Categories: Meeja

28 Jan 2010, Comments (6)

Education Revolution: A complete 360

Author: Helen

Even in those heady piñata-bashing weeks of November 2007, I don’t think any of us were expecting the Rudd/Gillard government to be some kind of paragon of progressivism. By then, I was already low expectations R Us. Simply not being Howard, Abbott, Nelson and Bishop were the key to gaining my vote. It turns out that even this was asking a bit too much.

Murphy's law states that if you post a scornful article bagging someone else's web site, there will be a great big dog's balls of a HTML error just below the byline.

Murphy's law states that if you post a scornful article bagging someone else's web site, there will be a great big dog's balls of a HTML error just below the byline.



At first, I was a fan of Julia Gillard, a funny, combatative ranga who could reduce the baying saurians in the Liberal seats to a humiliated near-silence (assuming they’re capable of understanding and feeling humiliation, that is). She’s fun to listen to in question time, but she broke my heart with the part she played in the 2004 election. OK, so she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near environmental policy, but surely she’d come good on the social justice issues…?

OK, now my heart is thoroughly broken and trampled on. I’ve become the voter who cannot love. The infamous My School database/website has been released today (and very buggy it is, too), and what do we see as the very first headline on the dead-tree Herald Sun? OUR SCHOOLS SHAME. The banner on the online version? HOW DID YOUR SCHOOL RATE? So predictable. Don’t ask me how the Boy’s school rates (The Girl has just left the public system with an excellent VCE score and as yet no crack habit – the Boy starts year 7 on Monday. Serial only children, I haz them.) The website hasn’t worked successfully for me yet. And yes, I am aware of most internet traditions and able to work most simple interfaces, so I don’t think it’s me.

Back to Julia, who on assuming the Deputy PMship announced that she would bring on an Education Revolution. Well, since “revolution” can mean doing a complete 360 and ending up facing the same way as when you started, then OK, technically correct, Julia.

Trevor Cobbold in his article, The Free market and the Social divide in Education (PDF), points out that the My School website is a continuation of the commodification of education which features the establishment of “quasi-markets” in schools.

The publication of the results of each school is seen as a central component of quasi-markets because it is supposed to inform parent choice…
The Rudd government has maintained and extended the focus on markets and competition in education… It has not reversed any of the key measures of the Howard government.
…It is paradoxical that a government which calls itself progressive is implementing the policies of its erstwhile conservative predecessor.

Progressive? They’re starting to make the previous government look more progressive:

…(A)s far as education policy is concerned, the Rudd Government has given John Howard and David Kemp another term in office…(The PM) says that schools that fail to improve will be subject to “tough action”, including firing principals and senior staff and closing schools. This is something that Kemp could only dream of.

And a Labor government that can actually introduce policies that aren’t the previous government’s leftovers plus spin from a personable pollie – that’s something that I can only dream of.

Robert Merkel at LP has more on the nuts and bolts behind the My School website.

30 Sep 2009, Comments (14)

Times On Line Journalist First Woman to Speak Up about Sexism

Author: Helen

Janice Turner writes about everyday sexism – you know, the ordinary stuff which we soak in – and invites readers to submit their own stories. (H/T: The F Word.) Which is a great idea, no? Except:

When The Times published my article last month on how feminism’s silence over the past decade has ushered in a grim, sexualised culture, I was astonished by the response. Hundreds of women — and some men — commented on the website, many more e-mailed me directly. The message overwhelmingly was: thank God, someone is saying this — I thought I was alone.

Get that? Don’t Blame the Patriarchy; it’s feminism’s silence which is responsible for the grim, sexualised culture. Leave the patriarchy out of it; what did feminism expect, going out dressed like that? It didn’t scream or try to run away!

It’s just that I’ve had it up to here with the “feminists have been silent about…” trope that springs up everywhere in the media both on line and off.

