Category Archives: Feminism

Each woman must be assessed

Posted on April 10, 2013 by | 32 Comments

This thing that’s going on lately, where women in public roles are assessed one by one and declared Feminist or Not Feminist, is a bit shit.

Gina Rinehart, Julia Gillard (many articles in The Australian which I’m not linking to), Taylor Swift, Marissa Mayer, Beyonce. And now, Margaret Thatcher (in a piece that fails to explain why being a bad-ass Prime Minister makes her a feminist, but if you’re going to read it, make sure you read this Hadley Freeman one afterwards).

Don’t get me wrong, it is important for feminism to be a natural part of our public discussion. And it’s important that our public discussion includes rad fems and lib fems, because feminism isn’t a monolithic beast. There is still so much to fix and I think we benefit from having different voices focus on reproductive rights, violence, everyday sexism, women in management, equal pay, women’s voices in the media, parenting, and poverty. For one person to fight on every issue would be exhausting. Attack from all sides! But I just think that whether or not individual women identify as feminist is less important than talking about the other shit we have to fix. Besides, holding women up, one by one, for the public to assess them isn’t all that different to the “who wore it better” and “stars without make-up” sections in celebrity magazines.

The thing is, while we’re discussing whether or not Gina Rinehart is a feminist, who’s writing articles about how women account for only 13 per cent of managers in the mining industry, and what can be done to fix that?

While we’re talking about whether or not Julia Gillard is a feminist, who’s writing about the fact that the LNP and ALP support so few female candidates in winnable seats that in federal parliament, women make up 24.7 per cent of the House of Reps and 38.2 per cent of the Senate.

While we’re talking about whether Marissa Mayer is a feminist, or criticising Sheryl Sandberg because her book is for some women and not all women, there’s less space to talk about sexism and misogyny in the tech industry. Yes, these things are talked about on twitter and on blogs, but I mean in the mainstream media so it reaches a wider audience. There is precious little room there so we shouldn’t waste it by judging women who are at the top of male-dominated industries, rather than looking at those industries and why so few women make it to the top.

Over the last 18 months, feminism has become mainstream – largely thanks to the middle-class feminists who are now being mocked for their efforts because apparently, in the she-pee contest about who is doin’ it right and who is doin’ it wrong, being middle-class means your opinion doesn’t count. Are we really going to use income levels to judge who has a right to speak and who doesn’t?

We have a great opportunity here. Feminism isn’t going to be mainstream forever, but while it is, we need to get in there and fix shit.

(There’ll be a delay in pubishing comments this evening – I’ll be at the very first Tipsy Rabbit, a panel discussion with Sevana Ohandjanian, Caitlin Park, and Richard Cartwright talking about music and writing about music. Doors at 7pm for a 7.30pm start, Red Rattler, Marrickville.)

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Posted in Feminism, Journalism

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Women play sport? Never heard about it

Posted on February 18, 2013 by | 33 Comments

At the beginning of last week, twitter told me there were a couple of big things coming up in women’s sport: the Australian Open (golf) and the World Cup (cricket). I was curious to see what coverage they’d get in my paper of choice (Sydney Morning Herald – I don’t read News Ltd papers), so from Monday to Friday I counted the number of stories in the SMH sports section. I also counted the number of stories on the smh.com.au/sport homepage around midday (when online newsrooms are well-staffed and the page is ready for the lunchtime increase in traffic, so theoretically any gaps in coverage have been identified and filled).

For the purposes of this short study, I counted everything with a byline, including opinion pieces. I also made a note of the small news briefs from wire services.

What I found was worse than I was expecting.

Monday 11 February
There are 29 stories in the sports section. Only one involves women’s sport and it’s AAP copy – ie, they didn’t bother having one of their own journalists cover it. There are 10 news briefs, two involving women’s sport.

On the smh.com.au sport homepage at midday there are 57 stories. Two are about women’s sport – one from AAP, one from AFP.

