Classism in education

Note: all of you scumbag males who found this post by searching for child porn, please drop off the face of the planet.

Background information for readers outside of australia: Schoolies is a traditional end of Year 12 holiday that many students participate in after final exams. It is not uncontroversial of course, despite the money that adults make off these young people, because society is scared of young people in large groups. Schoolies is a public reminder that lots of young people have temporarily escaped the shackles of the state – they have left the mechanism of social control we call school, but are not yet engaged in work or further study. Nobody is watching them!

This load of bigoted drivel from Chris Fotinopolous, a teacher, had my blood at boiling point. It’s difficult to say what Fotinopolous is actually getting at in this poorly researched, unsubstantiated little hate piece; is he annoyed at young people having part time jobs and therefore a degree of empowerment and the resources to participate in celebrations he considers the domain of the elites? Probably. Has he not connected the dots regarding the relationship between child abuse and social participation? Definitely. But there is also a subtle undertone of classism in this piece. Have a go at this:

No doubt, encouraging children to stay at school is enormously beneficial for the individual and society, but it also leads to some students continuing with school when they probably would have been better off leaving earlier and doing something else.

The point that’s often missed by social commentators is that the ugly side of schoolies is largely due to the behaviour of students who performed poorly in year 12. It’s the kind of student who repeatedly neglects homework and refuses to attend after-school detentions because they work up to five nights a week.

I suspect these underperforming and disengaged students are behind the interstate schoolies shenanigans that we see on news bulletins.

Right, the poorly-performing students. The young people marginalised by structural inequality, social isolation, and inadequate access to social and other resources. Because the children of the rich and powerful never do anything wrong.

Fotinopoulos forgets that it is the law that keeps young people at school until the age of 17, unless they have an apprenticeship or are going to TAFE, a policy enforced by the witholding of Centrelink payments. It is governments that want to keep young people under their watchful eye until they are of legal majority, whether it be through institutions such as educational, law and welfare systems, or informal social controls such as media-driven rhetoric of youth-gone-wild or family values. It is not the fault of young people that they are forced to remain in a system that has already failed them. Neither do we encourage poorly-performing young people with rich families to leave school before completing the HSC. In fact, the pressure to complete the Higher School Certificate is enormous for all high school students.

So why does Fotinopoulos consider poor and marginalised young people to be somehow immune to the HSC propaganda? What he seems to be saying is, that the wrong types are somehow coming through the school system with a certificate. And this is in conflict with the true purpose of school, which is either to transfer wealth and resources from generation to generation, or to keep the offspring of the masses under control long enough that they can be channelled into safe, social order-maintaining activities, whether that be to support the labour market, as cannon fodder, or to line the prison system. Fotinopoulos’ hand-wringing over safety issues appears to be a bit of concern trolling, often indulged in by the privileged classes in order to push the marginalised back in their place. It must be, because to state that it is poor, under-achieving young people who cause trouble at end of school celebrations, is a fucking dirty lie.

In her book, Right to be hostile: schools, prisons and the making of public enemies (2007), Erica Meiners, teacher and social justice advocate, describes what has come to be known as the “school to prison pipeline” or the “school push out”, a pattern of systemic exclusion of students from certain social groups, mostly black students. This exclusion derives from increasingly harsh behaviour policies directed at poorer, marginalised students, and tends to masquerade under the guise of “safety”.

This is exactly what Fotinopoulos is on about. This is not a safety issue; he’s not calling for a ban on Schoolies. He just wants a ban on certain young people from participating in a school-related activity that he and other teachers have no power to control. He also wants the poorer young people, and young people already most excluded and disadvantaged within the school system, to be squeezed out early. But how early?

Because this month we care about child abuse, we’ll all be aware of the increasing awareness and prevalence of it in society. So many men abuse children – who would have thought? The only people not surprised by this news are radical feminists (and some social workers), because we faced the awful truth long ago. But child abuse features highly in the collective public mind at the moment. As a teacher, Fotinopoulos would have some awareness of the prevalence too – he’s a fucking mandatory reporter. He would be aware that these poorly-performing students as he calls them, the disengaged, the ones labelled with “behavioural problems” are very often young people who as children, were abused, either emotionally, sexually or physically, and/or neglected. They are the young people who, as children, were the subject of child protection reports, were removed from their families, passed around the foster care system and who suffer from ongoing post traumatic stress disorder, learning disabilities, impaired social development, mental health issues and all the attendant problems in regulating their own behaviours.

NSW schools are suspending and expelling these children from kindergarten onwards, because they do not have the resources to include them (many of them do not have the compassion or insight either) and so these children quickly get tagged as the naughty ones and become scapegoats for entire school communities. Many of them move from school to school, either because of expulsion (often due to pressure from parents of higher socioeconomic backgrounds), or due to multiple foster care placements.

These are the young people that Fotinopoulos is whining about, and he would be well aware that these young people rarely have the resources to participate in schoolies. This is why I call bullshit. He doesn’t so much care about young people’s safety at schoolies – he just wants these young people out of school. This is a shameful attitude from a person who makes a living off children and young people. Not surprising that he did not enable comments on this piece, nor did he mention the name of the school he works for.

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.

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

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.

Maybe Nora Ephron was a feminist

But it sure wasn’t reflected in any of the work that she’s famous for. Why are feminist sites suddenly hailing her as a great feminist? She was talented, she was successful, she was admirable in a lot of ways. But we haven’t lost a great funny feminist. If she had been an outspoken feminist do you think we would have even heard about her death? Just because a woman does it doesn’t mean it’s feminist.

When Harry Met Sally was one of those 80s movies that contributed to the Backlash against feminism. It helped to reinforce in the public mind, the idea that women working in order to be financially independent would end up miserable. It presented women as a white middle class monolith who all had the time to sit around bemoaning the lack of eligible nigels. It repeated the erroneous statistic about women over a certain age being unlikely to marry and of course that bogus ‘biological clock’ trope. The heteronormativity aside, the creepy sexist douchebag played by Billy Crystal aside, the characterisation of a woman who’s just so damned uptight she needs a man to sort her life out aside, it spoke a shit tonne of dangerous lies to women. Lies that were always intended to dissuade women from feminism and freedom. It clearly stated, don’t be uppity, don’t go for a career, all your convictions are wrong and a man will put you straight, otherwise your fate is to be miserable about your misguided aspirations to be a regular human being, forever. You’ll find out the hard way.

A few libfem bloggers appear bedazzled by Nora Ephron’s commercial success within patriarchy. It’s the success part that gives us the clue here.

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.