You could be excused for thinking that this was all over with or had nothing to do with you, considering the little attention it gets in the news. But in case you were wondering how you are directly responsible for the deaths of more than six million people in the Congo, here’s something to consider:
This morning, Australian news was abuzz with excitement over a caucus meeting of the Australian Labor Party that was set to vote on ousting current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in favour of his Deputy PM, Julia Gillard. And in a piece of Australian political history, Rudd did indeed step down, leaving Gillard Australia’s first female prime minister.
Everyone seems pretty excited about it – the morning ‘news’ broadcasts aired into overtime in order to cover the meeting and change of leadership. However, without missing a beat, wouldn’t you know, Sunrise anchor Melissa Doyle announces that tomorrow we’ll discuss whether or not Australia “is ready for a female prime minister”?
I’m going to set my outrage aside for a moment. I accept that these sorts of sensationalist morning programs require “provocation,” if you want to call it that, to engage viewers in their thirty-second discussions of salient news issues. But it’s cheap media. It’s a cheap trick, and a tired one. Worst of all, though, it’s insidious for two reasons. Firstly, by questioning whether or not Australia is ready for a female prime minister, Sunrise implies that the country is not, that a female leader is something to be feared or approached cautiously, or as anything but what it really is, which is LONG OVERDUE. The question legitimizes chauvenism by opening the door to arguments that women shouldn’t be Prime Minister. Secondly, the question represents exactly the barriers faced by women in politics. Were it a male challenger, no one would be asking if Australia were ready for him. The media is notoriously bad for getting stuck in the gender angle when reporting on female politicians, so all we ever hear about is their childbearing/rearing capabilities, their fashion sense, or their bitchiness (which is very interesting to contrast with the forms of confrontation expressed by their male counterparts).
I suppose, Mel, you’ll be asking your “expert” guests to comment on whether Gillard’s ascension to Prime Minister means the end of the feminist struggle, or somehow proves that Australia isn’t a sexist country. You’ll be wrong.
That Gillard was ever made deputy was probably the biggest step for women in Australian politics. Honestly, there was no alternative for leadership if the party had decided Rudd couldn’t win them another election. And before we applaud ourselves too much, by my count, Australia is now the 54th country in the world to elect a female leader. Surely, Mel, we deserve our spot among the ranks of:
Surely we won’t suggest that there’s something particularly progressive about the 53 other countries in the world who have had female leaders that Australia may yet be lacking. In terms of Australia’s representation of women, just 13 per cent of the current ministry are female, putting us in the company of countries such as Oman, Qatar. Bahrain, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo – all of whom have less than 20 per cent women in ministerial positions. Only Australia, Israel and the US among the developed democracies have such small numbers of women political leaders.
I think the media plays an important role in maintaining negative perceptions of female politicians. Voters have shown themselves to be willing to vote for a female representative, with women comprising 25-35% of seats in parliaments across the country. It is not from the public that the majority of criticisms of female politicians come – it is from the media. Journalists trivialise women publicly, focusing narrowly on their hair and clothes, assessing her worth by her maternal and domestic prowess. Gillard has been criticised in the media not only for lacking children, but for having a kitchen that is “too clean.”
What more would it take for Australia to be “ready” for Gillard? She already wears the standard uniform of dark suits, and has appropriated the required mimicking of men to speak in ‘polliespeak’. She demurs from confrontation lest she be called a ‘bitch.’ She knows not to show any originality and difference, because the media will make her pay if she does otherwise.
No, it’s rather unhelpful to question the ‘readiness’ of Australia for a female prime minister. As twitterer benpobjie so accurately responded to the question: “if not, a pro-Gillard vote may well tear the space-time continuum.”
author on June 24th, 2010 | File Under Australia, Commentary, Election, Feminism, Media | No Comments - |The host of my preferred morning show was, this morning, rather pleased with himself for being part of a group of men who apparently do more domestic work than others: Australians. This is, of course, only in comparison with a very small and not-sure-how-they-were-selected cross section of Western countries – namely, Italy, Denmark and France. And by “others,” I of course am referring to “other men.” This is big news in Australia today, though I’m not sure why as I can’t seem to find any recent publication made by the study author Lyn Craig.
