When Supermarkets Are More Aware Of What Women Want Than The Government

One of my – and I’m sure many other Australians’, female and male – biggest bugbears is the fact that the Rudd Government has flatly refused to remove the GST on women’s sanitary products that was brought in approximately fifty thousand years earlier by the Howard Government when the GST was introduced to Australia. Their refusal to bin, as my friend Mel called it on Twitter, “the world’s stupidest and most sexist tax” suggests that there are people in the Rudd Government who honestly believe that tampons and pads are monthly “luxury” items and not feminine hygiene essentials.

Well, I never thought I’d live to see the day that a supermarket chain drew attention to the idiocy of the ‘tampon tax’ – which it’s worth adding is nearing its 10th birthday – in a marketing campaign: Coles will be “paying” the GST on all women’s essentials for the next week as one of their specials. I spotted a television ad during morning tele today, and here’s the word-up from Coles’ website (emphasis mine), in this instance regarding Carefree liners (though all sanitary items are included in the special):

You shouldn’t be taxed for being a woman. Coles will pay the GST to the government for all feminine hygiene products bought in our stores, so that you don’t have to.

It’s a shame that the special only lasts for the next week, but in terms of a statement made within an economic climate and retail industry that generally wants women to spend as much as they possibly can (or perhaps more correctly, can’t – hello credit cards) on anything and everything, I find it quite revolutionary. Sure, it’s a marketing ploy – they want you to spend your dollars at Coles – but the fact that they are also willing to highlight the ridiculous nature of the ‘tampon tax’ in the meantime is heartening and suggests that, unlike our Government, someone high up in Coles is actually listening to what Australian women want. (If you’d like to send Coles a thumbs-up, you can do so here.)

So, for the nth time, Prime Minister Rudd and Mr Swan: WHY ARE WOMEN STILL BEING TAXED FOR GETTING THEIR PERIODS?

Update at 12.30pm: here’s the catalogue page, too, in all its newsprinty glory:

Can we say it’s a small handful of loose change, but one giant change for womankind?

Fairfax can do better

Fairfax’s nest of gender stereotypes, the online Life & Style section has some smashing content to provoke a mid-week ponder.

Thanks Lisa Pryor for asking what men want in a wife, and thanks too to the subs who stuck ‘Maid to Order’ on the graphic linking to the story. Domestic help then I gather.

I hope included in this story simply for effect, ‘nightclub impresario’ Nicholas Atgemis ticks all the chauvinist boxes and more.

Having addressed the emasculation that comes with a financially independent wife, ‘Atgemis is fine with the idea of a wife with a career, so long as she stays home with the children for the first seven years or so; years he considers crucial to a child’s development.’

He actually talks about the future primary care giver of his children in these terms: “I want something a bit exotic, something no one else has got their hands on.” Straight from the showroom floor then?

It is clear that Atgemis represents the extreme end of a spectrum of views, and his inflammatory comments are balanced by the spirituality of Anglican Minister Justin Moffatt and construction manager Luke Keller’s balanced salt-of-the-earth approach to relationships.

Freedom of speech and all that, but this two-dimensional article isn’t breaking any new ground in the area of personal relationships or representations of character.

Australian model Alyssa Sutherland reflects on pole-dancing for fitness:

“It’s not in the bedroom, it’s in the living room. But it’s a brand new pole and it’s way too slippery. Apparently, it needs to be worn in. One trick is to put shaving cream all over your body so you’re sticky,” she says.

Definitely newsworthy.

Meanwhile Sam at Ask Sam taps into a mob-like single consciousness in her look at interstate dating. Inhabitants of Melbourne and Sydney attain a single gendered voice - Sydney women say their men are commitment-phobes! Melbourne women are livid Sydney women are on their turf!

As Sam is clearly in possession of some sort of literacy I assume this obtuseness is a stylistic choice, but that doesn’t save it from being pointless and dull and actually counter-productive.

Melbourne/Sydney rivalry is artfully rendered by Sam in a totally novel way:

Melbourne men are only too happy to meet a new crop of singles. One gent told the media Melbourne women were too hard to meet because they were all “introspective and introverted,” while saying Sydney women were “much more assertive.” (Which is interesting, considering Sydney men will say that Sydney women are impossible to talk to!)

And answering Sam’s opening gambit, “what do you think is so wrong with women in this city these days?” – I’d say it’s that any of them read her blog. Advice I usually follow, when not seeking to stir myself up on a quiet day.

To finish on a positive note, The Guardian’s website has a Life & Style section that doesn’t rely on such formulaic content. The articles on the Women page regularly engage with serious issues affecting women – such as legislation affecting the sex industry - and call on feminist perspectives. Fairfax on the other hand have turned tabloid – probably because it is easier to do so than trying to surpass standard tropes.

