The pastel divide

Code Pink, posted by Lauren Sandler at Mother Jones’ Culture & Media blog, examines the implications of the gendered pink-blue split among children. Gender as represented by pink and blue goads me particularly because it is emblematic of the first step of applying gender to an individual; the first aesthetic step in a socialising process that will ultimately determine or at least heavily influence lifelong behaviour, relationships, occupations, treatment at the hands of others, education etc.

Dressing a newborn in either pink or blue is not a benign social tradition. Like expecting a woman to change her name upon marriage, it is an unquestioned convention that is hugely symbolic – in this case of the enormous gulf between sex and gender, and the widespread indifference to this disparity. In contemporary society pink and blue each carry codes of behaviour that children comprehend at a very young age. From Code Pink:

“Pink itself isn’t the problem; it’s the message it conveys. That troubling message…is that girls and boys are deeply dissimilar creatures from day one. Lise Eliot [a neuroscientist and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It] argues that the pink-blue split shapes some enduring assumptions about babies’ emotional lives—at a time when girls’ and boys’ brains are almost entirely alike.”

A girl in pink will be encouraged to be passive and appearance obsessed. She will have different opportunities to her brother in blue, and different expectations placed upon her. Despite her own personality, she will have been shaped by forces beyond her control all her life – without ever really exercising her choice.

Monica Dux highlights how dramatically young girls can be affected by adherence to gender colour-codes and its accompanying behavioural baggage.

“Like raunch culture, the fairy princess aesthetic and its associated paraphernalia serve to entrench an extremely narrow idea of femininity, impressing on young girls that they are pretty, flighty little objects to be admired and marvelled at, rather than active young things seeking out adventure.

“This reinforces a passive understanding of what it is to be female, encouraging fantasies that are focused less on action, and far more on how you look. Of course, fairies and princesses can have adventures, but hyper-feminised modes of dressing put the focus squarely on appearance, teaching girls that self-worth is measured by how pretty you are, and not by what you do.”

The gender split that begins with the pink/blue dichotomy has other more sinister effects.  Kate Townshend, a British primary teacher, has written about ‘gender in the playground’ for the F-Word. Calling on her experience in the classroom, she links infant pink to the sexualisation of young girls – a topic which has had a great deal of media attention in recent years.

“They don’t call it grooming for nothing, and it starts with the indoctrination of ‘pink’ for girls from infant-hood onwards. Or so say the organisers of Pink Stinks, “a campaign and social enterprise that challenges the ‘culture of pink’ which invades every aspect of girls’ lives”. They argue that by the time they reach their teens, female children have a life-time of learning to become sexual objects behind them, so perhaps we should be far from surprised when 10-year-olds start clamouring for the latest porn star t-shirt, or worrying that their legs are too short…

“These kinds of attitudes hurt children of both sexes, not least because they leave them bereft of positive examples of male-female interaction in the media world they tend to worship and adore. But though they lack the words to articulate it, it seems obvious in some of the schools I go into that the boys know things are weighted in their favour, at least in the short term. By 11, they have already learnt that calling a girl fat effectively finishes the argument. It doesn’t matter whether she is actually fat or not. It has become a code word which makes it clear that since female self worth is built upon looks, it is easily destroyed by male indifference or antagonism.”

All of this is fairly self-evident. What is illuminating is that this convention, so entrenched as to be accepted as reflecting human nature, is a relatively recent social development:

“Assigning colour to gender is mostly a twentieth century trait. It should be noted that it is a practice limited most often to Western Europe and the Americas. It would also seem that the effect of colour-coded gender differences (pink for girls, blue for boys) existed oppositely initially.”

As Sandler explains in Code Pink, “this was a nod to symbolism that associated red with manliness; pink was considered its kid-friendly shade. Blue was the color of the Virgin Mary’s veil and connoted femininity.”

Which makes pseudo-scientific breakthroughs that support an evolutionary basis for every perceived gender difference, from a woman’s predeliction for shopping to a man’s fear of commitment, look ridculous – such as this one linking the pink/blue split to blue skies and blushing berries in our prehistory.

Still, pink for girls and blue for boys remains the dominant code used to consider sex and gender, and this stereotype is exploited and perpetuated by advertisers.  

So colour-coded gender and the ideology it represents – clearly such an effective marketing tool – is not likely going anywhere soon.

