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

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

(Transcript)
…As a single woman taking on the role, do you, are you concerned perhaps you’re giving up the potential to have a family? Is it compatible?

I like to think there’s a split second where Giddings gives the journo a death-ray glance before she breaks into her, apparently signature, charming smile. But that’s probably wishful thinking. Like most of our politicians, she knows she has to roll over and play nice for the press gallery, however shit her immediate questioner may be. They have the power to make her look bad. And she knew she was wedged. So instead of saying “what an appalling question, and beside being not relevant to the topic and none of your bloody business, you wouldn’t be asking a single man that if he was in my shoes today”, (Headline that day: Tasmanian PM proves Feminists Have No Sense Of Yumour!1!”) she said

If I had the choices, then, uh, it might be an issue for me, but I’m yet to find that man.

Which broke my heart. No, not because she hasn’t found a man! Because a woman who’s being interviewed on a rather important achievement and should be in a position of authority still has to submit to insults like this and laugh along.

I don’t know who the “female reporter” was, although I have my suspicions, based on level of reporting fail, proximity to Hobart and obsession with femininity performance.

Although Giddings tried to have a red-hot go at talking about her actual policies and qualifications for the job, this was what the Australian put on its front page today – “Leftist Lara still looking for Mr Right”. FFS.

To those of you who are going to say this is trivial and not political and build a bridge, this stuff matters. Sure, little girls are watching and learning that they can become Premier. They’re also learning that if they do, people will quiz them in public about their marital status and sex life and that for a woman, not being partnered or having children is a terrible loss of face. And they will get the message, still, that if you’re a woman and you want to aspire to the top jobs, you risk having to give up the family thing, but men don’t. (And, no, reporting family matters about Tony Abbott or Kevin Rudd isn’t the same thing.)

Journos, I know you’re having a difficult time of it, but is wilfully choosing braindead stupid questions really necessary? And does advancing the male-as-default-woman-as-curiosity narrative really have to be part of your job description?
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

-Unless you are have been raped in the socially approved manner, that is, jumped on by a stranger out on a dark night, your allegations of rape or sexual assault must be false, and in this case, must be some kind of deliberate “honeytrap”.

-Discussing “womens issues” like these is diverting attention from the really important things. Will women please stop spoiling everything all the time! *tosses toys out of pram*.

There are two forces at play here which I don’t trust. One is what one commenter described as the “secular canonisation” of Assange. He’s Che! He’s Ned Kelly! He’s… he’s… Jesus! The T shirts are being printed! And the quasi-biblical narrative of betrayal by the Female just go along with the whole excellent adventure.

One writer after another has tried to explain that it’s possible for someone to do useful and effective activist work and be guilty of sexual assault (not pre-empting the court case, just trying to counter the popular notion that a folk hero can’t be guilty) and that one does not necessarily negate the other.

Intelligent people should be able to hold more than one thought in their head at once. The point of this piece, once again, was NOT to speculate on whether Assange did or did not commit a crime — it’s to point out that the media narrative around this story has quickly become depressingly similar to every other media narrative around rape and alleged rape. (That is to say, ugly and victim-blaming.)

Largely, these arguments have fallen on deaf ears. Or eyes. Because Assange is a hero, he can’t possibly have done anything wrong. I’m not the only person who finds this cult of personality a big turnoff.


Living Colour – Cult Of Personality

Because – and this another thing which gives me pause – when the media says that Wikileaks is a fine piece of activism by “the left” and that any subgroup, like women, should shut up and keep quiet about anything negative, because, you know, ruining it for everyone – well, that is all of a piece with the fact that the widespread and active cyberactivist groups, 4chan and its spinoff group Anonymous, are Assange’s defenders, his cyberarmy if you will. And if you identify as feminist, 4chan are no friends of yours. Try googling “4chan” and “women”. While their leader eschews anything so crude, he is also capable, at the turn of the Twentieth century, of writing a sentence like “(For) man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.” The technical skill is cutting-edge, the social consciousness (and thus the will to social justice) is early last century. The massed forces of 4chan and other romantic admirers don’t have any investment in seeing women as human, at all. And Assange might be a romantic hero, but he has no actual control over an “army” of pimply-faced admirers who are prone to statements like “Rule number one of the internet is you don’t piss off 4chan” and “make me a goddamn sandwich”. As Mark B says, “Where is a truly alternative politics? It’s not that of 4Chan or Anonymous.” Or, as my dear old apple-cheeked Grandma used to say, “with friends like those, who needs enemas?”