That AAP story that was in print and online – Stars crush Lankans to book spot in final – is about our women’s cricket team being in the World Cup final. Here’s how it’s promoted on smh.com.au/sport:

The value given by smh.com.au/sport to the women's cricket team being in the world cup final.

The value given by smh.com.au/sport to the women’s cricket team being in the world cup final.

That’s right, it’s BELOW two stories that don’t involve an actual game.

Tuesday 12 February
There are 19 stories in the paper copy. Only one involves women’s sport (cricket). Of the five news briefs from AAP and AFP, one is about a female athlete.

There are 40 stories online, and only one is about women’s sport: Star injury unearths teenage tearaway.

Wednesday 13 February
There are 13 stories in the paper version, and none about women’s sport. Of the five news briefs, two are about women’s sport: Laetisha Scanlan – Australia’s best female trap shooter, also a Commonwealth champion – won the Qatar Open (there were four Australian women in the top 10 but that wasn’t reported); and Torah Bright wants to be the first snowboarder in the history of the Winter Olympics to compete in three disciplines. Two good stories that are only mentioned in passing at the very end of the sports section, after coverage of domestic injury news for male athletes and speculation about which men might be in a team for an event later in the year.

There are 43 stories online, and only one is about women’s sport.

Thursday 14 February
There are 25 stories in the paper version, and two of them are about women’s sport. Of the five news briefs, only one is about women’s sport – Rachel Jarry joining the US WNBA.

Online at midday, there were 43 stories, and only 3 on women’s sport, tucked right down the end in “More sports”. No coverage of the cricket World Cup.

Friday 15 February
There are 24 stories published in the paper version. Two are about women’s sport. Five briefs from wires services, two about women’s sport – one begins “Accused of sexism last year, Basketball Australia is making the national women’s team coach a full-time job to boost the world No.2-ranked Opals’ quest for an elusive first Olympic gold medal”.

Online there are 51 stories, and 4 are about women’s sport. Two are even – gasp! – in the top section:

Woah! Two stories about women made it to the top of smh.com.au/sport.

Woah! Two stories about women made it to the top of smh.com.au/sport.

However, one story is so wrong that it should cancel out the others: Love is all around me, says Sharapova. In a story about the Qatar Open, Richard Eaton reports THE MOST IMPORTANT TENNIS NEWS: whether Maria Sharapova, Caroline Wozniacki, Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka are celebrating Valentine’s Day. Yep. You read that correctly.

I’m not including the weekend in this little study because I was out doing stuff and didn’t get a chance to count the online stories, but I think it’s worth mentioning the paper coverage. The Weekend Sport section on Saturday had 26 stories and only one about women’s sport (golf). There were four news briefs – all male sport. The Sun Herald sport section on Sunday had 34 stories, with three about women’s sport (two cricket, one golf). There were two news briefs on male sport.

Now, you might want to argue that I picked a bad week to do this, because each day had two pages of the Australian Crime Commission’s Organised Crime and Drugs in Sport report. But you’d be arguing a dud point. The majority of stories published were about injury news in male sport, and who was maybe going to be in a team and who was maybe going to be left out of the team, and what the people in teams thought about upcoming games in male sport. Yet Australian women were competing in world events that barely rated a mention. Where were the stories about the Aussie Gliders at the Osaka Cup (wheelchair basketball, and they won, by the way), and the final round of the WNBL season? Netball’s pre-season games are about to start, so where’s the pre-season coverage that we get for AFL and League and Union? There was a Football NSW Women’s Sport Festival yesterday that wasn’t previewed on Saturday (a classic weekend story) or reported on today. Women’s football has 100,000 registered players, which is something editors might want to think about the next time they wonder how they’re going to get more readers. These are just the events that I know about, and I’m not a sports fan at all, so I’d expect that a sports reporter would know a lot more about what’s going on at any given time. You know, because it’s their job to report on sport.