As far as daily life goes, in her anecdote about the newspaper editor, she illustrates beautifully the “not ruining the entire afternoon” and “not wanting to be the strident joy-killer” pressures that weigh on women and girls who are already conditioned to be nice and nonconfrontational. As well as the forces of “get over it” and “sense of humour” and “overreacting”, there’s the Concern Troll which sometimes appears when we do bring the topic of everyday sexism: Why are you blogging/writing talking about this trivia which is only the concern of rich, western white women? Why are you Silent about [insert preferred topic here]. As many of us don’t want to be entitled whingers, that shuts us up, too. It would be nice if Turner could have paid some attention to the pressures that silence us.

Turning to the writing thing, for one, most of us – unlike Turner – don’t have a platform in the mainstream media. Indeed, you don’t go out and force yourself into the mainstream media as an opinion writer; you get invited in, so how she could judge us as silent or not in the days before blogging is a mystery. It’s also a mystery why she should blame feminist “silence” instead of the much more likely assumption that the mainstream doesn’t like us and that a male dominated media company and editorial staff are likely to reflect that dislike. Most importantly, she demonstrates a lack of knowledge or disregard of just what has been going on in the online world for the last decade.

Turner could educate herself a little as to just how silent feminists have been by going through the archives at Feministe, Shakesville and its predecessor Shakespeare’s Sister, Pandagon, Feministing, The F word, I Blame the Patriarchy, Hoyden about Town and of course I could go on (and on and on), but you get the idea.

Ad for Times on Line LUXX magazine featuring woman in crazee Couture with headgear like black bunny ears, described as Power Dressing.

I notice that Turner herself is silent about the fact that (1) the editors have relegated her article about a gender issue to the Life and Style section, again, and (2) her job of convincing any sceptical reader is massively reduced by having pictures like the one above on advertising links in the sidebar. (Power dressing? You have to be joking. Isn’t it hard enough for women to be taken seriously in positions of power without dressing up in ridiculous space outfits with little black bunny ears? Fuck off.)

But fear not, because, having discovered sexism in late 2009, she will now Save Feminism:

Feminism — or whatever you want to call it — is back, and we’re not going to take it any more.

Corr! Powerful stuff, Janice. Thing is, it hadn’t gone away. She just wasn’t paying attention. And that’s not a crime, but it makes her look silly when she plays the “Silence of the Feminists” card.

21 Sep 2009, Comments (20)

Black Harvest

Author: Helen

When was it that the word “harvesting” began to creep into the debate over the logging of old growth forest in our State? I can’t quite put my finger on it. It was some time last year that I became aware that the usual suspects – the timber lobby groups and their supporters – were using the word freely to describe what’s happening away from the concealing strips of forest left on either side of the tourist roads.

The words Harvest and Harvesting are freighted with positive associations. Although on an intellectual level we know that it’s mostly about combine harvesters and pea pickers these days, they’re still words which evoke the warm glow of late summer and autumn. Haystacks with horny lads and lassies in them drinking cider at the end of a long day. Heaped cornucopias of pumpkins, squash and sheaves of corn at the altar at Harvest Festival. Pagan and Christian rituals of joy and thanks. Baskets of apples as red as the cheeks of the pickers carrying them… Baisakhi, Gawai Dayak, the Moon Festival…

As opposed to this.

Clearfelling at Brown Mountain

A Supreme Court judge has compared images of a felled forest with a World War I battlefield before ordering a temporary ban on logging in a hotly contested part of East Gippsland.
Environmentalists claimed a historic victory after winning an injunction over logging of two zones of old-growth forest at Brown Mountain, seen as a symbolic battleground by greens and the timber industry.
The injunction will stand until a trial to test whether the logging would pose a threat to endangered species, particularly the long-footed potoroo.
Justice Jack Forrest said the case had been strengthened by photographs showing the ”apparent total obliteration” of a nearby site during logging and subsequent burning off.
”To put it bluntly, once the logging is carried out and the native habitat destroyed, then it cannot be reinstated or repaired in anything but the very, very long term,” he said.
Earlier, Justice Forrest told the court: ”I know what it was like before and I know what it was like after, and I’ve also seen pictures of the battlefields of the Somme.”

More pictures here.

