ALP moving further to the right on women’s reproductive freedom

The SMH informs us of a new organisation formed within the Australian Labor Party, one that seeks to impose compulsory pregnancy on the women of Australia. Senator Claire Moore has this piece of wisdom for us: “It’s a message to … Continue reading →

Clarifying myths about the feminist movement Part 1

A point was raised in the comments section on a thread at the funfeminist blog mentioned below, regarding white, middle class bias within the feminist movement. There is no point trying to do feminist consciousness – raising in a militant … Continue reading →

Are you looking for an alternative feminist blog?

Good news! This is one of them and there are many more. Like this one: a radical feminist collective blog Are you tired of the feminism lite type blogs? Where there seems to be a core ingroup who rally to … Continue reading →

Tampon advertising and transexceptionalism

Libra has been criticised for what you could be forgiven for thinking is the first ever offensive tampon commercial ever. Commercials for tampons and pads have been pissing me off for years with their condescending sexist shit. Those ones where … Continue reading →

Intentional women-only space and the evolution of rape culture

Allecto has just posted a speech she gave at the SCUM Radical Feminist Conference 2011, on the need to keep women-only spaces for born women. I especially love the distinction Allecto makes between intentional women-only spaces and other women only … Continue reading →

Van Badham

…is my new hero. You will recall my response to Clive Hamilton’s sexist bigotry about women in combat roles. Well, a journalist from The Drum has just published this hilarious response to him and to another knob of similar ilk, … Continue reading →

New marriage equality campaign

This new video strongly reflects the politics of the equal marriage movement itself, but is not very representative of lesbians and gays in Australia.

The whole marriage equality push is quite literally rooted in conservatism. It was started by conservative gay white men who, being men, presumably didn’t like to be denied what straight men are entitled to.

My problem with it is that it is based on the principles of assimilation, which is a form of erasure. Did anyone see any butch dykes in the video, for example? No doubt we’re too grotesque for the nice het folks of Australia to have to look at. We’d probably ruin the whole campaign.

The other thing I hate about it is that it promotes one of patriarchy’s primary institutions, one that features highly in the oppression of women (see my other posts for more on my thoughts on this). So how is allowing more women the “right” to it, about equality?

Finally, it really promotes monogamy in a big way, and monogamy sucks in my opinion. It’s a push for yet more couple privilege in a society where couples are already privileged. What of lesbians and gays who are not exclusively partnered, or don’t want to be? This so-called “right” to marriage will eventually cause many gays and lesbians to be even more marginalised than ever. It will cause straights to become more marginalised than ever as the patriarchal ideal of a household set-up which is built around coupledom becomes ever more entrenched as the only way to live. What of single parent families, gay and straight? Siblings living together? Friends living together, or all the other various living arrangements that exist in Australia?

Living as a part of a legally recognised couple brings a hell of a lot of social capital and political and economic privileges. Why should those people be privileged above the rest of us? There is nothing revolutionary about allowing a few extra people into the privilege club. Abolishing the privilege altogether would be revolutionary.

This new ad reflects the conservativism and white malecentrism of the marriage equality movement. Where are the lesbian couples? Where are the poor or poverty class lesbians? Indigenous lesbians? There is one (non-threatening christian) lesbian, who appears without her partner. The other people speaking are either gay men, or straights, straights who claim they want their friends to have this sacred right to marriage. So, where are those friends? Why are they not there speaking for themselves? How is giving straights the power to speak for and define us, in any way progressive?

The older guy at the end is particularly inappropriate, speaking for his son while his son stands there mute. It’s older men who are often the worst for public displays of homophobic abuse. Just because he is convinced that his son should have the right to get married doesn’t mean that he will have less homophobic thoughts about lesbians.

The push to keep an institution that is destructive and harmful for women, lesbian or het, is not my idea of good feminism.

Clive Hamilton, shutUP about feminism and gender issues

You are in NO way qualified to speak on this subject.
As if wanting to offer a public display of solidarity with Andrew Bolt, Clive Hamilton, garden variety fauxgressive dudebro of The Left from the Charles Sturt University, gives us a spectacular demonstration of the male right to broadcast any old unsubstantiated shit within the mainstream news. Hamilton has no academic authorisation to speak about women, gender or feminism – it’s just not his area – yet he gets a prime platform handed to him by the Sydney Morning Herald; a status quo-upholding platform.

Everyone is talking about the issue of women in armed combat which has just been given the OK here in Australia. Hamilton has seen it as a great opportunity to help erase feminism. According to him feminism was already dead but now we should admit it, or something. Because women, ALL women, are soft and pretty and kind and should not be in men’s boardrooms because men are violent beasts either biologically or conditioned to be so, one or the other, doesn’t matter which because well…feminism is dead. DEAD, I tell you!