You might also want to argue that women aren’t as interested in sport as men are, so therefore it’s a waste of resources to cover women’s sport at all. I’m calling bullshit on that one as well. You only have to look at twitter when a game of some sort is on to see all the women tweeting passionately about it. It’s also bullshit to suggest that men aren’t interested in women’s sport. And perhaps women aren’t reading your sports coverage because it’s always male sport that gets coverage. You’d think that with the newspaper industry in so much trouble, they might be looking at ways to get new readers, because business as usual clearly isn’t working.

And you might also want to argue that it’s not a sports reporter’s job to promote sport, their job is to report sport. Right. So report sport, then. Or change your job title to Men’s Sport Reporter.

So, from Monday to Friday, the Sydney Morning Herald published 110 sport stories, and only 6 were about women’s sport (5.45 per cent). On the same five days, smh.com.au/sport published 234 stories, and only 11 were about women’s sport (4.7 per cent). You tell me, is that good enough?

Oh, and for the record, South Korean golfer Jiyai Shin won the Australian Open yesterday, and this is how smh.com.au/sport is reporting Australia’s cricket win:

Smh.com.au/sport coverage of the Southern Stars winning the World Cup early this morning

Smh.com.au/sport coverage of the Southern Stars winning the World Cup early this morning

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Can we talk about Gina Rinehart without insulting her?

Posted on January 9, 2013 by | 22 Comments

You know when you notice something and then you can’t stop noticing it? Like, when people say “like”, like all the time? Or when you think, “I like her yellow shoes” and then you see loads of people wearing yellow shoes? There’s a piece on Daily Life about whether or not Gina Rinehart is a feminist role model that is filled with something that I can’t stop noticing.

For most of the article, Alecia Simmonds looks at whether there’s evidence of feminism in Rinehart’s business life. But it’s the little digs at Rinehart’s appearance that I noticed, and once I noticed them I couldn’t stop noticing them, and I reckon Simmonds didn’t even notice she was doing it.

For example:

And she exhibits a delightful refusal to conform to patriarchal standards of feminine beauty.

Um, what? If you do a google image search for photos of Rinehart, you’ll see that in almost all of them she is wearing make-up (usually lipstick, often eye shadow), her hair is coloured (I’m making that assumption because in some photos there’s grey hair and in others there isn’t), she’s wearing the classically feminine accessory of pearls, and she’s neatly dressed in feminine clothing. Now, I don’t have a list of patriarchal beauty standards, but if I did it would be any combination of: wearing make-up, colouring your hair so you look younger, wearing feminine outfits, being slim, being pretty, and spending money and time on maintaining the slim and the pretty and the outfits and the make-up. So, what exactly is Simmonds talking about here? Is it a comment about her weight? Because I’m not sure that Simmonds wants to be in the place where she says that women whose bodies are bigger than slim/curvy-yet-still-slim automatically stop conforming to/caring about beauty standards. Statements like that are best left for when we know, for sure, that a woman is refusing to conform to patriarchal standards of feminine beauty. And we usually know this by asking her if she is refusing to conform to patriarchal standards of feminine beauty and she says “yes”.

I definitely furrow my feminist brows when Rinehart is called an heiress while James Packer is called a billionaire. How is Packer any less an heir? When Julian Morrow quipped that Rinehart was ‘the elephant not in the room’, and Germaine Greer advised her to find a decent hairdresser I became a spit-flecked ball of feminist fury. Rinehart is held to a suffocatingly restrictive image standard that her counterparts like Clive Palmer and James Packer are not. We’re capable of discussing wealthy men without mentioning their hairy shoulders or wide girth. Gina Rinehart is reduced to her bingo-wings.

