Andrew Elder politically homeless? Political landed gentry more like it.

We have discussed this before; the issue of dudely political bloggers of the small L liberal persuasion, and their consistent failure to actually see women as part of the political landscape (and their consistent failure to reflect on this consistent failure, and you know, LEARN).

Today I want to talk about Andrew Elder, who writes the poliblog “Politically Homeless” a male groupthink blog, and a particular discussion that has been happening there over the last week. Elder claims to have been a Liberal Party member, among other things, back in the day. He also claims to have been a”libertarian punk” whatever that is supposed to mean; sounds like an oxymoron to me, but whatever. He presents himself much the way that P.J. O’Rourke does – a dude who as a youngster, used to be kind of wild and edgy but who also cared about social justice issues, but has now seen reason and is therefore presenting a balanced view. He also, curiously, claims to be politically homeless. Yeah right. For someone who claims to be politically homeless he sure behaves with a sense of entitlement more consistent with someone who is a member of the political landed gentry class. He’s a consistent promoter and recipient of male supremacy. That’s his political home, and it’s more like a castle really. But of course he wouldn’t see that as political. That’s just the natural order of things. By his own admission he disdains the “interest groups” that “flit” around australian politics – see, he’s above all that nonsense like feminism, he is a voice of reason, a noble source of fresh, manly wisdom, writing as a lone outsider who is really safely tucked up within. Delusional. You get the picture.

Elder pretty much sticks to blogging about how crap australian journalists are as though this is news, or some recent phenomena instead of the way it’s always been, or as John Pascoe Fawkner put it in 1828, [that his newspaper] would be “devoted to the support of the Government…”. The latest post is about the Obeid drama, which is in the papers almost every single day. It’s not really news. Corrupt men, abusing power and exploiting anything and everyone within sight, for personal gain – not news. Male supremacy is the default situation right across the planet and has been for thousands of years. But men who don’t have as much Stuff as some other men, love to talk about every individual example of this shit all the freakin’ time, as if each example is somehow unconnected to the broader context of a male-infested planet. Snore.

In this particular post, Elder chooses not to actually blame men for the hideous shit that men do, but instead goes after a woman journalist who he accuses of not doing her job to expose Obeid all those years ago. Because a lone woman can totally stand up to male supremacy and like, stop shit happening! We all know how angry and emotional men can get when we say perhaps they should not do x, y or z. That perhaps they’re not the glowing examples of human decency that they’re working so hard, around the clock, to convince us that they are. We know what happens to women who call men out. Draw a small dagger on the giant beast of patriarchy and it will eat you alive in a second. Women simply cannot win; call men out and we’re fucking heartless bitches. Don’t call them out and we’re blamed for the bad things that men do. Elder is actually doing the exact thing he is accusing Anne Davies of – not blaming a man for something he has done. Much easier and culturally safer to blame women for men’s total disregard for nature and humanity. As it turns out, this particular journalist actually was doing her job in investigating Obeid, so much so that Obeid sued the paper that she was working for at the time. Elder conveniently left that part out of the story but he did not like being reminded of it. Like I said, do not tell a man he is not nice, or wrong about something, cos men are really really nice ok, bitch?

The OP is not really any more snarky than all his posts directed at “bad” journalists. However, when Anne Davies herself posted in response, pointing out the inaccuracies in his critique, his replies get really nasty. He refused to publish it at first, then he lost the plot completely and forgot all about the topic, instead turning it into a soap opera about how unfair Davies was being to him personally. He plays the victim and whines about being tarnished with the dreaded “slur of Misogynist”, and sputtering at her that she is ” lazy, not smart enough, careless, idle, petulant, desperately silly” to level such a “flimsy, dirty slur” like that at him. Too far, Anne, too far. Because women do not get to define themselves in this world. Men get to define women and tell us stories about who we are and what we do and what we experience and how, and men’s accounts of this, written or verbal, are undeniable truths. Men control the knowledge pools in this world. Men get to destroy the joint and then say, with eyes wide open, that women are destroying the joint, and then have that lie taken seriously by many many people, lending it political traction. Anne Davies accused Elder of misogyny and that’s when he really got his feathers ruffled. As did several other commenters. As is typical in blokey blog spaces when a woman dares to drop the M Bomb. Because unless they are out raping and mutilating women 24/7 they can’t possibly be misogynist – they’re the Nice Guys. They’re the ones who don’t have to do all the dirty work of physically annihilating women because there are enough other men who will. They just sit quietly sanctioning it in order to benefit from the system of male dominance that it perpetuates. Then they get to write the stories and to say there is no misogyny and women are crazy bitches to say there is. Guys like Elder think that misogyny is nothing more than individual thoughts of individual men who hate women, rather than a bigger system of oppression that all men benefit from. This is not rocket science.