Here’s what she has to say about Australian men and domestic work:
Australian fathers, her study shows, are run off their feet. Their long hours in paid work combined with their domestic labours means they work harder than Danish, French or Italian fathers and the same as Americans. For example, they spend 10 to 11 hours a day in paid and domestic work compared to eight hours for Danish men.
…
The French, in particular, are sanguine about time spent with their children. French fathers spend on average 20 minutes a day in routine physical care of their children aged under five, and in accompanying them places, compared to 40 minutes by Australian fathers. They also spend much less time reading to them and playing with them.
Well, thanks for that, news service, but I think something important is being overlooked, and something that Dr. Craig emphasizes herself in her interviews with these media outlets:
”They do less than Australian women but they compare favourably to men in some other countries,”
…
Dr Craig points out in her study, Work and Family Time: Australia in Comparative Perspectives, that the gender division of labour is much more unequal here – not because fathers do less childcare than fathers overseas, but because their wives do less paid work, and much more housework and childcare than elsewhere.
Dr Craig believes it is pointless for Australian policymakers to exhort hard-pressed men to pitch in more at home. ”Perhaps rather than looking at what households should do to share the load more equally,” she says, ”we need to look at what workplaces should do to limit demands on workers’ time.”
What Dr. Craig is actually discovering about Australian culture is not that it is more egalitarian in terms of gender, but rather that Australians as a whole are overworked compared to their European counterparts.
And regardless of the amount of work that Australian men are doing in terms of childcare, Australian mothers are doing more work than fathers.
So quit congratulating yourselves and give your partner a hand with the cooking, already.
author on March 22nd, 2010 | File Under Australia, Feminism, Media | No Comments - |A friend recently asked me to watch the ridiculously long “Telephone” video by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé as she wanted my feminist opinion on it. She described it thusly: lady gaga is thrown in prison, has explicit lesbian relations, gets telephone call for the sole purpose of showing a virgin mobile shot, gets out of prison, goes to a restaurant and poisons Beyoncé’s boyfriend and everyone else, dresses in an American flag and dances around in the dead bodies before driving off Thelma & Louise style in a vehicle labeled “pussy wagon.”
It’s a pretty accurate description:
And here’s Fox News’ conservative reaction to the clip:
But the objections of feminists, while similarly concerned for the representation of women and the sexualization of violence in this clip, are inherently different than those expressed at Fox News. Sean Macaulay at the Daily Beast sums it up when he says the video is all about “lezploitation”:
The women-in-prison genus has been in steady use since the 1920s, and its rules and clichés are among the most strictly observed of exploitation fare. “Telephone” is no exception, and reverently starts with a New Fish (Lady Gaga) arriving at a jail to Run the Gauntlet of Leering Inmates before being Sexually Assaulted by pair of strapping Lesbian Guards.
Sadly, the video epic doesn’t have time to include other staples of the category, such as the Sadistic Warden; the Queen Bee; the Inmate on the Edge, usually carrying a pet mouse; the Wise Old Lifer, who generally works in the library; and the aforementioned Shower Scene. This last one is a glaring omission, rather like reviving Oklahoma! without “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top.”
But “Telephone”—directed by Jonas Åkerlund—makes up for these omissions with a vicious catfight, a mass murder, and a deadpan Beyoncé doing a Kill Bill homage as the “butch top” in this criminal partnership. “You’ve been a very bad girl,” she tells her wayward lover. “A very, very, bad, bad, girl, Gaga.”
I found this last quote interesting as it’s followed up with both women putting a very phallic object in their mouths. You see, unfortunately Sean Macaulay isn’t critical of lezploitation as a genre that sexualizes violence and constructs a fantasy ideal of women as secretly loving abuse and as always ravenous for sex (from men, btw).
But besides the obvious gender issues of the clip, what I find much more subversive and dangerous is the advertising in a way that I can only really compare to the 2001 film Josie and the Pussycats:
Upon a little further investigation, I realized that Virgin Mobile was getting so many shots because they’re sponsoring Gaga’s world tour and she has multiple deals with them in the works. But then, I came across this really interesting list in The Moderate Voice, from which I learned that a lot of the labels were unpaid spots:
* Wonder Bread: Unpaid. Used in a sequence showing Gaga poisoning diner customers, because Gaga wanted to contrast the poisoning with an all-American brand.
