Category Archives: Language

Warped reporting at Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph

Posted on March 4, 2013 by | 135 Comments

.

Trigger warning – this post discusses sexual violence.

.

It’s tough being a woman. We just walk down the street and then, out of nowhere, an assault happens to us. We need to be particularly careful of these disembodied assaults that just hang around until they can happen at someone. At least, that’s the impression I get when journalists report on violence against women: men don’t assault women, it’s just that women have assaults happen to them.

Today’s story is awful. On Sunday morning, a group of men kidnapped a woman and raped her. I can’t imagine how terrified she must have been and how much it must have hurt. I can’t imagine how any victim of a crime like this copes in the weeks, months, and years afterwards. I really hope that this post does not add to her trauma because that is not my intention at all. My intention is to make journalists think about why they report violence against women in a way that almost removes the perpetrator from the crime.

AAP was the first to report the story. On dailytelegraph.com.au they headlined it Sydney woman abducted and gang-raped by group of men, police say. On smh.com.au they headlined it Sydney teen abducted and sexually assaulted by gang. They are both passive sentences – generally frowned upon in journalism. But it becomes more sinister when you consider that passive sentences are usually used to deflect blame, to be vague about who is responsible, or because the person responsible is unimportant.

Four hours after they published the AAP copy, smh.com.au had an updated version (with two bylines and an additional nine words): ‘I don’t think it gets more serious’: woman gang-raped after men ask for directions, police say.

Call me crazy but I think the men did something more serious than ask for directions.

The journalist (Rachel Olding) even includes this sentence at the end:

The victim, who was not affected by alcohol at the time, has been receiving intense counselling and is being supported by her family, Detective Superintendant Kerletec said.

Now, I don’t know if Olding asked the alcohol question, or if another journalist asked it and she reported the answer, or if Kerletec anticipated the question, or if Kerletec believes it’s important, but how is it relevant to a story about other people committing a violent crime? What do journalists think it actually means if she had been drinking? That the crime those men committed is less of a crime? That it’s somehow her fault? That it’s ok for a group of men to assault someone who has been drinking? What? They obviously think it means something important, otherwise they wouldn’t have asked. I’d really like a journalist to let me know why they asked the alcohol question – why they always ask the alcohol question – because I’ve been a journalist and it never occurred to me to ask it.

Here’s the story on smh.com.au:

Standfirst reads: Teen allegedly gang raped after being forced into car by group who asked her for directions.

Standfirst reads: Teen allegedly gang raped after being forced into car by group who asked her for directions.

The men who committed the crime aren’t even mentioned.

Compare that to another crime story below it:

Standfirst reads: Four men attempted a brazen armed robbery near a Sydney shopping centre, witnesses say.

Standfirst reads: Four men attempted a brazen armed robbery near a Sydney shopping centre, witnesses say.

If the robbery story was reported the same way as the assault story, the standfirst would read: “AN Armaguard van was attacked early this morning while parked on a street in Glebe.” It might even include this sentence: “The van, which was not affected by alcohol at the time, had previously been at a bank where it collected a large amount of money.”

But wait, there’s more.

In one story, ‘I don’t think it gets more serious’: woman gang-raped after men ask for directions, police say, the criminals are barely mentioned in the first two sentences:

Police say an alleged gang-rape attack on a teenager in Sydney’s north-west is “as worse as it gets”.

The 18-year-old woman was abducted and sexually assaulted by a car load of five men after leaving a house party in Baulkham Hills on Sunday morning, police said.

In the other, Shot fired at Broadway: gang attempts to rob van, the criminals are the main part of the first two sentences:

Four men have attempted a brazen armed robbery of a cash-in-transit van outside a Sydney inner-city shopping centre, witnesses say.

A witness to the incident said three of the men approached the Armaguard truck armed with firearms outside Broadway Shopping Centre at 8:30am on Monday.

Two crime stories, both involving gangs of men, but reported very differently. Why is that?

Here’s the story on dailytelegraph.com.au:

Standfirst reads: A YOUNG woman has been abducted and sexually assaulted by a gang of men after leaving a house party in Sydney's northwest.

Standfirst reads: A YOUNG woman has been abducted and sexually assaulted by a gang of men after leaving a house party in Sydney’s northwest.

The bit mentioning the gang of men is tucked into the middle of the sentence so you don’t really notice it.

Now, compare it to the story below it on the homepage:

Standfirst reads: TWO priests are under investigation by church authorities in Australia and the UK amid allegations they abused two boys in the 1960s and 1980s.

Standfirst reads: TWO priests are under investigation by church authorities in Australia and the UK amid allegations they abused two boys in the 1960s and 1980s.