In bygone days, the defenders of logging were at least honest enough to call it by that name. In South-Eastern Australia, “logging” of old growth forest means “clear felling and woodchipping”. “Clear Felling”, as practiced here, means the removal of all trees from designated areas, in mountainous regions where the soil is highly suceptible to erosion and runoff without those trees. The residue is then burned (firebombed) using a substance similar to napalm. Bulldozers, logging trucks and other machinery criss-cross the area, leaving deep ruts and compacted soil. The forest is then expected to regenerate “naturally”. The firebombing is compared to indigenous mosaic burning of the forest before European settlement.

Attempts to locate evidence of indigenous bulldozers have so far been fruitless.

No wonder the Judge saw a comparison to a war zone rather than a “harvest”. Next time you see that particular weasel word in the newspaper, in relation to Brown Mountain or any other remnants of our ancient old growth, remember that picture up there.

More background and action alert here.

6 Sep 2009, Comments (20)

Men, Women and Risk

Author: Helen

Anson Cameron glares truculently out from the AGE Saturday opinion page (photo, sadly, not featured on this online version) and dishes it out to all those panty-waists, girly-men, Deltas, Gammas and drones “with fat voices” who would dare to suggest that bushwalking by yourself in a remote alpine area minus emergency beacon, crampons and other necessaries? Maybe not such a great idea.

It’s sad to live in a time when a man is slated for walking alone on a mountain. A cowardly age where the supine pontificate through a spray of Cheezels crumbs. Could John McDouall Stuart have foreseen a day when Australians upbraided one another for going close to the edge? Could Albert Jacka have imagined so many of his countrymen would come to believe mollycoddling themselves through their allotted span and dying amid a symphony of chirps and beeps given off by medical machines was a life lived? What might Nancy Bird have made of an age where her fellow Australians sit there and tut, immersed in disapproval, while stunning themselves with whatever calorific high their lapbands allow? How despondent would Sir John Monash be to see so many of his countrymen lost in a Bermuda triangle of couch, TV and fridge?

…etc. Yes, I think we get the idea.

Other people were more about the positives of the Minister’s solo walk and the spiritual high which such an experience can give. A climber called Andrew Ramsay described the Mount Feathertop experience as like “a drug”.

‘It’s really spiritual. It’s communing with nature in a way, well to me, it’s like no other.

”I’m sure it’s the way surfers talk about big waves and solitary beaches. They’ve got the danger of getting washed on to the rocks or shark attack and things, and they’re out there surfing on their own in wild seas.”

One reason Tim Holding came in for criticism was the cost of his rescue, which was considerable (involving helicopters, 50-plus volunteers – with the concomitant risk to their lives and safety – plus a Super Seekrit spy plane which the owners, the Federal Police, hadn’t even unveiled yet. So, again the question was asked, and again the debate came down on the side of the bushwalkers, the solo boaters, the kayakers, and all the followers of extreme solo sports. Because awww, what a blow it would be to the human psyche if we weren’t allowed to push ourselves to the limit like that, even if in rare cases someone needs an expensive emergency rescue? How can we allow filthy lucre to dictate the extent to which we extend help to those who are prepared to go further than the next person?

Meanwhile, a debate with a very different tone was going on over at Crikey and the newspapers over the Victorian changes to the rules for home birth midwives, which turned, of course, into a debate about the pros and cons of home birth. The consensus on home birth seems to be that it’s terribly dangerous (which I haven’t researched in depth but appears to be untrue for properly regulated systems like the one they have in Canada) but also that it will direct taxpayer’s funds to the selfish wants of selfish, middle class (boo!) women!

Commenter “Chris Johnson”:

Since when did insurance companies hand out life policies to tight-rope walkers? If you use an unlicensed tradesman to build the family home you pay for the fall-out. So isn’t this debate about much the same? Improving birth options within the health system for the majority of users shouldn’t be interpreted as cracking down on a handful of people who prefer in this case to birth outside it. No one is preventing births from taking place at home or in the backyard swimming pool as long as liability for the outcome is accepted by those seeking the alternative. Directing taxes towards improved birth facilities in public hospitals where most births take place and where there’s a concentrate of medical and allied health professionals seems more constructive than handing out Medicare rebates to a minority opting for makeshift delivery rooms. We’d all prefer to be tucked up in our own environment when in need of family support but if we can’t offer the luxury to millions of ageing Australians it seems a bit rich to pander to .22% of our population. Our health system is begging for a revolution but there’s a national budget that can only go so far. Using taxes to install and upgrade facilities for the majority of birth experiences seems more logical and realistic to me. Wingnuts or selfish sods – take your pick Bernard.

