Tag Archives: The Punch

There’s nothing more pathetic than writing about how old people should disappear

Posted on August 11, 2011 by | 14 Comments

Ok, so you know I get a perverse pleasure from looking at The Punch and laughing at how shit it is. And rolling my eyes at how many Coalition MPs get a run in it. And feeling smug about how there’s no quality control (I’m thinking about everything written by Nigel Bowen). And shaking my head at how it’s all the same old shit that’s been published before and will never generate intelligent discussion in the comments.

Well, guess what? Surprise, surprise, today there’s a very stupid piece by Jason Tin saying old people are gross: There’s nothing more pathetic than an ageing star:

Earlier this week, Liz Hurley tweeted about the nation’s obsession with the movements (or lack thereof) of Shane Warne.

“FYI Slender Shane ate very rare steak and chips for dinner. Hold the Front Page,” she wrote, while totally not attention-seeking at all.

Ah, no Jason. That’s Liz Hurley taking the piss out of the “news” media, particularly the organisation you work for. She’s taking the piss out of photographers who have been camped outside her door to get a photo of Warnie, who think someone leaving a house is Very Important News. Jason, I’m a little embarrassed for you right now.

Looking at his profile page, he writes about things after everyone else has: beards, not owning a car, hipsters. That’s real finger-on-the-pulse stuff there.

There is also so much cross-promotional inbreeding going on that I wouldn’t be surprised to see a game show hosted by a grinning, two-headed, taxidermy fusion of Grant Denyer and Karl Stefanovic.

Neither of those people are old, so Jason, what’s your point? Are you writing about how you don’t want to look at people who are older than you, or about the fact that Australian tv executives are making the cheapest tv possible?

Then, of course, there was the time Channel Nine execs cracked open the Hey Hey It’s Saturday sarcophagus and resurrected its embalmed host, Daryl Somers.

As I recall, Jason, your news organisation ran prominent stories across all its websites about a Facebook page calling for Hey Hey to be brought back.

And then there’s some blah blah blah about the Logies. I guess he expects a country with a population of 22,675,602 to produce the same tv awards show as a country with a population of 311,960,177.

We deny them the privilege of slipping quietly into irrelevancy behind the curtain, leaving them unable to create the carefully-crafted illusion of graceful ageing.

I call bullshit, Jason. You’re saying that once people have a certain number of wrinkles they have no right to earn a living the way they want to. Are you really that shallow?

If someone chooses to age “gracefully” (ie, out of Jason’s sight) or wearing oversized hot-pink cat eye glasses and orange hotpants while yelling “boobies!” from the back of a taxi, that’s their business. Personally, I hope my days over 60 are an eccentric, multi-coloured, shouty bunch of fun. Besides, we all know that journalists who write ill-thought-out opinion pieces about how they don’t want to look at old people are the ones who fade into irrelevancy.

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Posted in Celebrity

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Nigel Bowen and the Evil Feminism

Posted on July 26, 2011 by | 18 Comments

Nigel Bowen is whining about his favourite topic again: how feminism is to blame for things that are unrelated to it.

And, surprise surprise, it’s in The Punch: Is the pick-up movement men’s answer to feminism?

Surely a better question is ‘Why are you writing about this when the pick-up movement peaked in 2005 when Neil Strauss published The Game and has been seen as pretty daggy since then?’.

Oh look, his opinion piece is actually about that book. How sad. Oops, I mean, that evil feminism.

Granted, pick-up artists want to sleep with women (and some want to sleep with hundreds of them) but that’s hardly an unusual mindset among the male of the species and not, in itself, evidence of misogyny.

This is true. Except that The Game uses the “neg” – insulting a woman to make her interested in you, simply because you want to fuck her. That’s hardly a respectful attitude towards women. And makes it hard to argue that there’s no “evidence of misogyny”.

Ever since second-wave feminism kicked off four decades ago, people have been wondering if an equivalent movement for men would emerge.

