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.

The Federal Government’s War on Mothers & Children

It’s been quietly breaking my heart to have to face the realisation, once again, that the Gillard government hate women as much as the Liberal National Party do. Around the same time Prime Minister Julia Gillard was making the world famous Misogyny Speech, which brought a tear of joy to my eye, the Gillard government and Abbot’s opposition, united to pass the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Bill 2012. They also timed it to coincide, more or less, with Anti Poverty Week. Cute. The bill, one of the most significant examples of claw-back policy to date, was passed in order to force single mothers from one social security payment to another lower payment once their youngest child turns 8 years – from Parenting Payment Single to Newstart, which is not actually a payment, but an unemployment allowance. It’s about $266.50 a week, maximum.

The use of the word “fair” in the new legislation is Orwellian. There is nothing fair about it. In a nut shell it means that single mothers who rely on the government to help them raise their families will now get less money. Quite a bit less. Reports of just how much less depend on the different circumstances of women’s social security arrangements.

Most women will lose their Health Care card because this supplement is not a part of the Newstart Allowance, which will result in poorer health for women and children. Variables such as having a child with a disability will be managed on a case by case basis and will depend a lot on who the woman happens to speak to on the day she makes an enquiry, what kind of mood they were in and how well they know the legislation. My personal and professional experience of Centrelink informs me that many Centrelink workers do not know their jobs very well at all. Quite often I had to inform them about my entitlements and requirements, and I am an able-bodied white woman who speaks fluent english. Many women will not have the social capital, language skills or self-advocacy skills to negotiate with Centrelink staff. Many will not push the point for fear of retribution or fear that the worker will report them to Community Services if they disclose domestic violence, for example. Most Centrelink workers wield power and privilege against women carelessly and insensitively.

Women will also lose the opportunity to study as a way of enhancing their income-earning capacity in the future as the Pensioner Education Supplement will now only be paid to women who were already studying when the legislation went live, and then only for the duration of the course they are currently undertaking. So too bad if your big picture plan was to complete a Tafe course or your HSC equivalent in order to be eligible for a university degree. Your capacity to engage in tertiary education while juggling child-raising, domestic labour and menial pink collar paid work outside the home, was just reduced even further. I have to wonder how this aspect of the legislation will impact on women who had already enrolled in courses for this year, but were technically not studying when the legislation went live.

Many women will, right now, be experiencing high levels of anxiety. Women who are already just scraping by because they thought they had their situation assessed and their strategies to keep their families out of poverty worked out. These women were told by the government that they could stay on the Parenting Payment until their youngest child turned 16 years. Now that the government has pulled the rug out from underneath them their long term plans have been smashed. Their chances of avoiding poor health, homelessness, and avoiding or escaping men’s violence have been greatly reduced. Social security payments for single mothers originally gave many women a degree of economic independence and enhanced capacity for self-determination, benefits which have now almost completely been eroded away by forces of economic rationalism and principles of workfarism, and have forced women into institutional dependency on the state. They have exchanged dependence on one male, private patriarchy, to dependence on the collective male, public patriarchy. This change to social security arrangements seems a bit at odds with the government’s previous statements about violence against women. “The great silent crime of our age” said Kevin Rudd when the government launched the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women. Violence which the same government also recognises as the “major driver of homelessness” in this country, as stated in the White Paper on homelessness.

It is also unclear just whether or not the issue of social security debt has been factored into this. Many women accrue Centrelink debt due to reporting requirements being so damned complicated, or because provision of information regarding reporting minor changes to circumstances is extremely unclear, even for able-bodied, english-speaking women. For example, will a woman’s debt repayments be reduced when she moves onto the Newstart Allowance? Many women do not even know the process for appealing a Centrelink debt, or just how easy it is, because the anxiety produced by Centrelink interactions is so great that women often only go there or pick up the phone (if they have one) when they absolutely have to.

It is also becoming apparent that many women have not been provided with adequate information about how the changes to the legislation will affect them or what they need to do. The Dept of Human Services website states that women whose youngest child has already turned 8 years will receive a phone call advising them of how to access payments after January 1, 2013. However, I know many women who did not receive a phone call, some because they have no access to a phone. Of the women who did receive one, many of them were not told clearly that the transition was not automatic. That is, that their Parenting Payment would suddenly be cut off after January 1, 2013, and that they would have to actually submit a new application for the Newstart Allowance. Remaining on a Centrelink payment is hard work at the best of times, and time-consuming. Women who are already over-extended through raising children, through the constant effort of just providing basic needs for children, and all the other unpaid work that women do, now have to negotiate an entirely new hurdle – right in the middle of the Christmas school holidays.