This is from a professor of ethics no less, who should fucking well know better. Like every twerp-faced male professor I ever knew, Hamilton talks about feminism in the past tense – something that occurred within a vacuum, back in the 60s and 70s. Not only that, but he offers the tired old mantra about how all feminism did was reinforce the status quo, or something.

But why bother putting women into boardrooms if the corporations they run continue to despoil the environment, evade their taxes and pay their chiefs obscene salaries?

Right, cos even though 97% of CEOs are men, corporate destruction of the environment is only a problem if a few women get involved. Not that getting a few women into boardrooms was ever the main goal of feminism – way to make a big straw feminist, Clive. Feminism IS about freeing ALL women from male violence, power and tyranny, all forms of it.

We do not want to think about women soldiers returning with their faces blown off, for we know we will feel a special kind of guilty revulsion.

Way to utilise some gratuitous ideation of violence against women, Clive. You really enjoyed writing that little sentence didn’t you? Women with their faces blown off. How many men read this and thought “Hells yeah!” The guilty revulsion would not be for the deaths of women who misguidedly thought they were fighting for a noble cause, but because men might be reminded that violence characterises the lives of most women and the transference of it from the private to the public domain would make a lot of men squirm. That’s the key issue at stake here for men: the gendered divide of violence as needed to enforce the status quo. Legitimising women’s violence is just gonna mess everything up for men.

Further to this, women being on the frontline might ensure that women’s experiences of war might have to be publicly acknowledged and honoured instead of actively diminished and erased by the men who record history. Women’s experiences would be as glorified as men’s already are and that scares the fuck out of men like Clive. Absent from a lot of the commentary is the obvious truth – women have been dealing with men’s violence since forever. Violence within NON-combat zones and from supposedly NON-enemy males. We’re good at surviving men’s violence. At least on the battlefield we’d be equipped to stand a fucking chance, and that too scares the fuck out of men like Clive. Because the violence and the threat of violence that men perpetrate against women is HUGE in maintaining the existing social order, an order in which middle class knobs like Clive depend on. How else could a total numbskull like him ever become a fucking professor if not for a social order that privileges men over women? The thought of the state actually giving women the training and resources to fight back must conjure up enormous implications within the minds of men.

Every time an issue of gender equality comes up in public discourse, men like Clive freak the fuck out, and the first thing they do to cover up their fear is to proclaim that feminism was a bad thing. Clive’s personal fear has caused him to blather several poorly constructed, selectively-referenced paragraphs in which he conflates biological determinist theories with sociology and liberal ideology, and not only that, he fucking tells lies. He tells lies about feminism which is an attempt to erase women. This is a highly irresponsible, egregious piece of shit from someone who occupies a very powerful and privileged position in the upper halls of education, feeding his sexist, misogynist bile to young minds, drip drip style. Promoting propaganda which harms women must surely be in breach of the Sex Discrimination Act. Because when he misrepresents feminism, lies about feminism and erases feminism, he is effectively impeding women’s right to access information about their own oppression, information that will help them. As feminists are aware, and as Clive should also be aware, the rates that men perpetrate abuse and violence on us are in no way diminishing. Women still do most of the world’s work for free, and when we are paid it’s never as much as men are paid. We still have nowhere near equal political representation. So for you, Clive, to write shit, utter shit, about women, feminism and gender issues, in a widely read mainstream newspaper, you are telling women lies, you are discouraging women from knowing what feminism is really about and therefore discouraging us from engaging with the writings and activism of other women. When women discover feminist theory it is extremely empowering and liberating. You and your bogus straw feminism are like a big detour sign, directing women away from freedom and self-determination. Shame on you for being part of the problem, for presuming to define women, and for colluding with dominant males in order to keep women subjugated. You are about as conservative as it gets.

Here’s his uni profile page in which the word philosophy is spelled wrongly – lol – gotta love it.

http://news.csu.edu.au/director/experts.cfm?itemID=072AFA2E03374E63F2595A75111AF7B5

Andrew Bolt attempts to return to the protection and assimilation era of white colonisation then throws a tantrum when criticised for it

Yesterday was a good day. Right wing racist doucheplonker, Andrew Bolt, was found by the Federal Court to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act when he wrote lies about some Aboriginal people and accused them of being deliberately Aboriginal (or something) in order to profit from it. Anyone who reads here can imagine the kind of bile I’m talking about. I won’t link to it but he is easy to find if you goog him. Bolt is the typical privileged White middle-class male who uses his privilege and power to oppress everyone else, his reasoning being that when White middle-class male privilege is ever called into question this constitutes gross social injustice and is a sign that PC madness is denying him his civil rights. Implicit in all of his commentary is that social justice, freedom of speech and civil rights are the domain of White middle-class males only and that’s just as it should be.