The focus of sentence is the alleged criminals, not the victims. Again, the opposite of the way journalists report violence against women.

We get this constant stream of “a woman was abducted on the way home, a woman was sexually assaulted while drunk, a woman was assaulted in her home, a woman had something bad happen to her because she was somewhere late at night” because journalists pretend that assault just hangs out on the street waiting for a woman to walk past so it can happen at her. Assault is not something that’s just part of being a woman, like periods or a squirty bot bot after eating three-day-old takeaway that was a bit iffy. Assault is a crime committed by another person. Yet it’s reported as though that other person doesn’t exist. There are two options here: one, journalists don’t bother to think about the words they use; or two, they want us to believe that men aren’t to blame for the majority of assaults against women. So, journalists are either stupid, or they’re arseholes. I don’t know which is worse.

Update: The smh.com.au story now has video. The caption reads: NSW police are warning women to be cautious on the street after an 18-year-old woman was abducted and sexually assaulted by five men after leaving a house party in Baulkham Hills.

No mention yet about NSW Police warning men not to rape women.

→ 135 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Language

Tagged , , , ,

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.

→ 22 Comments

Posted in Feminism, Journalism, Language

Tagged , , ,

The problem with Mia Freedman’s ‘leggings are not pants’ column

Posted on December 13, 2011 by | 56 Comments

As I see it, the bigger problem with Mia Freedman’s “leggings are not pants” column is not what she said in the column, but what she didn’t say afterwards. She was using what she believed to be a light-hearted point about clothing to introduce bigger issues around political attitudes, and I get that. And for many in her audience (judging by the comments on her blog), they get that too. But when it was pointed out by some readers that there are classism, ableism and sizeism judgements in the leggings as pants conversation, any good points that Freedman’s column made were immediately erased by her response: that they were wrong. Instead of admitting that she’d never thought about those issues before, she told people their views were not legitimate. Readers on her blog responded the same way, telling people to “get over it” and that they were “getting upset about nothing”. Critics were silenced.

I highly recommend reading Fat Heffalump‘s post on the isms around leggings: Cut the snarky fashion judgement crap.

The leggings as pants conversation is one we had here last year. I made a joke about it, but it wasn’t a very funny joke and I offended my readers. I relied on people knowing that I don’t believe anyone has the right to tell others what to wear so it must be a joke, which is not good enough when you have a public blog. So I apologised and updated my post. I had never considered the issues around leggings, but now I know better.

I also offended people with a remark about bullying in my Kyle Sandilands post, and updated that one too. I guess it’s about what kind of person you want to be: someone who can’t see their privilege, or someone who is willing to acknowledge how their privilege shapes the way they see the world. (My privilege: white, middle-class, able-bodied, in a heterosexual relationship. It’s almost the Western privilege jackpot, right there.)

And since I’m sharing the times I’ve offended people through my ignorance, I used to say things were “lame” until it was pointed out that I was using ableist language. From FWD:

“Lame” is an ableist word. It’s an ableist word because it assumes that having difficulty walking is objectively bad, and that therefore, a word which is used to describe difficulty walking can be safely used as a pejorative to mean “this is bad.” Using “lame” reinforces ableism in our culture by reminding people that disability is bad, and that it’s so bad that it can be used as a shorthand code to talk about bad things in general.

(And before you say “oh, it’s political correctness gone mad”, I’d like to point out that in my experience, people who complain about political correctness are just annoyed that when they use someone’s race/religion/ability/gender as an insult, someone will call them on it.)

Freedman is, of course, free to hold any view she likes. And she’s free to write about her views, just as people are free to disagree with them. But it’s disappointing that when informed of the world outside Freedman’s privilege, and about how her comments have offended others, she put her fingers in her ears and shouted “LALALALALALALALALALA”.

→ 56 Comments

Posted in Language

Tagged , ,

Comments and credibility on news sites

Posted on November 7, 2011 by | 14 Comments

A journo friend sent me this link and suggested it was one for NWN: An abusive battlefield for women at ADFA.

Many journos send me stories to blog about because they can’t. They have been silenced by heavy-handed policies that ban them from saying anything negative about their organisation and about their competition. Which means that anyone working for Fairfax or News Ltd can’t critique anything written by anyone else working for Fairfax or News Ltd. It’s something I’ve written about here before (in a post I had legalled yet my editor at the time still tried to bully me into removing it), and also in the NSW Writers’ Centre magazine, Newswrite, about how my job was waved in front of me when I wrote about one of the organisation’s other publications.

