*Emerges from mountain of work, housework, family stuff*
*Looks around*
*Blinks*
*Notices that QoT at Ideologically Impure has put up the 40th DUFC: Bigger, better and with more punnage!*

*Cheers*
*Is buried for an unspecified time under more stuff as Work Mountain collapses*

It’s relentless, from the first bar of the cliched piano intro. As the first episode opens, Tim is followed by a bunch of subteen boys who taunt him about his lack of manliness as he puts the bins out. That sets the monotonous pattern from then on as Tim fails again and again to live up to masculine standards. He even visits JG’s workplace with a sandwich. Emasculating! His day continues as a mounting litany of humiliations. Gillard calls him “my little T-pot”. And while the Tim Mathieson character bears most of the weight of the superannuated tropes, as he becomes ever more irritated and frustrated (and as oblique jokes about his manhood are made by the minute) we’re given to understand that JG’s relationship is doomed to failure. A woman simply shouldn’t be under work pressure. Everyone knows it’s the woman who makes the damned sandwich, amirite? Even in the first episode we feel the relationship is so strained it must eventually crack, and then she’ll be all alone with only Bill Shorten the terrier and Bob Katter for company, won’t she? And serve her right for being an emasculating prime minister and destroying her man.

Clearly – still – the idea that men taking the role of partner to a successful woman are pathetic, and they’re pathetic because they are then comparable to a woman, which is terrible, still has great traction. I’m just about to watch Rush: a woman running about in a flak suit with a gun might be frowned on by some conservatives, but no-one sees her as pathetic and laughable. Women taking on mens’ roles might meet with resistance, but it’s because they’re a subordinate moving up. A man taking on (what’s still defined as) a woman’s role is looked on as moving down.

I can’t help but wonder what this meanspirited and patriarchy-fellating little show will do to the real-life relationship. No matter how Mathieson presents himself in his everyday life, he now has the “man emasculated by successful woman” lesson rammed down his throat weekly, and it can’t help but affect how he’s treated by the public when he goes out. I imagine it can’t help but affect the dynamic between the two of them. And if anything happens to their relationship, then the world will be all, “See, there you go, ball buster.”

And I can’t help but wonder how many teenage girls are abandoning plans for a bigger role in the wide world, because you know, it just makes you unloveable and makes your partner miserable.

Thanks, ABC.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo

One reason the Ramage case has been in the news so much is that it was the last time the defence of “provocation” was used in a court case in Victoria. That was the reason for the derisory sentence, and since the case exposed the enormous injustices flowing from that defence, the law was changed. The law moves slowly, but social mores change more slowly still.

The silencing argument that women of the Anglophone “Western Civilisation”, or whatever you would like to call it, are completely liberated, done and dusted, and have no business complaining about anything, has continued unabated lately. In such a cultural climate, a few people were rocked back on their heels when Phil Cleary and Julie Ramage’s sister Jane described her murder as an “honour” killing. But you know what? They’re right.

A couple of years ago I heard Germaine Greer reply to a question from the late Pamela Bone, as to why we (meaning anglophone “western” feminists) weren’t doing more to liberate our sisters in the Muslim world. Her answer was in two parts, and the first part was about our absence of standing in that world. The second part was that we haven’t yet cleaned up our own back yard. There is a pervasive myth in our “western” society that harsh and primitive crimes of misogyny only happen There, perpetrated by Them, those Others. Therefore, Western feminism is a hobby for genteel and well-off middle class women who enjoy perfect equality in their world. It’s false. Let’s not let them get away with it.

If Julie Ramage’s killing had been some kind of rare aberration it would still have spoken volumes about gender related violence in our society, but in fact it was just a very high-profile instance of a common and repeating pattern. Here’s the thing: Women are most at risk of being killed by an intimate partner when they have just left the relationship, or when they are planning to leave and the partner becomes aware of it. Think of the number of times you read “estranged husband / boyfriend / de facto husband” when you read about murder cases in the news.

Sure, there’s cultural differences aplenty between our anglocentric killings and the honour killings in other countries which we, rightly, deplore when we read about them. But they’re still about “honour”, a notion of honour which has been twisted and deformed by patriarchy until it looks like its opposite. Sure, the manifestations differ. Here in our more individualistic society we don’t have “but she can never get married now!” or “Shame on our family!” excuse. Instead, we have the “He just loved her too much!” “If I can’t have her, no-one can!” or some shit. But it’s the same thing, different continents; Control of women under patriarchal norms, whether it’s out and proud – as they are in the countries we finger-wag at – or flying below the radar, as in Australia, UK and US.

