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
…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
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.
Posted in gay rights, heteronormativity, marriage
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
Posted in Feminism, malestream media, patriarchy, politics