This silencing goes on in newsrooms too. In the last place I worked, any attempt to talk about the way we covered stories meant I was Trouble. A Difficult Employee. It meant I’d never get a pay rise, never get a promotion, and was encouraged to leave. Audiences (and journalists) were abandoning – and ridiculing – the publication, yet the editor, Mr Toupee, was not to be questioned. Surely the most obvious question to ask when audiences are laughing at you is: maybe we’re doin’ it wrong?

But I digress.

Back to the ADFA story:


MORE than 70 per cent of female students at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) have experienced some form of sexual harassment, according to a high-level inquiry.

Despite this, the majority of women surveyed by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick were positive about the military academy.

The second sentence sits uneasily with me. Instead of giving more information about that statistic – and that 70 per cent of female cadets are sexually harassed is ridiculously, outrageously high – the journo (Ian McPhedran) moves on to imply that the Broderick review says “hey, women get sexually harassed but it doesn’t bother them so we shouldn’t worry about it”. The information in that second sentence is important, but it shouldn’t be used to dismiss the first sentence.

I’ve had jobs that I’ve enjoyed, even though some dickhead sexually harassed me. The douchecanoe wasn’t someone I worked for or with, just someone in the same company on a different publication, so the two issues were separate. I’m not saying this is the universal experience. But it is tied to what the McPhedran article doesn’t mention – and I don’t know if the Broderick review asked – about whether the harassers a small group of fuckwads or if they are the majority of cadets? If it’s the former, then it’s easier to stop. If it’s the latter, then there’s a cultural problem inside ADFA and also outside ADFA if we are raising loads of people who think this is ok.

And, of course, since the article is about men doing bad things to women, the journalist has used language that removes the men from their actions. Check this out:

The Broderick Inquiry is one of six launched by Defence Minister Stephen Smith in response to the “skype sex scandal” earlier this year when secret film of a female student having sex was shared among male cadets.

There is no mention of the male cadet who made the film. There is no mention of the plan the male cadets made beforehand to film the sex. The film just happened. Possibly as the female cadet was having sex with herself. Oops. I don’t know about you, but that happens to me all the time.

But the true “joy” in this article is in the five comments that some bright spark at dailytelegraph.com.au decided to publish. I hate to think of the ones they didn’t publish:

Ubique1964 of Sydney Posted at 8:16 AM November 03, 2011
LOL is she really serious:- Ms Broderick has made 30 recommendations for cultural change to attract more women into ADFA and the military. They can’t control the woman in the Defence Force now and they want to add more fuel to the fire, look out fellas. Yes that is right, I AM implying that it is not always the blokes fault.

Yep, that’s right, ADFA can’t control the women who are forcing men to sexually harass them. Probably by wearing their army uniforms just a little too tight. And saying hello to fellow cadets. That’s a true sign of a slut who is asking for it.

Dan of Sydney Posted at 9:04 AM November 03, 2011
This sounds like a friday night at any pub in Australia. A storm in a teacup.

Dan of Sydney likes to sexually harass women on Friday nights. My guess is he’s a complete loser with no social skills who gropes women in crowded venues because that’s as close as he’ll ever get to a woman’s body.

Ex Digger of 10 years of Sydney Posted at 10:55 AM November 03, 2011
And if they can’t handle the unwelcome suggestions, I wonder what will happen to their feelings once some insenstive jerk starts firing Ak-47 rounds or an RPG at them! Perhaps they could complaint to the UN about the unwelcome advances made by the bullets and how the enemy should be made to stop such actions against females. And then of course, see a lawyer about compensation… Heaven forbid we should hurt anybodys feelings whilst training them to be unfaltering “leaders” on the battlefield. Nobody likes a soldier until the enemy is at the gate.

Can you imagine having to work with this knob? Being groped by your workmates is just part of the training, and if it hurts your feelings, then you aren’t tough enough.

I judge a news site by the stories they run and by the comments they publish. To be seen as a credible news source, you can publish the stories and comments that add to intelligent/useful discussion, or you can be the dailytelegraph.com.au.

→ 14 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Language

Tagged , , ,

Four powerful women is like Ladies’ Day at the races

Posted on October 20, 2011 by | 39 Comments

You had to know I’d be blogging about this nonsense from Tony Wright today: Ladies in waiting for Queen’s visit.

He’s talking about the Prime Minister, the Governor-General and the Chief Minister of the ACT. And yes, I know he didn’t write the headline, but a lady in waiting is an Elizabethan era PA to the Queen or Princess. Hardly the role played by these three women.

AS ROYAL visits go, it was ladies’ day: the Queen, the Governor-General, the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister of the ACT.