Venus women's razor

Schick Quattro Titanium men's razor

Montmorency Football Club & The Legal System

As I’m sure many of you have read, three junior members of the Montmerency Football Club – a suburban football club in Victoria – have been charged with the sexual assault of two young women. Thirteen other players were interviewed and the police say they expect to lay further charges. At the end of their playing season a group of young players had organised an unofficial weekend away to Phillip Island. **trigger warning** Whilst there they lured two women to the villa they had rented and held them prisoner whilst raping them. One woman was reportedly ’sexually assaulted by as many as eight men’ and the other at least five different times. They finally escaped when a brawl broke out between the men and they could sneak away unnoticed.

I know that it is because it’s a high profile case (it appears sports teams raping women is in vogue for the media) but it is so exciting to see the police taking this crime seriously and the courts processing it quickly. Several women I know are still caught up in the legal system two years after their original assaults. One woman I know had to wait a year and a half before she even got a committal hearing. Rape and sexual assault cases frequently take years to be processed and, as I’m sure you can imagine or are aware, this is not an enjoyable process. It’s not as easy to move on and heal when you have a court date in two months… and then in five months… and then in a year… Apart from the waiting and the wondering there’s the potential – or at least fear – of having to see your abuser. A given part of the process is that you have to relive the experience of your assault over and over and over again – to the police, to the judge, to the lawyers, on paper, in person, via video link up. You have to be cruelly cross examined by the lawyer of the person who assaulted you (I state unequivocally, right now, that the majority of lawyers that represent rapists are fucking scumbags).

Reclaim The Night 09

Reclaim The Night is this week! Some events are on Thursday evening and some are on Friday but it’s THIS WEEK. You can find your local event here.

If you’re wondering what RTN is Mel Campbell gave a great round up last year of what it is and why it exists which you should go (re)read.

I’m in Melbourne so I can only speak from experience about that but I thought the rally last year was great. It really got away from the sort of cliquey activist crew event that it can be and there were a lot of women from all walks of life present. Hopefully it’ll be even bigger and more open this year. I find it really thrilling and empowering to stand with so many different women and walk the street with them in a big group, laughing, talking, yelling, chanting, listening and more. It definitely felt like a really positive experience that celebrated the collective strength of women and our right to not be afraid or experience violence. It’s not about heavy handed feminist dialectic (as much as I love the stuff) but just about standing together, voicing a belief and feeling good about doing so. Anyway! I hope to see you all there!

Disclosure – I’m not part of the organising collective but I emceed the rally part last and am doing so again this year. Give me a wave! c

Intersex Australians Classified Under ‘Sexual Deviant’

Anti-androgens are drugs that restrict the release of hormones – primarily testosterone – in the body. They can be used as a treatment for prostate cancer, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), acne and male pattern baldness. They also work to suppress the male libido/sexual drive and as such is used to ‘treat’ sex offenders. Additionally, intersex people that identify as female might take anti-androgen medication to help with hormone imbalances and some trans women (that are transitioning medically, sometimes in the lead up to surgery) will take it to suppress testosterone so that introduced estrogen can work more effectively on their body.

In Australia the main/only anti androgens I could find available are Cyprone, Cyprostat, Cyproterone Acetate (the generic name), Procur, Cyprohexal and Androcur. If you follow any of those drug links you’ll see they can only be prescribed for:

1014    Advanced carcinoma of the prostate;
1404    To reduce drive in sexual deviations in males.

You have to fit in to one of these two categories to get the drug. So, unless you have pretty much incurable prostate cancer, if you need an anti-androgen in Australia – and can’t afford a non-subsidised prescription – your doctor has probably had to get a little inventive with the prescription and classify you as a ’sexual deviant’. What’s in a label, right? Well, if you are classified as a ’sexual deviant’ and prescribed this medication then the Therapeutic Goods Administration will put you on their list of possible sex offenders. That’s right. In Australia we like to classify intersex and trans women as possible sex offenders. It can’t just be argued away as a bureaucratic list. It’s dehumanising for people who already have enough trouble being treated as human beings.

And, seriously, who knows how the TGA information is being shared or with who. Does Centrelink? The DOCS? Next time we have another sex-offenders-not-in-our-neighbourhood panic are we going to start pulling TGA files and combining them with the various state sex offender lists?

Credit where credit it due, first heard about this here.

UPDATE. It seems you can access the medication under:

1230 Moderate to severe androgenisation in non-pregnant women (acne alone is not a sufficient indication of androgenisation).