* Miracle Whip: Paid. Used in the same scene-and for the same reason-as Wonder Bread; seems to be part of the spread’s new, edgier campaign.
* Diet Coke: Unpaid. It was Gaga’s idea to curl her hair with Diet Coke cans in the video as an homage to her mother.
* Virgin Mobile: The cell phone in the video is a nod to the company, a mobile sponsor of Gaga’s Monster Ball tour.
* Polaroid: Camera and photo booth featured acknowledge Gaga’s role as Polaroid’s creative director.
* Heartbeats headphones and Beats laptop : Unpaid. An extension of her partnerships with Interscope Music and Hewlett Packard.
* PlentyofFish.com: Unclear. Possibly the weirdest deal of the bunch; result of the dating site’s partnership with Interscope.
And of course, the sponsors of the video knew what they were getting into – this video wasn’t meant for regular airplay. It’s allegedly been banned from MTV. This video was made to be viral, so people like me and my friends would discuss it and then look for it online, post it on our blogs, and discuss more. All to benefit Virgin-fucking-mobile and Miracle Whip (though I really love the latter…). As Feministe points out:
It was not designed to be shown on television, ever! It is ten minutes long, and it has more dialogue than music, and it has the “fuck” word and naked breasts and vaginas and girl-on-girl action and basically everybody gets murdered. At no point did anyone making this video think, “I’m still pretty sure we could get this on television, though.” No. It was made to be on the Internet. And you can tell because this affects the form itself, like the actual decisions of how to shoot and edit the damn thing. You can tell this video was meant to be turned into nine million animated GIFs, for example, because there are several parts of it that are shot to look like animated GIFs: you know that thing where there’s like two seconds of movement that loops back around on itself in a weird, jerky, headache-inducing way? That’s what this video looks like, a lot of the time. Gaga has now apparently incorporated not just an analysis of gender and sexuality into her work, she has apparently decided to take on the issue of new media.
Advertisers are getting smarter. We’re all becoming more susceptible. Damn them.
author on March 20th, 2010 | File Under Commentary, Feminism, Media | 1 Comment - |What a buffoon! According to a Sydney-based researcher, the Australian Prime Minister, at an event in January, told her that her PhD was an excuse commonly used by young women “to avoid starting a family”.
Deputy PM Julia Gillard better get on the clean up trail after that one. Apparently Mr. Rudd doesn’t recall making such a comment. I’m sure he did – he’s such a useless goon. I’m also sure he’s not a total misogynist like his rival, Tony Abbott. He’s just an indoctrinated, socialized, mostly-misogynist like most other men. He may not really believe she’s avoiding having babies, but his comment does imply a belief that education is somehow lost on women.
And I don’t fully believe that Rudd wants to see women get a fair go. Otherwise his government would not have just denied any possibility of a quota system for women’s employment. According to a newly released KPMG report, only 54 per cent of employed women are full-time, compared to 84 per cent of men. The findings didn’t seem to phase Minister for the Status of Women, Tanya Plibersek, who sluffed off the suggestion that the government should address this disparity with an appeal to the fact that the report included no formal recommendations to government.
Riiiight, so governments are incapable of analysing data and finding their own solutions, but must rely on recommendations from the private or NFP sector for action?
Bullshit, Ruddy, you just think women have stolen enough rights and should be happy with where they’ve gotten to, right?
author on March 1st, 2010 | File Under Australia, Commentary, Feminism, Media, Politics | No Comments - |Gosh, on the heels of that disturbing study on the attitudes of children yesterday comes another figure out of the UK, this time from an online poll of over 1000 respondents, that more than 50% of women believe rape victims bear some responsibility for their attack.
The poll was administered by Haven, a safe refuge for female survivors of abuse, and called ‘Wake Up to Rape.’ The responses were startling:
A fifth of the women said the victim was partly responsible if they went back to the assailant’s house and a 10th said taking a drink from a stranger had unforeseen consequences.
Twenty per cent of women surveyed said they would not report a rape to police, with half of those citing shame or embarrassment as a reason.
One in eight thought a victim who danced in a provocative manner on a night out was also to blame for any consequences.
In a more striking finding, 14 per cent of the women told the surveyors that 14 per cent of women believe most rape accusations were cooked up.
More than a third of women thought that rape victims who’d gone back to a man’s place for a drink were partly to blame for the attack, compared to less than a fifth of the male respondents.