Yes, the PM, the GG and the ACT’s highest-ranked politician greeting the Queen is just like a racing club having free entry for women on one day so they can enter a fashion competition because women are only interested in clothes, and because if lots of women are there, then men who don’t normally go are more likely to turn up and spend their money on overpriced booze and horses they know nothing about, and so Fairfax and News Ltd can run condescending photo galleries the next day of drunk women so all their readers can talk about what slappers they are while peering for flashes of undies. He’s right, you know. It’s exactly like that.

The powerful women gathered on the tarmac at Canberra’s Fairbairn RAAF base, their husbands and partner relegated to bit players.

Oh noes! Men are just “bit players” because their ladies took the important jobs from them. Quick, someone get a glib comment Tony Abbott about what women need to understand as they do the housework.

The Governor-General, Quentin Bryce – a symphony in pink to the Queen’s quieter aqua – offered a curtsey. The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in sensible navy two-piece suit, bent her head a bit in what might have been construed as a bow.

As @popebrentus pointed out on twitter, no one has to curtsy for the Queen. But, predictably, we’ll now have curtsygate. This will be The Most Important Thing that journalists talk about today. Oh look, News.com.au is already on the case:

News.com.au curtsygate

OMG, Gillard did nothing wrong, that's the WORST THING EVER! It's time to call an election.

Wouldn’t it be nice if journalists actually checked the facts before ducking from those falling bits of sky?

(Update 11.20am: Since we’re talking about News.com.au, they’ve “moved the story on” to “Gillard defends” – which apparently took the news ed, a journo and a wire service to write, yet we all know the un-bylined AAP writer did the heavy lifting – but yet still no one bothered to check what the protocol actually is.

Update 3pm: The Age has also moved the story on:

Still no one at The Age has checked the facts

Still no one at The Age has checked the facts

But they’re presenting it as “Gillard claims” she did not break protocol. This is despite many people tweeting the link to the Royal homepage dealing with protocol, which very clearly states that a handshake is fine. When your whole story hangs off whether or not someone has to curtsy, you’d think the very first thing you’d do was check if it was true. If it’s too late and you’ve already published, then you make the story quietly disappear from your homepage and hope Media Watch and The Hamster Wheel don’t mock you too hard. *mumble mumble, fuckin’ amateurs in newsrooms*)

Also, I look forward to Tony Wright mentioning all those grey, navy and charcoal suits that men in positions of power wear when they meet.

Ms Bryce’s husband, Michael, and Ms Gillard’s partner, Tim Mathieson, stood by, while Prince Philip trailed his wife by a step or two. Yes. Ladies’ day.

Yes. Complete sexist nonsense from the national affairs editor of The Age that was front page news in two states.

→ 39 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Language, Sexism

Tagged , , ,

Removing the criminal

Posted on October 12, 2011 by | 23 Comments

Today in our ongoing discussion of how the culture we live in says that violent crime is something that “just happens” to women, we have the second most important story on smh.com.au removing the criminal from his crime:

According to smh.com.au, women just get themselves slashed

According to smh.com.au, women just get themselves slashed

Here’s a close-up because, frankly, my eyes aren’t that good:

A close up of the story

A close up of the story

Second only to a story about a store offering cheap phones is this: Sleeping woman repeatedly slashed at home:

A woman has been woken by an armed intruder who slashed her head, face, arms and legs with a blade in her western Sydney home.

The intruder is the one who did the thing that is newsworthy. Yet the reporting almost completely removes him from his crime. When you read the first sentence, you notice the woman and her injuries, but the attacker is buried in the middle. It also makes it seem like the worst thing that happened was that she was woken up.

If you want to keep the details of her injuries in the first sentence, it should read something like this:

An armed intruder has broken into a woman’s home and slashed her head, face, arms and legs with a blade.

Or you might want to go with something like this:

An armed intruder has broken into a home and attacked a woman with a blade.

It might seem like a small thing, but it’s really important. And apologies to people who already know this, but we’ve had a few new readers lately. We live in a culture that believes it’s cool to say things like “I’ll make you my bitch” and “you totally raped my eyeballs with that picture”; a culture that uses the threat of being raped in prison as a deterrent (ignoring the fact that people in prison are already being punished for their crimes); a culture that says women should do a hundred things/show common sense/take responsibility for their actions so they don’t get raped; a culture in which journalists remove the perpetrator when they report violence against women. This is known as rape culture. Before you send in comments saying “bullshit, our culture does not say it’s ok to rape”, I suggest you read this first.