The other thing that annoys about this post is that he ambiguously refers to the “Bulldogs scandal” without bothering to clarify whether he is referring to the salary cap scandal or the time when several Bulldogs players were accused by a woman of gang rape. Because men raping women is so far off the radar of male political bloggers that Elder can write “bulldogs scandal” and be confident that everyone will know what particular scandal he means, that he is of course talking about men and their money, not the silly issue of sex-based violence and oppression experienced by half the world’s people. This is rape culture and misogyny in practice. The great forgetting of women’s lived experiences, and the replacement of memories with male perspective. Because it benefits all men to not refer to the things that men routinely do to women and children with impunity. Ever. Like it benefits all men when men go ape shit at a woman for daring to stand up to them, like Elder has done with Anne Davies. Men only need a small excuse to turn on women who expose men as not the nice guys they tell us they are, and intimidate them into silence and complicity. Men keep women silenced and compliant in this way, then they use that silence and complicity as evidence that they must be nice guys, because silence and complicity. Elder thinks he is being all gender-neutral and simply criticising just another journalist* totally oblivious to the underlying misogyning oozing out of his responses and completely without any objective assessment of relative power. But this is not a part of Real Big P Politics. This is just the natural order of things. Because men say so and in a male supremacist world it is ideologically impossible for a man to be wrong about male supremacy.

*It is in fact his second attack on a female journalist in the space of a week. The first one has a thread of sexist comments also directed at that journalist which Elder failed to acknowledge, but hey he’s defo NOT a misogynist ok? And any woman who says he is, is a dirty, lying desperately silly bitch who should just shut the fuck up now.

Mike Carlton ‘s Alan Jones blast, really not so radical…(and what about that other Jones?)

Note to readers outside of australia: Mike Carlton is an ex talkback radio presenter.

I was a bit surprised to read Mike Carlton’s piece on sexism and misogyny within australian radio, and Alan Jones’ sexism and misogyny in particular:

The sorry truth is that Australian radio is a sludge pit of male supremacy. I cannot think of any commercial talk station that has a female voice in a prime slot. The ABC is better, but not much: 702 has just one woman in its front-line shifts.

On the surface it appears to be a pretty ballsy article, although it might have been ballsier had he made these statements when he himself was still employed in radio for twenty something years. Very easy to state the truth after you’re safely tucked up at the Sydney Morning Herald with a cushy over-paid writing job, isn’t it Mike? Still, it sums up the issues with talkback radio and Alan Jones pretty accurately and I’m sure it pissed a hell of a lot of men off.

But to nit-pick, feminists have been saying this stuff for years so it would have been nice to hear Carlton acknowledge this. Also, Carlton is not exactly a non-offender himself. In 2007 I heard him express approval of the appointment of Julie Bishop as deputy leader of the Liberals with the comment “Well, she’s photogenic enough”.

What’s also interesting is that the one female presenter whom Carlton refers to in the article is actually Sandy Aloisi, Carlton’s former co-host on 2GB. I find it odd that he did not refer to her by name. I also recall him engaging in, on air, low-grade sexist banter with Aloisi during that time, quite consistently, referring to her as “Randy Sandy”, and of course hogging 90% of the oxygen as well. This is something I emailed him about at the time, outlining a feminist perspective of why he shouldn’t do that, an email he never replied to.

And while it’s true that aus radio is a bastion of male supremacy – so is the print media. So is fucking well everything. Carlton is making the mistake of thinking that radio as a vehicle of male hegemony stands alone outside of the context of patriarchy.