As seen here. (Click on the ‘conditions for prescribing’ link.) I apologise for having not seen or mentioned this before. There are still worries though. If the previously reported isn’t the case why are intersex and trans women being lead to believe it is true? Why are their doctors not aware they don’t need to be classified as sexual deviants? As Wildly Parenthetical says:

I have, however, heard of at least two trans or intersex people who were advised that they would be placed on a sex offender registry if they were prescribed the drug under the PBS, which raises the question of what role physicians play in a potentially scaremongering style of gatekeeping.

Thoughts on rape reporting

There’s a story up on The Age about the horrific rape of an Australia woman in Edinburgh. I’m attaching a massive TRIGGER WARNING to this article and this story. If you think reading somewhat graphic details about rape is a bad idea for you then be careful following the link to this story. It’s here.

Briefly: an Australian woman living in Edinburgh was raped multiple times by two strangers who were also physically violent in other ways. There’s a couple of reasons I want to mention this article.

First is that Fairfax has finally managed to write an article about rape that isn’t horribly offensive. (I checked outside and the apocalypse hasn’t come so I’m not really sure what is going on.) Sure, the title (‘Australian woman’s eight-hour rape ordeal’) is a bit jarring and they mention the nationality of the perpetrators, a possibly unnecessary descriptor. But, for the most part, it’s a simple and well written piece of reportage on an horrific and devastating crime.

Second is, why?

The article states that the “rape was reported as one of the worst to ever occur in Edinburgh.” This makes me wonder if she’d instead been raped by her partner who was claiming she had consented, would the reporting be as straight forward and clear? Or would they write “pretty bad but not the worst” and would we be back to the inverted comma’s of ‘rape’? I understand that there are different levels of brutality and different forms of trauma, some worse than others. But I try really hard to not buy into the sliding scale of rape. Disqualifying a persons experience of rape as ‘less’ than that of someone else is very dangerous territory. One of the cruelest things about rape, that I think a lot of people don’t understand, is that it often can’t be measured by the form of the original attack, it’s the long term emotional consequences that are the true terror. Obviously, the rape itself impacts on those long term consequences but not in a definitive definable way.

I know I sound awfully cynical here but to get to the point: is the reason the article is written so clearly due to the crime itself being so brutal and horrific? There is no way anyone could cast aspersions on the survivor after reading in detail about what happened to her. Additionally, the survivor was able to give lengthy and detailed statements to the police about her attack as well as appearing in court. Is the reporting on this woman’s experience fair, balanced and reasoned because what happened to her is – beyond a shadow of doubt – awful and because she was able to tell us exactly how awful it was?

Thoughts?

Dr Elizabeth Blackburn Becomes Australia’s First Female Nobel Prize Winner

Hearty congratulations are in order for Dr Elizabeth Blackburn, who last night was announced – along with her colleagues Jack Szostak and Carol Greider – as the winner of the Nobel prize for medicine. The San Francisco-based Blackburn’s work concerns the study of telomeres, cellular “caps” that protect chromosomes; ”You can think of a chromosome as a shoelace with a telomere as the aglet,” she explained, “the tag or sheath at the end of a shoelace that prevents the end from fraying.”

Here’s some background info from The Age’s coverage:

Australia’s 11th Nobel laureate, Dr Blackburn is a vocal advocate of independent scientific thought, and fell out with the Bush administration over cloning and stem cells. She was dropped from the president’s Council on Bioethics in 2004 after questioning its bias.

A colleague and friend, Melbourne University dean of science Rob Saint, said Dr Blackburn chose her career at a time when women were starting to become much more involved in the sciences. ”I think she would be representative of a change in that gender balance,” Professor Saint said. ” ”She is a very down-to-earth person, intelligent and wise. She stood up for not letting politics intrude into discussions about science.”

Fellow Australian geneticist Jenny Graves said the Nobel prize would serve as great encouragement to young women. ”It’s quite inspirational to those [who] realise we’ve all struggled and persevered to do fantastic science,” said Professor Graves. ”Liz’s time was definitely coming. Her work was just becoming more important as time passed.”

Couldn’t agree more. You can read more about Dr Blackburn and watch some of her lectures over at the University of California San Francisco’s Blackburn Lab Research page.

I think, however, I do need to briefly mention The Age’s choice of headline:

The headline is contextualised in the article’s introduction:

EARLY in her tertiary education Elizabeth Blackburn was asked by a family friend: ”What’s a nice girl like you doing studying science?”