Back to why it’s important that journalists start thinking about the words they use. As Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch (2009, p. 3) write:

news shapes the way we see the world, ourselves and each other. It is the stories of journalists that construct and maintain our shared realities.

When every story about violence against women starts with “a woman was” (instead of “a man did”) then, as a society, we believe that violence is something that happens to women. Like periods. Many first sentences don’t even mention the perpetrator at all, giving the impression that violence is just this disembodied thing that will happen all over you if you step too close to it. (And then, of course, what were you doing stepping near it in the first place?)

Unless we personally witness it, everything that happens in our world that is considered newsworthy is filtered through the eyes – and the words – of journalists. But journalists, in general, don’t give a single thought to the words they use. They are just following the pattern, the structure, that they have been taught and that gets replicated over and over in newsrooms and journalism courses. I don’t believe that it’s intentional – they’re just writing the way that everyone else writes.

After I tweeted about it, I got this response from Stephanie Gardiner:

tweet from stephanie gardiner

The power of twitter

The headline was changed to “Intruder slashes sleeping woman in her home”. We call that a win. Of sorts. There is still the matter of the first sentence.

Reference:
Wahl-Jorgensen, K. and Hanitzsch, T. (2009), ‘On why and how we should do journalism studies’, in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, Routledge, New York, p. 3.

→ 23 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Language

Tagged ,

If you’re drunk and get raped, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself, says NSW Police Commissioner

Posted on October 9, 2011 by | 267 Comments

Oh look, the NSW Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, is a rape apologist: Girls’ drink pact:

YOUNG women planning a night out should tell their friends if they plan to have sex to avoid unwanted and potentially dangerous drunken encounters, the NSW Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, has warned.

What’s a rape apologist? Well, I’m glad you asked. Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog has a wonderfully clear definition, that even people like Andrew Scipione should be able to understand:

The simple answer is that a rape apology is any argument that boils down to the myth that rapists can be provoked into raping by what the victim does or does not do.

Most people who make such arguments are not consciously intending to defend rapists. They are simply repeating arguments they have heard before and haven’t fully examined.

Clearly Scipione was sleeping through the several months of mainstream media coverage about SlutWalk. But it does go some way towards explaining why we still have police officers who believe rape myths.

While the non-drinking Police Commissioner is retreating from his earlier calls to raise the legal drinking age from 18, now he is calling on young women to “look out for your mates”.

Yes, telling people – not just young women – to look out for your mates is a good thing, but most people already do that. It’s a bit frightening to think that NSW Police’s anti-rape strategy is “hey women, don’t get drunk and you won’t get raped, but if you do get drunk and raped then you should take responsibility for your actions”. Not only is that offensive victim-blaming, but it’s telling women that they will be safe from sexual assault if they don’t get drunk, and that is simply bullshit. Scipione would know that.

Mr Scipione pointed The Sun-Herald to a soon-to-be-published study of 235 female university students, aged 18 to 25.

One-quarter drank twice a week and the same number drank heavily in a single session at least four times a month, the University of Wollongong study found.

Those who drank heavily were more likely to find themselves in dangerous sexual situations. And yet almost half said they never, rarely or only sometimes used a condom during sex.

I don’t know if Scipione doesn’t get it, or if the journalists – Nick Ralston, Saffron Howden – don’t get it, but unsafe consensual sex is not the same thing as sexual assault.

About 3000 people aged 15 to 24 are admitted to Australian hospitals each year for acute intoxication. Between the late 1990s and 2005-06, the rate of young women being admitted to hospital doubled.

That statistic is meaningless if you don’t give a figure. For all we know, there could have been only five women admitted to hospital for acute intoxication during the 90s, so for that to double in a decade is hardly cause for wringing of hands over young women not behaving like ladies anymore.

“In the past we always saw this overuse, the abuse, the drunken behaviour, the violent behaviour, the stupid behaviour … that was predominantly the domain of young men,” Mr Scipione said. “It’s not that way any more.

“It’s now unfortunately something that’s seen as cool: to be drunk as a young woman. For the life of me, I don’t know what’s that attractive about some young woman vomiting in the gutter at 3am after a big night.”

What’s attractive? Judgey Scipione, who gives a shit about what you find attractive? A woman’s purpose is not to be attractive at all times, just in case a man happens to look at her. If all you have to offer the public discussion around binge drinking is that you think it makes young women look unattractive, then we need a new Police Commissioner. One who thinks with his brain, not his penis.

Mr Scipione, the father of two sons and a daughter, said he wanted young women to take responsibility for their safety when drinking before they became victims of crime.

When you tell women that they are personally responsible for whether or not someone else commits a violent crime, you’re letting the criminal off the hook. You’re giving them an excuse for what they did. I wonder if he tells his son not to rape women?