What’s the difference between the two? Is it that extreme sports and exploratory solo journeys, while not exclusively done by men, are still dude-approved activities, while home birth is not something that any dude is thinking of participating in? Let’s line them up and compare:

Mountaineering dude: Very expensive for taxpayers. But it would be an inestimable blow to the human psyche if we discouraged people from following their dreams and pitting themselves against the wilderness.
Homebirths: Seen as expensive for taxpayers, so forget it. Selfish women.

Mountaineering dude: As the search and rescue leader told us repeatedly, Mountaineering dude could be responsible for the deaths or disability of others if there were further accidents out there as a result of the search in the terrible weather conditions. However, no injunctions against going out on Silly Walks.
Homebirths: If something goes wrong, a transfer to hospital is in order. If everything possible goes pear-shaped, it is possible that someone could end up dead or disabled. (The idea that this happens in hospitals too is rarely mentioned.)

Mountaineering dude: It’s a drug, it’s a spiritual experience. I need it to get away from the humdrum existence and relieve the pressure of my responsibilities. Chance to get close to something that’s bigger than myself etc…
The Plain People of Australia: Right on!!! And that spy plane is way cool boy-toy!
Homebirths: The experience of birth in the home environment will be immeasurably better for me and for the baby, although I always keep my responsibilities in mind throughout.
The Plain People of Australia: I’m not going to let the Government spend MY TAXES just so you can have YOUR EXPERIENCE, Lady.

And just a hypothetical – although one of these examples is true:

Mountaineering dude: Describes the Mount Feathertop experience as “a drug”. Is interviewed respectfully.
Homebirth mum: Describes her home birth experience as “a drug”. Is held up as an example of these irrational hippie moonbats.

Interesting, isn’t it? Mountaineering Dude and Homebirther seem to be a bit of a wash, risk wise. I can only surmise that it’s part of the tangled web of gender expectation. Men take risk, good; it all fits with the manly character (and the idea of venture capitalism) and is necessary and good. Also, their experience matters; they should be allowed to enjoy risktaking behaviour without criticism or undue financial …err, risk! (Wait, what?)

Women take risk, bad: Should shut up and do what we tell them to do. And their experience is neither here nor there. If they want a spiritual high they can do the Dude-approved thing and climb a mountain; Home birth, being very much womens’ business, can’t possibly be accorded the dignity – and tax dollars – that we assign to recreational climbing.

11 Jul 2009, Comments (7)

Ad Nauseum: Masterchef and fear of food

Author: Helen

Killer tomatoes eat Masterchef viewers!

As I mentioned over here, we have been glued, glued, I tell you, to Masterchef lately.* And the kids and I have been noticing a certain disconnect between the program and the words from its sponsors. While MC obviously is about celebrating cooking and eating delicious food, the ads that interlard the episodes are full of the usual Western fear of food and cooking.

There are a couple of ads which try to express the joy of cooking. The plug for Western Star (possibly because it’s for a whole food, not some packet additive-laden stuff), does it best. The Diary of a Mad Housewife commercial (Tessie the Real Cook for Real Stock) is giving it a go, but I don’t think they quite hit the spot with the cute, lovable madcap family. These ads are in the minority.

The ad for Master Foods just-add-meat cooking bases says: “Why cook when you can create”? Sure, this is just a cooking show, why on earth would we be trying to get the audience interested in (Gasp!) cooking? Cooking is too hard, people! And what does their distinction between cooking and creating even mean?

This is irksome, but the Uncle Toby’s muesli bar ad is downright creepy in its cibophobic imagery. A sports star tells us she has lived up to now with a crew of dieticians, coaches and sports scientists controlling her every move. Now, sadly, she’s out on her own and OMG how is she going to stay in control? Enter the calorie-controlled muesli bar that “helps you stay in control”. Control, control, control. Because some of the twiglets watching Masterchef might completely lose it and eat some pork belly or something gross like that! And balloon to a size 10!!