Problem number two: We think we’re on the same side at first glance, but Wikileaks is aiming to fight top-down government power (by an attack on secrecy) – seeing horizontal layers, if you like. Feminists and anti-racists and others are fighting pervasive power which comes from privilege and which exists at all levels. Seeing vertical slices of power, you might say. (Or once you add the idea of intersectionality, it’s more venn diagrams of overlapping power systems.) Whoa, I am straying into the realm of Theory in which I am unedumacated, but more simply – what’s the outcome of this Excellent Adventure? When we talk about change, some of us don’t seem to want much change, just to unseat the people on top of them. If you know what I mean.

So, Mr Assange, I hope Geoffrey Robertson does you proud and that you do indeed get the full benefit of due process. I hope your two accusers do likewise. And I’m sorry this joy-killing feminist can’t bring herself to think of you as a superhero who cannot possibly do wrong. Women a bit older than me went all starry-eyed and handmaidenish about ultra-charismatic male activists in the 60s, and look how far it got them.

Hurrah for Ted!

DON’T let political correctness ruin Christmas, Ted Baillieu has warned schools and other community groups.
The Premier said Victorians should embrace the festive season.
He said schools should not back down from running Christmas pageants, concerts and nativity scenes for fear of offending minority groups.
“A Baillieu government expects school principals to take a reasonable and commonsense approach so all Victorian children have the opportunity to enjoy the simple pleasures of Christmas,” he said.
The warning comes after some schools and community groups imposed Christmas bans in recent years.

Ah, “some schools and community groups”. Could some journo – I suppose it’s too much to hope for a Hun journo, but could someone with journalistic credentials please do an in-depth investigation to find out just how many schools and community groups are actively forbidding expressions of Christmas cheer? I suspect the answer might be “very few”, or “hardly any” or “really could not find any examples of Christmas festivities being forbidden as such, just an overwhelming meh-ness about the whole rampant sentimentality and consumerism thing”, but that might crimp the annual Festival of “Let’s Whine about Political Correctness”, or Boltmastide. In short, we have no way of knowing how much of this urban myth is true and how much is invented out of whole cloth, but Baillieu is getting unlimited traction by fixing this non-problem. So important, we’re told, is the Attack on Christmas that the editorial was written about it. “Premier’s Xmas gift to children!” “…Nativity scenes and children singing carols and exchanging cards could once again be part of Christmas celebrations at Victorian schools.” Funny, that, because carols and cards and all that malarkey have never ceased at this end of town.

Anyway, I am guessing our cube jockey, like the Hun commenters, swallowed this annual Boltmas legend whole and had the article displayed so that the exceedingly diverse collection of people who had to visit her office would have their unchristian noses jolly well rubbed in this happy news.

Can we please examine this earth-shattering rescue of Australian culture for a moment, because like most sweeping statements made by Liberals, it contains a pretty illiberal undercurrent. If the new Premier now says that organisations will no longer be allowed to ban tinsel and Santas and Bethlehem dioramas, does it follow – as it surely must – that such displays are now compulsory? Will legislation brought in, and how does that reconcile with the separation of Church and State (if the Federal government’s obsession with funding chaplains and Religious Ed and faith-based private schools hasn’t destroyed it already?) Or will dissenters simply be subtly monstered, like the one example they did find – some Public service wretch who has now been “counselled”?

I have, really, as a person whose mother was a staunch Anglican for many decades, tried my best to think how I might feel if I was a practicing Christian faced with the cancellation of my kid’s school’s nativity play in favour of some other kind of end of year celebration. As church and community groups regularly put on Carols by Candlelight and other celebrations, I hardly think I could claim that had destroyed my ability to celebrate my religious holiday in the way I see fit; just not in that particular place. I might even feel that religious belief and religious festivals are part of the private sphere. Sure, I could imagine I might be a bit pissed off if I was really keen on the whole thing, but I don’t think they would be nearly as pissed off as I am at having my taxes spent on chaplains, RE, and faith-based private schools. You gunna do something about that, Ted? Thought not.

No, no Disney damsel in distress narrative here at all.

With a side serve of We Knew a Sheila wouldn’t be Up to the Job. Move outa the way, Gillard, and let the men do this properly.

HULK SMASH!!

Tools getting you down? I know the feeling.