Unfortunately, choosing to riff on it via the headline misses the point (i.e. that Dr Blackburn has triumphed over such outmoded, sexist and infantilising statements) and instead perpetuates such inanities – girls can’t study science; when are you going to get married and quit work; yes, but you’re not a real scientist, girlie – for the sake of a tittersome headline. So, “thanks”, The Age, for continuing a century or so of sexist rhetoric.

Parent = Mother

For ages I’ve been meaning to write about the issue of sexism in regards to male and female parental responsibility (for the record, I’m only discussing heterosexual, dual parent households here), and was finally spurred into action by this report yesterday about parents whose extreme neglect killed their daughter – the mother has been given a life sentence for murder while the father has been sentenced to 12 years for manslaughter.

Admittedly there may be details about the case that explain why the father – who lived in the same house – has been given a much lighter sentence. However, these (as far as I can see) haven’t been explained in media coverage, which to me is indicative in itself of a wide spread presumption in our society that, for better or worse, mothers are more responsible for their children than fathers are.

I say ‘for better or worse’ because depending on circumstances, mothers can be heaped with praise or damned for their actions…either way, the father is often left out of the equation and receives neither praise for a healthy, happy child nor damnation for a neglected, unhappy child.

Obviously this division of responsibility between parents can actually reflect reality in families where the mother takes the primary caring role for children – and I’m not arguing that every family should split responsibility 50/50, I think that’s for each couple to work out themselves. What I’m focusing on here is the presumption so often reflected in the media, workplaces and the courts that women should be more responsible for their children than men are.

A few cases in point. I recently was on the staff team negotiating my workplace’s Enterprise Agreement. I argued (in vain) for greater equity between maternity and paternity leave. Women in my workplace currently get more than 6 times the length of leave than men when they have a baby. I understand the argument that women have usually been through the physical experience of pregnancy and labour and that deserves time off on top of baby-caring leave; however, in my workplace mothers who adopt also get the full female entitlement, thereby showing the presumption behind the  unequal leave is based on one’s sex, not on whether one has just gone through pregnancy and labour or not. Surely dads have a right to care for their babies just as much as mums – not to mention the benefit to the mother and baby of having more ‘hands on deck’.

Victorians may well remember the case of baby ‘Catherine‘ who was abandoned outside a hospital in Melbourne. The entire media coverage presupposed it was the mother, not the father, who had left the baby there, and vilified her for this, while the role of the father was almost entirely ignored – many of us will remember the infamous Herald Sun headline ‘How Could She’.

My partner alerted me to this story by the BBC about research showing ‘Children whose mothers work are less likely to lead healthy lives than those with “stay at home” mothers.’ Yes, it’s all about the mums. Never mind fathers’ responsibility for their children.

Professor Catherine Law, who led the study, said they had not looked at fathers in this study because fathers employment levels had not changed whereas the numbers of working mothers had increased dramatically.

So, if I follow the argument correctly, it goes something like: ‘because men have always been absent, they’re not responsible…mothers used to be present, so, damn it, they still should be!’? A comment on the story by Naomi of Sussex echoes my point:

I’m cross on so many levels, but mainly a personal one! I work, my husband doesn’t, he is our daughter’s main carer…Why do people insist on saying ‘mother’ when they often mean ‘parent’. It’s wrong on other levels too of course, but for me it’s the stupidity of assuming a mum should stay at home and a dad should work – are we still in the 50s?

My point is simple: however couples choose to take responsibility for their children is their business and, unless no responsibility is taken i.e. the child is neglected, others should reserve judgement. I think this can best be done by the media, courts, workplaces and other important institutions taking as neutral a stance as possible i.e. making no assumptions and when an assumption is unavoidable (e.g. when deciding on maternity and paternity leave provisions) assuming equal rights and responsibilities between women and men.

Toyota Prado Campaign Doesn’t Want No Poofs Or Women ‘Round Here

Back in gender studies class at uni, momentum was regularly stopped while our lecturer explained to whinging sportoes that the patriarchy was bad for men, too – and the new Toyota Prado campaign has had me thinking precisely that for the past week. Here’s the ad, if you’ve not yet seen it:

The ‘net has been abuzz about how hilarious it is, particularly as a skewering of the myriad ‘phobias exhibited by Border Security-type television shows (xenophobia springs to mind), but that’s where it falls down for me, and all because of one of my least favourite phobias of all.