The connection between anorexia and the need for control is well documented. I have an uncomfortable image of certain people watching Masterchef as food porn while cautiously imbibing some weight loss “shake”. No prizes for guessing the gender of most of those people.

The commercials the kids find most fascinating (and counterintuitive for the program) are the Lite’n'Easy Meals. This is one of those “complete systems” where a guy with a van brings you a week’s worth of frozen dinners, you stick them in the freezer and consume one by one, instead of cooking. Calorie Controlled, of course. We see a young professional say something like, “I’ve never been able to cook, so this is perfect for me!” We’re just intrigued that the company flogging this “system” would choose to market it during Masterchef, which is trying to teach us that cooking is interesting, exciting and accessible to all of us, and celebrating fresh and intense flavour. Again, I get the mental image of viewers watching each episode wistfully, thawed frozen dinner, heated in the microwave, on lap. Because learning to actually, you know, cook, is just too hard.

Oh, and ads for Contours Gymnasium also feature on the website, just to remind you that you are all disgusting people who touch, ugh, food.

Masterchef is pulling the viewers one way, the sponsors are (in the main) pulling them another way, towards our society’s warped and unhealthy relationship with food.
 
 
 
*MC Australia doesn’t allow external links on their forums, so I’m returning the courtesy by not extending them any link love. Of course, there’s a link to the official site on the Wikipedia article.

6 Jul 2009, Comments (14)

What, no baby?

Author: Helen

Continuing the unrelenting pressure on women who might be having a few happy moments surfing the news and forgetting about their manifold duties to society, the AGE had a link yesterday to yet another “Panic! Ladies women still oblivious to the biological clock!!1!” article in the sidebar. This stuff is becoming manic. The article title is Are you Leaving it too Late?, but the text appearing in the tab when you click on it is “Don’t Delay Motherhood Experts Warn”, and the link text on the main page is “Ladies, are you leaving it too late?” OK, we get it, we get it! We’re all totally irresponsible – that can be the only explanation!

Does anyone else find the continued use of the word “Ladies” incredibly irritating and insulting? Please, Fairfax, cut it out already.

The gist of the article is that women are, of course, stchoopid. And uneducated about reproduction. Yes, that can be the only explanation for the failure of Australia’s women to produce more white, blue eyed babies like the one in the illustration!

That, and of course, their schtoopid insistence that they can “have it all”: AKA, actually use the education that they excel in to take on a job, earn money, gain independence and earn some super for their old age. Silly “ladies”! Everyone knows that we pay lip service to how women can do anything, but if you try to, you know, apply your qualifications, you’re trying to have it all and you shouldn’t be allowed to have a family. After all, how many men who work at jobs have families? Don’t answer that!

If you’d like an intelligent analysis of why most women don’t consider themselves ready for childbirth until their late thirties or later, try Leslie Cannold’s What, no Baby?, which focuses on the structural social barriers to childbearing.

while the percentage of women choosing childlessness or suffering infertility has remained relatively steady over the past few decades, the number of women who are circumstantially childless is rising at an astronomical rate. It is the phenomenal rise in circumstantial childlessness, not the childlessness that women choose, that explains a good chunk of the downward spiral of fertility rates across the developed world.
There is no question that women should be in charge of decisions about their bodies and their lives. Choices about motherhood – the whether and the when – are unquestionably theirs, and theirs alone, to make. But in order to be free, really free, to make a choice, people need a range of external supports.

And instead of putting the microscope again and again on these irresponsible having-it-all “Ladies”, perhaps these Essential Baby writers could find time to examine the currently fashionable figure of the cute, lovable eternal man-child, to whom the responsibility of family life are anathema and whose extended adolescence continues into his late thirties, if not forties. I don’t see any “Silly dudez refusing to breed” articles, do you?

2 Jul 2009, Comments (1)

Repost: Where’s Spiny Norman when you need him?

