that thing when you try to get me to believe that I’m just imagining stuff.

Melissa McEwan has written a very clear, accessible, descriptive piece on Rape Culture. Even non-Feminists should have a reasonable understanding of what is meant by the term “rape culture” after reading this post. In the interests of inspiring feminist light-bulb moments, this should be circulated as much as possible.

A rape culture is a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm.

In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes. This violence, however, is neither biologically nor divinely ordained. Much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the expression of values and attitudes that can change.

Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women’s daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you’re carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you’re wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who’s at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.

And from the comments section:

“I nearly cried reading this, as a person who used to be a little boy who was repeatedly raped and told (by my rapist) that it was because I was too girly/faggoty.

What I was trying to say (in a somewhat choked-up way) is that even sexual assault committed against men/boys/males is a misogynistic act, something that a lot of people argue with me about.”

I also agree with this and this point wasn’t addressed in the OP. I’ve said before that rape and rape culture exist to enforce the social order, the social hierarchy and the dominance of males. This is why they rape children, it’s why they rape women and it’s why they rape each other. Patriarchy is dependant upon the subjugation and oppression of a feminised underclass. To borrow from Jill P Smith for a minute, Patriarchy is an occupying force on planet earth and sexual terrorism is it’s primary enforcer. The underclasses are reminded of their place in the social order by pervasive gendered cultural imperatives which insist on extreme feminisation and then use that feminisation in order to justify the sexual terrorism.

I just want to run this by the radfem community. For people outside of Australia, our state and federal governments have recently signed off on, and in fact already begun to implement, a huge twelve year plan to address the issue of homelessness in this country. The plan is called the National Affordable Housing Agreement (NAHA). It was based on policy recommendations outlined in a white paper, “The Road Home: A National Approach to Reducing Homelessness”. This paper is amazing; it addresses every aspect of every factor which contributes to homelessness, housing affordability, domestic violence, family breakdown, entrenched poverty, substance problems, mental health, etc. It addresses issues which are specific to Indigenous Australians both in regional and urban environments. It discusses the issue from a holistic perspective and outlines the need for mainstream services of all kinds to get on board with tackling homelessness. It’s an excellent paper, I love it!

So, as stated on page 7 (I’ll see if I can find an online link to it) domestic violence is the main driver of homelessness and the primary cause of homelessness for women. This is why I’m putting this out there in the radfemisphere; because it raises issues that we’ve been talking about recently, like marriage and housing affordability and scumbag real estate agents (ok it was really just me talking about the real estate agents). The way I see it, heteronormative living arrangements set women up to be domestic/sex slaves and are also the unhealthy unequal set-up from which ugly bacteria like domestic violence and child abuse grow, but when they want to leave it’s really hard to find affordable accommodation. Why is that? Short answer; capitalism, neoliberalism, the notion that we all be free to profit from each other, which in reality works out to be the freedom for the Haves to profit from the Havenots. Freedom to profit in any way at all, even if it means exploiting the Havenots over one of the most basic human needs/rights; shelter, or a roof over one’s head (see Maslow). And yes, that wasn’t the shortest of answers, but I get very hot and bothered about this issue.

Other answer; patriarchy, patriarchal capitalism if you like, and the principles of the idealised patriarchal family unit which are enshrined and upheld right throughout every rung of our entire social system. The idea that people live 1. straight 2. married and 3. having children. I won’t go back into how this set-up is institutionally-privileged above all other living arrangements, or how people who conform to this ideal are also therefore privileged, because you’ve read it all before. My point today is that most dwellings are designed and built with this living arrangement in mind. In fact I don’t think there are any in Australia that aren’t. Blokes design most houses and blokes build most houses and it’s paid for by blokes because well, they own and control all the stuff in a patriarchy. So there are not too many options for radfems like me who are economically disadvantaged sole parents and don’t want to have to live with blokes (for all the reasons already outlined above).

In some remote areas of Australia, people from Indigenous communities have made it known that when the government funds new housing projects for them, they want those houses to be designed to accommodate their cultural traditions, they want their kinship obligations and responsibilities to be taken into consideration. They want large living areas and large communal sleeping areas. Not everybody is suited to the standard aussie home which consists of one MASTER bedroom (there’s a heads-up for those feminists who think they’ve tamed patriarchy in their own homes) with it’s own ensuite, two or three smaller bedrooms for the kiddies plus another bathroom, kitchen and living areas. I’ve been saying for years that western-style houses are all arse up. We waste so much fucking space on bedrooms for example, we fill up these huge rooms with huge elaborate furniture to sleep on. That’s space that could be used for other things and I think it’s safe to say that the reason we still have these master bedrooms is because it’s a reflection of male privilege. It’s where the master of the house officially enjoys his sacred godbag-given, state-sanctioned right to sexual access to women’s bodies.

Obviously this kind of housing design doesn’t suit everyone and in fact I don’t think it suits most people’s living arrangements but that’s pretty much all we have to choose from when we’re looking for a place to rent. Which brings me back to the issue of domestic violence and how hard it is to escape. Not only does it increase our risk and that of our kids, because statistically, when we leave them is when they kill us, but it’s hard finding affordable housing in the private rental market* and waiting lists for public and community housing are YEARS long, and not only that but they don’t allow a lot of choice in where you live and when you’re trying to transition from a violent situation you want to ensure as much stability and continuity for the kids as you can, that means NOT having to change schools. This is an issue that has been addressed in the white paper, but not quite fully (according to me). The paper highlights the need for more safe, affordable, long- term housing options for women escaping violence, not only so that women and children can transition faster and begin rebuilding their lives, but to free up the emergency, crisis and other short-term services for other women who are in immediate or significant risk, to access.