Bolt has spent a lot of his freedom of speech expressing his deep-seated and multi-layered racism. He points to criminal justice statistics all over the world to prove, not how the process of White colonisation has impacted Black and indigenous peoples, but that non-White people have some kind of criminal or violent thug gene. He points to empirical examples of arrests for terrorist-related offences, not as examples of anti-Arab racism in the Western resource-guzzling world, but as proof that Muslims are all terrorists and we shouldn’t let them in our great democratic country even when it’s the resource-seeking behaviour of Western nation states that displace and dispossess many of them in the first place, forcing them to seek refuge here.

Bolt occupies an unfair share of public platform and wields disproportionate amounts of discursive power through the print news media, his personal blog, his own tv show as well as doing guest spots on various other tv shows including the hideous neo-con vehicle known as The 7PM Project. He is educated and articulate and being male to boot, can sound alarmingly like a voice of reason who knows what he is talking about. This makes him divisive and very fucking dangerous. He is a public concern troll who goes to a great deal of effort to sugar-coat his racism to make it taste like philanthropic concern for all of humanity. “I don’t believe in racial division” he says piously. Yeah, he’s that kind of racist. The one who has the luxury of not having to believe in racial division because he happens to have been born into the safe one.

A lot of people are talking about this but most commentary I’ve seen lacks critical analysis. This is not surprising given that Bolt was found to have breached the law on the grounds that the things he wrote were untrue. The nine Aboriginal people he named and accused of having a white identity “available to them” and which he states they rejected in order to win awards and accolades, were all raised within indigenous community and do in fact have indigenous cultural identities. That was the area on which the case hinged, presumably. Bolt lied. He said they were not Aboriginal and they are.

What has not yet been scrutinised is the depth of racist belief Bolt must hold in order to rationalise his attacks, in order to have even been thinking that way in the first place. Bolt sees some Aboriginal people who in his eyes could “pass” as White because they are light-skinned. He knows or believes them to have some Whites in their family tree. This is where his White Supremacist thinking is obvious; surely if a person could get away with a White identity, then they would, wouldn’t they? Who wouldn’t want to be White? How could any normal person actually be comfortable being Aboriginal if they didn’t have to be? He is ignorant, obviously. There is no just being a “little bit” Aboriginal, or “part Aboriginal” or 1/8th or whatever ridiculous ways in which Whites condescend to define indigenous peoples. You are Aboriginal or you are not.

The other glaring facet of Bolt’s White Supremacist thinking is his unapologetic and undisguised arrogance in being quite comfortable to presume authority over Aboriginal people’s identification with their culture. This harks back to the days of the Protectionist and Assimilationist eras, where Whites observed the children of indigenous peoples and removed those who were lighter skinned or could “pass” as white, those considered suitable candidates for assimilation projects which amounted to genocide. Not only does Bolt borrow the actual language and thinking of that era, but he appears to be oblivious to the insensitivity of his commentary and the impact it could have on people of the Stolen Generations and their kin. The way Whites smashed up Aboriginal families and ripped their children from them, forcing a White identity onto those children, is still an issue Aboriginal people are dealing with now. There are Aboriginal people using services like Link Up in order to trace the cultural heritage that was forcibly and indeed, violently, denied to them by colonisers. To now, five minutes later, be accusing indigenous people of trying to pull some kind of swifty on “us” the proper White folks, by trying to reject a White identity that White Supremacists have chosen for them, is a big fuck you to all those people. It is also an extraordinary expression of the complexity and endurance of the colonisation process and of White settler imagination.

So, Bolt has woven himself a very tangled web of White Supremacist presumptions, blatant racism, ignorance and condescending paternalism, and now he’s caught in it. He has spectacularly managed to ignore truths, spread lies, assume power to define other people, erase history and be calculatedly hateful and offensive after which he then pretends innocence and good faith. Not only that but he actually has the gall to position himself as some kind of victim in all this, a victim of PC madness gone too far. Apparently, he thinks he has civil rights and freedoms to promote racism but the people he targets, the people who live every day with the results of his hate speech, don’t have those same rights to challenge him on it and call bullshit. That right there is the core of his racism and white privilege, to just assume that everything he says will be believed and carved in stone because after all, he’s a white dude, how could he be wrong? How could we now accuse him of racism? He’s not racist, he’s just very very concerned that the more deserving “real” Aborigines are missing out on awards because these fakers are getting them all (or something). Seriously, he expects us to believe this was his motive? Genuine concern about a genuine social issue that exists within his own mind and on which he chose not to consult any indigenous person on before writing about it? Occam’s Razor, mate. Either you are so in tune with indigenous australia that you know of serious issues that indigenous australians themselves don’t know about and are heroically speaking out to champion their cause and draw attention to it without even needing to ask them about it – OR – being White in a White-dominated society has made you prone to being a bit of a racist douchebag.

I think I know.

Life in paradise. Death in custody.