Instead of a ritualised, family mandated killing involving brothers or cousins or fathers – and how painful that betrayal must be to the victims – we have more individualised, but still family centred, killings where the betrayer is the person who has promised to love and cherish the woman; not the same in every detail, but still a horrible betrayal, the killing of a woman for a warped notion of “honour”. Not, here, the family-based “honour” but something more modern, the man’s ego or self worth. It’s the same thing, dressed in modern, individualistic clothes. Also, it hardly needs to be said, it involves the concept of the woman as property, which we’ve supposed to have left behind but which seems to just be thinly buried. As with everything else – our remotely controlled weapons, our Guantanamos and detention centres – we really excel, in the West, at disguising the aggressive impulses of our society to make our harms look more civilised or justified. In this case, we pretend that wife-killings are random acts of aggression rather than a repeating pattern.

This affects women of all classes, indigenous women, transwomen, up to and including women at the top of the income and status tree, like Julie Ramage. Privilege won’t save you here.

If Australians want to be smug about the fundamentalist fringes of Islam, we should take a harder look at the rising fundamentalism in the Christian churches in our society. Around the time the Victorian justice system was getting ready to release Ramage, it was jailing John McDonald for the murder of his wife, Marlene McDonald. Again, power and control was front and centre. Marlene had left the abusive relationship and was working at a truck stop north of Melbourne, where her husband believed she’d formed a new relationship with one of the customers. But it went further than that. “Ms Ritchie told the hearing McDonald had confided in her that she had been attacked by two masked men in her home one night but she knew they were her father and brother. “They both started punching and kicking her. The father was very religious and was saying over and over that she had sinned, that she had committed adultery … whilst her brother was calling her a slut and a whore,” she said in a statement tendered to the court. They continued dragging her by the hair to the laneway … when they got outside, her brother started using a baseball bat … She thought they were going to kill her.” She was right.

So, commenters on “western” blogs and news sites, let’s not pat ourselves smugly on the back and vilify feminists on the grounds that we’ve achieved absolute equality (I wish!), while they, over there, commit atrocities in the name of honour and therefore have to bear all the opprobrium. Our honour killings may appear different in detail from the ones those Others perpetrate, but in the end, the women are just as dead.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

Brought to you by Bluebec.

Next month – Mim’s.

Submitting a post or Interested in hosting a Carnival? The submission form is here, the Carnival home page is here.

This month’s carnival is brought to you by the mighty Boganette in NZ, who, you might notice, has moved from Blogspot to new digs at http://boganette.com. Adjust your bookmarks now!

Next month – Bluebec.
Submitting a post or Interested in hosting a Carnival? The submission form is here, more info here.

The Down Under Feminist Carnival 36 is brought to you by Creatrix Tiara the Merch Girl. In her own words – interdisciplinary iconoclast and creatrix of awesome, performance artist, production assistant, creative producer, writer, media personality, rabble-rouser, dabbler.

Deep in the Headquarters of DUFC, Chally is accepting submissions for May, which will be hosted by Boganette.

This article was free online when I began to write this post, but has since been taken down. I’m not sure why.

Every element in the layout of the article was loaded with subtle textual and visual digs, which is of course down to the editorial, not Rundle. The title, “Crayfish” Summer. A photo of Assange looking charismatic in the clothes loaned to him by his English hosts, next to a sign with a hump (hurh, hurh) and “give way”. All plausibly deniable, of course. (To be fair, the Monthly appears to be having a subtle dig at Assange’s supporters, too; the ASIS recruiting ad taking up half of one page of the article was a wizard jape, Monthly layout/editorial people! “Could you be an intelligence officer? Extraordinary work for extraordinary people! a career with a difference!”)

The first half of the article was not bad. Rundle stuck pretty much to the facts of the case which are routinely ignored by starry-eyed apologists for the Wunderkind du jour. Far from simply regretting a perfectly consensual one night stand the following day, as the popular story goes, the women went to the police to request a STI test because Assange had insisted on unsafe sex, and persisted with coercion when the women wouldn’t oblige.