The white paper also discusses strategies to ensure that women and children who are experiencing violence can remain in their own home, IF it is considered a safe option. Now this is where I think the paper is a little bit naive or unrealistically optimistic, cos hey, we all know that putting security screen doors up and changing locks etc. won’t necessarily ensure that a woman is safe from a violent partner, especially not one who has just been court-ordered to leave HIS home, HIS castle, where he has been the lord of the MANor for however long, lording it over and bullying, assaulting and abusing to his heart’s content. Those guys just don’t go quietly. Also, the paper talks a lot about security measures which basically add up to a woman being a prisoner in her own home.

So those are the two main issues I wanted to put out there; 1.the issue of designing alternative dwellings for people who are NOT het and who DON’T have kids, or who for whatever reason just don’t want to live with other people. We need more options besides having to cram our square-peg lifestyles into the round hole that is heteronormative housing design, and then having to pay for stuff we don’t need like master bedrooms. And 2. options for women escaping violence. Because those two issues are inter-connected and I think they’ve been over-looked in this otherwise excellent plan to address homelessness. There just needs to be a bit more thinking outside the square. This is what Radfems do best!

Edit – October 24: Marion Roberts, architect and all round awesome radical feminist published “Living in a man made world: gender assumptions in modern housing design” 1992, Penguin, London. This is a gem of a book in which Roberts contextualises the issue of housing design within the broader patriarchal framework. I highly recommend it.

Overall, persuading governments to address homelessness has provided us with a great opportunity to get governments to address a whole range of other social issues which are often difficult to bring attention to, like men’s violence for example, and so it’s important that we make the absolute most of this opportunity while it’s there, and while the funding for it is there. It’s also an excellent opportunity to put forth a radical feminist perspective and raise the issue of radical feminist goals such as abolishing things like gender, and marriage. Because while any government will agree that yes violence against women is very bad and needs to be eliminated, getting them to see the underlying causes of it (let alone getting them to address them) is another thing altogether.

*Ideally I’d like to see the private rental market taken out of the hands of the real estate industry altogether and possibly handled by a new government body. This way the real estate industry can stick to the buying and selling stuff, and rich white fatcats would have to go through a completely differently regulated channel in order to lease out their exploitation investment properties. This would keep disadvantaged and marginalised people safe from exploitative practices of real estate agents, property managers and landlords. The strategies outlined in the white paper include the development of services to liaise with real estate agents on behalf of tenants who are struggling to pay ever-increasing rents; these services would negotiate rent decreases etc. and in order for that to work then real estate agents and landlords would need to develop the capacity to think like decent human beings instead of greedy blood-sucking scum. This would take a lot of expensive training programs, and so I think it would be easier to just create a new department to handle private rentals. Too radical? Too revolutionary? Probably.

I really didn’t need this shit at this point in the semester. Nick Cave, who should know better, has been gradually sinking deeper in my opinion for a few years now. After a masterpiece of a double album in 2004 (Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus) and then the release of the tres cool box set of bits and pieces (B-Sides & Rarities) not long after, he goes and does Grinderman in 2007. This was a turning point – Grinderman was a sort of side project involving him and three other Bad Seeds, Jim Sclavunos, Warren Ellis and Martyn P. Casey, featuring such gems as “I’ve got the no-pussy blues” – It turned out to be a support group for middle aged men who are sad about not pulling chicks anymore. And I’ve been a fan since The Birthday Party days so I’m allowed to say that. Then there was The Proposition, a film with a graphic and violent rape scene.

So now he’s written another novel, the second one since And The Ass Saw The Angel back in the 80s (It was shite – I couldn’t get into it). This new novel, which he apparently scribbled out in a few weeks, is what’s earned my wrath.

This shit: The Death of Bunny Munro

Yeah how’s a bout a little sexay femicide boyz?

Of course, Bunny, the main character, is a bloke! He just happens to be called Bunny, and he’s a stereotype of a sleazy rapist who preys on women. Nick says he was inspired by Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto, when he wrote the character who is a door to door salesman (yeah cos there are so many of those around these days!) and who is just basically your typical sexist misogynist predatory pig, who gets his comeuppance in the end.

I haven’t read it but that won’t stop me dissing it. Firstly, the title; both “Bunny” and “Munro” are sexualised women’s names; Bunny=Playboy – Munro=Marilyn. So the title is “Sexy Woman + Death”

It doesn’t matter that Bunny is really the bloke – the title is designed to make you think it’s a book about a hot dead chick, cos NO writer has ever thought of that one before! Then of course there is that cover with a female corpse looking very crotchy and rapable there – mmm MMM! The cover for the editions released in the US and Britain, incidentally, are very different. Just a fluffy bunny head which reminded me of Donnie Darko, but hey Australian women are just such a bunch of low budget convict sluts, they won’t even notice!

300 odd pages of cheap trashy porny penny dreadful at the bargain price of $29.95. Apparently it breaks the record for references to women’s genitalia, and even though the creepy rapist dude gets it in the end, we still feel sorry for him cos well he’s just SUCH a fuckin’ loser AND he had a bad relationship with his asshole dad so it wasn’t even his fault that he had to rape all those women!

Nick, you jerk! I have spent so much fucking money on your records over the years, queued up for hours to get the best spot at gigs, I’ve LOVED your brilliant and talented work for much of my life and this is what it’s come to? You seeking to profit from the idea of sexual violence against women. Fuckin’ wonderful.

Just go away.
It’s over between us.

Caitlinate at The Dawn Chorus has linked to an article by Catherine Deveny called “Love and Marriage – Don’t go together like a Horse and Carriage” in which she makes so many excellent points I thought it was worthy of a post here.

Anyone who has looked at this blog of stench will be familiar with my uncompromising view on marriage; the institution, so I will try not to make this just more of the same. Of course, swimming against the tidal wave of majority mainstream opinion on this subject requires a surf life-saving certificate and a tough hide (neither of which I am claiming to have) and I applaud Deveny, more than applaud actually, I’m giving her a standing ovation here, for having the guts to speak the unpopular truth.