Many of us who work in criminal justice reform have been waiting for the release of this documentary based on Chloe Hooper’s book about police brutality within the indigenous community of Palm Island.

You can find some tokenistic recognition here, on a thread that has remained mostly ignored. One commenter, however, points out that:

The femosphere has talked a lot about capital punishment recently, but there’s been less on the kind of ongoing racism inherent in the ‘justice’ system and how black deaths within it are much more than just the abolition of the death penalty can solve.

Emphasis is mine.

So… why don’t liberal feminists care about this shit? This seems to be the question the commenter is asking.

Allow me.

This raises the issue of white colonisation, white supremacy and white privilege. Issues which, despite what some ignorant racist feminists at IBTP think, is an ongoing process that continues to subjugate indigenous peoples in order to privilege non-indigenous peoples. The commenter I just quoted was the only person to respond to the thread linked to above. Apparently all the “Hoydenizens” are either ignoring it, or are out promoting another of the status quo-enforcing institutions of the white man, marriage, and therefore far too busy to bother with issues of colonisation and racism. Or they might just be caught up with discussing their husbands or their otters or whatever.

Since whites invaded this land, law enforcement agents have played a primary role in the colonisation process, in the massacres, in the genocide and then later in the implementation of public policy designed to further coloniser’s aims of total white domination. Policies such as enforced removal of children and restriction of movement of all native peoples.

This process continues today and while the role of law enforcement agents may have evolved, it is no less powerful, no less dangerous. Cops continue to perpetrate monstrous acts of violence against Aboriginal men, women and children, on the street, in police stations, and in police vehicles. When they are not engaged in the actual perpetration of these acts of violence, they are threatening to engage in them. Feminists will recognise this strategy. Just as the ever-present threat of male violence serves to keep women subjugated, so does the ever-present threat of white colonial violence impact on the lives of indigenous peoples.

Police are racist, sexist, domineering thugs; the hired goons of the ruling classes. Prison officers are racist, sexist, domineering thugs who didn’t make it into the police force. The police force is made up mostly of low class males who would otherwise have had little or no access to traditional white male power structures. Policing is how they embiggen themselves, how they participate in patriarchy. They grovel in the service of dominant white males to enforce the social order and protect the elites from the masses.

This is why you won’t see much challenging of police brutality coming from the liberal femosphere. Because liberals are white people who enjoy enhanced social privilege thanks to colonisation and white supremacy. The law enforcers are hired specifically to protect their interests which means they can’t afford to risk too much critical analysis of issues like deaths in custody or police corruption. Their privilege is bound up with maintaining the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, of law, of the police force. Because those institutions are all there to serve and protect us, right? Who cares if these institutions don’t serve everyone equally, or don’t protect everyone equally? They have to be blindly supported and maintained because the existing social order depends on it. Who cares if “Us” actually only applies to some people and not others?

This is why we see television saturated with the glorification of police who bravely put their lives on the line to protect “Us”. It’s why the fact that despite all these supposedly brave and courageous individuals who go out there every day to keep “Us” safe, we’re actually NOT safe as evidenced by statistics on sexual violence. It’s why we’ve recently had conversations about whether a cop’s life is worth more than your’s. It’s why politicians win elections based on “tough on crime” rhetoric. Because we all understand who “Us” is.

It’s why liberal feminists, whose interests are bound up with the males of the white, ruling classes, the colonisers, don’t say much about this issue.Their privilege hinges upon being associated with “Us”. After all, it’s really only indigenous people and poor white people who experience being verbally abused or harassed in public, threatened with a good bashing, or, as is the case with the young indigenous man in the documentary, murdered, by police. It’s not the middle classes who get targeted and arrested by police, then shoved into the back of a police wagon and driven around in such a way that they are flung all around the back of the wagon, and end up in court with bruises and broken bones. Or who get crash-tackled by police and have rough hands forced down their throats to the point where they start to vomit, in order to find a miniscule amount of some illegal substance that might get them thrown in gaol. It’s not the middle classes or their wives who are routinely humiliated and ordered to strip just so the dominant class can have a “legitimate” reason to lock them up. Because this is what cops do when they’re not busy throwing homeless people off the trains in wet weather.

“Us” refers to all the people who don’t live with this threat in their every day environment. It refers to all the people who actually benefit from this brutal enforcing of the social order, whose privilege is very much dependent on the myth that cops are tops. This is why Li won’t see any challenges of this form of social control in the libfemosphere. It’s not in their interests to challenge it or offer any kind of radical criticism, or any comment at all beyond “Oh how sad!” This force only exists to protect the rights of some people to subjugate other people, to profit out of other people, to exploit and dominate other people. To own property at other people’s expense. The rights of Humans vs Non-Humans.

It’s exactly the murderous brutality of cops like Chris Hurley that allows the privilege of liberals to exists. Why would they challenge it?? They can’t even name it!