Here’s the thing, NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione. I’ll stop blogging and tweeting about you being a rape apologist if your rape prevention strategy starts to prominently involve the following:

“Hey guys, when you go out tonight, DON’T RAPE ANYONE”.

→ 267 Comments

Posted in Blaming the victim, Language, Sexism

Tagged , , ,

Female soldiers have to fight the stupid at home

Posted on September 27, 2011 by | 94 Comments

Katie, one of my lovely readers, sent me this link today and pointed out the confusion in the comments: Women cleared to serve in combat.

The confusion and stupidity would be priceless if it wasn’t so frightening. But it’s still pretty funny.

Arthur, poor misguided Arthur, had this to say:

I still question the issue of potential sexual assault from both friendly fire and the more importantly (in terms of my arguement) the enemy. This has nothing to do with physical weakness or ability, it is simply to do with being female. In war sexual assault is used as a weapon against civillians and in the event women are in the front line would be used as a weapon against those women also.

Right, so if our male troops – ie, friendly fire – rape female troops, then it’s not the rapist’s fault, it’s the fault of the women for being there while in possession of a vagina. It also ignores the fact that men can be raped – and there are many reports of male prisoners in Abu Ghraib being raped.

Tahlia, the rape myths in the comments might be of interest to you too, and a timely example for your thesis.

Joe is a bit of a scaredy-waredy when it comes to feminists:

This is exactly what concerns me. As there will be a lower percentage of females than males in these sorts of roles, it will give feminists grounds to argue that standards need to be relaxed to encourage more females to join. We could potentially be putting soldier’s lives at risk by surrounding them with incompetence.

Because there are no incompetent men anywhere. Mind you, silly ol’ Joe also believes that there are more male executives than female executives because men are better at being executives.

Sean is either a concern troll or an idiot:

No, it’s a terrible idea. What if they get captured? The units will go out of their way to rescue them. Also, units with women in the front line will be targets for the enemy. And if the woman gets injured more soldiers will stay behind to try to save her. I believe in equality and am glad that our PM is a female but women should stay out of front line combat.

So he believes that when a male soldier is captured, the rest of his colleagues just leave him there?

Bootneck thinks that with women around, the male soldiers will only be able to think about HAVING SEX WITH THEM ALL, which is exactly what happens in workplaces around the country every single day and no work ever gets done:

My concern is the distraction of females on the front line. We have to remember that although we are talking about highly trained troops they are still young and full of youthful tendencies.

Seriously, how does the ABC get such idiotic commenters? Like Jim:

just a little more unravelling of the roles of males and females…..soon be a single gender species.

I personally can’t wait for the day when I have a vagina and a penis. I’d never leave the house.

I’m guessing that Alan of Manunda is single:

There is no privacy out on patrol for a female to halt the section to find a little private area to have a tinkle, something any bloke can do quickly and efficiently, ask the footballers in Melbourne who are always in the news.

And what about hygene? In jungle warfare you do not finish work at 5pm and then have a shower and put your feet up!
Depending on the operation you may be required to go weeks without a shower.

Kate, despite having a female name, doesn’t realise that you don’t need to have your period every month. I skipped mine when I went to Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Russia:

I support women in the front line if they are as capable physically and psychologically as men (and also not a distraction). It is my understanding however, that front line personnel cannot be reliant on prescription medication. I personally could not think of anything worse than having a menstruation cycle in a war zone.

As this link implies, you can be on prescription medication in the army.

And that’s about all the comments I feel I can read. One thing that keeps coming through is, “how would you like to see this happen to your daughter or wife?”. Well, if it’s your wife, then chances are you know by now that she’s in the military. If it’s your daughter, you probably know this is the career she wants. Maybe you even proudly went to her graduation ceremony. A frontline combat role is not something that will “just happen” to them, like jury duty.

Katie, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. And the thoughts from everyone else too, of course, particularly my two resident military experts, Pirra and kimsonof.

→ 94 Comments

Posted in Feminism, Journalism, Language, Politics, Sexism

Tagged

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Charlie Sheen, Prince Harry and disposable women

Posted on June 30, 2011 by | 34 Comments

That headline is an SEO bonanza, eh?

I was listening to ABC News24 yesterday and in all the stories about former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, newsreaders and journalists said he was accused of sexually assaulting a “hotel maid”. Her identity has been suppressed, but the mainstream media isn’t even calling her a woman. Had Strauss-Kahn been charged with sexually assaulting and attempting to rape a woman whose job was PR manager or stockbroker, journalists would refer to her as a woman.