Says Deveny:

Weddings and marriage are spin-doctoring propaganda to maintain social order. Which is code for ”making sure the blokes are running the joint while women are oppressed and conned into doing the majority of the unpaid domestic and emotional heavy lifting” (and a hefty whack of the income earning as well). Married men live longer than single ones. Unmarried women live longer than wives. Girls, read the fine print and ask yourself: ”What’s in it for me?”

This is really the gist of my opposition to the practice; as I stated in an earlier unpopular post “…the wedding ring was forged for foul purposes”. It advantages men and disadvantages women. This is why the hegemonic forces of evil continue to coerce us into doing it! Wake up sisters! We are being duped bigtime here. A white dress, a diamond and a spray-tan are no fair recompense for a life time of diminished capacity to earn, further your career and study AND a shorter life expectancy, all while we’re conveniently (for the dominant classes) upholding the status quo so that our sisters who will come after us are stuck with the same crap dealio. We’ve cottoned on to the fact that taking care of the environment for the sake of our forebears is a good idea; how about we do a little taking care of these hideous power structures for the same reason??

Deveny also raises another of my pet peeves; forms that insist you state your marital status. I don’t buy the line that “Ms” is a way of not disclosing your marital status – everyone knows that Ms means you’re probably not married, and hello but it’s against discrimination legislation (supposedly) to discriminate against me based on my marital status so why then do you need to know it? It doesn’t appear on my birth certificate, drivers licence, Medicare card or passport, so why ask me? And it isn’t as simple as just skipping the question, not now that we have electronic database systems that will not allow a form to process unless the mandatory fields are checked. Can someone pass this info on the the dudes who create this software please?

Of course, the conservatives who hold the balance of power, including discursive power, are indignant about any perceived attack on their precious institution. No surprises there, but at least in progressive online spaces could we learn to drop this habit of universalising from own experience? Just because you love your husband it does not necessarily follow that every single fucking married couple in the world is floating on a pink cloud in blissful content. Just because you love your husband, does not change the bigger picture which when it comes to marriage is chock full o pain and misery. Try looking beyond your own suburban picket fence and acknowledging other people’s lived experiences as well as overall divorce statistics. You being happy where you are does NOT alter the bigger picture and frankly it’s pretty fuckin’ disingenuous and small-minded of you to try to use Your Own Individual happy circumstances as a point of reference when we are trying to discuss the broader societal discourses and macro forces and the way they manifest in the lives of others who are less fortunate than you.

There is nothing noble or exceptional about helping to uphold the social status quo in exchange for het/couple privilege and sitting back and delivering sanctimonious judgements about people who just don’t “try hard enough” to endure a miserable life is anti-progressive, anti-feminist and just plain old unenlightened.

I agree that using language such as “needy” and “insecure” was not the best way to make a point about why we continue to conform to this draconian practice, and that pointing to things such as socialisation, norms and pop cultural narratives that promote marriage, would have been more helpful. However, I reject the suggestion that Deveny has been “heavy-handed” which seems to be a criticism saved mostly for women who fail to demonstrate a willingness to conform to gender roles and ideals of “femininity”. I’ve heard so many women talk about being unhappily married yet being afraid of coping with life outside of a conventional relationship that I think Deveny makes a good point about insecurity – however it is an insecurity that comes from women’s low social status and disadvantaged position in society, and not as Deveny (perhaps unwittingly) implied, anything to do with personal failings. It is tough for women who are not partnered to men and it’s understandable that women might be afraid to not be partnered to a man. So rather than trying to shame women who don’t conform to this social expectation, let’s change the structural and institutional inequalities that create these cultural imperatives instead; and the first step to doing that is changing the discourse, which is what Deveny is attempting to do here. She is in there batting for us so let’s give her and each other some support. Patriarchy benefits when we don’t support each other, when we see each other as Enemy, and I believe Deveny was attacking the institution and the social forces surrounding it rather than the individual women who fall for it’s trappings.

Thank you Catherine Deveny for going out on a limb in a mainstream news publication and giving voice to the silenced minority who have the guts to try and articulate an alternative discourse. I say all power to you sister!

You know, I love community radio station 2ser – 107.3. It’s pretty much the only radio I listen to at all – it has everything a dirty hippy like myself could want. Shows cover a range of social issues; the environment, human rights and the law, prisoner support, news stories that progressive-minded people who actually you know, give a shit, are interested to hear about, plus all those awesome academic lectures every saturday – all wrapped up in an abundance of excellent music. Sounds perfect right?

Almost, except for this one program which constantly causes my head to implode – Double X: Women’s Issues.

Unfortunately, as well as being a bleeding heart lefty, dirty hippy and stinkin’ commie, I am also a hairy radical feminist and I would like to hear genuinely feminist issues covered in the media without them being sugar-coated and delivered with cute giggles and head-tilts, as if that’s the only mode of delivery that I can get my stoopid woman brain around. I want to hear women’s issues treated seriously and with respect. If we can’t demonstrate a capacity to take our OWN issues seriously we give Dude Nation a convenient escape clause – it allows them to point to evidence of DIFFERENCE between the sexes as a way of justifying different treatment.

This morning I almost had a fucking aneurism listening to how empowering it is for women to take up pole-dancing! If you want to present a show about pole-dancing, ok, do it, but PLEASE don’t associate it with feminism! It’s NOT fucking FEMINIST to get semi-naked and grovel submissively around a chrome phallus in the interests of living up to male-defined standards of sexuality and servicing the male libido, which incidentally is not titillated because the sight of a woman looking like a fucking idiot is so naturally alluring, but because showing him just. how. much. you are prepared to demean yourself for his approval, gives him a little power rush. Don’t confuse the desire to subjugate with sexual attraction. And while we’re at it, you can call it ‘Pole’ all you want – when we get down to the nitty gritty ‘pole’ means ‘dick’ and you’re deluded if you think swingin’ around a giant dick in a purple feather boa can make you look anything but fucking ridiculous.