I agree with her point about Packer. I think Morrow’s comment was mean and childish. I think Greer, well, I find it hard to agree with anything she says these days. I think Palmer and Packer cop shit for their bodies, but without the nastiness that Rinehart gets. But in that final comment – “bingo wings” – Simmonds does exactly what she’s railing against: she makes a mean comment about Rinehart’s body. Look, I’m sure it was just a witty one-liner. But bingo wings is a derogatory term. It’s used to shame women – particularly older women – into covering their bodies. To stop them wearing comfortable clothing in hot weather, in case someone is forced to look at their arms for a moment. The horror of bingo wings is used to get women to diet and to exercise (this article suggests stretching your arms FIVE TIMES A DAY to avoid bingo wings. With all that arm-stretching we have to do, who has time to topple the patriarchy?). Why didn’t she just write “body” or “appearance”? It would make the same point about the “suffocatingly restrictive image standard” without buying in to the same language? This may seem like a trivial objection – this whole post is probably trivial – but I’m interested in the way that so many people just casually insult Gina Rinehart. Because honestly, what the hell do her arms have to do with whether or not she’s a feminist role model?

If you’re poor, then stop ‘drinking and smoking and socialising’, she barks.

Nasty people bark orders. It’s a small thing, sure, but the article is about whether or not Rinehart is a feminist role model, not whether or not she’s a nasty person. A better word would have been “lectured” (if you feel you have to use a word like this) or “said”. There is nothing wrong with said. It’s a very good word because readers don’t tend to notice it, so they focus on what is being said, rather than the fact that it’s being pondered/mused/uttered/barked. And it’s also a poor choice of word because dogs bark and dog is a word commonly used to insult women and you know I may be overthinking this.

Her philanthropic contributions to feminist organisations are negligible, she has campaigned to destroy decent working conditions and she refuses to see that opportunity is defined by social context. Let’s keep the obscene, unshared wealth of Gina Rinehart and feminism in opposite, warring camps, and focus more on the liberation part of women’s liberation.

Ah, Rinehart’s “obscene, unshared wealth”. I think we all have a philanthropic responsibility, because we’re rich people in a rich country. And I also think people can do whatever the hell they want with their own money. But when it comes to Rinehart, there’s an expectation – no, a demand – that she share her money (with who? With writers of opinion pieces?). Because women should care about others and help others and sharing her money with others is a nice thing to do and if she doesn’t share her money then she’s greedy and mean. And I’ll stop believing that this is what it’s about when I see an equal number of articles that casually mention that James Packer and Rupert Murdoch and Clive Palmer should share their “obscene” wealth.

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Posted in Feminism, Journalism, Language

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Old memes as new news

Posted on January 7, 2013 by | 16 Comments

Thank goodness we have News Ltd websites to tell us that slut shaming is a new trend perpetuated by girls on the internet. Because without their investigative journalists, how would we know about a meme that was popular in July 2012?

The story is MEME GIRLS: The sorry trend of ‘s— shaming’. That’s slut shaming not – as I first thought – shit shaming, which is something else altogether. “Oh honey, you really need to eat more fibre”.

News.com.au story on six-month-old meme

Slut shaming is a hot new trend, as reported by News.com.au

THERE’S some serious girl-on-girl crime happening all over the internet.

Women are posting memes ridiculing their peers for the way they dress and the make-up they wear.

The story – all five sentences of it – is one of the worst examples of journalism that I’ve seen in a long time. Sure, everyone’s still in holiday mode, but this story is appallingly lazy.

Firstly, it’s a story about a new trend on the internet that doesn’t contain a single link to evidence of this trend. (It doesn’t contain any links at all.)

Secondly, one of the images used as evidence of girls slut shaming each other is a captioned photo of a young women telling “citizens” to wear deodorant. Um…

Thirdly, only one of the photos has a credit (a vague “tumblr”), which is incredibly poor form.

And finally, if the journalist had done a basic search (you know, used a second source) they’d find Know Your Meme, which reveals that this meme had its day in the middle of last year – which is decades in meme time – and that the parodies were bigger than the original.

If you’re going to write about a six-month-old meme, then at least write something more intelligent/useful than just five sentences of “oooh, sluts! Sluts! I get to write SLUTS in my news story!”.