A Sentence Reflects Its Crime – But What Is “Less-Serious Rape”?

Initially I began reading this report on the sentencing of serial rapist John Xydias with a sense of justice being served, a feeling that at times can feel increasingly rare when it comes to the sentencing of sex criminals. Victorian Supreme Court Chief Justice Marilyn Warren sentenced Xydias to 28 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a history of criminal sexual behaviour that almost beggars belief (particularly upsetting is the fact that many of the victims were not aware of the assaults until they had been shown the video tapes by police):

He pleaded guilty to 86 charges, comprising 25 of rape and 61 of sexual assault, in a series of sex attacks on 11 women between 1991 and 2006,

He rendered the women unconscious, probably with the date rape drug Rohypnol, before sexually assaulting them and filming the attacks.

Too often, rapists receive sentences that in no way reflect the seriousness of their crimes (particularly in light of the ongoing damage it wreaks on their victim’s life) – that is if they receive sentences at all.

However, I was shocked when I read this particular passage of Justice Warren’s sentencing (emphasis is mine):

“Your offending was sustained over a period of 15 years, your conduct was not low-level or less-serious rape.”

It’s particularly disappointing as I feel it lessens the impact of a sentencing statement that otherwise conveys the severity of Xydias’ crimes. As she then continues:

“The worst aspect of your conduct was the degrading and dehumanising of your victims,” she said.

“The community will not tolerate the abuse, degradation and humiliation of women as you have carried out.”

All true, but I read the entire thing but what stuck in my mind was the passage I emphasised previously.

What on earth is “low-level or less-serious” rape? Would “the community” tolerate these supposed “low-level” offenses, thus necessitating a lighter sentence? Rape is rape. I appreciate that she perhaps was referring to relative levels of physical violence with regards to the act, but even then, surely the core issue is that the rape itself – the sexual assault – is the most damaging part of the crime for the person who suffers the attack?

The perceived semantics and language of rape – witness the ongoing debate about “grey rape”, “marital rape” and “date rape” (with many pundits and politicians seemingly believing the latter two don’t even exist) – are doubly frustrating because the fact that we even need to argue about the impact of language in these situations demonstrates that the seriousness of rape is still doubted or misunderstood. If a man rapes me, no matter whether I am given a black eye, a slit throat, a drink laced with drugs, or a bunch of flowers afterwards, a man has still raped me. When will the wider community (and, importantly, the legal world) realise that the issue is not (primarily, at least) what happened before, during or after the rape, but the rape itself?

What do you think?

(PS go here for Hoyden About Town’s excellent discussion of the use of passive voice in reporting rape and sexual assault – something that, in rare respite, hasn’t happened in today’s coverage of Xydias’ sentencing.)

Your inner sexpot consumer

 

The image accompanying The Age article

A couple of Sundays ago The Age website featured “Cheeky ad campaign or sexploitation?” – an article about “a popular clothes retailer using highly sexualised images of young women – many of them company staff ” in its advertising.

 

There are tons of photos of women in provocative poses on the Models page of the American Apparel site. I’m not arguing for the complete removal of sexual provocation from advertising images – sex has a place in the public arena – however some of the photos have no discernible relevance to American Apparel products. In this slideshow, for instance, Hannah Lee is pictured topless, with no American Apparel clothing in frame. Sunday’s Age article describes Hannah as ‘very young’ and the pictures ‘all provocative poses and barely covered breasts.’

The DIY aesthetic of many of the photos – taken in front of door frames, on couches, but mostly on white-sheeted beds – gives the viewer a sense of the voyeur. The many pictures of Natasha look like they were taken by a lover. Sophia, on all fours, arches her back and cocks her hips. Veronica, looking over her shoulder towards the camera, juts out her buttocks. Many of the other photos stick with this soft-porn script.

It is not hard to work out why businesses such as American Apparel opt for overtly sexual images to advertise their product. As Daily Finance points out, this strategy has been very effective for Calvin Klein in the past. “Every year or so, Calvin Klein manufactures a fresh “controversy” with a button-pressing, taste-defying ad campaign calculated to generate stories on the evening news without quite crossing the line into outright indecency of the sort that would provoke the authorities.”

I followed the Daily Finance article to this early incarnation of teenage sexual innuendo as a marketing strategy, when Brooke Shields reminds us nothing comes between her and her Calvin Kleins.

Do these images constitute the “caricatures of female hotness” identified by Ariel Levy? Last year the Herald Sun reported that many women “felt the way they were portrayed in advertising and marketing harmed their ability to be taken seriously in the workplace.” Citing the results of a survey conducted by Splash Consulting Group, the article said “most of the 500 women surveyed said they would go out of their way to boycott a product or service if they were offended by an advertisement for it.”