But Rundle’s “forensic” (as a non-native Swedish speaker) reading of the police reports continues the obsessive tendency of many commenters to examine every action and utterance of “the women” in the most negative possible light, while looking for the best possible interpretation of Assange’s. None of this is new.

More disappointing, though, is that the last part of the article is a polemic against “invit[ing] the law into the bedroom”. Only in cases of violence against women does society throw up its hands and declare that the legal system has no possible remedy for crimes committed in a domestic setting. Cases of theft, arson, burglary and other crimes aren’t thrown out of court because they are committed in a bedroom. If the only point Rundle made was that the collection and interpretation of evidence in rape cases where the rapist is known to the victim, to the point which would satisfy a Western court of law as they operate now, is difficult, I would agree. But he goes much further than that. Rundle argues that to take away the option of forced sex (he wouldn’t want to call it rape, and I’m sure he’d like to think it was in some other category) would be unacceptable to men.

[T]he charges against Assange will amount to a criminalisation of consensual (if unenjoyable) rough foreplay, and of a sleeping encounter almost immediately granted retroactive consent.”

How can sex be “consensual” if it’s only “granted retroactive consent”? How is Rundle sure that “granted retroactive consent” is willing consent, and not “the power disparity between us is just too high, and I’ll be pilloried by millions of Boy Superstar’s fans as well as the usual suspects, so I guess I should just suck it up”? What about the word “unenjoyable”? The point of consensual sex is that it is mutually enjoyable. Are we now back to Justice Bollen’s assertion that a bit of “rougher than usual handling” is perfectly fine to get women to consent to sex? ¹

There is no evidence that the victim enjoyed it, but for the rapist to believe that he is not a rapist — that theoretical creature of evil and monsterhood — the victim must enjoy the rape, which will transform it into wanted rape-sex — sex that resembles rape and has all the desired benefits of rape (aggressive humiliation, sexual gratification, sadism, expression of power and domination) but carries none of the moral and legal baggage of real rape. This also aligns easily with gendered beliefs about men and women and sex: women secretly want sex, no matter what they say; men’s enjoyment of sex is the baseline to determine whether a sexual encounter is pleasurable; and that aggression, force, and a woman fighting back in pain is sexy and erotic. Thus, a rapist can rape a woman, but as long as he can find some way to convince himself she likes it, then it does not count as rape.
-Harriet J, Fugitivus

I think it’s vitally important to remember – in all the online sneering about the hubris of a woman presuming to think about consent once her body is in the proximity of a bed – that Ardin and Wilen were objecting to Assange’s sudden insistence on “bareback” sex. Given his promiscuity, this was objectively very dangerous. They were frightened of HIV transmission. They were “changing their minds” (an action which society, it appears, can only sneer at) due to new information which indicated a threat of actual bodily harm.

I find it interesting that this idea of forced sex as not-rape is retailed, not in some MRA or 4Chan page, but perhaps the most respectable, bourgeois magazine in Australia. It shows how Justice Bollen’s definition of not-rape still permeates the culture and goes a long way to explain why women who dare to seek legal redress (for potential bodily harm incurred, not even for the rape itself) are treated as dangerous, malicious people whose version of events can never be believed.
 
 
 

¹ In attempting to assist the jury to distinguish a true lack of consent from acts of mere “persuasion”, Justice Bollen said: “There is, of course, nothing wrong with a husband, faced with his wife’s initial refusal to engage in intercourse, in attempting, in an acceptable way, to persuade her to change her mind, and that may involve a measure of rougher than usual handling. It may be that handling and persuasion will persuade the wife to agree. Sometimes it is a fine line between not agreeing, then changing of the mind, and consenting …” (R v Johns, Supreme Court, SA No. SCCRM/91/452, 26 August 1992).

 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

Wasn’t March a busy month? For our NZ bloggers it was still a matter of coming to terms with the terrible Christchurch earthquake. Amanda of Pickled Think lives in the Canterbury/Christchurch area and has published her experiences during the quake and afterwards. She has had a story published in Tales for Canterbury: a fundraising anthology, a short story compilation the profits from which go to earthquake relief. Buy up big for friends’ birthdays and next Christmas. Deborah, at The Hand Mirror, takes a moment to remember and reflect on the earthquake .