Really? Most people have been wondering if women are ever going to be paid the same as men. And if we will ever have a society that values the input of men in child-raising. I can’t imagine many people have been wondering if we need a social movement so that the work men do isn’t consistently undervalued, and so that men don’t have their arses grabbed at work, and so that men’s careers aren’t punished because they took six months off work a decade ago.

What’s interesting about the burgeoning, globalised pick-up artist community is not that it’s a reaction against feminism but that it is, by and large, an intelligent response to it.

Oh, this is going to be fun. I am eagerly awaiting Bowen’s discussion of this intelligent response. Particularly since the pick-up movement has NOTHING to do with feminism and is simply about superficial guys who want to have sex with hot women, but always get turned down because they’re creepy/funny-looking/smelly/boring.

At the pick-up school I visited (Damien Diecke’s School of Attraction), the PUA line on feminism seemed to be that it was necessary and largely praiseworthy but had resulted in some unfortunate consequences, chief among them men believing they had to suppress their masculinity.

Yes! He’s so right! I always make ManFriend suppress his masculinity! After all, it’s hard for him to be masculine when I have his testicles in a jar.

Exhibit A: The sensitive guy, who becomes everything women say they want in a man, only to find none of them are interested in him as a sexual partner.

You know, it’s pretty obvious when a guy pretends to be something he’s not because he wants to put his penis in your vagina. It’s also insulting because the dickheads who do this are making it very clear that they only see you as a vagina. It’s sad – and embarrassing – that people like Bowen haven’t yet worked this out.

The sleazy reputation may once have been justified but as Diecke observes, the community is heading away from that sex-crazed, game-playing, manipulative place it started.

So Bowen, at what point did it become an “intelligent response to feminism” that was not “evidence of misogyny”?

The increasing number of men flocking to pick-up gurus aren’t so much chasing sex as self-transformation.

They yearn to be the respected, powerful and, yes, desired man of their dreams.

What on earth does this have to do with feminism? I have a strong urge to pat Nigel Bowen on the head and say “there, there, it’s ok mummy’s special boy, the mean feminists won’t hurt you anymore”.

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Posted in Feminism

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Reading The Punch so you don’t have to

Posted on June 3, 2011 by | 71 Comments

One of my favourite things is to take the piss out of The Punch. Unfortunately that means I sometimes have to read it, but usually I can just see what they’ve published and roll my eyes.

Some days I like to call The Punch “I Don’t Know Why People Care About This Issue But I Will Publish Something Anyway And Demonstrate That I Simply Don’t Get It”. Other days I just marvel at how News Ltd gets away with not paying contributors. Sure, there are some good writers who contribute every now and then, but on the whole, it’s pretty blah.

And today we have a piece by GQ Australia‘s chief sub, Nigel Bowen, who demonstrates that making all the required cultural references doesn’t mean you actually understand why they were important: It’s the Return of the Battle of the Sexes.

Don’t let the headline fool you. It’s really just a piece about how women either think all men are rapists, or spend all their time sexting their friends with benefits.

For those of certain age (that is, old enough to have spent any time on a university campus between the early 80s and mid 90s), the controversies of the last few months – the Penny Wong meow-slur, Slutwalk, the Brocial Network, the Pippa Middleton Ass Appreciation Society Facebook page, ADF sex Skyping, Julian Assange’s alleged sexual misconduct – are like déjà vu all over again… Gen X women sure knew how to put on a feminist protest.

Huh? Since when is sexual assault a feminist issue and not a criminal one?

Back then, when what Helen Garner memorably termed “feminism’s grimmer tribes” still wielded considerable cultural and political influence, every female arts student had a copy of The Beauty Myth on her bedside table, all sex was rape, all men were rapists and women wore sensible shoes and expressions of grim determination to marches protesting sexual assault.

Oh dear, where to start with this one? I was at university in the 90s (and the 00s, and the 10s – I’m a sucker for letters after my name) and “all sex was rape”, “all men are rapists” was not a part of the feminism I knew. Perhaps in a small part of radical feminism, but you can’t suggest that they “wielded considerable cultural and political influence”. And would he rather women smiled and giggled when they marched against being raped and sexually assaulted. Would he mock the “expressions of grim determination” of a group of men marching against being raped? (As an aside, it smacks of “honey, smile”, that incredible sense of entitlement that some men show when they tell a woman, a complete stranger, to smile for them.)