The radio business needs to take a long, hard look at itself, to think about joining the rest of us in the 21st century.

Because the “rest of us” (men of course) are such a shining example of equity and justice?

He’s doing that thing that leftist males do, he’s creating a false dichotomy in order to challenge conservative males – right wing men=bad/left wing men=good. He’s using his highly privileged public platform and disproportionate level of discursive power to speak for oppressed peoples, without, it seems, doing a scrap of consultation with those peoples. He’s using Jones and radio generally, to highlight the sexism of Other Men, men who are not him, all the while apparently ignorant of his own role in this sludge pit of male supremacy that is the whole. fucking. world.

While I’m on the subject of radio, Brendan Jones of the Jonesy & Amanda partnership, seems to slip under the radar a lot. A couple of weeks ago he was referring to the concept of “consensual rape” when discussing the tv show Puberty Blues. Like what the…? He also made some pig ignorant comments about the abuse experienced by Charlotte Dawson after she was hospitalised during a misogynist twitter attack, saying things along the lines of “Well just don’t read it”. This week after the Bulldogs players were reported to have sexually harassed and abused a female journalist by yelling “Suck me off, you dumb dog” at her, Jones made the outrageous statement that if she hadn’t been there it wouldn’t have happened. A statement right out of the Blame the Rape Victim for Rape 101 handbook. Jones also has a segment that he calls the Boozometer, which is a few seconds of old school radio sound effects meant to be some kind of mad scientist’s data analysing device, which calculates the number of bare breasts in any given tv show. He constantly bemoans the lack of bosoms on television as though it’s a pressing social concern. This is all done under the guise of “humour” of course. He regularly makes sexist and racist remarks on air, but you just never hear of him being called on it. Curious…

Actually, it’s men who are destroying the joint

Some readers will be familiar with the hate speech of Alan Jones, from my Cronulla Riots post (still the most viewed post on High Dudgeon). In 2007, Jones was found guilty of inciting the violence of the Cronulla Riots with his openly racist hate speech. However, the same governing body cleared him of any serious wrong-doing for his ideation of violence against women, when he called for the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to be “put in a chaff bag and thrown out to sea”. Last week Jones won an Ernie Award for his statement about women with access to political power structures:

‘Women are destroying the joint, Christine Nixon in Melbourne, Clover Moore here. Honestly. There’s no chaff bag big enough for these people.’

This morning we woke up to the news that Jones has made yet another misogynist attack on the Prime Minister. This time at some elitist dinner for Young Liberals, where he referenced the Prime Minister’s father, who died earlier this month, stating that John Gillard died of shame:

“Every person in the caucus of the Labor Party knows that Julia Gillard is a liar, everybody. I will come to that in a moment. The old man recently died a few weeks ago of shame. To think that he has a daughter who told lies every time she stood for Parliament.”

The callous misogyny of such a statement makes you want to hurl.

But I want to go back to the earlier statement about women destroying the joint. You might recall this earlier post about men and their fear of women having any kind of perceived power. I think Jones’ comment about women he perceives as having power/not conforming to gender roles etc. is linked in with that fear. It’s Patriarchal Reversal Syndrome in action because women are not in fact destroying the joint. Men are destroying the joint:

Men’s greed and aggressive obsession with acquiring land, power, wealth and resources, has pretty much destroyed the joint. It’s Jones who is a liar.

I disagree with the Australian Communications & Media Authority that Jones’ comments were not seriously inciting hate and violence against women. Commentary from malestream media, which we are all saturated in, is not benign or unintentional. It has a sociological purpose, to preserve the status quo, and that means that violence and the threat of violence used against women, to keep women down, is the norm. The hateful discursive bile that spews out at us from Jones and all the other talkback radio pie holes like Hadley and Price, along with other discursive forces like film and television, porn and print media, contributes to the maintenance of social attitudes which have direct implications for the lived experiences of women, every day. It gives permission for men to openly hate, abuse, violate and exploit us. I’ve discussed before my suspicion around the fact that the horrific murder-rapes of Anita Cobby and Janine Balding in the 1980s occured in a social context where women had recently made substantial political and legislative gains. I have heard my American sisters refer to the fact that at least two abortion doctors have been murdered immediately after the election of a perceived-to-be soft-on-abortion-law, Democratic President, first after Clinton, then Obama. Has the misogynist shitstorm that has been simmering within the malestream media since the election of our first woman Prime Minister, begun to seep over into the community again? This week women everywhere were subdued by the heart-breaking news of the murder-rape of Jill Meagher, who was abducted by a patriarchal enemy sniper whilst on her way home, raped and killed. This type of violence embodies many principles of hate crime; it happened because she was a woman. I’m not convinced that Jones’ hands are completely free of blood here.