International Womens Day

March 8 was, of course, International Womens Day. In No more men?, Shiny new coin SNC pre-empts the cries of “why isn’t there an International Men’s day?” and writes about a new study on women and homelessness. “It Could be You: Female, Single, Older and Homeless, aside from the irksome and unwieldy title, reads like a perfect storm of why there is an International Women’s Day.”

Here in Victoria, Great Southern Land writes about “ a pretty vile little tale of racism I’ve been tweeting my lardy butt off about, trying to get some media coverage for the ballsy gals in the midst of it all. On International Women’s Day the ballsy Gunai/Kurnai chickybabes at Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust blockaded the former mission due to a great many issues happening.” The Victorian Liberal government is staging a mini-Intervention in Lake Tyers.

Steph of All My Penguins had mixed feelings about a Melbourne panel discussion on publishing, Women in Print. Here’s Jo Case’s take on the same event. In Western Australia, Lauredhel is unimpressed with IWD offerings in the local news: “Happy IWD. Now shut the fuck up!” Fuck Politeness, in NSW, is similarly unimpressed with the local news outlets. Miss Eagle attends a Melbourne IWD cocktail party and encounters heavy-handed security, overzealous policing, and feelings of ambivalence towards the choice of speaker (Jenny Macklin) and political expedience. Over in NZ, Stargazer of the Hand Mirror blogs the IWD speech given by Rachel Simon-Kumar, a senior lecturer at the university of Waikato.

Pharaohkatt published an IWD post honouring women in science, mathematics, politics and other fields. From Pickled Think, Dear You, which, in my opinion, is going Straight to the Pool Room (a quaint Australian expression like You Bewdy and Bloody Bottler.)

Politics and activism

There was some controversy around the Wellington Young Feminist Collective. Maia of Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty, wrote a controversial post on the Hand Mirror, Is this what Feminists look like?”: Will we be taken seriously if we write about “lifestyle” topics on a feminist space? Here are some thoughts from Anjum/Stargazer, also at the Hand Mirror, In Support of Exclusion. (Update 5/04: Alternative views from QoT, Deborah and Coley in comments.)

In a Moral, if meaningless, victory, Nadia of Mixed Nuts shows and comments on a TV panel discussion in Pakistan, with a lawyer/activist and a teacher, both women, expertly pinning down a fundamentalist politician’s spin.

We’ve had a State election in Australia. Joanna at The View Down Here, a voter with a disability, used the iVote electronic voting system to vote from home in the NSW State election on 26 march. “But my question is; is this going to simply be a work around so the various electoral commissions don’t need to improve the distances to and percentages of accessible venues. I hope not. But sadly I fear so.” “But what,” writes Chally at Global Comment, “if the NSW and Australian governments were invested in disability services as much as they claim during election campaigns? That would mean confronting the situation for some of the most vulnerable disabled Australians – even the politically unpopular ones, like disabled inmates.” (Election Promises in New South Wales: Forgetting Disabled Inmates).

Reproductive Justice

NZ blogger Queen of Thorns at Ideolgically Impure has had an article published in the NZ Standard, Shrieking harpies to abort Labour?s election chances. “New Zealand’s abortion laws are shite, they are outdated, they do fuck up women’s lives, and it is time for a fucking change.” But of course, to mainstream politicians, it’s NEVER a good time to bring up this topic. QoT deals with the blowback (from “the Left”) in subsequent posts: Keep obstacles on abortion for Bob McCoskrie’s boner, Letters from a New Zealand basement: opposing opposition to opposers « Ideologically Impure , Dinosaur trips over own boner while tilting at self-constructed windmills and Way to dispel that “condescending Papa Bear jackass” rep, Chris. Fascinating, if horrifying, reading. More from In The Gateaux (Honourable mention for best blog name) with The Great Mansplainer.

Deborah at A Bee of A Certain Age blogs about the Pope sticking his nose into womens’ reproductive rights again in Don’t worry their pretty little heads about it. In The right way to talk about abortion, Boganette riffs on the timid and submissive way women, even activists, are supposed to behave rather than “demanding” such things as reproductive rights, which is so rude, isn’t it? LadyNews suggests we may have to be like Oliver Twist, with Please Sir, May We Have Some More Rights?