As for “happening all over the internet”? The vast majority of slut shaming and abuse that happens on the internet is perpetuated by men against women. But never let the truth get in the way of yet another story about women being mean to other women.

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On wanting the PM to be everything

Posted on December 14, 2012 by | 28 Comments

When Julia Gillard became PM – and it wasn’t because she “knifed him” as the MSM mindlessly repeats, but because the majority of the ALP decided that she’d be better than Kevin Rudd – I got very excited.

Very.

excited

I’m not a Labor voter, but I was so very very pleased that we FINALLY had a woman as Prime Minister.

And even though I disagree with the ALP on lots of issues (like their breathtakingly cruel asylum seeker stance) I think Julia Gillard is doing a pretty good job. Particularly faced with a hostile/stupid media who are being taken for a ride by the Opposition and who berate the Government for not being able to get their message across when at every policy announcement they ask the same questions about leadership, the latest Opposition beat-up and blah blah blah. Seriously, political journos have no idea how silly they look to the rest of us.

Of course, as a woman in power, she is being held to an impossibly high standard. If she isn’t considered The World’s Greatest Leader by people on both sides of politics then it will be taken by many as “proof” that she wasn’t a very good PM. Which, apart from being fucked, is fucking ridiculous.

Anyway, I realised something on Saturday. (It was during a pub lunch that started with tequila and finished with me ranting at my poor friend at 2am, so be kind.)

A lot of us want Australia’s first female Prime Minister to be AMAZING. We want her to make Australia a better place so we can point and say, “See? She did that”. We want her to implement marriage equality, save the environment, pump funding into public education, end homelessness, increase support for people on low incomes, and to do all these things even if the rest of the ALP doesn’t support them.

In other words, we want the leader of the ALP to be an autocratic Green.

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In the future, even the robots will be feminists

Posted on November 20, 2012 by | 4 Comments

On December 5, I’ll be hosting the 55th Down Under Feminists Carnival. 55 is a good number. It’s like two numbers spooning. Or a cropped top and buttocks. Or collarbones and boobs. Everyone loves boobs. (Which, frankly, would be a better tv show than Everybody Loves Raymond. As long as it wasn’t made by that “we’ve reached peak vagina” guy.)

Anyway, the DUFC brings together the best Aussie and Kiwi posts of the month. It’s a great way to discover new blogs, but also to see how freakin’ awesome the feminists on your internet are. You can submit your own posts, or someone else’s, via the carnival page, or email me at newswithnipples at gmail dot com. The current carnival is at 天高皇企鹅远.

I’m allowed to pick a theme that people might want to write about. So I did, because I do love a theme party: The Future.

On January 26 I wrote:

If you told me over Christmas lunch that 2012 would start with a two-and-a-half week discussion about the different feminisms, I’d have asked if you were on crack.

After a whole year of feminism in public – particularly the hugely successful Destroy the Joint campaign – it now seems quite sweet to be excited by two-and-a-half weeks, doesn’t it?

So, here’s what I’d like in the future. Or at least the next 12 months:

1. I’d like employers who discriminate against female employees financially and opportunitially – yep, that’s a new word, just made it up – to be named and shamed. Because making this shit illegal hasn’t stopped it.

2. I’d like journalists to interview – and photograph – fathers as well as mothers for their stories about children and childcare. I’ve only seen one childcare story in the Sydney Morning Herald that featured a father. One.

3. I’d like moderators on news and comment websites to realise that they don’t need to publish every comment, and the dumbass ones they do publish keep the intelligent commenters away.

What’s on your 2013 feminist wish list?

(I wanted to illustrate this post with a picture of a female robot doing awesome stuff, because robots are cool. Do you know how hard it is to find an image of a female robot who isn’t a heterosexual teenage boy’s wet dream? The only difference between “female robot” and “sexy female robot” in google images is the suggestion of anal sex. And the real actual girl robots only do “girl” things like singing and being charming, or walking on a catwalk. This is the only one I could find that wasn’t drawn like it wanted you to fuck it, big boy, or wasn’t pushing a shopping trolley. Can someone draw an awesome lady robot for me, pretty please?)