I do not buy the workfare rhetoric of “helping” women to move into paid employment. Most of these women are already doing paid employment along with everything else that they have to do to survive. The new arrangements will mean that the threshold for extra income will be lowered once women are on Newstart. So women who were on the Parenting Payment Single actually had more incentive to work outside the home than they will once they are on Newstart. On the Parenting Payment, a woman could earn up to $176 a fortnight, plus an extra $24 for each extra child she has, before her payment would be reduced by 40c in the dollar. Now she will only be able to earn $62 a fortnight, with apparently no consideration of how many children she has, before her payment will be reduced by 40c in the dollar. So like what the actual fuck, Gillard Government? Your statements about “helping” people into the workforce are lies. Filthy fucking lies. This so called “fair” legislation even seems at odds with the government’s stated economic aim of saving itself money. The costs will arise in other social service areas such as increased pressure on housing and health services.

British Social Worker, Lena Dominelli, has talked about the paradigm of the welfare state in relation to women (Feminist social work theory and practice, Palgrave, 2002). She talks about the ways Social Workers who are mostly women working to help other women, are just another sub-class of women who are dependent on the state for their income. Seeing as Social Workers get paid very little compared to people in male dominated professions, despite the requirement of a four year degree, and the great show made by the Gillard government of implementing the Equal Pay Case recommendations last month, it appears to this cynical radical feminist that divisions between women have been exploited once again. I wonder if the Equal Pay Case came at the expense of the women we seek to help. Overall it appears to be a very short term, but very vicious solution to the issue of the need to deliver a budget surplus in an election year – at the expense of women and children. What a surprise.

Edit: For people wanting more information about the changes I would suggest the Welfare Rights Network as a good starting point:

https://www.welfarerights.org.au/

Council Elections: An open letter to Liberal Councillor Kent Johns

Dear Kent

Thank you for reminding the womenfolk in our family of our place in patriarchy. My twenty two year old daughter has been on the electoral roll for several years now. However, now that my seventeen year old son has enrolled, it makes perfect sense that all your correspondence now be addressed to him, with my daughter’s name merely added as an appendage to his Mr.

I will endeavour to make sure that full power of attorney over my daughter’s assets be signed over to my son as soon as possible, until such times as a suitable husband can be found to transfer ownership to.

In the interim, please forward us all of your laundry including dirty socks, shirts with particularly tough collar stains etc. to us. And what would you like on your sandwich?

Yours Sincerely

Linda Radfem

Men’s unsubstantiated fear of female power

It’s pretty obvious when you look through the mainstream news media that men are feeling a bit worried at the moment. Castration anxiety lurks there in the backs of the minds of the men who control public discourse. Take a look at Mark Knight’s expression of castration anxiety in Adelaide Now this week.

Oh noes! The women are ruling the world now!

For those of you outside of australia, this is supposed to imply that women have some kind of stranglehold on power. A female prime minister, Julia Gillard, who today marks two years in the job. A rich woman, Gina Rinehart, actually the richest person in this country. And Quentin Bryce, the govenor general, also a woman. This means that the power structures are now reversed in favour of women, according to Knight. Of course he seems to have forgotten that both Julia Gillard and Gina Rinehart have both been publicly accused of having big arses, just this year in fact. The false narrative of the cartoon also seems to be oblivious to that fact that the prime minister is usually portrayed like this:

And this:

Or this:

Or that female politicians get meowed at by male politicians:

Or that Gina Rinehart, who has an economics degree and decades of experience and is acknowledged, even by douchebag men, to be very good at business, is usually portrayed like this:

Gina Rinehart is a serious threat to insecure men. It’s unthinkable that a woman should be allowed to control such a large chunk of wealth and resources. She controls the largest source of iron ore in the world and is worth around 30 billion. But she gets criticised for being a bad mother.

Julia Gillard has been the country’s first woman prime minister for two years today, despite a vile and relentless sexist media campaign against her, a campaign that involves journalists quite literally making up lies about her credibility. But she gets criticised for not being a mother at all (not sure which is worse under patriarchal systems. It’s a four-way tie between being a single mother, a teen mother, a bad mother and being no mother at all. You can’t win.).

Anyway, back to the women and that whole reversal of power thing. Before we get carried away, it turns out that women do not have power after all. According to Amnesty International , violence against women is still one of the most widespread human rights abuses. As my readers know, men’s relentless campaign of violence against us constitutes a global war against women. It quite literally involves terrorism at individual, collective, institutional and systemic levels in order to keep us socially, economically and politically excluded. One female prime minister and one rich woman do not change this paradigm one bit.

According to Homelessness Australia , 40% of homeless people in this country are women. Expand this to include the children of those women and that percentage would be much higher.

What about wealth? Gina Rinehart has billions, making her “rich” under a patriarchal system. But are all women benefiting? FAHCSIA says no. The gender pay gap is increasing steadily.