Author: Helen

This is a repost from the old Blogspot Cast Iron Balcony in March 2004. I was going to link to it in this LP post about Desmond Moran and the Melbourne gangsta thing, but the old blog has lost its template, and its paragraph breaks, completely. For those who perhaps aren’t familiar with Victoria and its obsession with things “Gangland”, I’ve reposted it here instead.

The gangsters of Melbourne have been having something of a killing spree lately. Killing each other, that is. There is even a special Task Force out on them called Purana, which the radio meeja takes great delight in pronouncing “piranha”.

None of us are perfectly consistent: I may be a bleeding heart pinko most of the time but I, too, have an inner right winger. It is hard to feel any sympathy at all for these characters and the temptation is to think “There goes another one! You Bewdy!” and perhaps award a mental Darwin Award.

Callousness is a two edged sword and something that there’s too much of these days, both in the blogosphere and the world at large. It’s to be resisted. Justice can be counter intuitive. Once you say it’s OK for one idiot to blow another away because the other lowlife blew his brudda away and anyway they’re less human than the rest of us, then you’re heading for Rwanda or Northern Ireland. And you’ll be no better than Ronnie Reagan. Remember that 80s joke? Reagan says, “Hmmm, you say there’s a new disease, it’s always fatal, and it affects homosexuals, prostitutes and injecting drug users?… And the problem is…?”

One good reason for ridiculing our homegrown Dougs and Dinsdales is that we need to stop portraying gangstas as cool. The Meeja pretend not to do it, but they can’t help themselves. I guess it’s too easy for a journalist on a deadline to whack in some Hollywood imagery to help a piece along. On the way to work the day after Lewis Moran’s death I saw a Herald Sun poster: GANGLAND KING DIES. Terrific! The Hun, usually of the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” persuasion, promotes this sad man to King status. This wasn’t on the online version, but we did have “Drama plays like a movie”.

A couple of weeks ago in the Australian, the wife of one of the gangstas had a bit of a grumble about it. Sorry, can’t find the link. Her opinion, that a group of younger wannabes at Andrew “Benji” Veniamin’s funeral, standing around in dark suits and black sunglasses, were pathetic and up themselves, reflected the views of many of us out here in the, ahem, wider community. She also mentioned, revealingly, that Veniamin was full of valium and on his way to his mum’s to get his washing done when he was killed.

Think on that, you young boys and girls. Is that glamour? Is that excitement? Valium, the drug of choice of bored Tennis mums in the 60s, and in the boot of the Merc, instead of another wasted gangsta, a load of smelly washing. Boys, organised crime isn’t glamorous; it’s boring. Gangsters are not people to admire; they’re clueless. ‘Benji’ wasn’t shot down in an exciting, Bonnie and Clyde-type scenario; he was sitting in a restaurant with a mouthful of Fettucine Carbonara*, on his way to his mum’s to get his washing done. As a crusty old feminist, sorry, I can’t resist a final poke: If he had simply learned to bung a load of washing in the machine and turn the knob, instead of being a knob, he might still be alive today.
 
 
*Embellishment alert: I do not know what type of pasta Veniamin actually was eating. It may have been Alfredo.

29 Jun 2009, Comments (14)

Spirit of P P McGuinness, leave Razer’s body!

Author: Helen

One of the scary things about getting older is watching other people, who used to be younger and groovier than yourself, age and settle into the sclerotic patterns of unexamined privilege and rightwing attitudes.

In the 90s, as a thirtysomething, I used to listen admiringly to Helen vocalising volubly on 3-RRR Triple J with Mikey Robins. You might have noticed I have a weakness for people who write hilarious, OTT rants full of subordinate clauses, tangents, abstruse words and the occasional runon sentence – Twisty and Tiger Beatdown, Elizabeth Farrelly sometimes. That’s a clumsy attempt to describe what I liked about Helen on the radio. As a thirtysomething in the 90s, I heard her as the voice of younger and hipper people, as well.

So who took away that Helen and replaced her with Christina Hoff Sommers?

I respect Helen’s childfree status – but she doesn’t, it seems, respect others. And all that boilerplate anti-Greens shit? “Hippies”/naive/”ancient-grains”/”patchouli” – it’s a wonder there’s no reference to hemp or volvos there, but you get the incredibly original and edgy jokey references that have never been made before, don’t you?