LGBTQI and Gender

“Gay marriage against my upbringing” I just I don’t even – Steph at All My Penguins tries to make sense of Australian PM Julia Gillard’s conservative statement on gay marriage, but can’t. “This is like some sort of word salad, a mish mash of sentences randomly squished together in the hopes of confusing us…”

In Masculinity and the fear of losing it, Blue Milk’s thoughts on the pressure to parent her son Cormac to be “masculine”. “…I confess to privately celebrating the girlish moments a little more. It is not because I entertain notions of undoing masculinity, it is because I recognise its dominance.” Mindy has written a companion piece at Hoyden About Town, Enabling Femininity? . “(I)s allowing our girls to wear nail polish and dress up in pink enabling femininity? Are we giving our daughters the wrong message?”

Bluebec Makes Trouble. “I wish it wasn’t the case that the way SOME gay and lesbian people treat bisexuals mirrors quite closely the persecution that gay and lesbians fought against for years.” And in A Quick Response to a bad Article, she responding to John Dickson in The Drum: “Is holding a moral view hateful? That depends on the moral view. If that moral view suggests that a group should be marginalised, stigmatised, and treated negatively for an attribute they possess, then yes, that moral view is hateful. And what you are suggesting Dr Dickson is the continuation (with sanction) of a hateful moral view…” Feminethicist discusses Facebook behaviour and the double fail on the part of some Facebook users – One, they equate updating someone else’s facebook account with rape, and two, the extreme homophobia endemic in the culture.

Queen of Thorns on privilege : “I’m a straight woman with Real Queer Friends…Because I am Schrödinger’s Heterosexual: my friends can never truly be certain whether or not I’m homophobic or transphobic or see the world in heteronormative terms until I demonstrate it. Until I fail the test.”
Coley Tangerina on the transphobia of NZ shopping site “1 Day”.

And as Deborah points out, male remains the default gender.

The Body

A Shiny New Coin muses on her newfound activity, roller derby, and how liberating it is to participate in an activity where her body is less under scrutiny as an object of social approval, even as she works to increase her physical fitness – unlike the gym. Stef of A Touch of the Crazy goes to the doctor for Roaccutane and finds that as a woman, you’re always seen to be in a state of pre-pregnancy. Kath of Fat Heffalump wrote a beautiful post titled Dear You (snap with Pickled Think!): “All those things that magazines and advertising and TV and music videos etc tell you aren’t good enough about you, that’s bullshit. They are designed to make you feel bad about yourself so that you’ll buy more stuff. They lie to you on purpose. They make lots of money by lying to you.” Fighting words. We both love Emma Thomson and we love this video. “Constantly worrying about your reflection and criticisng your body, shape and size is an act of violence against yourself.”

Feminethicist wonders why the personal products industry seem, in 2011, still so obsessed with being “discreet”, as though menstruation was still something to be ashamed of? Rachel Hills at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman remarks on the continuing use of dead women as a fetishist image in popular culture, videos, advertising – the latest example being the Rivers catalogue; plus a more general discussion of activism and admitting when you’ve fucked up. In which I get hysterical is a discussion of the use the word “hysteria” posted at Octavia’s Spitfire Emporium. As one of her commenters says, “the word ‘hysterical’… feels like psychological slap in the face every time I hear it, and a reminder, as if I ever need one, to shut-the-fuck-up.”

At Hoyden about Town, guest poster Frances of Corpulent announces the All Bodies Directory. “This is a site that will collate health care providers from across Australia and New Zealand who treat all bodies carefully and respectfully. Listings will be organised by state, by regions and by specialisations. I want this to be a really valuable resource for the fat community.” See Corpulent for the background story. From Spilt Milk, Description: A screenshot of some tweets under…, a most excellent rant on how the diet industrial complex has now been rendered powerless and no longer… What? Oh, she’s being sarcastic.

From Coley Tangerina, more Facebook fail – this time with Breast cancer ‘awareness’.

Lauredhel writes about the media obsession (not in a good way) with scooter users. Cars kill more than a thousand pedestrians every year in Australia, not to mention all the deaths of people in cars, so of course the ACCC and media are highlighting the terrible danger of… people with disabilities on scooters.

Stargazer at The Hand Mirror discusses commercial surrogacy: Can we talk about “choice” where there is a huge diferential of wealth, privilege and power? “good quality education is the right of every child, and shouldn’t have to be bought with a pregnancy.”