When can we drop this idea that just because a woman does something it can be defined as feminist?? And when can we drop this neoliberal bullshit about ‘choice’? As I explained in the last post about smoking, none of us make a ‘choice’ totally independently of the macro social forces of patriarchy. You might think you chose it but you didn’t think this idea up all by yourself. It’s the result of a lifetime spent internalising the imperatives of rape culture which NONE of us are immune to. It takes a fucktonne of self-delusion to convince yourself that it’s powerfullising to showcase your willingness to be submissive. This is NOT going to translate to actual social or political power in a woman’s personal life – this is why none of the people on this planet who DO have real power, obtained it through self-degradation and stilettos. Yet those same people will happily continue to support a culture that indoctrinates women, who have NO real power on this planet, into believing that being leered at or groped or objectified as nothing but a fuck-hole, somehow equates to real power. It’s one of patriarchy’s biggest scams, and I should point out that it takes a hell of a lot more courage and sense of power to reject the ideals of rape culture than it does to embrace them.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, less-privileged, less-white women are experiencing the trickle-down effect of this culture when they’re trafficked, forced into sex slavery, prostituted and pornofied – just to survive.

As famously stated by Jill Posey-Smith aka Twisty women are toilets.

Trafficked sex slaves, young onions, are the murky far end of the rape continuum, the one that proceeds from the pornulation of mainstream media, escalates into your boyfriend going, “Come on, just a little longer, I’m almost there,” devolves into the mainstream with the winky, nudgy, boys-will-be-boys attitude toward street harassment, and climaxes with the date assault you are reluctant to report because you didn’t say “no” loud enough. For the joyrapist who’s keepin it real, there are prostituted women he can pay to assault. This shit is all rape, but the rapists are protected by long-standing patriarchal tradition.

Think about that while you’re degrading yourself for shits and giggles in order to get a pat on the head and a heh heh heh from some lecherous knob. So you feel a sense of empowerment – but you are supporting an industry the darker end of which is unspeakably cruel to many women who are way outside of your privileged position to make this ‘choice’, and so ask yourself; on whose backs you are climbing in order to obtain this sense of empowerment? Participating in rape culture, complying with your own otherisation and oppression is not only NOT a form of power, it’s also pretty fuckin’ selfish, and any radio program that supports it is way out of place on a progressive station such as 2ser. Rosie and Wendy, perhaps you’d be more comfortable at 2dayFM.

Vile Kyle Sandilands has been opening his mouth and letting words come out again; the man continues to diligently use his unearned privilege and meritless position to show-case his unthinkable ignorance – this time it’s Holocaust survivors who copped it. Read about it here

Will someone please tell this clueless prick what time it is.

The obligatory faux-pology:

”It was not my intention to upset anyone and I sincerely apologise to anyone offended by my comments.”

No Kyle, the right response would have been “I have thought more carefully about my comment and realised just how dangerous and offensive it was; I realise now that being deliberately offensive and obnoxious really doesn’t pass for edgy, creative humour and that it stems from my privileged perspective, and I’ve decided to leave the public sphere to do something good with my life, like in the human services maybe…”

For people outside of Australia, Magda Szubanski has been involved in aussie comedy for decades, most recently as Sharon on “Kath and Kim”- she’s in the news right now not because of her comedic talent but because she lost a lot of weight.

As usual the sexism expressed in Sandiland’s comment has been totally ignored by the media. This is what the fucknozzle said about her:

”She’s not skinny.”

”You put her in a concentration camp and you watch the weight fall off … like she could be skinny,”

See, she might have lost 25 kilos but for women nothing is ever enough when it comes to conforming to the practice of femininity, the goal posts are constantly shifting. If Magda were to lose another 25 kgs then we’d have people saying she’s gone too far, she’s setting a bad example, she’s encouraging anorexia etc. The beauty myth is a no-win deal that only women have to put up with. Fat-shaming is something only women put up with.

So while it’s sick-making that someone with that amount of discursive power could ever even think of dropping such an outrageous casual line about concentration camps, the sexist and misogynist mode of delivery should not be ignored either.

This is what shits me; traditional gendered roles such as cook, cleaner and childcarer are still assigned to women. Not only are we assigned them, but we are expected to perform them perfectly, cheerfully and with no remuneration or recognition.

BUT – it still seems to be mostly men who profit from performing such roles. I’m thinking of cooking: Jamie Oliver/Matt Moran – celebchefs, businessmen and general media knobs. Cleaning: Seems the job of cleaning is a woman’s job but when I think of who profits from cleaning all I can come up with are Big Kev and Mr Sheen. Plus, men own all the companies that produce toxic cleaning products. Childcare: All the great “experts” on childcare are male – Dr Spock, Chris Green the Toddler Tamer, Steve Biddulph.

So while it’s mostly women who perform all the low value unpaid labour of the day to day living, it’s men who seem to be able appropriate these roles in order to profit from them and achieve ‘expert’ status and therefore achieve recognition…and money.

Sucks huh?

From time to time I hear about a supposed crisis in masculinity, usually from MRAs and other various apologists who are still feeling indignant about feminist-perpetrated enfringements on the dudely right to rape women with impunity.

I myself see masculinity as a crisis in itself. I mean just have a go at this effing planet will you. It has the claw marks of masculinity all over it. Masculinity hasn’t gone anywhere despite what MRAs and Steve Biddulph say; it’s here and it’s standing over us flexing it’s biceps.