This from Michelle Grattan, who I once respected so much:

“Knifed one day, needed the next…
…Move over Julia. Kevin’s here to help.
…Rudd looked positively prime ministerial when he spoke yesterday.

And the next day:

It’s the ultimate girl-meets boy encounter…His place or hers?

HURL!

…the woman who grabbed his job from him.
(John Faulkner was) a prime matchmaker for this bizarre marriage of convenience …

There’s more, but I’d really like to keep this nice Sunday dinner down.

So, Gillard can’t win. If Labor wins the election it’ll be “she couldn’t do it without Kevin10!1!”. If she loses, well, a chick just wasn’t up to it.

Headzup to the Oz media. You’ve already been called repeatedly on your crap (non) reporting. And I’m not Robinson Crusoe with my disillusionment and anger.

Shape up, please, before we end up with this.

I heard Kevin Rudd channelling Shakespeare on the ABC Breakfast program that morning, doing MacBeth and Duncan simultaneously.

KR: it’s far better these things are done quickly rather than being strung out over a period of time.

MacBeth: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (Act 1, sc 7)

Quite a contrast to a past era where Labor politicians expressed their keenness to do people slowly. But back to the Scottish play. It was an ominous coincidence, and the weather outside the kitchen window was obligingly dark and rainy, but in this case it appears there were four witches, not three.

“When will we four meet again?…
when the hurly burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.
That’ll be ere the 6 o’clock news set of sun.
Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
DRASTICK ACSHUN MUST BE TAKEN
LEST HE LOSE US TEH ELECSHUN”

I’m sure the right wing commentariat would like to riff on Julia Gillard/Lady Macbeth, but it isn’t really a starter. The apparatchiks played the three four witches and Lady Macbeth rolled into one, and Julia was MacBeth herself. Who, you will recall, was a pasty freckly celt. See, it all fits. It’s spooky.

As for the next few weeks in the media, this pretty much says it all.

A senior lecturer in psychology at Charles Darwin University, Dr Peter Forster, says there is no truth to the argument that testosterone levels make men more aggressive.
He says social factors such as the rise of feminism in the last few decades could be behind the rise in violence amongst women.

I’m happy to give him points for biology not being destiny – a refreshing change from most antifeminists I’ve read – but what actual evidence does he have that the “rise of feminism” has kicked off a rise in violence among women? Has he demonstrated that there is a rise in female violence?
Has he told us what the increase(s) are and from what bases they’ve increased? No. Has he teased out increases in actual violence from increases in arrests and charges? Nope. Has he looked at whether violence overall is rising or static, and if so, is male violence rising as well (See also previous point)? No.

Has he mentioned that if you look at historical sources of milieux such as Victorian London and accounts of colonial Australia, the idea of women as gentle and delicate creatures who never threw a punch was somewhat class-based? No.

I went off in search of more information, because I thought that if the ABC had seen fit to publish an article about Dr Forster pronouncing on women and violence, it must be that Dr Forster and/or his department had come up with some ground breaking research, perhaps resulting in a report or peer-reviewed paper which we could read.

Apparently not. In fact, my usually effective google-fu hasn’t unearthed any publications or reports put out by Dr Forster on women, violence, or women-and-violence at all. So what’s he got?

…(P)eople were now looking at other contributing factors, particularly at social and cultural factors such as the effects of several decades of feminism which have largely removed the expectation that women would behave differently to men, and, more recently, the binge-drinking culture among young people, for the rapid rise in female violence.

“Studies have shown that at the age of 14, girls were just as likely as boys to be involved in fights, threats and stealing,” he said.

“This is supported by studies at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, where they have found similar rates of binge drinking by men and women, and women are also catching up in the use of illicit drugs, and these behaviours are linked with aggression.

“People” are looking at contributing factors. “Studies” have shown. I’ve seen undergraduate essays, let alone blogs, with more demonstrated evidence – and active verbs – than that. Well, there is a citation of sorts, the AIHW, which does exist, although would it kill him to point to the studies themselves? And there doesn’t appear to be anything to do with women and violence, but women and “behaviours (which) are linked with aggression.” Right! Men binge drink and set women on fire and king-hit other men on King street, while women binge drink and “get themselves” raped. See, equal!

The only actual piece of work done within the walls of Charles Darwin University that he seems to be able to point to is a study of road rage by his colleague Mary Morris.