Free Pussy Riot: Radfem Hub asks whose freedom and whose riot?

Please get over to Radfem Hub and read this amazingly cogent piece on the Pussy Riot phenomenon. Seriously, even Twisty is linking to this;

The aforementioned Radfem Hub post gleams like a golden jaundiced eye at the very pinnacle of world class patriarchy-blaming.

…and Twisty never links to other feminist blogs.

Here’s a snippet from The Hub:

I found it suspicious that Pussy Riot was getting so much media attention, even for pseudo feminist standards. You can measure the degree of feminism of an action by how men react to it, and if men collectively cheer and celebrate it, then you can be pretty sure there’s something wrong about it, or that it doesn’t somehow support our liberation from men. And as far as I can recall, even the slutwalks didn’t get as much coverage or public appraisal. What was it that men liked so much about Pussy Riot?

Well, under closer inspection I discovered that the high level of coverage was related to – though indirectly – promoting men’s right to women’s sexual subordination and the pornification of our movement. The arrested women actually form part (and are victims of) a mixed anarchist group called “Voina” (meaning “war”), founded in 2007 by two men called Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolaïev, who regularly engage the women in extreme and degrading women-hating pornography as part of their public “political stunts”. Some of Voina’s men have actually already been incarcerated in 2011 for hooliganism – which is punished for 7 years of prison in Russia, but their bail was paid for by an artist named “Banksy” four months after their imprisonment. (More information can be found here and here)

Included in their anti-government actions are a “public orgy” in the national museum of biology in a room full of stuffed bears, where several men anally penetrated their female partners in a position of submission, including one heavily pregnant women, as a metaphor to “bugger/fuck Medvedev”. “Medved” means “bear”, hence all the stuffed bears – this was meant to be symbolic, artistic and revolutionary according to the activists. Here the male anarchists literally used women as dead bodies or receptacles through which to make a political point to other men. Violating women as a means to offend other men is nothing else but an age-old patriarchal mechanism – behind which the intended target are us, for men to bond over our annihilation.

Another planned stunt in the name of “sexual freedom”, inspired by extreme forms of pornography such as zoophilia/ necrophilia, includes a member of Pussy Riot masturbating with a dead chicken in a supermarket under the watch and camera of the anarchist males, after which she inserts the dead chicken entirely into her vagina and hobbles with the chicken inside her out of the supermarket.

The president is presumably Oleg, and the woman in question, apparently his wife – a situation which would qualify as domestic abuse and sexual slavery given the level of violence, women-hatred and humiliation directed at the women involved. The woman is reduced to a corpse to be ‘stuffed’ in the most degrading and insulting way. No woman would desire such things as inserting a dead chicken in her vagina in public were she not under heavy control and terror. Also of note is the fact that one of their children was brought to this stunt, visibly no older than four. Sexual exhibitionism in the presence of children may also qualify as child sexual abuse. How deeply has women-hatred sunk into men’s minds, that they are incapable of imagining a riot without it being a by-the-book copy of a gonzo porn film? Here again, we see men instrumentalising women and using sexual torture of women as a means to communicate a political message (which if not totally vacuous, communicates nothing other than their hatred of women).

Perhaps the most saddening action of all consisted in filming one of the women naked, covered in cockroaches, meant to be understood as “sexy”. The association of women to filth and parasites to be eliminated couldn’t be clearer. This is women-hating, genocidal propaganda at its most dangerous form. Voina’s men give the world to see where women’s place must be, even when fighting against authoritarian regimes: head down, underneath men and fucked by them.