I came to this realisation after a few minutes of tv on Sunday night. The news headlines came on; a year nine boy was kicked to death in his school playground; a man has been found to have abducted an 11 year old girl and detained her as his rape thing for eighteen fucking years…

The next thing that appeared on the screen was an ad for a ‘male’ deoderant:

“Brut – Still brutally male”

What the fuck is up with that? Brutally? Brutally? BRUTALLY?

To be male is to have the capacity for BRUTALITY?

I have to ask the question – where the fuck will this all end?

Click here to watch the thirty second video.

I’ve noticed this particularly odious new Kraft-Oreo commercial directed by Mat Humphrey for Draft FCB.

The scene is set in a primary school playground, (because these cutting edge creative dude types are just tres fucking original dontcha know??) and features two boys, probably about ten years old, engaging in sleazy fuckability-rating dialogue regarding the girls at the school, whilst eating their cookies and ‘playing a game’.

The gist of the game is along the lines of whoever ends up with the least cookie cream on their side of the Oreo after twisting, has to marry a particular girl. It’s kind of the classic Oreo Twist meets Russian Roulette meets Male Gaze scenario (cos primary school kids totally DO that kind of stuff!).

One of the leering little apprentice predators calls a name, Emily Davies, to which the other reacts with groans and disgust, because presumably Emily Davies is just some worthless bushpig destined to grow up NOT to make men’s wangs happy. Same goes for Laura Fisher (and I’m just wondering if the arseholes who made this shit stopped to consider the impact it might have on the REAL Emily Davieses and Laura Fishers out there, I doubt it) who is also apparently butt ugly.

Then just as Creep-to-be1 and 2 are congratulating each other on avoiding the humiliation of getting stuck with a dog, the hot babe, read CHILD, comes along, smiles as she grabs her ball, and runs off leaving the guys drooling and leering after her. Nice. Have I mentioned that these are PRIMARY SCHOOL AGED KIDS?

Mat Humphrey’s profile on The Guild of Commercial Filmmakers website states that Mat’s work is based on ‘the love of a good idea’ so I have to ask the questions 1. Since when is the perpetuation of the same tired old cultural norms and practices that have long been entrenched in gender relations, considered in any way, an ‘idea’? I mean come on – that whole ‘dudebros sitting around discussing who they’d like to bone’- as comedy dealio just might have been done once or twice before, Mat. And 2. Who the hell decided that it was a good idea to use young children to act out such a sleazy scenario, for marketing purposes??

There are two things going on here. There is the sexualisation of children which I consider heinous and totally unethical, and there is the reinforcement of the message that women and girls spend their entire lives internalising; that we are the sex class and that men have the power to define us by our fuckability level and nothing else.

You can email the producer of this commercial, Helene Nicol – helene@theguildfilm.com

Edit: Oh, and let’s boycott Oreos/Kraft!

When clueless male media knobs refer to rape and sexual assault as sex! Um hello, “sex attack”? If there is any kind of attack involved then it’s not sex!

And what’s with all this “alleged attack” shit? He’s been charged with sexual assault. All that needs to be said is he’s been charged with sexual assault! Because do you know what you’re really saying when you say “alleged”? Every single time that word appears in a report about sexual assault/rape it’s whispering to the reader “…psst she could be lying, she might be lying, women do lie about this stuff”.

And Channel Ten? I think women are already ‘vigilant’. In fact women tend to order their entire lives around avoiding these attacks but hey thanks for the tip anyway. Cos it never occurred to me that as a woman living in a male-dominated society who has experienced sexual assault several times already and who knows of many female friends and loved ones who also have, that maybe I should be on the look out for this kind of shit. Lucky I have you to remind me hey? Can you please let us know exactly what times of the day we are allowed to appear in public without being blamed for our own rape?? I mean, is there some magic rape-free happy hour that I don’t know about?? And has it occurred to you to start warning men against raping us instead of warning us not to ‘let ourselves’ be raped?? Just once I would love to hear a news guy say “…and police are now warning men to be extra vigilant about not raping women”.

The Patriarchy – it burns us!

Here is the awesome Harriet who has loads more patience and skill than I do, to really spell it out.

There has been some interblogular tension going on just lately, between those who preside over Bitchyville* Hoyden About Town and Larvatus Prodeo.

As is customary at HAT, a thread was posted in which a woman was attacked and shamed (I say customary because it does happen a hell of a lot there; I’m thinking Monica Dux, Clementine Ford, Wendy Harmer…) in this case it was over a post she had written at LP on Christian Rossiter, the man with disabilities who has recently been granted the right to refuse food until he dies. Anna Winter, the author of the post, had the sheer audacity to NOT run a draft of it by Lauredhel from HAT before she published it. Lauredhel’s perspective of the case was different to Anna Winter’s. How dare Anna Winter address the case from a different angle to the one that Lauredhel approved of ? What followed was a bit of a shitstorm on both blogs with a lot of cross-posting and toing-and-froing of commenters. All a bit highschool really, and it left me with the impression that some in the blogosphere have too much time on their hands.

I personally thought that both AW’s and Lauredhel’s posts on the subject were excellent – one thing social workers understand is that nobody can be all things to all people, so for the two of them to be writing from different (different NOT opposing mind you) perspectives made a whole lot of sense to me. There is room in the blogosphere for everyone, I would have thought. The snark between the Hoydens and AW has now carried on into the discussion of Possum’s post at Crikey (see below) and has gradually gotten around to the issue of blogs feeling like safe or unsafe spaces in which to post. Commenter Fine, stated that the culture at HAT makes it an unsafe space for zir to post as opposed to the LP blog. Lauredhel then responded to that statement with a sort of deflection, either deliberately or unintentionally ignoring what Fine was getting at, she tried to make it all about race…yeah confused? Me too.