While the sexualisation of women in advertising uses women as commodities, as Monica Dux and Zora Simic point out in The Great Feminist Denial, young women ‘make ideal consumers’. Will women use their buying power to render obsolete exploitative advertising?

This Just In From The Pointless Sexism Desk: Miranda Kerr Poses Nude To Save Koalas!

Picture, for a moment, this scenario: Rolling Stone Australia are to launch their inaugural “green issue”, which will feature a handful of environmental issues discussed by favourite celebrities – a noble idea, you might think; maybe ‘the kids’ will look into some conservation charities or turn off a few power points at the wall. So how do they spin it? By getting Miranda Kerr to pose nude on the cover, chained to a tree, of course!

She says she decided to go “au naturel” to raise awareness of the environment, specifically koalas.

“I feel strongly about the need to protect our natural environment because it supports our life – it really is that simple,” Kerr tells the magazine, in stores on Wednesday.

Kerr shot the cover for Rolling Stone’s first “green issue” in Sydney in January, with photographer Carlotta Moye behind the lens.

The day-long shoot also included a real koala named Koral, as Kerr is the face of the Australian Koala Foundation’s No Tree, No Me campaign.

The campaign aims to protect koalas’ natural habitat, hence Kerr’s only prop for the shoot is a chain locking her to a tree.

“It’s a sad thing – there are only about 100,000 koalas left in Australia,” Kerr said.

In an odd way I feel for Miranda in this instance; she believes she’s making a statement that will give strength to the cause, and I’m sure that’s how the cronies at RS headquarters pitched the shoot to her, too. I have visions of publishing fatcats schmoozing, in between puffs of Cuban cigars, “Yeah, baybee, get your gear off – that will really help raise the profile of the No Tree, No Me campaign!”

Unfortunately the only thing being raised here (apart from the obvious gutter colloquialisms) is Rolling Stone’s sales, which will surely go through the roof for the July issue, and not because the readership suddenly develop an environmental conscience en masse. As for the whole ‘chained to a tree’ angle, I’m having nightmare visions of PETA’s various “women = battery hens” protests.

When did naked women in bondage become the international visual slang for environmental/ethical protest? What does Miranda Kerr’s (clearly beautiful but here, completely irrelevant) naked body have to do with anything held within the pages of the Rolling Stone Green Issue? I am aware that the magazine is far from a paragon of feminist (or even just non-sexist) excellence, but this is taking things to a new low.

Am I the only one who finds this whole debacle deeply depressing?

Lewd Liberal losers

The Young Liberals are at it again with a website of photographs of ’sexy’ Liberal women.

The purpose of the site, according to creator Tim Andrews, was to recruit more men into the Liberal Party on the basis of the calibre of its women.

“To put it simply, we have all the hot girls,” the Washington-based blogger and member of the Ashfield branch of the Young Liberals wrote.

“Well, judge for yourself. I present to you the conservative and libertarian girls of Australia!”

What followed was a gallery of University Liberal Club women, one dressed in lingerie and others in provocative poses and bikinis according to The Daily Telegraph

This reminds me of my time at University with a Liberal Party women’s officer who wanted to bring back a Miss University competition and who auctioned off the campus Women’s Room message book with the details of all the women who’d signed up for a ’surviving rape’ workshop.

It’s a shame that the Daily Telegraph had to extend the pathetic sexism by reproducing the photographs of the women from the website.

Women We Love: Rachel Power

Rachel Power with Griffin and Freya

Melbourne-based writer and editor Rachel Power has had her finger in an assortment of pies over the years – she’s worked as a court artist for television news, designed album covers and taught life-drawing. And she’s done plenty of writing – as a freelance journalist, a biographer (she wrote Alison Rehfisch: A Life for Art), a contributor to The Age Cheap Eats Guide, and as chief reporter for the Australian Education Union Newsletter. She’s certainly come a long way from her cadetship at The Canberra Times, where she spent a lot of time trying to draw coherent answers from teenage guitarists for her column Band Scene.

In August last year, Red Dog Books published Rachel’s second book, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood – a collection of interviews with Australian artists including singer Clare Bowditch, expat actress Rachel Griffiths, filmmaker Sarah Watt and author Nicki Gemmell. In the book, Rachel asks these women about their choice to have children and the ramifications of motherhood for their art. Rachel’s journalistic aptitude is apparent as she teases out her subjects’ unflinchingly honest opinions on the delicate balance between art and motherhood. The Divided Heart is book ended with Rachel’s own experiences – she shares with us the strains of cosseting her creative instinct while being mother to Freya, 4 and Griffin, 7.