If we want justice for the women imprisoned and to show true solidarity, we need to not only denounce the injustice by the Russian state, but also denounce the violence by the men from Voina. We need to recognise and openly denounce the pandemic levels of sexual violence present in most male-centric leftist or anarchist activist groups, whereby women are often pimped by the men of the group for pornography or expected to submit to extremely violent or degrading acts in the name of “sexual freedom”. What counts for these men is to fight for men’s total public access to women, especially militant women, because it really serves to put all women back in line. The weapon of mass destruction against women is the penis and this is why all men are focusing on making Putin look bad while they say nothing about the bastards of Voina.

For our sisters, for all women, we need to say out loud that this is not feminism.

This NOT feminism! The malestream media have created a false dichotomy here; the patriarchal pigs in the Putin regime=bad/the noble heroic male lefty activists of Voina=good. The reality is that all of these men are woman-hating pigs and the women of Pussy Riot have simply been tossed from the patriarchal frying pan into the patriarchal fire. In the so-called free world they are being raped by their so-called comrades. In the Russian carceral system they are at the mercy of their guards, behind closed doors and iron bars, far away from the public gaze. Human rights standards in the Russian prison system are pretty much non-exisitent for any incarcerated person. As an advocate and an activist for women ensnared in the NSW prison system, I say the same thing I say regarding all women who are locked up by the state, free them now. But I am also saying this is NOT feminism.

From Hoyden About Town who appear not to have received the memo yet:

We are talking highly principled, seriously thought-through activism here.

Get with the program, Hoydens. How embarrassing for Australian feminists.

Edit: Hoyden is now giving Twisty all the credit for uncovering the misogyny underpinning Voina, after I pointed out the lack of critical thinking in their commentary. That women’s work should be acknowledged and given credit for is one of the fundamental principles of feminist thought. You’d think feminists would know that. So disgusting.

Edit 2/09/12: Ah it’s ok now, Helen has spoken up at Twisty’s and announced that she just didn’t want to link to tranphobes bwhahaha. Cos that’s a reason to erase the work of women. Being non trans-inclusive somehow diminishes the brilliant work that the women at Radfem Hub do, in the interests of ALL women, even the funfems at Hoyden. It’s also not really the erasure of women’s work because I criticise Hoyden occasionally.

I’m the cause of the trouble upthread i.e. the commenter at Hoyden About Town. I *explicitly* linked to the thread here because, as I stated, the ideas came from a second source but I refused to link to a transphobic blog. The link to this thread provides anyone who wants to the wherewithal to find the source of the info. I feel that’s quite above board and as clear in attribution as necessary. Linda has an ongoing vendetta with Hoyden about Town and her comments need to be filtered through that knowledge

But it’s fine to link to MRAs.

Why are journalists refusing to name Grant Hackett’s behaviour for what it is?

Violence. Abuse. Tyranny. Domination.

Grant Hackett, ex-Olympic swimmer, is guilty of perpetrating domestic violence and child abuse. This is not simply an allegation. He has admitted to a heated argument with his wife after which he went about smashing up the apartment, and destroying his wife’s possessions in particular. Here are the 16 photos taken by the cops after his wife gathered up her two children and escaped his violence before calling 000. Notice he went to the trouble of over-turning a grand piano? His wife is a musician/songwriter. It reminds me of a woman I once worked with whose violent husband, during one of his assaults on her, took her flute outside, put it on the drive, and repeatedly drove the car back and forth over it. Domestic violence is about so much more than actual physical violence. It’s about absolute subjugation of a woman, destruction of her identity, an incremental process of dehumanisation through various and creative means, in order to hold a position of power and control over women and children. This is why the ‘anger management’ or ‘alcohol problems’ explanations are wrong.

There are loads of contradictions in his story. Hackett admits to smashing up the apartment but claims he did not harm his wife or children. He admits to intentionally targeting his wife’s possessions but also claims he was out of control. What he’s done is to perpetrate violence in somebody’s home, yet he appears to not be aware that this is assault, it’s harmful. It will have a lasting affect on his wife and on their children. Is it too much to ask that journalists inform themselves about issue they are reporting about?