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Feminists are taking over your internet

Posted on November 5, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Head over to Steph’s place at 天高皇企鹅远 to check out the latest edition of the Down Under Feminists Carnival:

DUFC logo of the symbol for female, with the Southern Cross in the circle

There are great posts on sex and sexuality, politics, performance art and bodies, women in the media, families and motherhood, and Ada Lovelace day. Steph has done a great job putting it all together.

I’ll be hosting the next one, so send me all the great Aussie and Kiwi posts you read this month. I thought the theme should be The Future. It’s been an amazing year for feminism, because all the dickwaddery has been pointed out loud and clear. It’s been laughed at, mocked, and we have the t-shirts to prove it. As Jane Caro wrote “If Tony Abbott needs to be seen as a feminist before he can have a shot at being our next Prime Minister then we’re winning”.

Submissions via the carnival page, or email me at newswithnipples at gmail dot com. Carnival’s up on December 5.

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We’ve reached peak stupid

Posted on October 23, 2012 by | 58 Comments

Which, of course, means that from now on there should be less stupid.

A good friend sent me a link to what is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve seen on a news site in a long time.

The. Dumberest.

It’s on Yahoo, with captions by Kathryn Eisman: Twenty secrets every woman keeps:

A woman may give you her body and her heart, but there are parts she’ll never give up. Pieces woven into the very fibre of her being. Mysteries only hinted at in a brief, sly smile, an inscrutable laugh.

These are the secrets of lovers past, hidden fantasies and unshared longings. A woman’s deepest secrets that don’t – and never will – include you. You’re about to sample this hidden knowledge. But like any man who seeks it, you’d better be prepared for what you’re about to find.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA WUT?

The problem with putting together a gallery like this, is that it tends to say a lot more about the author than it does about “every woman”. Plus, it’s eye-wateringly predictastupid. Here are the highlights:

Secret six
You’ve made me cry more times than you’ll ever know.

Lady, this is not how you judge a good relationship. It’s really not.

Secret eight
I obsess about when you’re going to call me again. The period of time between our first date and your “I had a great time the other night. Would you like to go out again this weekend?” always seems stretched into slow motion. So don’t worry about appearing eager. Call.

Or, you know, you could call him. After all, it’s 2012 and this gallery is sooooo 2011. Feminism is so hot right now.

Secret nine
At the beginning of our relationship, I save all of your voicemails and listen to them repeatedly.

Ok, the combination of eight and nine makes me suspect that you might need to see a counsellor.

Secret 10
I’m constantly testing you. I observe, analyse and judge every action, word, gesture, e-mail and facial expression. When I ask you if you want to have a threesome, I don’t mean it. If you want me to speak to you again, let alone sleep with you after this conversation, the answer should always be: “Why would I want to sleep with another woman when I have you?”.

Any relationship that involves one person “constantly testing” the other person, particularly with trick questions, is not a good relationship.

Secret 12
I need constant indications that you want me around. That’s why it’s better, for example, to say, “I want you to come away with me for the weekend. Could you come with me?” than to ask, “What are you up to this weekend?”.

I wasn’t kidding about the counsellor.

Secret 14
Twenty secrets every woman keeps

Um. I think you missed one.

Secret 16
I start fights with you because I’m feeling ignored. Don’t retreat into your cave; just give me what I want: some attention. And never tell me to “calm down”, unless you want to guarantee that I absolutely won’t.

There’s a Medicare rebate for psychological services.