Women and children are victims of sex trafficking, with australia being a primary trafficking destination .

Sexual assault statistics also appear to be increasing.

Perhaps this fear of female power is not based on anything rational but rather a fear of loss of male privilege? The evidence above would appear to be enough to assuage men’s anxieties. Men are still quite cheerfully oppressing women through many and varied means, despite there being a woman doing the prime ministerial job and a woman with a lot of money. Men continue to harm us, deliberately and intentionally. But men need not feel guilty about this. Because, it’s not their fault. Women, according to some douchebag , are their own worst enemies! Men aren’t our enemies at all. It’s us. We are our own enemy.

But hang on. Which is it? Are we taking over as implied by the cartoon at the beginning of the post? Or are we still oppressed but we’re oppressing ourselves?

The ethics of Valentines Day: why you should boycott.

Charming slave bracelet courtesy of Dear Lover

When I was a very young girl of fifteen, working full time in the local bakery, I unexpectedly received a box of orchids from one of the male workers who had been preying on me. I was so excited. I asked my boss, a wise woman who had escaped a violent husband and moved to Sydney from the country to start over, what I might have done to deserve this honour. She looked cynical and replied “It’s more about what you’ll have to do”.

Valentines Day – it’s harmful on so many levels that I need to keep the focus of this post narrow lest I be sat here all day. National Pronging Day would be a better title for it. Dude, pressured by masculinist propaganda, forks out a shitload to persuade the unforunate woman he prongs or aspires to prong, that today of all days she must succumb to social pressure and offer up her body for his personal use. He’s paid good money for it after all. He’s made the purchase of the obligatory red thing and carried it proudly through the town as a demonstration of his capacity to buy access to the female human body and PIV. Straights like to call it romance or love. I see it as re-gilding the cage for her but as badly as we might feel for hetshackled women at this time of year, the practice serves as a public reminder to ALL women of the neverending reign of male domination. She is socially and culturally obligated to grant access to her body every other day of the year, after all. Today is more about reinforcing ideas of gender power relations in the public sphere than about individual expressions of affection between drone-like hetcouples.

As if all this isn’t bad enough, it gets much worse when we peek beyond quaint hetwestern sex rituals and examine all of the other ways that Valentines Day reifies global patriarchal structures. Basically, V Day wouldn’t have morphed into the current nauseating circus that it is now, without the cut flower, chocolate and lingerie industries and their reliance on slave labour of women and children.

This piece by Adeline Lambert makes a powerful case against V Day. The article focuses on the cut flower industry in the americas but things are not all rosy here in australia either. In australia we have industrial regulations and employment laws to protect workers to a degree, however during peak and high demand times such as V Day, the market is saturated with imports from the countries mentioned in the article linked to above. Local growers are annoyed about this, not because of any ethical concerns about child labour of course, but because it hurts their profits. So people who purchase flowers for Valentines Day are most probably helping to sustain child slave labour in other countries or at the very least, the labour exploitation of large numbers of women and children.

When we talk about “death by chocolate” we’re not usually talking about human trafficking and slave labour. In the west, chocolate is heterocentric code for het sex.

Found here.

According to National Geographic, in 2010 47% of consumers were expected to purchase candy for V Day, and 75% of those purchases were expected to be in the form of sexy chocolate, which, according to antislavery.org means that Valentines-related chocolate purchases are directly supporting child slavery and abuse.

Finally, the lingerie industry, mass producer of women (and children’s) subordination uniforms, also relies heavily on slave and exploited labour of children. Rarely do we hear about forced labour of vulnerable peoples (well, except when a woman-bashing opportunity arises), and certainly not at times when it might put a dampener on our hetcentric festivities.

So we can see that what appears on the surface to be a fun day of lerv and romance for western straight folks, is actually playing a very significant role in upholding oppressive social structures and institutions. You might be flattered by a bunch of cheap red roses, or cheesy red satin, but access to those items is facilitated by a vast global capitalist system of abuse, violence, misery, poverty and exploitation of many millions of people, mostly women and children. People who actively buy into the bullshit are cheerfully supporting this. Anything other than actively seeking to abolish V Day is to show tacit approval of this dirty rotten system.

Still feeling sexy?

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 those of us who feel differently, that we can never be complacent,” As Anne Summers […]

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

Vilification of young women

As I pointed out on the previous thread, social security law in this country changes every couple of months, and never in women’s favour. In fact, given that social security payment recipients are mostly women, single women, single mothers, we can understand this constant tweaking of the law as effectively sexist and a strategy to keep women poor and disempowered. It is an enforcement of the social order, which, despite millennia of ‘empowerfulising’ sex work, has not seen women’s social status change much.