The problem with headlines that define people by their job title is that we make assumptions about them. Since cleaning jobs in the service industry tend to be performed by migrants and by people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, we make a class judgement about them. I’ll come back to this point.

There is one good thing about the way the Strauss-Kahn story has been reported. Because the woman’s identity has been suppressed, the language of the story has remained focussed on the person who was charged with committing the crime. The story is about what Strauss-Kahn allegedly did, rather than about the victim. It’s a welcome change from the mainstream media’s usual reporting, which pretends that sexual assault is something that happens to women, rather than a crime that some men commit.

On news websites, referring to women in headlines by certain job titles is a creepy combination of cynical and sinister. Online journos know that if they put “model” in a headline, people will click on it to see how hot she is. It’s an invitation to judge her attractiveness and say yes she’s hot or no she’s not. Or, yes you’d root her or no you wouldn’t. If a woman who works as a model is the victim of a sexual assault, people will still click to perve and journos know this. That’s fucked up on both sides.

The story that got me thinking about this post was across all News Ltd websites in prominent places this morning: Prince Harry may or may not be dating a woman. Holy shit, stop the presses, that’s clearly the most important story in Australia at the moment.

Daily Telegraph image

The Daily Telegraph - any excuse to run a photo of a woman in underwear

It changed before I could get a screengrab of it, but News.com.au was running a main image of Prince Harry and Florence Brudenell-Bruce, with a caption along the lines of “Prince Harry is reportedly dating a lingerie model, the ex-girlfriend of Jenson Button”. Her name wasn’t even mentioned. So according to News.com.au, the only things worth knowing about her is that she models underwear and she was with a racing car driver until he got sick of her. Which is why she’s referred to as his ex, rather than him being her ex. Subtle, huh? We all make subtle judgements with our language without noticing, and I am trying to make myself notice it.

I heard about a buck’s party a while ago, in which two naked strippers had the groom-to-be lie on the floor holding a dildo at his crotch and another in his mouth. You can imagine what happend next. Now, if he had done that with two women who weren’t strippers, chances are his partner would be furious. (Of course, this is assuming they have a monogamous relationship that excludes strippers and dildos and I don’t know for certain that they do because I’ve never asked.)

Why doesn’t it count as cheating? Is it because there’s money involved? But if money is all that’s needed to make it ok, then you could just leave $20 behind each time you have sex with someone who isn’t your partner and say you paid for it. Or is it because a woman who provides a sexual service in exchange for money isn’t a “real” woman and therefore you won’t get into trouble. After all, if you met two women in a bar and went somewhere for some naked dildo action, you’d get your arse kicked.

Which brings me to Charlie Sheen, who was until recently the highest paid actor on US television. He was paid $1.2 million per episode for the awful, apparently family-friendly Two and a half men. (That’s terrifying, isn’t it?) But it’s well-known that there’s nothing family-friendly about Sheen’s attitude towards women. Anna Holmes wrote in the New York Times:

In 1990, he accidentally shot his fiancée at the time, the actress Kelly Preston, in the arm. (The engagement ended soon after.) In 1994 he was sued by a college student who alleged that he struck her in the head after she declined to have sex with him. (The case was settled out of court.) Two years later, a sex film actress, Brittany Ashland, said she had been thrown to the floor of Mr. Sheen’s Los Angeles house during a fight. (He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.)

In 2006, his wife at the time, the actress Denise Richards, filed a restraining order against him, saying Mr. Sheen had shoved and threatened to kill her. In December 2009, Mr. Sheen’s third wife, Brooke Mueller, a real-estate executive, called 911 after Mr. Sheen held a knife to her throat. (He pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.) Last October, another actress in sex films, Capri Anderson, locked herself in a Plaza Hotel bathroom after Mr. Sheen went on a rampage. (Ms. Anderson filed a criminal complaint but no arrest was made.) And on Tuesday, Ms. Mueller requested a temporary restraining order against her former husband, alleging that he had threatened to cut her head off, “put it in a box and send it to your mom.” (The order was granted, and the couple’s twin sons were quickly removed from his home.) “Lies,” Mr. Sheen told People magazine.

Sheen didn’t get into any sort of trouble until he called Chuck Lorre, the creator of Two and a half men, a “clown” and a “charlatan”. Gee, that’s so much more offensive than hitting women.

Holmes writes that value judgements “underscore our contempt for women who are assumed to be trading on their sexuality”.

A woman’s active embrace of the fame monster or participation in the sex industry, we seem to say, means that she compromises her right not to be assaulted, let alone humiliated, insulted or degraded; it’s part of the deal.