My comments about seeing a psychologist were for comedic value at first, but there’s a lot of benefit in talking to a trained stranger. It might stop you picking fights with someone you care about, and to see what’s really going on. If you do feel like you’re being ignored, then you should talk about that with your partner. I’ve googled you, Kathryn Eisman, so I know you’re an adult and not a teenager who is figuring shit out while being bombarded with cultural messages that are usually not good for anyone. Cultural messages like this gallery of yours. Or it could be time to leave that relationship. I once had a boyfriend who told me several times a day that he loved me, but I never felt more lonely. So I stopped seeing him. It was an excellent decision. I recommend that shit.

Secret 18
I may find your best friend repulsive, but I’ve fantasised about sleeping with him. Not because I want him, but because I want a piece of a bloke who is so close to you.

What the actual fuck? This is the one my friend warned me about. As he said, “I can’t imagine any other company so willing to insult half the population”.

I don’t believe that everything published by women about women has to be reasonably intelligent and/or feminist. I’m not interested in taking away someone’s right to publish something stupid. Because then where would Miranda Devine be? And I know there are plenty of women who denigrate feminism while enjoying the benefits of feminism. Oh hey look, it’s Miranda Devine again. But, really, Yahoo, this is what you think of your female readers? It’s not even on trend.

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Posted in Celebrity, Feminism, Journalism

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Actually… how to respond when you see some sexism happening

Posted on October 22, 2012 by | 43 Comments

A friend was talking with colleagues the other day about sexism and discrimination that they’ve witnessed at work. They knew what they were seeing/hearing was wrong, but felt they didn’t have the right words to challenge it. He asked me to put together those words, and TA DA!!! here are some words:

Statement: I don’t hire women in their 20s because they go and have babies.
Response: Actually, with every person you hire there’s always a chance they’ll leave because they’ve found a better job. However, when someone goes on parental leave they don’t actually leave the company, so the company benefits from the retention of knowledge.
Further: The business case for paid parental leave: Employers who provide paid parental leave show their commitment to their employees, and in return they get greater employee productivity and loyalty, higher rates of staff retention, and employees have increased job satisfaction. It’s hard to argue against that.

Statement: That’s reverse sexism.
Response: Actually, reverse sexism doesn’t exist. Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on gender. Something is either sexist, or it isn’t sexist.
Further: Sexism = power + prejudice based on gender. Any group in society can be prejudiced, but if they don’t also have power, then their prejudice can’t disadvantage anyone.

Statement: Someone tells a joke in which the punchline is sexist, or involves someone getting raped.
Response: Reply, “I don’t get it”. And keep repeating this until they explain exactly how it’s funny. It’ll make them look stupid.
Further: Some jokes about rape can be funny. This one by Tig Notaro is freakin’ hilarious (via Blue Milk). Also, telling someone their joke isn’t funny isn’t taking away free speech, because you can say whatever you want.

Statement: People are promoted on merit, not gender.
Response: Actually, that’s not true. In our society, male experience is considered the norm, and female experience is considered something that isn’t really important. It’s the case in politics, in the news, in popular culture, and in the workplace. Even when women “do ‘all the right things’, they are unlikely to earn as much or advance as far as their male colleagues” (50.1KB pdf).
Further:Yale researchers presented scientists with identical resumes for a lab manager position. One had a male name, the other a female name. The scientists rated the female applicant “signficantly lower” than the male in terms of competence, hireability and whether they’d be willing to mentor this person. The female was also offered a much lower starting salary. As Ilana Yurkiewicz writes, “We are not talking about equality of outcomes here; this result shows bias thwarts equality of opportunity”.
Further further:“Exposure to sexism is the greatest threat to the work performance of women” and Hidden Gender Bias in the Workplace.

Statement: I’m a feminist and I am anti-abortion.
Response: Actually, you’re not a feminist. You can’t support women’s rights while also seeking to remove their rights. If you’re opposed to abortion, then don’t have one. But let other women make their own decisions about what is right for them.
Further: If you are concerned about Australia’s reasonably low abortion rate, then lobby your local MP for longer paid parental leave, for cheaper childcare and more childcare places, and for real flexibility in workplaces that allows mothers and fathers to balance paid work with parenting. Mind you, if you are genuinely pro-life – rather than being against safe abortion – then you’re already doing that, right?