Interestingly, it was mostly women aged 18-24 who espoused these opinions. This is a really frightening social regression after the lengths feminists have gone to to get courts to recognize any form of non-consensual sexual activity to be rape. It’s a bizarre form of self-denial that women put themeselves through to think that it won’t happen to them if they behave in a certain way. The issue is not that women look or act a certain way and put themselves in vulnerable situations. It’s that men choose to rape. It’s that rape, in the words of Susan Brownmiller, is a tool of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear for the purposes of maintaining male dominance.
This wasn’t something I truly grasped until I read the title of Andrea Dworkin’s speech to the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men: “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape.” Read it! It’s incredibly moving. Here’s an excerpt:
We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.
It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.
The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.
I would argue it’s also institutionalised by the socialisation of women to believe in the system. To believe that we play a role in our own abuse. To believe that men have this right – this male sex right – over our bodies, over our actions, over us. Systems naturally want to reproduce themselves and the shit we are fed in the media is for this purpose – the maintenance of patriarchy and women’s subordination. Somehow, somewhere we’re being told we’re to blame for men’s violence and that voice is so pervasive it’s reaching children, who are parroting this belief.
Again… dangerous. Dangerous stuff.
author on February 17th, 2010 | File Under Feminism, Media, Research | 1 Comment - |In one of the most disturbing news stories of the year, the BBC had an article today on research of schoolchildren that has found most students think violence towards women is okay if there is a reason behind it. The examples of times when it’s okay? If the woman has an affair or is late making dinner.
The research was conducted in Glasgow with 94 primary children aged 11 and 12 years. The children were questioned in depth about their attitudes and aspirations towards gender roles and behaviour. The children were asked to consider if it was okay for a man to punch his wife/girlfriend if he found out she had had an affair. Nearly all the children thought this was justifiable. In a second scenario, roughly 80% of the children said a man was justified in slapping his partner because she did not have the dinner ready on time.
Edinburgh Napier University researcher Nancy Lombard says of her findings:
“The children didn’t agree with violence, but gave reasons to try to justify it if the woman had done something ‘wrong’. The old saying of ‘If he pulls your pigtails it means he likes you’, translates into violence in adulthood which girls accept as normal.”
Another disturbing finding of Lombard’s study was that girls expected to modify their behaviour and narrow expectations once they were married and had children.
One of the girls said: “I want to be a dancer or a doctor.”
But she added: “When I grow up I’m going to have two babies and work part-time in the shop down the road.”
Lombard argues that gender role stereotypes are limited girls’ perceptions of life options and their behaviours in order to ‘accommodate’ men and boys. Honestly, while part of me is surprised by these findings, another part of me isn’t. The socialisation of girls to fulfill gender roles of nurturers and carers starts very early, and I think has gotten stronger with the advent of marketing to children. Toys that used to be gender-neutral are now much more gendered, to the point that even Lego blocks are marketed separately towards girls and boys. This has been found to be deeply embedded at all levels of marketing.
What’s the implication? These are stereotypes that reflect male dominance exacerbate social inequalities for women in all areas of their lives, from the workplace to the home. And clearly this is resulting in some sort of perverse regression to fifties-era gender ideal-types and norms of social behaviour. The next generation is clearly growing with expectations that women exist for the sole purpose of serving men.
Dangerous!
author on February 16th, 2010 | File Under Feminism, Media, Research | No Comments - |Durex has come out with a series of new print ads featuring sexual acts with the bodies of the heterosexual couple comprised of words that presumably their different body parts are thinking/feeling. Take a look:
Right… apparently while giving head, I’m not only feeling dainty and really into the taste, but am all kinds of satisfied (pleased, contented, happy, smug). And apparently my boobs can’t stop thinking about themselves. And I’m really hungry for… fruit? What? Meanwhile, men’s penises turn into their brains and their entire bodies go into some sort of system failure?
But wait, there’s more:
Here, I am quaking and numb and shuddering and vibrating throughout my whole body (save for boobs, which are still thinking of themselves, apparently) with apparent pleasure, but wait… my head… I’m confused and paralysed and embarrassed. Apparently I’m privately traumatised from my pleasure?