This in turn has led to tig tog sort of but not really, acknowledging that yes there may be problems for people who “swim against the Hoydenish consensus”. That right there is exclusionist rhetoric that reinforces the insider/outsider dichotomy that characterises HAT. There are Hoydens and there are The Others, and I would also point out that there IS no swimming against the general consensus allowed there AT all. The rules are very selectively imposed there. People who enjoy privileged In Group status are allowed to break them all the time, such as…deleted.

On this same thread we can also see the mixed messages that Fine mentioned. To shame TAB people who try to participate in discussions about disability, for example Dina was told to “Shutup! Just shutup!” by Lauredhel for unconsciously exposing her able-bodied privilege, but then to also shame white people for not participating in the part of the thread that was to do with racism, seems contradictory to me. As a clueless privileged white person living in a white-dominated society, I believe in shutting up and allowing space for less-privileged voices to help shape discourses surrounding issues that my privilege has blinded me to. I’m not really cool with privileged white middle class blog-owners dominating discussions about racism, and I’m going to go out on a very fine limb here and suggest that maybe tig tog started a new thread (which ironically is supposed to be all about checking privilege -lol- and already has all the usual enablers bowing and scraping) about exactly that issue in order to silence certain commenters and diffuse the brewing discussion about that other issue that came up in the course of the thread, that of the group dynamics at HAT.

I particularly appreciated allordinary2.blogspot.com @42 posting in support of Fine. Zie states:

but I don’t get how you reconcile the desire to subvert oppressive structures of domination with the way you treat people (who) don’t agree with you here

This is exactly what I was getting at with my earlier snipe at HAT. The culture there is anti-progressive, anti-feminist* and quite often, oppressive. Tig tog states that she doesn’t want HAT to be that sort of place but as I just said, she doesn’t seem to be listening to people who have had bad experiences there. She says that that isn’t her experience of HAT. *eyeroll* Well it wouldn’t be would it?? I know she’s well aware that high power group members and low power group members are going to have drastically different experiences within those groups, so again, I’m going to assert that she is being deliberately obtuse about this, and also that her concerns are mostly to do with maintaining power and control rather than actually subverting those broader oppressive power structures refered to by allordinary2.

Some of the loyal In Group members have speculated that the problem is the snark. The problem is not the snark itself but the way it gets used for and against people. We are all pretty fond of snark, but when it’s made clear to me that my place lies only on one end of the snark and never on the other, then I get pretty pissed off. Snark is fine if it’s a two-way street, but when it’s used consistently to silence some whilst simultaneously propping up others, then it does become a problem, absolutely. It can also make a space unsafe for people like myself who are not neurotypical and might be slow to pick up on the social cues that clue people in to what the expectations and norms are of an established group. Both Lauredhel and tig tog employ snark as they like, but often cry foul when it’s used against them. I put this down to an enhanced self-perception stemming from the experience of being high power group members. So the problem really isn’t snark, but group power structures and dynamics and the unexamined privilege of select group members and the way that privilege informs their interactions with low power members or Outsiders.

It will be interesting to observe the extent to which the Hoydens take on board these criticisms.

*Yeah I said bitchy – take a xanax.

**I no longer even think of HAT as a feminist site.

Update – We’re gonna need a bigger elephant. Now all the people who have made noises about HAT being an unsafe space have been characterised as just being miffed at being called out on privilege, which is a load of utter shite! It’s unsafe there for people who call out others on privilege and are then vilified for it. When I snark about class or het privilege I get told I’m being ‘unconstructive’ or ’self-righteous’ but apparently when the people who own HAT do it it’s praiseworthy. Right. Gotcha. Still no sign that either tig tog or Lauredhel have considered that maybe they have (unintentionally perhaps) created an exclusive club that unofficially excludes anyone who doesn’t post along lines consistent with the general zeitgeist of HAT. The poor Hoydens have come under fire – unthinkable!
In fact tig tog continues to assert that her issues with me are all my fault whilst totally not owning her side of things. She states that she dislikes interacting with me. Not surprising seeing that she has constantly gone out of her way to create negative interactions with me, and devalue any input that I’ve ever had at HAT. This is typical behaviour of high power group members – the devaluing of contributions of low power members. This allows her to justify excluding me simply because she finds my politics too radical.

I see blogging as a form of activism, a form of activism which has an overall goal to do with issues of social justice and social change. I recognise that there are other bloggers who have very similar overall goals to mine. As far as I’m concerned, any personal issue between myself and other bloggers is piddling compared to our shared overall goals, and I have no problem putting personal clashes aside in order to support other bloggers whom I perceive to have similar goals to me.

Apparently not all of us are prepared to do that.

Update2 – Now we have Lauredhel posting righteous platitudes about not making her threads safe spaces for bigots – like that was totally what this was all about! LOL Anything but face the real issue!
Leave some straw for the poor horse, Lauredhel! And make up your mind! Either it’s ok to use snark to call people out on privilege or it’s not. My experience of HAT is that it’s not acceptable to call privilege EVER and that it’s not acceptable to express a minority view EVER, snarkily or otherwise. I think it’s a case of there being rules for some and rules for Others.

Hard to believe I know, but hey I shit you not.

I don’t think it’s EVER ok to call a woman a “fucking wankstain”, but when it appears on an ostensibly progressive blog which also purports to be feminist-friendly, it is pretty disturbing.

Refering to women in terms that associate them with male masturbatory practices is always great for patriarchy, and frankly, I’m really out of patience with women who use their position to hate on other women.

…and are undertaking a comprehensive procedural review, as a result of the events of 29 July. After this review they will be implementing whatever changes 2Day FM considers necessary to prevent anything similar from ever happening again…blah blah blah…managementspeak…blah blah blah…

This letter could have been written by David Brent, seriously.