Statement: Feminists are ugly man-haters.
Response: Dude, have you been living under a rock? Feminists are HOT!

Let’s make this list Bigger! Better! Suggestions below and I’ll update the post.

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Some of Tony Abbott’s best friends are women

Posted on October 8, 2012 by | 37 Comments

I completely understand why women related to Tony Abbott are defending him from accusations that he has a problem with women. I have no doubt that he is a supportive and caring parent, husband, brother and son. (And, of course, they’re not just calling media conferences and speaking to the Daily Telegraph‘s Gemma Jones because they want the public to know the Real Tony. It is politics after all.)

This from Margie Abbott:

“I say to the people who claim that Tony Abbott doesn’t ‘get’ women: You get this. Tony Abbott is surrounded by strong women. In fact, not only strong but capable women.

“He grew up in a household with three sisters. He has encouraged me and supported me in whatever I have chosen to do.”

Just because you’re “surrounded” by women in your family, doesn’t mean you “get” women. It just means you care about your family. It certainly doesn’t make you a feminist. It’s how Tony Abbott acts towards women he’s not related to that reveals that he does indeed have a problem with women. After all, Todd Akin has a wife and I’m sure he respects and trusts her. But in his breath-takingly ignorant and offensive comment that women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape“, it shows that he thinks that other women – millions of American women – are probably liars and can’t be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies.

Tony Abbott also believes women can’t be trusted to make their own decisions about their bodies and their reproductive health. What is it with conservative men and women’s vaginas? In his own words, he shames women who terminate a pregnancy:

The problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience…. Even those who think that abortion is a woman’s right should be troubled by the fact that 100,000 Australian women choose to destroy their unborn babies every year.

He’s right, though – I am troubled by that statistic. Because it’s a lie. He’s wrong by about 20,000. And since he was Health Minister when he wrote it, he’d know it was a lie. He’d also know that most terminations are the result of contraception failure.

But check out the language he uses: 100,000 Australian women choose to destroy their unborn babies every year. That’s a fuckload of shaming right there. If Abbott really wanted to reduce the number of abortions, he’d be pushing for better contraception, rather than shaming women with words like “destroy”. (Check out Leslie Cannold’s great talk on shaming: I had an abortion… or maybe I didn’t.)

Tony Abbott even believes 14-year-old girls should be made to have babies, to punish them for having sex (no mention of the boys they had sex with, though. Funny that):

To a pregnant 14-year-old struggling to grasp what’s happening, for example, a senior student with a whole life mapped out or a mother already failing to cope under difficult circumstances, abortion is the easy way out… Our society has rightly terrified primary school children about the horrors of smoking, but seems to take it for granted that adolescents will have sex despite the grim social consequences of teenage single parenthood.

That’s right, if you’re a mother who is “failing to cope under difficult circumstances” – like an abusive partner, or illness, or that there just isn’t enough money – you should be forced to have another baby.

Those quotes are from a speech he made in 2004. In 2006, members of Parliament stripped Tony Abbott of the power to make decisions about women’s reproductive health. He had demonstrated that his personal beliefs were more important than the rights of Australian women. That Abbott believes that women terminate pregnancies “almost [as] a badge of liberation from old oppressions” demonstrates how little he understands, well, pretty much everything to do with women. Most of his own side voted against him.

He told women that the carbon tax would make ironing more expensive – then dismissed women who got annoyed by his comment as “hypersensitive”.

Then he made a rape joke.

The quotes from this video date from 1979 to 2010 (and yes, we were talking about this a few weeks ago, but that post was about the bigger picture rather than Abbott in particular, because it’s evidence that his ideas haven’t really changed):

Tony Abbott’s biggest problem with women is that we refuse to put up with his shit.

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Posted in Feminism, Politics, Tony Abbott

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