It is “funny”, much like the Snickers/Mr T ads and moments of the new VB campaign. But here’s the problem I have with it: campaigns like these (and, for a real flashback, the old Collingwood “What’s that in your locker, you big girl?” Sunsilk ad), play into your average “Aussie” person’s latent (or in many cases, not so latent) homophobia.

All that’s missing is for one of the tough boder patrol team members to use the phrase “a bit of a poofter”.

That might seem like a stretch, but it isn’t when you examine the campaign’s examples of apparent “soft” manhood (i.e. “men’s cosmetics”, “manscaping”). Much like the phrase “real women” makes my blood boil, so does implied ideals of “real manhood”, which, let’s face it – despite the presence of a few women in the ad, both on the Patrol and behind the wheel – is essentially at the core of the Prado campaign: people who drive “soft-roaders” are either not real men (in other words, potential gay men), or women (who are most certainly not real men).

We’ll keep laughing at this sort of humour in advertising because in our post-internet-slang (“Taste the future in your mouth”, “The drinking beer”, etc) and satire-drenched world, it will be shrugged off as “irony”. But isn’t it time we examined the deeper implications of such depictions of manhood, real or unreal?

Methinks it’s time for Joe Jackson’s sage meditation on gender roles to climb back up the classic hits charts for a much needed repeat airing:

Love & Marriage… Don’t Go Together Like A Horse & Carriage

So, I know it’s lazy to just post a link and say ‘go look here’ but I think this piece by Catherine Deveny in the Sydney Morning Herald today is a worthy excuse for such an indolent act. I also think it’s a good kick off for a fun TDC discussion about marriage and it’s place and purpose in our current day and age.

The article begins:

I AM against gay marriage. I’m against straight marriage. I’m against marriage full stop. Why are we hanging on to this relic of an anachronistic system (which still reeks of misogyny and bigotry), established so men could own women to ensure their estates and titles were passed on to their kids – sorry, their sons? Time to ditch it.

Go read!

Religion and the law

I got along to a session at the Melbourne Writers Festival a couple of weeks ago called ‘Writer As Activist,’ which featured Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah on the panel. Her debut collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly, is published by Faber. Gappah won Zimbabwe’s Mukuru Nyaya Award for comic writing, and was a runner-up in the SA/PEN HSBC short story competition judged by JM Coetzee. She has law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. She lives with her son Kush in Geneva, where she works as an international trade lawyer. She speaks English, German and French, as well as her native language, Shona.

I’m still trying to figure out when on earth she finds time to write fiction.

In the panel discussion, Gappah came across as an extremely intelligent, funny and sensitive woman. She did point out that she struggles with being referred to as “The voice of Zimbabwe” in the media. She also mentioned that she doesn’t necessarily consider herself an ‘activist’; rather, she identifies as a short story writer whose fictional characters inhabit contemporary Zimbabwe. She lamented that because of the nation’s current political situation and the overwhelming interest in Mugabe, she had never been asked, as a non-fiction writer, how she crafted her characters. (Later, during Q&A, a lovely man up the back did ask her this, which was met with appreciative laughter from both the audience and Gappah).

Anyway, I decided to have a look at her blog. She had posted about a story which appeared on the BBC news website regarding a new law in Mali which gives women equal rights in marriage. Here’s Gappah’s post in its entirety.

First they want an education, now this. This, right here, is exactly why women should remain poor and illiterate.

The irony of this story, pinched in its entirety from the BBC news website, is that the woman inveighing against “intellectuals” in this story will never appreciate the irony of that last sentence.

_____________

Tens of thousands of people in Mali’s capital, Bamako, have been protesting against a new law which gives women equal rights in marriage.

The law, passed earlier this month, also strengthens inheritance rights for women and children born out of wedlock.

The head of a Muslim women’s association says only a minority of Malian women – “the intellectuals” as she put it – supports the law.

Several other protests have taken place in other parts of the country.

The law was adopted by the Malian parliament at the beginning of August, and has yet to be signed into force by the president.

One of the most contentious issues in the new legislation is that women are no longer required to obey their husbands.

Hadja Sapiato Dembele of the National Union of Muslim Women’s Associations said the law goes against Islamic principles.

“We have to stick to the Koran,” Ms Dembele told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme. “A man must protect his wife, a wife must obey her husband.”

“It’s a tiny minority of women here that wants this new law – the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country – the real Muslims – are against it,” she added.

Gappah is right. Irony WIN. The reality is pretty frightening, though.