This ridiculous 60 Minutes interview where he tries to redeem himself is a farce. It’s about Channel 9 and the Olympic coverage in which Hackett will be a key presenter. He doesn’t give a crap about perpetrating violence against women and children. He doesn’t care about them. He just wants to hang onto his gig as a tv presenter. For fucksake, this happened 8 mths ago and at the time he described it as a “bit of a misunderstanding”! He hasn’t even seen his kids in 2 mths. But now that the photos are out and the Olympics are around the corner, he wants to go on tv and make sad faces about his personal pain while making a point of NOT even acknowledging what it was that he did. This interview focuses on him, on his feelings, his unhappiness being married blah blah blah vomit. It’s an MRA’s dream!

Soon we’ll have the father’s rights crowd whining for sympathy for him. It’s so tough for abusers these days, not quite being allowed to perpetrate freely.

Why can’t journalists ask the hard questions? Why can’t they call this shit out, name the behaviour?

It’s DOMESTIC fucking VIOLENCE.

Grant Hackett is a PERPETRATOR.

This constitutes CHILD ABUSE.

It is NOT anger.

It is NOT an alcohol problem.

It is VIOLENCE.

It is ASSAULT.

It is HARMFUL.

When will journalists stop supporting the status quo? No wonder people have completely lost confidence in the fucking media. They’re part of the problem.

Criticism of the sex industry in a mainstream newspaper!

What a breath of fresh air! Dr Caroline Norma tells it like it is and men, predictably rally to defend their entitlement to rape women.

The comments thread has just got warmed up but already the backlash has started. Do any radish feminists feel like popping in to provide balance and show support for Caroline? I’m just one radfem and it’s a rare opportunity. Registration doesn’t take long.

Lindy Chamberlain, all power to you sister!

I’ve been waiting for this for ages. The final finding in the Azaria Chamberlain case. It was a dingo. Case closed.

“That was that after Mrs Chamberlain placed Azaria in the tent, a dingo or dingoes entered the tent, attacked Azaria and dragged or carried her from the area.”

Occam’s Razor. What’s more likely? A mad feminist plotted in order to arrange her family’s holiday trip to the desert specifically so she could sacrifice her new baby daughter, conceived and birthed just for this purpose, to god? For no apparent reason. OR, a hungry wild animal preyed on an easy target?

In 1980 – 82, Lindy Chamberlain became a target of anti-feminist backlash in Australian society. Everywhere, there was moral panic about women’s libbers and what would happen to the children, who would become “latchkey kids”, when women got jobs. I can recall conversations between my mother and her friends about being “allowed” by their husbands, to get jobs or not. There was moral panic about the poor men whose partners might be given opportunities to escape their tyranny and violence, and who would later become very confused about whether or not to open doors. There was public “debate” about women’s roles and responsibilities and it was clear that the dominant voices were opposed to this women’s lib nonsense. Feminists were threatening the very foundations of our terribly fair and just social order. They were a threat to Good Men who just wanted their dinner on the table at a reasonable hour for crying out loud. And to all the children who might never now be born what with all this reproductive freedom bullshit. For about five minutes men had to actually think twice before raping their dates. Here is a short clip from an historical documentary about the reactions to 1970s feminism:

The Making of Modern Australia

Then there is Lindy Chamberlain, who was probably not perceived as feminist, but was still flouting some codes of conduct for Good Mothers. Who takes a newborn baby (and two other young children) camping? What sort of mother would leave the home and hearth with her children, and go far away into the wilderness near all those Aborigines? To make matters worse there was photographic evidence that she was having fun out there, away from the kitchen.

I also have to wonder if the fact that local Aboriginal people supported her claim that a dingo had attacked and stolen the child, and that Aboriginal trackers had been shown to provide a level of expertise in the original search process (and rightly so), also grated on a bigoted, racist white australia. This was also a time of intense activism around the rights of indigenous peoples, revealing the horrendously racist foundations on which the colonising society had been built.