Then an Ariel Levy reference, and a reference to Boomer and Gen X feminists (they think “their Gen Y daughters are ungrateful little sluts”) without understanding that women of different age groups have different concerns.

And then this:

Now, much to the surprise of everyone, the girls gone wild of Gen Y have taken a break from sexting their friends-with-benefits and debating which Sex and the City character they most resemble to march in the streets for, erm, no-one’s exactly sure but it definitely seems to be something that would have once been called “a feminist issue”.

No one is sure what SlutWalk is about? Well, fellow Punch writer Tory Shepherd didn’t know but that didn’t stop her publishing something on the topic, but all of the other opinion pieces in the MSM have been pretty clear. Perhaps, Nigel, you should have read at least one of them before demonstrating that you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. It’s a little embarrassing for you.

Oh, and SATC reference, check. Don’t let the fact that it’s a Gen X show, not a Gen Y show, get in the way of making your, um, argument.

Slutwalk is just the latest indication that the battle of the sexes is heating up again over, well, sex.

NO NO NO NO NO. SlutWalk is about demanding an end to our clothing being used to justify someone else’s crime. SlutWalk is about demanding an end to police perpetuating rape myths which stops them responding to crime. SlutWalk is about demanding an end to victims of crime being blamed for what happened to them. SlutWalk is about demanding an end to society shaming women for real or perceived sexual activity (I was called a slut when I was still a virgin).

So, as a veteran of the last war, my advice for the young men of today is this — if you’re dating an arts student, be prepared for her to announce she’s decided to become a radical lesbian-feminist separatist at least once before she graduates.

That was supposed to be witty, wasn’t it?

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Posted in Facts about women that must be true because they were in the media, Feminism

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I am a slut

Posted on May 16, 2011 by | 44 Comments

I am going on the Sydney SlutWalk on Monday June 13. And I’ll probably be wearing jeans and a jacket. Because you don’t have to wear fishnets, stilettos and leopard print to take part. (Here’s a hint to journalists covering the story: give the cliches a rest for the day. If you look at the photos from the marches around the world, most participants are dressed “normally”.)

Predictably, the story is getting a lot of coverage in the mainstream media because of the word “slut”. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s excellent that it’s getting coverage, but if it was the Walk Against Victim Blaming it would be lucky to be a brief just before the world section.

And – also predictably – someone writing for The Punch has missed the point. Tory Shepherd’s piece today: The sluts protest too much, methinks

Passionate protestors too often get caught up in their own hype and do themselves and their chosen issue an enormous disservice.

Last week a father who just wanted access to his children instead earned the wrath of a city after his one-man protest closed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and left irate drivers stuck in traffic for hours.

I don’t know the background story, but it’s a pretty safe bet that if police have stopped this guy seeing his kids, there’s probably a good reason – which is a question most journalists don’t appear to have asked. Anyway, back to SlutWalk:

Victim blaming is a horrendous compounding of the original crime, an archaic misdirection of shaming. It’s hardly a widespread sentiment outside fundamentalist Islam, inbred Bible Belt communities, and apparently the occasional police station.

Still, where it happens it should be loudly condemned.

Hardly widespread? I suggest you take a look at the way News Ltd journalists report violent crime against women. And the way Fairfax journalists report violent crime against women. And the way that Punch reader after Punch reader will suggest that a woman “asked for it”.

I think the name has a far bigger problem than that. People’s attention spans are spread so thin these days that everyone except the already converted will probably miss the point entirely.

Many will simply take away the idea that it’s now OK to call women sluts if they’re showing some cleavage.

Others will see it as an easy opportunity to perve on a bunch of semi-clad chicks. Older people and conservatives will see it as proof of the moral laxity of today’s women.

Well Tory, that seems to be your understanding of the issue. That it’s just about reclaiming the word slut and getting your tits out. You’ve missed the point and added nothing to the conversation. Ooh, and that’s what The Punch is all about, isn’t it? “Australia’s best conversation”.