In other words, they’re waiting for the storm to blow over before K&J can go back to work. They are undertaking a review and then if they consider no changes are necessary then it’s business as usual!

In fact they will be back on air on Monday 17 August.

Meanwhile the family of the girl who was exploited on the show have made some hideous victim-blaming comments regarding what is and is not rape.

I guess we can be thankful that Sandilands lost the Idol contract. We still have that.

This is Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, United Nations journalist and women’s rights activist.

My new hero.

“If some people refer to the sharia to justify flagellating women because of what they wear, then let them show me which Qur’anic verses or hadith say so. I haven’t found them,” she said.”

Rather than use her legal immunity as a United Nations worker Hussein has opted to be tried for the ‘crime’ of wearing trousers in public and use the trial to draw attention to women’s rights violations.
She could be sentenced to 40 lashes with a camel hair whip.

All power to you sister.

In light of the recent success in the campaign to make entitled male media knobs accountable for what they say to and about women and children (see below for posts about Kyle Sandilands) I’m going to make this a kind of media misogyny log.

Rarely do I ever watch evening television without registering something sexist, misogynist, degrading or denigrating to women, so this should be a busy thread. I had the idea to start this last night after watching Ten’s new show The 7PM Project where the hosts Carrie Bickmore, Charles Pickering, Dave Hughs and guest presenter Sophie Black, deputy editor of Crikey, were discussing poor widdle Kyle’s recent fall from grace and although Dave Hughs, or Dickwad1, was very restrained, I could detect a kind of petulant outrage on behalf of Sandilands; several times he repeated himself in stating that Ten had taken “…a big step, a BIG step, really put it on the line!”- in sacking him from Idol, and one did get the feeling that he’s feeling that the poor bloke has been very harshly dealt with, a bit like Fatty Vautin’s visible upset over Channel9’s sacking of Matthew Johns after his gang rape-involvement.

Says Hughs: “Ya know as someone ON radio I’m considering everything I DO!”. He makes this statement with his usual nasally incredulity, as though you know, things are just getting CRAZY now! How on earth can the whining public be imposing these over- the-top standards on HIM, and other media knobs like HIM?? Why can’t he just say whatever he wants?? Um, Dave, as someone who is ON radio, you occupy a very privileged platform; that’s a hell of a lot of a shitload of discursive power, mate. One would hope that you were ALREADY CONSIDERING EVERYTHING YOU DO! Luckily Sophie Black was there to take the catch, replying “Well that has to be a good thing” but alas, once again I am reminded of just how little merit is involved with the allocation of discursive power.

Later in the show Charles Pickering, or Dickwad2 as I refer to him, had a good old laugh about Paris Hilton and the way some prick had secretly filmed her having sex (Hello? That IS against the law, Charlie!).
He finished the segment by calling her a “vacuous moll” (cos yeah he’s so highbrow and intellectual!). So have these dime-a-dozen media buffoons learned anything at all yet? Like that vicious, public, sexist attacks on any woman, is hate speech against ALL women.

It just goes to show how heavily these entitled twonks rely on misogynous cultural narratives and blatant and shameless woman-hatin’, for their fauxcomedic material. I’m thinking Rove here, Mikey Robbins, Paul McDermott, Shaun Micallef, The Chaser etc etc.

Hear this, assholes! The only funny thing about you is when you lose your jobs! Hah! Let’s make a TV/Radio show out of that!

http://7pmproject.com.au/video.htm

Clearly, the buzz surrounding Matthew Johns and Kyle Sandilands hasn’t been enough for the pennies to drop yet. Pickering must be under the impression that each incident has occurred in some kind of vacuum as he obviously can’t integrate all the information he’s been exposed to, in order to develop a higher level of understanding of rape culture and how it’s perpetuated in media. He can’t see how he too is helping to perpetuate hateful and misogynist attitudes to women, which then have REAL consequences in REAL women’s lives.

I’ll just finish off with a quote from Cathy in the comments at IBTP regarding the Sandilands case. This is a spot-on take of what happened, by a person outside of Australia who has heard about this only via the feminist blogosphere.

…it occurred to me that the fuckwad was demonstrating to the girl exactly what will happen to her if she ever accuses a man of rape: She will be grilled about “other sexual experiences” in order for the defense to claim she really is just a slut who wanted it and therefore the man must be innocent. Her feelings will be of concern to no one.

So true…

I sure did not predict this but it is great news.

The Chaser and Kyle Sandilands off the air all in the same week!
*does a happy butt dance*

Meet Kyle Sandilands- “…it is just one of these things, unfortunately rape happens in society.”

- homophobe, sleazebag, media jerkoff and all round misogynist knobhead. Sandilands has been expressing his hateful views via Australian media for some years now. Last year whilst filling the Dicko role of scathing critic on Australian Idol, he made a comment about the rock star status of one of the contestants “…complete with the skanks down the front” referring to the very young girls in the studio audience. Charming.

The year before he made homophobic (and creepy) comments to contestant Matt Corby who was sixteen at the time.

So Sandilands already has a track record of sleazy, innappropriate and exploitative public interactions with very young people.

This week he and his hired enabler, Jackie O, arranged for a fourteen year old child to be held against her will and interrogated on-air about being raped two years earlier at the age of twelve. Why, you might ask? Oh, for fun! For the purposes of entertaining the dullards who listen to fauxcomedic commercial morning radio shows. Nice. Sandilands claims that he wasn’t to know that the child was a rape survivor, but the fact remains that it was his intention to publicly shame and humiliate her in the name of “entertainment”.