I quite appreciate Katy’s analysis at Jezebel:
author on February 12th, 2010 | File Under Feminism, Media | No Comments - |The most annoying thing about these ads is that they have the potential to be really good – if they made a little more sense. The female body is shown as a complex textbook of emotions, while men are reduced to one single thought (or less). Naturally, Krahne wants to play up the sexy part of sex, but wouldn’t it be funnier if the oral sex-woman was thinking about “suction,” “teeth,” “knee pain” or if we wanted to be really honest, “this condom tastes like a Fruit Roll-Up that has been sprayed with Lysol.” Also, we appreciate that it takes a certain about of strain to maintain that position for men, but it’s not exactly a cakewalk for us either. Finally, maybe instead of “confusion,” a woman on the brink of an orgasm could be shown thinking “hells yes!” or at the very least “don’t stop.”
Trust superbowl Sunday to construct a celebration of all that is mainstream misogynist, hyper-masculine with the ads that the world has been abuzz about. In case anyone still harboured romantic ideals that our culture had become more equal and respectful, here’s a mash-up via Feministing:
The ads that don’t make the cut? The ads too unpalatable for CBS? Man with head up own ass, and ‘the gay kiss’ ad:
For great analysis of the above and other ads, check out this piece in the Washington City Paper by Amanda Hess.
author on February 10th, 2010 | File Under Current Events, Feminism, Media | No Comments - |There was a story out of New Zealand today about a 19 year-old girl who auctioned her virginity to pay for university fees. At auction’s close, her highest bid was for $46,000 NZD, and more than 1200 people had bid on her virginity. According to the girl:
“I have never had a sexual relationship and am still a virgin.
“I am offering my virginity by tender to the highest bidder as long as all personal safety aspects are observed.
“This is my decision made with full awareness of the circumstances and possible consequences.”
She added: “I am fit, healthy and have no medical conditions of any nature.
“I am a keen athlete and have a trim physique.”
While some people may commend her entrepreneurial initiative to fund her studies without going into debt as the rest of us do, there are some serious issues with the fact that prostitution is one of women’s only viable ways to make money. It says a lot about our society that some strange man would be willing to pay a girl that much money for the gift of her virginity.
People talk about the “free choice” women make to sell their bodies. Where is the freedom? Being brainwashed by the porn culture to believe that prostitution is glamourous and an easy way to make a pile of money? A 1998 ILO (UN International Labor Organization) report suggesting that the sex industry be treated as a legitimate economic sector, found that prostitution is one of the most alienated forms of labour; the surveys [in 4 countries] show that women worked “with a heavy heart,” “felt forced,”or were “;conscience-stricken” and had negative self-identities. A significant proportion claimed they wanted to leave sex work [sic] if they could (Lim, 1998: 213).”
And where to men in society get the justification to feel as though they have the right to buy women’s bodies? It amounts to women being treated and considered as less than human. As Catherine Mackinnon points out:
To be a prostitute is to be a legal nonperson in the ways that matter. What for Blackstone and others was the legal nonpersonhood of wives is extended for prostitutes from one man to all men as a class. Anyone can do anything to you and nothing legal will be done about it. John Stoltenberg has shown how the social definition of personhood for men is importantly premised on the prostitution of women. Prostitution as a social institution gives men personhood–in this case, manhood–through depriving women of theirs.
In an interview with The Guardian she explains:
the selling of sex because “gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them”. Otherwise, she contends, unenlightened men still write the laws. And when, for instance, they write laws on rape they make what she believes are grotesquely sexist assumptions. “The assumption,” she says, “is that women can be unequal to men economically, socially, culturally, politically, and in religion, but the moment they have sexual interactions, they are free and equal. That’s the assumption – and I think it ought to be thought about, and in particular what consent then means. It means acquiescence. It means passivity. You can be semi-knocked out. You can be dead in some jurisdictions.”
It is interesting that the article on the NZ girl auctioning her virginity refers to her as “Poor New Zealand girl,” justifying her decision to sell her virginity on the basis of desperation. Because it is overwhelmingly destitute women who get into prostitution. Prostitution gets romanticized in our society and glamourized through the pornographication of culture. But it’s not glamourous or attractive. It’s violent. It is sexual torture. It is degrading and humiliating and abusive. And this is what society tells us is the most attractive option for women with few employment prospects?
author on February 4th, 2010 | File Under Feminism, Media | No Comments - |