Maybe you should have gone to the SlutWalk Melbourne website to see what the global protests are really about:

We are tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result. Being in charge of our sexual lives should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of violence, regardless if we participate in sex for pleasure or work. No one should equate enjoying sex with attracting sexual assault.

Join us in our mission to spread the word that those those who experience sexual assault are not the ones at fault, without exception.

It’s pretty funny that she says people will miss the point and then does exactly that.

It will have an effect on girls and young women who will see these protests in the papers, online and in the news. And it will reinforce the already widespread impression that sex, for a woman, is power. Or the route to power.

That it is cool, and tough, and desirable to label yourself a slut. That a woman should aspire to be sexy at all costs. That if you are not a slut, you are not cool, you are not powerful. That sex equals success – and a paucity of it, therefore, failure.

Um, what the fuck? That’s not the message AT ALL. But we really should thank The Punch for this contribution to public discussion. And for publishing this comment:

Tim says:
07:50am | 16/05/11

I would give more credence to this protest if all of the organisers hadn’t been hit with the wrong end of the ugly stick.
I don’t think any of them are in any danger of being victimised for their clothing choice.

And this one:

Sonny Carrington says:
10:01am | 16/05/11

If half of all the sluts in this country turn up for this protest, it will be the biggest rally Australia has ever seen. But I doubt the single mothers will have the will power to get out of bed – Since there is no mention of a handout for their participation.

“Australia’s best conversation”? Sure, if you like talking to douchebags.

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Posted in Sex, Blaming the victim, Feminism

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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).

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Posted in Journalism, Language, Sexism

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Did you hear that?

Posted on April 15, 2010 by | 24 Comments

It’s the sound of my heart breaking.

Check out the comments on Daniela Elser’s piece for The Punch: How feminism became the dirty new f-word.

It’s the same old bullshit from MRAs (thanks lissy!) on how feminists want to destroy men.

Eric says:
Feminism is just about women, as its name implies.
It’s a hate movement that blames men collectively for all the ills of the world. The main aim of feminism is to give every privilege to women at the expense of men’s rights.

Peter says:
Your right Eric. Just go out to a night club and follow the progress of events that lead up to 2 males fighting. Behind most of it is a couple of scheming women “just checking out” how far blokes would go to pick them up. They deliberately play one off against the other, laugh when a fight breaks out, and the men get locked up.. I guarantee you this accounts for about 90% of nightclub violence..

Peter says:
BTS you are 100% correct. If the world were full of female leaders, i can see countries going to war because one leader doesn’t like the colour of the nail polish the other one has got, or it might even come down to jealousy over a dress? All war is about money. Why do men love money? Because women love men with money? So i could say, if there were no women, there would be no war!!

And it goes on and on and on and on and on.

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Posted in Feminism

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Now the zombies are middle class

Posted on November 17, 2009 by | 3 Comments

I had a rotten night last night. Couldn’t get into a deep sleep. Was still just dozing at 5.53am. I did have one dream though.

I was back in the house of my childhood (I never dream about the house we moved to when I was 14), under attack from zombies. No surprises there as I’ve just finished reading the fantastic World War Z by Max Brooks. It tells the stories of the people who survived the zombie war. Even if you don’t like zombies, you should check it out because it’s so well written.

Anyway, we had sticks with sharpened ends to ram into their heads. Most of the zombies died (again) straight away. Except the middle class ones. The sticks wouldn’t go into their heads. Yesterday I had a rant at work about the ridiculousness of David Penberthy’s piece in The Punch, complaining about how no one has asked men what they think of female body image. Because, you know, middle class blokes always struggle to be heard.

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Want a glass of sexist Punch?

Posted on November 16, 2009 by | 13 Comments

Writing in The Punch today, David Penberthy tackles The Big Issue: Guys talk about female body image. Because, you know, men haven’t had enough say about women’s bodies.

ALMOST 70 per cent of men say that a woman’s face is much more important than her breasts, legs or figure, a Punch survey of male attitudes on female body image has found.