Finally, the conservatives (and leftist dudes!) had a face to put to the problem that they had been stewing about for years. Lindy bore the full force of men’s irrational rage against women and feminists in particular. This was a turning point. Men didn’t need to put up with this insubordinant shit any longer. Lindy might as well have been the anti-christ. This was also the decade in which unspeakable, public, violent attacks took place against individual women. Anita Cobby… Janine Balding…

No doubt the wave of hysteria that washed over Lindy, who was found guilty of murdering her daughter in 1982 and spent three years in gaol before being acquitted in 1988, was partially driven by the growing suspicion of “funny religions”. The legacy of the Jonestown mass suicide, in which over 900 people, all part of a cult presided over by godbageous patriarch Jim Jones, died after being coerced to drink Flavor Aid (like Kool Aid) laced with cyanide*, was public fear and opposition to non-mainstream religions, or cults. The Anti-Cult Movement, led by Sen. Bob Dole, promoted a picture of alternative religions that was synonymous with violence. The Chamberlains were members of the Seventh Day Adventist church, with Michael Chamberlain being a pastor of the church. Rumours went around at the time, I remember them, about how in this funny religion, the name Azaria really meant “sacrifice in the desert” and that the baby’s mother had been planning her murder for some time.

During the trial, Lindy was hounded relentlessly by the media, about her clothes, for not smiling enough, looking a bit cranky at being found out for being a Bad Mother, or for not showing enough emotion. Look at those cold eyes, killer’s eyes.

As feminists, we know that it wouldn’t have mattered what she did, she could never have got it right.

Smile, and she would have been showing how happy she was about being a baby-killer. Cry, and she would have been using crocodile tears to manipulate the press and the jury. She also had the audacity to get pregnant before the end of the trial, and so violated codes of femininity by daring to show her hideous pregnant belly in public. It was also assumed that she only “got pregnant” in order to hoodwink the jurors into thinking she loved children or something (the little girl she was carrying, Kahlia, was born in custody). All the boxes for anti-feminist thought are ticked, pretty much, but the one that stands out for me is that a woman’s story was not believed. Lindy saw the dingo come out of the tent, she said she saw the dingo come out of the tent, she immediately knew the dingo had stolen her child. She said “A dingo took my baby”, a statement that has been universally mocked and ridiculed ever since. Because women’s voices are not legitimate under patriarchy. Lindy was the subject of intense hatred and hostility, even after the baby’s jacket was found at the base of Uluru, miles from the place where she went missing, and Lindy was finally cleared. Even now, newspapers are referring to her as “the woman the world loves to hate” or “the woman who still claims it was a dingo”.

So Lindy was the scapegoat for a toxic cocktail of social forces – hatred of women, bad mothering/child welfare discourses and suspicion of non-mainstream religions. Michael, a pastor of a non-mainstream religion, didn’t receive anything like the outpouring of vitriol that Lindy did. Lindy left the country in order to escape it.

Although Lindy’s name was cleared decades ago, Azaria’s death certificate still stated that the cause of death was unknown. Now it clearly states that a dingo attacked her and dragged her away from the camp site. This is what Lindy has been fighting for all these years. The forensic evidence always supported this. But it still bears thinking about what she must have gone through back then and since. Coping with the death of a baby, and a particularly violent and cruel death, while weathering the shitstorm of misogynist abuse, including accusations of murder, for years to come. Lindy knew all along what had happened to Azaria, that an animal had killed her, probably eaten her. No wonder she did not want to help with the search, another thing the media picked on her about, she knew what she might find. Below is the jumpsuit Azaria was wearing when she disappeared. There are blood stains around the neck as no doubt that was where the dingo was able to get the best grip. This jumpsuit was found during the early stages of the investigation but apparently all it proved was Lindy’s guilt.

As a mother myself, I don’t know how there is any way to come back from that experience even if you were offered all the support, love and sympathy in the world. But to face all that hate and bile and then to continue to maintain a public presence and a defiant voice…my hat is off. All power to you, sister!

Lindy Chamberlain

And, refereshingly, stand up comedian Wendy Harmer has publicly apologised to the Chamberlains for her part in the hate campaign. She admits that her Lindy Chamberlain routine effectively resulted in her carrying a burning torch in the witch hunt. It’s unusual to see comedians acknowledge the role they play in enforcing the social order with their cheap laughs. I hope other comics listen up.