“The research by Dr Morris has clearly shown that, in such aspects of road rage as aggressive gestures, sounding their horn at another driver and verbal abuse, there is no significant difference between male and female drivers. There used to be differences, but not any more,” Dr Forster said.

Road rage covers a continuum up to and including stabbing, shooting, thumping and running over people, so I don’t see that an increase in female horn-sounding and verbal abuse is very useful evidence of an epidemic of violent femmes. I haven’t been able to find Dr Morris’s study either, but I’ll take his word that it exists, so that’s one more on the topic than I’ve been able to find for Forster. It’s ironic that given that the subject is the evil power of feminism, he took her work and ran with it as “Expert Warns”.

Dr Forster hasn’t even begun to demonstrate any link between feminism and violence.

I have no idea why this should have been put out as a media release by CDU and why it should have been news, but unfortunately it’s one more brick in the wall of the bullshit “Feminism gone wrong” story that the media is hellbent on giving us, no matter how dodgy the source might be.

Money has been around forever on the “social” pages, drip, drip, dripping a kind of slow poison against anyone he sees as being leftyscum, but evidently in Modern Times his previously thinly concealed xenophobia, sexism and homophobia has kicked up a notch. Here’s another one: Enoch Speaks from the Grave!. That is, Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell. But obviously Money’s on first name terms.

 
I’m starting to see that little guy’s moustache in quite a different way.

I don’t know that if I were in Fairfax management’s shoes – a strange place to be, I agree – I would necessarily find Deveny the worst trollumnist on the payroll. A writer who, in her own time, although in a public forum (her “passing notes in class” defence was unbelievably silly), made a couple of rather horrible bad taste jokes about a two very successful people; versus someone who, in the Fairfax online space, contributes to the ongoing drip, drip, drip of polemic against asylum seekers and people of other races and religions?

If I were Rove or Bindi, I’d be hurt by the Deveny tweets. They would be like a little savage kick to the gut, those jokes. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. (And of course they are not me, and possibly they weren’t offended at all…)

But more importantly, Rove and Tasma and Bindi aren’t threatened. “Offended” doesn’t cover how an immigrant or asylum seeker might feel, perhaps traumatised already by war and suffering and then subjected to “opinion” articles like this. Many of them, of course, won’t see the article, but they’ll certainly be aware of the zeitgeist which it feeds. “Offended” doesn’t cover physical personal injury at the hands of people who are given courage and targets identified by this stuff. People have died and they are still dying, some just around the corner from me, so perhaps this is a little close to home… literally.

And Money keeps drip-drip-dripping out his poison in the pages, social and online, of the AGE. I don’t know that I’d bone either of them. But I know which one “offends” me more.

Of course, this is another deliberate troll by Fairfax (this time) to get us all annoyed and get more eyeballs on the advertisements. But OK. I’ll ask the obvious: Why print an article which seems to just be recycling the same old tropes we see over and over again in the comments threads of online tabloid articles?

Tropes such as: Women do it to women . That is, Natasha Walter’s new book, Living Dolls, is all wrong because some women are employed in the fashion and glossy media industries. Of course this is just the usual failure to distinguish between patriarchy and maleness. The phenomena of high-status women seeking to maintain a status quo which benefits them here and now, and lower-status women desperately maintaining a hold on financial stability by using the limited pathways available to them, is not exactly news to us.

Trope two: Feminists in the West have failed to fix the world for women in other countries. Which, of course, is exclusively the responsibility of feminists. Female ones. This, of course, conveniently allows the Sheehans to criticise without offering any kind of “fix” themselves, that is, ways of helping that don’t involve invasion or other forms of coercion. I don’t think western women ignore the terrible things that are done to women in other countries. That’s not my experience. But for most of us, our traction to achieve change is limited, and where it is possible, it goes ignored by the Sheehans of this world.

As always, I’m curious about the article image and the process by which certain illustrators are associated specifically with this or that writer. This time it’s Michael Mucci. Does Fairfax have a little black book of rightwing illustrators for hire? or will impecunious artists simply do anything they’re told to do, for a commission? For the benefit of those who can’t see it, a female hand, with beautifully manicured and polished nails, is disappearing into dark swirling water. Someone is throwing her a lifebuoy, but it won’t save her, because the lifebuoy is miniature – it’s tiny! The lifebuoy is the usual round red-and-white shape, but with a cross on one side. You know, the old feminist symbol, but without the fist.