Our culture has decided which women count and which women don’t count, and I don’t know what to do about that. But I do know that the language that journalists use to refer to women influences the way we think about those women. It isn’t about taking a strident, pro-woman stance in the way you use language, but about asking yourself why you would mention a woman’s previous relationship before you mentioned her name. You can call me nit-picky, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with suggesting that journalists think about the words they use because words are their job.

→ 34 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Language

Tagged , , ,

Farr out, that’s sneaky

Posted on May 3, 2011 by | 18 Comments

Oh look, another sexist dinosaur who isn’t happy about the Prime Minister being a woman. Malcolm Farr in The Punch (aka “Australia’s best conversation” about really trivial shit): She is woman: Gillard’s gender still too hard to ignore. But he’s being very sneaky about it. He’s putting down female journalists in order to trivialise Julia Gillard.

There have been mutterings among some women reporters that Gillard “flirts” with their male colleagues, leaving the boys tittering and beaming at her special attention and jokes during press conferences.

Some of these miffed women might have swooned over a chat with Paul Keating or been charmed by Hawkie, but a flirty female PM – and it is low-voltage flirt if it exists at all – is unacceptable.

Some female political writers have given the prime minister fashion advice – not just in passing, but as a theme of their pieces.

Ah, so female journalists are just jealous because they don’t have a male PM to flirt with. And they’re making a big deal out of nothing because it doesn’t exist. And they’re not serious journalists because they’re only interested in hair and fashion. You know, Malcolm, just because some women know about hairstyles, doesn’t mean they don’t also know about other things. It’s not like our teeny lady brains only have room for one topic.

Elsewhere, there was the Sydney talkback radio caller who wanted to know whether taxpayers covered the bill for Gillard’s tampons.

Really? What radio station? What day? What time? I am deeply suspicious of claims like this because they are so easy to make up. And even if it is true, when journalists repeat such idiotic comments, it just validates their narrow-minded opinions. Would Farr have bothered mentioning a “Sydney radio talkback caller” who had asked if taxpayers paid for Kevin Rudd’s toilet paper? (And of course we pay for her tampons. Just like we paid for John Howard’s tracksuits and (perhaps) metamucil. Plus, Gillard is 49, so she might not be having periods. Oh, and if you’re on the pill you can alter your cycle because we don’t need a period every month, and if you’re on implanon you might only get a few a year. See how pointless and none of our fucking business this is to include in “Australia’s best conversation”?)

One of her female colleagues believes a significant part of Gillard’s political problems, specifically her struggle to have the minority Labor government accepted by voters as legitimate, is that she is a woman.

This Gillard supporter is convinced that the Opposition has a male core who privately list her gender as a disqualification from holding the job. It is as if some believe a law of nature has been upturned.

The Labor woman’s theory would be forgettable were it not for the intensity of the abuse of Gillard and the clear reality that many of the attacks would not be used against a man.

Her theory would be “forgettable”? Because what would a woman know about what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated profession?

In May 2007, Liberal senator Bill Heffernan launched into her—while Gillard was deputy Opposition leader—for being “deliberately barren”, and therefore ineligible to be a national leader.

The only reason this sentence is here is to remind people that Gillard is “deliberately barren”. He then goes on to mention Mark Latham’s attack on Gillard’s uterus. But there’s no discussion about whether or not Heffernan and Latham were out of line, just that they said it. So I’m standing by my first thought, which is that Farr is only talking about Gillard’s uterus to remind everyone that IT HASN’T BE USED SO SHE ISN’T A REAL WOMAN.

Only a male would toss around a woman’s reproductive history as if it were a genuine matter of public interest and public inspection.

Oh look, we agree on something. Only a male journalist would spend 216 words (of a 969 word piece) simply repeating what was said by male politicians about a female politician’s uterus, with no additional information or opinion to add.

Margaret Thatcher was always seen as a woman.

That’s because she IS a woman. Oh, the stupid, it burns.

If the Gillard Government looks like it will go down, there will be women forced to decide whether they could allow a defeat which might be used to disqualify other women from becoming prime minister.

And here’s where he really demonstrates what he thinks of our lady brains. According to Malcolm Farr, women can’t be interested in real, serious, politics, just in what politicians wear. He believes that we’ll all vote for a woman simply because we have vaginas. Because we all know that worked out for Kristina Keneally, and Carmen Lawrence, and Joan Kirner, and Rosemary Follett (although she was beaten by Kate Carnell, which probably caused vaginas in the ACT to go into early menopause because they didn’t know which other vagina to vote for).

→ 18 Comments

Posted in Journalism, Language, Sexism

Tagged , , ,