*This is where the term “drinking the Kool Aid” came from, to mean just going along with the majority.

The old patriarchal reversal trick

Among things to piss me off in the malestream media this week was Stephanie Peatling’s article about what nasty bitches ALL women really are and jeez, no wonder women are in such a pickle, we really must deserve it. Apparently, we’re oppressing ourselves and it’s nothing to do with the vast, global system of male supremacy with all it’s entrenched structures, institutions and cultures.

The lazy-arse heading of the article asks:

“Why are women hell bent on destroying each other?”

Except it’s not really a question, it’s a statement; women are hell bent on destroying each other.

She then goes on to make an even more astounding generalisation:

Women seem to spend the first third of our lives tearing each other down about clothing and weight before spending the next third, regardless of whether we have children, arguing about parenting techniques.

She then goes on to not just mis-quote, but completely misrepresent Naomi Wolf’s writing in The Beauty Myth.

It is more than 20 years since the publication of Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth, with its powerful arguments about the pressure women put on themselves and each other to conform to a socially acceptable idea of attractiveness.

The fuck?
She has clearly never read The Beauty Myth which details the way male institutions and male power control women with the beauty mandate and how they actively police this and discriminate against women who do and don’t conform. It makes the clear statement that women can’t win whatever they do because the goal posts are constantly moving. Is it too much to ask that when journalists raise feminist issues they have actually informed themselves about feminist theory? Or are they deliberately promoting a bogus fauxfeminism?

All of this is springboarding off the hoo hah about that Time magazine cover*.

A cover clearly designed to exploit divisions between women so then a bunch of lazy media people can write up a bunch of stories about how women are divided because you know, it’s just our bitchy natures to be, so then yet more lazy journalists can refer to the whole fiasco and ask what the hell is wrong with women.

Stephanie Peatling has played right into the hands of patriarchy here; by taking up the issue of male power being used to keep women divided and so undermine women’s collective capacity for political organising and activism against oppression – and then twisting it all around and saying that this is something women do to themselves. This is becoming known as patriarchal reversal. Whatever message we are receiving through male hegemony, about male power/patriarchy/women’s oppression/feminism etc. you will find that in fact the exact opposite is true. Smoke and mirrors, people.

So when the question is asked, why are women hell bent on destroying themselves, the reality is that men are hell bent on destroying women. There, fixed it.

Needless to say, the comments thread is full of the usual rubbish about anthropology and biology and individual anecdotes about individual experiences of women’s bitchiness. But there are also some damn good comments in there too, though.

*I notice that nobody has asked if the child on the cover was able to give informed consent before being forced to the forefront of what people must have known would be a controversial shitstorm. For me, that was the issue, the child’s right to dignity and to not be used as a quirky prop to sell magazines.

AND…
in more exploitation of divisions between women piggy-backing off these so-called Mommy Wars, Simone Callahan has apparently “hit out” at Liz Hurley for spending time with her children. Of course the SMH published the most unflattering, close-up shot they can find because no doubt they want us to think that Simone is jealous of Liz. They want to quietly hint at the trope of the bitter ex lashing out over being traded in for another model. The first comment says it all. More reversal going on here because it was Shane Warne’s entitlement and predation of women that broke up his marriage in the first place, but now Simone is being made to look like the bad guy.

FINALLY…

Snog, Marry Avoid…I wish I had avoided it but the ads seem to pop up when I least expect it. How’s the rampant misogyny in this promo?

“We take the most cringeworthy girls, scour their faces, and teach them some self-respect”

Announcing Radfem-ological Images

A new radical feminist website which advances a radical feminist analysis of media images. The site recognises the inadequacy of liberalism as a lens through which to view, understand and respond to media, and describes a liberal feminist analysis as a “theoretical dead end”. A radical analysis responds to the ways in which media supports male power and names the ways men benefit from this at women’s expense. Which is the whole fucking point of feminism, after all.

Isn’t it?

Why??

Professor Germaine Greer, appearing on Q and A the other night, publicly ridiculed the first woman prime minister in this country, for having a big arse. This is not helping the climate of rampant sexism and misopolitics that have characterised the country since we’ve had a laydee pm. Abbott would have laughed his evil head off.