The artist has his woman-hating memes a bit mixed there, because it’s usually references such as “well-manicured” that are used to suggest that Western feminists, or women in general, are all effete and inconsequential and spoiled. So it doesn’t quite fit Sheehan’s accusation that Western feminism is failing to fix things for less privileged women in other countries. As opposed, for example, to the critics of feminism, who are… erm… not fixing anything much either.

But back to the rant. Some of his bald assertions just don’t make sense. For instance, he quotes some remarks from Professor Karen Beckwith about women parliamentarians in Muslim countries to “prove” that Western feminists aren’t talking about the darker side of Muslim society. But we didn’t hear the rest of the conference. Do I detect a piece of cherry picking or out-of-context quoting by someone who isn’t known for his careful source checking but who is known for being relentlessly anti-Muslim and anti-immigration?

For me the low point was provided by Dr Sue Goodwin, a senior lecturer in the faculty of education and social work at the University of Sydney, who said: ”We’ve just come through a very conservative, repressive 15 years in Australia.”

To someone like Sheehan this seems positively offensive. (“You’ve never had it so good!”) To many of us, it’s simply a statement of the bleeding obvious. To describe it as the “low point” is simply outing yourself as a trogdolyte who is not going to understand anything anyone says at such a gathering.

Then there’s the “The glass ceiling is only natural, after all” argument. He claims a young veterinarian at the Symposium proved this for him:

Another young woman complained that while 75 per cent of veterinary science graduates were women, male graduates average $10,000 a year more than women. ”We are pissed off,” she said. She then answered her own question: in large animal practices strength is required and men are stronger than women; country people respond better to male vets; women are perceived as future maternity leave candidates.

The old “stronger than women” argument. So, vets are paid by body type? I’ve never heard this one. Do small, weedy male vets get assessed against large and muscular female vets? Since most large herbivores are all stronger than Arnie Schwartzenegger and need restraint devices for treatment, how bloody meaningless is this statement, and how insulting for the legions of women all over the world who are quietly going about their business working with animals?

Country people respond better to male vets. Yes, what Tigtog refers to as the Klein Bottle argument. Sexism isn’t to blame, it’s just that country people prefer men! And this can never change, because, because… well, it just can’t, that’s all!

And…women are perceived as future maternity leave candidates. (Do you get the impression you’d like to know what the young vet actually said, without Sheehan’s filtering?) But faaark! This is why feminism is necessary. If you’re presenting “perceived as future maternity leave candidate” as a reasonable excuse to underpay someone to the tune of $10,000, you’re part of the problem.

and the last paragraph:

Or, as one of the panelists offered, ”Children are the glass ceiling.” Yes they are. It is one of the conundrums between the theory of equality and the complexity of daily reality.

Really. You’d think that a man who claims to do more than half of the domestic load in his household (and forgive me if I take that one with a shitload of salt), would have some inkling of the fact that that bit of handwaving about “daily reality” would go right to the core of what many feminists are trying to say about work and family and the glass ceiling, and the changes they’d like to help bring about?

Sheehan’s writing is so circuitous and confusing, it’s not completely clear whether, towards the end of the article, he’s saying (a) feminism has failed because the selfish Western women are all obsessed with unnecessary fripperies like equal pay, and they’ll just leave to have babies anyway; and they should stop complaining about the “glass ceiling” because it’s just impossible that things could be any other way; or (b) that he’s saying feminism has failed because it hasn’t fixed all this for us. I think the former, because the thrust of the article seems to be that Western feminists are all selfish and not helping the rest of the world out of the water, despite having come as far as our weak, biologically determined ladybrains (and lady bodies) will allow us to.

Not having been at the Feminism Matters symposium myself, I have a rather low confidence in a report from a hidebound conservative as to what actually went down there. Did anyone reading this attend? Leave a comment if you can!

Notice how the “failure of feminism” meme is mentioned in news article headings again and again. Feminism, fail, Feminism, failure, Feminism. Fail. How can this not be hammered into Western readers’ subconscious, and what effect is it having on people brought up reading it? Do we say Western medicine has failed because it hasn’t eliminated death yet?

One of the ways in which Sheehan could help all women would be to support feminism instead of pulling it down. And that doesn’t just go for Sheehan, who after all is a sad clown of the rightwing shock journo pantheon, but the editors who are continually running this sort of thing, because it gets a reaction.

Which I suppose it did. My bad. But I’m not going to click on any of the ads. So there!