Race and racism

One of the items in the Knapsack of White Privilege is that you’re not taken as some kind of representative of your race if you do something especially bad or good. Chally’s post On representing ones race is about this privilege. Chally also writes about “speculative fiction where whiteness is either universal or presented as an ideal in comparison to social structures based on the ME”, and brown people are part of a paradigm of wrongness: Some opening thoughts on race in (and as) science fiction dystopia(s). The Antibogan discusses a study by Dr Halim Rane at Griffith University which challenges popular assumptions that Muslims are opposed to integration and reject Western values. In If only those poor people would stop breeding, Deborah of A Bee of a Certain Age analyses the Welfare Working Group in NZ in the context of historical policy-maker attitudes to the poor.

In The best thing a woman can hope for, Chally writes about her uncomfortable feelings about being the “whitest” looking person in the family: “The worst part is that other people think they are less beautiful than I am, feel that they are worth less than I am, have internalised idea that looking as white as possible is the best thing a woman can hope for.”

How to radicalise your population posted at Opinions @ bluebec.com discusses Islamophobia in the US and where it might lead – similarities with Rwanda, Japanese internment? Or there’s an example that’s familiar to many of us, but that’d be a Godwin’s.

Violence

Although this is a southern hemisphere carnival, we were all very aware of the atrocity of the Texas gang rape. Blue Milk points to the victim-blaming which appears to be unavoidable even where the victim is eleven years old – You’re never too young or too overpowered to be the slutty trouble-maker. Fuck Politeness points out that, as usual, public sympathy is focusing on the welfare of the 18(!) men and boys, whose lives are now ruined, ruined! Spilt Milk : “Is it really too much to ask of the media that rape be reported with sensitivity, accuracy, and care?” – Blaming a child for her own rape: it’s just journalism .

Also from Blue Milk, All the way – gray rape and third base, about the tropes of “gray rape / date rape / not rape-rape” which are infesting the MSM at present, especially since the Assange case. In On Rejection and power, Gauche Sinister, who wins the Blog Name award for this Carnival, asks the Nice Guys™ : “If you are too polite to proposition, too precious to be propositioned, too evasive to reject and too insecure to be rejected, how are you negotiating consent?” Tigtog has more discussion of rape myths at Hoyden About Town, with Mythcommunication and defending the indefensible.

The news with nipples has more to say about media reporting of violence against women: Journalism for dummies – the passive voice. She also responds to the self-identified feminists who nevertheless get on board with the victim-blaming.

At Fat Heffalump, Kath writes about the case of the bullied child on YouTube. Too Little Too Late. ” “What I want to know, to ask all of the people who are full of suggestions for Casey, is where were they when Casey was being bullied?” The onus to change behaviour should have been placed on the bullies long before Casey snapped. SD makes a point which I want tattooed on my forehead: “This is a recurring theme in our society, that it is somehow a responsibility to take preventative measures against bullying, rape, and other acts of violence or violation, rather than it being a responsibility to not commit bullying, rape or other acts of violence or violation. Why are the victims being expected to make changes…?” In Bullying sucks posted at Mim’s muddle, Mim points out the limitations of a Facebook anti-bullying meme; again, the onus is on the victim.

From Kate at 16 Impacts of Sexual Assault, 10 Reasons We All Need to Care About Preventing Sexual Violence. This is a specialised blog and this post is rich with links and resources. One for the bookmarks.

History and Society

From Deborah at A Bee of a Certain Age: Friday Feminists- bell hooks on Sojourner Truth – Sojourner Truth’s speech to the second annual convention of the women’s rights movement in Akron, Ohio, in 1852, a story which speaks of the racist roots of the early “social justice” movements.

Jennifer’s Travelling Feminist series at Penguin Unearthed has been wonderful – check out Travelling Feminist: Beguines, Travelling Feminist: Marie de Gourney, and Travelling Feminist: Jeanne de Clisson, Lioness of Brittany (Pirates! Aaaaaaaaargh!!)

Flat 7 (Ana Australiana) dissects urban renewal and privilege among artist / creative social groups . “I would hope, rather, to speak to the possibilities for processes and projects of ‘community-driven’ urban renewal that take even more folks along with them and think even more carefully about who or what that community is…”

The Workplace, in the home and Out

In Mothering and Belonging, Autism & Oughtisms reflects on being a mother of a special needs child. “… I am keenly aware of it and of how people treat me differently depending on which child is with me.”

Blue Milk asks: How do Australians parent differently[than USians? A study has suggested we have more workplace flexibility than parents in the US do.