Welfare in this country has historically been about regulation of certain “problem populations” such as non-hetpartnered women, Aboriginal women, children and young people. It still is. Recently we have seen social security arrangements become increasingly punitive and controlling. This is exacerbating existing social problems for women and children, homelessness and domestic violence, for example. It also completely erases women’s non-economic contributions such as caring work, particularly parenting work.

This latest ‘reform’ announced by the Gillard Government seriously almost made my head explode. Teenage mothers, already high up there as society’s most despised pariahs, are now being constructed as a drain on the economy. Gillard wants to send those naughty little sluts back to school or cut off their payments. The argument is being framed as “for their own good” which also harks back to Australia’s original welfare model which saw young women being incarcerated simply for being sexually active – I shit you not I’ve written about in here. It has not even been two years since the Government made a national apology to the Forgotten Australians and now here we are reverting to the same moral judgements and prejudice that devastated the lives of so many young people.

As if young mothers are to blame for exploiting the economy. How about some policy measures to curtail the activities of white collar criminals? They are the ones who exploit the economy and destroy the environment. How about restricting the amount of land one person is allowed to own? How about telling the truth about middle class pigs and their bulging property investment portfolios?

Until something is done to address the appalling rates of sexual violence that men continue to perpetrate against women it is highly unfair to target women who have children outside of socially-sanctioned kinship arrangements. How about addressing pick-up culture? Or making abortion services more accessible? Or abolishing the fricking baby bonus? Five thousand dollars is fuck all to raise a child. Yet the Gillard Government continue this rort to coerce women into pregnancy. Then they blame them for needing state assistance to raise their children. The O’Farrell Government has refused to support the Australian Services Union’s equal pay case for women. If women are to be raped, coerced, cajoled and guilted into pregnancy, and the pay gap continues to be unaddressed, then how can the government back away from financially supporting single mothers?

I agree, that education is important for women to increase social and economic participation, but imposing top-down measures such as this is not the way to go. If women were not so poor, if they have stable, affordable accommodation and adequate social supports to make the parenting role less-disadvantageous to them, then they would be free to become self-determining, fully-participating individuals.

I also don’t hear the government talking about increasing social services, or introducing free child-care in high schools or anything at all like that. Who will care for these babies while their parents are studying? This whole idea stinks of age discrimination. The parent-child bond is not considered as legitimate because the parent is young. No thought has been put into the the possibility of disrupting the bonding process, not to mention breast-feeding. Forcing punitive policy changes will do nothing for these women but allow social vilification of them to continue. It will also ensure that young mothers are vulnerable to abuse by male relatives if their income is suddenly cut off as they will be forced into relying on financial support from them.

The radfem dilemma

I remember when the americans had that election and everyone was talking about the patriarchy-identified Sarah Palin. Radical internet feminists were caught in that wasteland between challenging her oppressive anti-woman views and defending her against the vile misogyny and sexism of men from both the left and the right of politics. I do not think that I am alone in the stress of negotiating that fine line when confronted by women who are so thoroughly indoctrinated in patriarchal bullshit. I am assaulted by those confrontations several times a day. It’s exhausting.

The State Labor candidate for Cronulla (sometimes known as KKKronulla) is Stefanie Jones, 23, froma nice white middle class family in expensive Grays Point. Without pre-emptively criticising her politics, because she has not actually mentioned politics yet to my knowledge, I already feel like I’m walking this fine line with her. Jones has been labelled a “bimbo” and yes this is 2011. There are apparently still people walking amongst us who use the term “bimbo” when referring to women who happen to conform to patriarchy-approved ideals of appearance. When I saw this headline in my local paper it curled my lip. Before I even got to the elevator I was mentally composing a letter to the editor. Then I saw this line:

‘‘But, I am still me — I am not going to put on a pants suit and pretend not to be me,’’ she said.

…and this:

‘‘Just because I can wear dresses that stop above my knee doesn’t mean I don’t have a brain,’’

Yep. Individual choosy choice chooser just happens to choose the very choice that men demand that she choose. I mean patriarchy has deemed her worthy of a short skirt, hello!

Wouldn’t it be great if she came back with something like “I consider that type of sexist commentary out-dated and offensive to ALL women” instead of this me me me shit? Does she not identify as part of a class?

If you read on she is deliberately interpreting the sexist slander as having something to do with her young age. It has nothing to do with age! Men have been entering politics at young ages for fucking ages and they don’t get cast in the bimbo role. Wake up woman! You are presuming to run for a position of power in an electorate which is situated within a shire with a very high rate of violence against women. Can we please talk about something other than your personal outrage and your skirt?

This is what a feminist looks like.

This is what a feminist looks like. Now if only my sisters here in australia would take to the streets and protest the sexist old bastards governing this country. These women have my respect.

Thanks to Noanodyne for the heads up.