Yet the picture with the story – indeed, below this very sentence – is of a dorky-looking bloke with his face between two “hot” female arses. Give me a fucking break. Basically what he’s saying is “hey girls, don’t worry about your bodies, we’re only interested in a pretty face”. There, body image issues solved.

And almost two-thirds of men believe that women spend far too much time worrying about their appearance, and should spend less time fretting about what men think – because you are all much hotter than you think you are.

Wow, knowing that men find women much hotter than we think we are has solved female body image issues everywhere. Thanks for this important contribution.

It’s all bullshit anyway, because the wording of the link – “Joe Hildebrand talking about his love of fat chicks” – and the last sentence – “And if you are a chick, stop worrying so much” – just proves that they still view women as objects.

We were moved to embark on this project because the one missing feature from the important national debate about female body image is that at no stage has anybody asked the blokes what they think.

Penberthy, when all you have to offer the discussion about female body image is asking a bunch of middle-class blokes which body parts they think are hottest, then you can’t be surprised that no one wants your opinion. Call me crazy, but this is just another article on “what men find hot and how you can be hotter for men”.

It’s a pity – because there is now some interesting evidence that women are laying a serious guilt-trip on themselves and reinforcing stereotypes about their size and shape which have absolutely no bearing on whether men find them attractive or not.

That’s right. It’s all our fault. Silly me.

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Posted in Feminism, Sexism

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Fancy a digital touch up?

Posted on October 30, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Following on from Miranda Kerr’s new arse, The Punch has digitally altered a photo of a woman. Go check it out, I can wait.

There are a bunch of comments about how this isn’t news (um, this issue is news at the moment) and how people who know her will know the photo has been altered. Well, duh. The point is to show people what can be done. And when you compare yourself to someone in a magazine, of course you’re going to feel shit because they’re not even real anymore.

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Posted in Celebrity

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Nedahl Stelio’s Kerr defence

Posted on October 19, 2009 by | 5 Comments

A few days ago I saw those bony photos of Miranda Kerr and didn’t think too much of it. She’s a model – ie, skinny – and it could just be a bad photo. (It does, however, irk me that she’s always called curvy. Yeah, curvy my arse.)

But then I saw what Nedahl Stelio wrote in her Cocolee blog:

Is there nothing else to write about? Must newspapers make up crap in order to sell something?

And this coming from a celebrity/fashion writer. Pot, meet kettle.

She might be working out more, so has more lean muscle which is what this photo is showing, but I’m certain that if you bent her over while she was shooting Victoria’s Secret, her ribs would show. That’s the nature of skinny women, that’s what they look like.

Time to stop being shocked at it and realise that when this happens in magazines, they airbrush out the ribcage.

I wonder if Stelio wrote this without a hint of irony. To have made a career out of peddling the idea that if you starve yourself you too can be model-thin, while at the same time hiding what you’ll really look like. Sure, the articles in Cleo and Cosmo – where she’s worked – may not directly say thin is better, but the images that fill the mags are screaming it.

Stelio needs to decide what her message is and stick to it. A week or so ago she was saying “HALLE-FRICKING-LUJAH!!!” over German mag Brigitte using real women instead of models, and now she’s saying that rather than being pissed off by what mags do to photos, we should just get over it.

Now, I’m not picking on Nedahl – “Nedahl Stelio” has turned up in my search terms so I’m pretty sure she’s found me – but I think she is in a position where does have a lot of influence. After all, her bio on The Punch says:

She’s had a weekly celebrity gossip segment on 2DayFM, was a regular panellist on Beauty and the Beast, was a regular guest on Channel V, has been a guest judge for two seasons on Australia’s Next Top Model, was a regular on the Kyle & Jackie O Show on 2DayFm and has done a multitude of media – radio, TV, web shows – associated with anything relevant to the female segment of the 18-39 market.

So if she believes that thin is better/magazines should be able to do what they want to images/anyone bigger than a size 10 should never leave the house, then just come out and say it. Don’t pretend to be “sticking up for normal chicks”. It’s as bad as Sam de Brito saying he’s a feminist.

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Posted in Celebrity, Language

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