Gladly, the Cross Eyed Bear presents a depressing insider's story of institutionalised sexism in the workplace.

Wildly Parenthetical writes about countering sexism, misogyny and harassment in academia. Some male allies - and it's nice to see them - suggest shunning, refusing to publish or invite to conferences, etc. And using formal complaint mechanisms can be very problematic for the women concerned. "Does justice need to be formal, or is misogyny better tackled outside the (equivalent of the) courtroom?"
Mary at Geek Feminism responds from the viewpoint of her experience in "geek" groups such as open source or fan sites, On feeling less safe.

Language and culture

Australia's opposition leader appeared at a tea-party style rally in Canberra, which included some breathtakingly misogynist signage like "Ditch the Witch" and "Bob Browns (Leader of Greens) Bitch". Which prompted Zoe at Crazybrave to write: "I know you think language is important, because you have claimed it is offensive to call someone who disagrees with something a “denier” because that language effectively identifies them as a Nazi sympathiser. So how offensive is it to refer to a woman in public life as a “bitch”?..." Freedom of Speech Does Not Mean Freedom from Criticism: Kath of Fat Heffalump blogs about the phenomenon whereby , when you push back against logic fail or cruelty or sexism or fat hatred or racism or whatever it is you do not like about someone's utterance, you are accused of denying them freedom of speech? Freedom of Speech, it does not mean what they think it means...

See also: On Being an Argumentative Killjoy.

Anjum at The Hand Mirror, in Language Matters, writes: "language matters, it shapes the culture and environment people live in, it can aid in marginalisation."

Watching The Hangover, Fuck Politeness feels the full weight of feminist despair.

...And more

Shiny: Deborah shows off her new bike and celebrates the Frocks on Bikes (with baskets) movement, which is fast encroaching on the lycra and road bike paradigm. "[It has] resonance with the early days of cycling, when bicycles were great liberators for women. Cyclng has seemed to me to be dominated by fitness and sports riding in recent years.” She also writes about not appearing on a TV show about journalism and laddishness, in Pick Me!

Stef at A Touch of the Crazy writes about a teenage girl who is fierce and proud, and the pressures she is about to face from the world she is gowing up in. In The women who’ve shaped me, Intermittent Blogger (Tanya) thinks about the women who have been her friends and mentors. And Coley Tangerina writes an absolutely neceessary post about that very vilified and denigrated group of people – youth.

Having a conversation about slut-shaming with your primary schooler: Blue Milk links to an article by Arial Clark, whose 11 year old son comes home from school with a Sports note, half a sandwich and a bucketload of slut-shaming stereotypes.

Donna, who writes about aspie and autism issues, writes about Sensory Hypersensitivities – how to how to “…work out strategies to most productively live alongside our own collection of sensation avoidances, sensation seeking and that to which we are sensation neutral”.

Mindy at Hoyden about Town writes about a beautiful example of male feminist ally-dom, and asks why there aren’t there Like buttons on everything? In Some kind of hopeful love letter to feminist men, Octavia is more cautious about male allies. I’d still put a Like on Bob, though.

Is there an absolute must-read from the southern hemisphere which I’ve missed here? Have at it in comments. But please, no comments like the ones in this Poem for Feministe Commenters posted by Chally at Feministe.

Now it’s over to Tiara The Merch Girl for Carnival number 36. You can start submitting posts for next months DUFC now!

More here and here.



To quote James Bradley of City of Tongues on Twitter, “The level of casual misogyny directed at the PM is truly appalling, and says a lot about those who endorse it.”

(Information on the Down Under Feminist Carnival for those of you who might be new to it)

You can send suggestions for Carnival #35 to the Carnival Submissions form, or just via email to h_smart_AT_iprimus_com_au. Otherwise, you could just put links for the DUFC in a comment on this post.

I thought I should at least nod to IWD, as I’ve been bad, as usual, and the day has sailed past in a blur of a full day’s work at the Mike Starr Memorial Dog’s home (and Cattery) , a load of washing, a load of dishes, garden and other diversions, OH THERE’S A TOPIC IN THERE. Ahem.

Yup. Missed it. I’ll have to do an IWD post next year. And I’d also like to link to the 33rd DUFC, brought to you by Leonine Anti-Heroine, which I also missed in recent kerfuffles.

Oh, and the CD launch? It went off.