What kind of a sick fuck questions a fourteen year old child about their sexual experiences? A fourteen year old child does not have a “sexual history” given that they are after all, FOURTEEN! I mean hello, it can only be sexual abuse or rape. What kind of an even sicker fuck pays him to do this?? How many men at 2dayFM besides Sandilands, knew what was supposed to happen to this child? This appears to be all about the male sense of entitlement to access and appropriate female sexuality. Would these people abuse a fourteen year old boy this way? I have to wonder. Optus is a major sponsor of this show btw so if you were thinking of switching from Optus now would be the time.

There is now a campaign going to help bring about the dismissal of the two offenders and also hopefully the manager or whoever else sanctioned such a vile piece of broadcasting.

In my mind this offense adds up to child pornography, 2dayFM being a commercial, for-profit station, the sexual exploitation of a child can be seen no other way. It is also a clear breach of the Commercial Radio Broadcasting Code Of Practices , the NSW Care and Protection Of Children And Young Persons ACT , and the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights.

This is child abuse, plain and simple.

Getting back to the quote at the top there, rape doesn’t just “happen” in society, mate. It is a device which is perpetrated against women by men and it continues to be a pervasive characteristic of our society because it is rationalised by scum like yourself. It is built into our social system, you ignorant cock.

To support the campaign go to-

www.sackkyleandjackieo.info

To complain to 2dayFM go to 2dayFM

Your complaint should state that the broadcast has been in violation of the Commercial Radio Broadcasting Code of Practices and should probably include the words ‘child’, ‘abuse’ and ‘exploitation’.

We should not be tolerating this type of practice and the only way to get that message across is to go to the trouble of complaining via the official channels.

Thanks to sackkyleandjackieo.info for the pic.

Edit: An open letter from a small group of child advocates including Noni Hazlehurst and Steve Biddulph, was published in The Age today, calling for the abusers to be sacked. Almost restores your faith in humanity don’t it?

Almost.

Edit: As usual Richie helps me to laugh in order not to cry.

“What happened on Wednesday wasn’t a single, isolated mistake; it was the culmination of all that had come before”.

Edit: The organisers of Australian Idol, due to go to air next week, are uncertain about having Sandilands on the show. Um, yay! He is still playing down his behaviour and acting pretty bloody smugly about the whole thing.

Much has been said and written about the most recent evidence of the rape culture inherent within the football industry
here and here for example, can be found some incisive summaries of the issue from a feminist perspective. Even within the mainstream media there has been some excellent commentary amid all the “But he’s a top bloke and she was just a slutty groupie!” bile. I really don’t think I can add much more to that other than to say that this rape culture is not limited to football culture but is in fact normative behaviour right across the entire effing planet. So now that I’ve said that I’d like to take a closer look at ways to address the issue (other than to annihilate the patriarchy via a bloody revolution).

I have it on good authority (and you didn’t hear this from me ok?) that one of the high profile football clubs have now approached a high profile counselling agency for help with programs specifically designed to teach these apes that women are not in fact merely a collective orifice, a set of holes (Jensen, R. 2006) to which their access is an unquestionable sacred birth right, despite messages they may have received to the contrary. Who knew??

So this knowledge has got me thinking about exactly what such an educational program would look like. Where would you begin to start re-conditioning over-inflated senses of entitlement inherent within brains that have long marinated in the murky algae of patriarchal privilege?

I think you would have to start with (and let me be clear, I would personally volunteer to design such a program, for free) some introductory sociological theory, covering concepts such as hegemony, power, social constructionism, socialisation, intersectionality and underclass, and how these things manifest in a patriarchal hierarchy such as our society, as well as how they are experienced by people according to gender.

Then we would begin incorporating this with radical feminist theory which would cover the fundamental principles of radical feminist thought, starting with the radical notion that women are in fact human. We would of course include radfem theories of gender, consent and pornography.

Next we would take a look at cultural and social expectations and the way they are defined by the dominant classes according to a rigid system of gender binarism. We would take them on an analytical tour of media practices, pop cultural narratives and the use of language to uphold the social order.

Then we would use realistic case scenarios as examples of the way the above-mentioned concepts are experienced in real life situations in order to assist them to apply their newly-gained theoretical knowledge to their own lives, assuming of course that they have successfully absorbed and intergrated all of the information we’ve exposed them to. For example, by this stage they will understand that women are taught from birth (actually we might not say ‘taught’ we could probably say socialised because they will know what that means by now) to be subordinate to men and to seek their approval, appease their oppressor; a theory first developed by the wonderful Mary Wollstonecraft who observed that it was the experience of living in a male-dominated society that caused women to behave in ways that degraded them in order to attract male attention and therefore achieve security both social and financial.

They will recognise the way this paradigm continues today with practices such as embooberisation, or letting a guy cut your breasts open and shove some kind of foreign matter inside, starvation, stupid debilitating shoes that make you look like a fucking idiot when you try to walk, blow jobs, spray tans, lingerie etc. They may by this point be on the verge of comprehending that flirting with footballers and agreeing to accompany a couple of them to their hotel room also falls within this category. Now will come the lightbulb moment. That women are not really biologically predisposed to degrading behaviour and self-exploitation, but that the culture leaves them very few meaningful alternatives for social validation. They will also come to realise that remaining on this endless treadmill of the pursuit of ‘beauty’ or ‘femininity’ not only keeps women vulnerable and insecure (and therefore more easily subjugated) but also keeps their financial resources depleted; as if we needed that in a society where we earn on average 60 cents to the dude’s $1.

We would most definitely include this incredibly powerful and well-written deconstruction of rape and sexual assault by Fugitivus and this one about rape jokes as part of the set reading. There will be a test on this reading.

For anyone who was as horrified as I was at the way Twilight reinforced the paradigm of controlling and oppressive/dangerous behaviour within het relationships (see some earlier post that I penned after watching the movie) by romanticising and normalising stalking and violence, Buffy feels our pain.

Thanks to girlie jones.