And the idea that she once voted Green because she was perimenopausal, and therefore unable to make a rational decision, is really special. Of course, that could be taken to mean that childfree women are equally unfit for Parliament because they’re all stark raving bonkers once they reach the median age for the MPs there. That just explains why no-one should employ a woman over forty to do anything, anywhere. Good one Helen! Seems there’s really no life stage in which we can expect to share in the democratic process!

Seems the spirit of backlash antifeminism has claimed another writing soul. And it seems in the MSM as it is today, that kind of writing is well rewarded. The punters love it – so maybe Razer has just made a rational decision, despite the dreaded perimenopause. It’s sad for us fans, though.
 
 
 
Crossposted

27 May 2009, Comments (6)

Balance! I’ll give you balance…

Author: Helen

Because of a deliberate campaign by the right-wing senator Eric Abetz, the ABC has gone out of its way to boost the Liberal voting and conservative element in the studio audience for the political discussion program Q & A.

ABC managing director Mark Scott told a Senate estimates hearing yesterday that, of the 2500 people who had attended the program this year, 34.4 per cent said they supported the Coalition, while 33.9 per cent voted Labor. Green voters comprised 12.8 per cent of audiences, while 2.4 per cent supported other parties and 16.6 per cent declined to reveal their voting intention…

…To restore the balance, Q & A producers leaned on Liberal politicians, firms such as Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers and organisations including the Australian Christian Lobby, the Australian Union of Jewish Students, the Australian Family Association and the Australian Retailers Association in their hunt for conservatives.

The Howard government has gone but their miserable culture wars live on. The ABC has to bow to the whims of wingnuts like Abetz or, presumably, stand accused of commie radical advocacy. There is a huge double standard at play here.

If that tactic had been employed by the ABC to boost input from people Mr Abetz didn’t approve of, it would have been called “stacking”. If efforts had been made to boost input from marginalised or less powerful groups in society, it would have been called “affirmative action”, and you know how well that goes down with the Abetzes and Albrechtsons. Oh, well, consistency, you know, the hobgoblin of little minds, etcetera.

12.8 percent Greens in the audience is called “over-representation”. When a single Liberal senator pressures the ABC to use affirmative action and stacking to increase the rightwing content of the audience, it’s called “balance”. Anyway, that explains why there are so many inane questions from young apparatchiks-in-the-making in this program’s audience.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo. Edited to correct typo “12.8 Greens” to “12.8 percent Greens

19 May 2009, Comments (12)

Heads up for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians

Author: Helen

Image of \"eve\" with an apple and snake, to illustrate the fact that sexual assault and simple bad sex is All Wimmins Fault.
Urrrgh!

I noticed an article in today’s SMH about yet another survey about sexual culture and mores which, of course, is in no way influenced by gender stereotypes.

Sex-education classes are failing to teach young women the skills they need to resist having sex they will later regret, an academic has said…

…Often neglected was the importance of teaching young women negotiation skills so that they could resist pressure from their peer group and partners.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia interviewed 68 girls aged 14 to 19 about the first time they had sex.

Read the whole article. What is missing here? Yup, that would be boys. And men.

I’m so sick of this deeply-entrenched idea that it’s is the responsibility of women and girls to police the boundaries of sexual behaviour and that, as we’ve seen in the Matthew Johns furore, men and boys are simply aggregations of brainless erectile material that can only be corralled, never asked to take responsibility themselves. As I’ve said elsewhere, and many have said before me, that view isn’t particularly complimentary to boys, is it?

I’m all for teaching girls to be more assertive, naturally. It comes with the territory of feminism. But not where it’s intended merely to compensate for boys’ bad behaviour. Why didn’t this study advocate behaviour modification as a necessary element in sex education for boys? Why can’t sex education address the rape myths and other toxic elements in our culture that keep the same bad things happening year after year?

As the events of the last few weeks have shown us, again, it’s not all about the girls.

(Update: H/T to Lauredhel for the totally-not-blaming-girls image, found on a page displaying the same article in the Independent Weekly.)

 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

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