Here, she chats with The Dawn Chorus about the artist/mother dichotomy, the debate about the inherent inequalities between men and women, and the likelihood of her domestically-themed reincarnation.

* * *

The Dawn Chorus: How long did it take to write The Divided Heart?

Rachel Power: I think about four years.

TDC: There’s a huge amount of work in it…

RP: That was in no way four years full-time! I mean… I might have written two or three nights a week, largely between 10pm and 1am. And I had [Freya] during that time, so there would have been whole months when I wasn’t doing anything at all. And also I spent a good year trying to get it published.

TDC: At what point in the process of writing the book did you actually start looking for a publisher?

RP: I think I’d done a selection of interviews – maybe five – before I had a publisher. Because I wanted to get a good sample of interviews together, and have a clear idea of what I was doing. And I already had two arts grants to do it as well. And I got a fellowship from Varuna, the writers’ house, so I felt like there was interest in the idea. Every time I approached a woman and asked her if I could do an interview on that theme, I’d get these ‘Thank God!’ reactions… you know… ‘I’ve never had the scope for talking about this before!’ And I realised it was really meaningful to these women, it was a huge question in their lives, how they were going be both [artist and mother], and the implications of children for their career and vice versa. So it was no small theme and I think it’s got all sorts of implications for the nature of art and the nature of women’s lives and the choices that women are forced to make.

Gigabytes for Girls

 

With yet another example of ridiculous gender stereotyping, technology retailers Dell have released a new Website Della, with editorial and products supposedly targeted at women. I don’t know I just like my technology to work when I want it to, not to be some kind of social accessory.

Some of the highlights:

There’s a big plug for the Mini plug notebook  with lots of gendered descriptions for women who like to hang out with their friends

Enjoy a resized keyboard for a convenient fit – even in your bag

Um, since when is my bag meant to be small because I’m female?

Check the weather, movie times or restaurant directions wherever you go

God forbid we might want to use our internet access tocheck the news or stock market or work emails like the other gender. Shall we check out horoscopes too?

Are you imagining the restraint the copywriters would have to use to ensure the absent of exclaimation marks? But rest assured, you can get more excited, the mini notebooks come in lots of different colours to ‘match your outfit”.

The”Tech” section specifically targeted at women offers nothing more than  matching a mini notebook to your lifestyle.

There’s  a “Featured Artist”, fashion expert Robin Moreno with a video on “How to score at Vintage Stores”.  

The Giving section is possibly the most patronising of all. It’s news to me that computer recycling (green wash anyone?) is somehow a women’s job. And when will the time come that big business decides to offer dosh to charities besides breast cancer fundraisers?

Excuse me whilst I go powder my nose.

Author’s edit: I just finished writing this post and saw a news item about Net Registry and their use of Benny Hill style ‘naughty nurses’ at the CeBIt Australia  trade show  to promote their products. But, don’t worry, it’s really ok, the company assures us that the stunt was just a bit of fun and was directed by “women and a gay guy”.

Rugby rapists and other sexual offenders

I’m sure I was the only one sickened when I watched Four Corner’s report into sexual violence against women by players and coaches in National Rugby League. I won’t detail the specific offences, I was distressed enough watching the program to be completely frank, as a victim of sexual violence myself. But I would encourage all Dawn Chorus readers to watch the program on the Four Corners website.  I’m struggling to write anything at all, as the images of the program play out in my head. I hope our readers will be kind towards my disjointed thoughts. I will hopefully add some more cohesive updates.

A few points that I’ve been thinking about…

I find the notion of group sex as an acceptable ‘bonding experience amongst men’ quite bizarre and can see it as little more than exerting physical power against women. Is this practiced (anecdotally or otherwise) amongst other groups of men in society? Surely the watchers of such acts are as implicated as the direct perpertraitors. The notion of consent in such an environment is surely, laughable.

What is the real impact of an apology? Apologising for embarrassing one’s wife is not the same as apologising for destroying the emotional psyche of another human being. An apology cannot be equated with restitution.

Many of these events were looked at by police many years ago and no charges were laid. How many more women will come forward, preferring the media as their vehicle for justice over  the judicial?-

What role did women play? A woman was interviewed who was effectively a match maker between players and fans. She viewed a video of sexual violence (filmed on someone’s phone) yet continued such matchmaking.  

I was pleased to see training for rugby players about consent and sexual violence but despair that such training is necessary at all.  Such ‘education programs’ further perpetrait the notion that acts of sexual violence can be attributed to a lack of knowledge or willful ignorance of what constitutes sexual assault or consent. Surely respect for women at a deep internal level is not something which can be taught. Further, I shudder to think how one tabulates whether such programs reduce the instances of sexual assault against women.

The article is noticeably absent on the front page of the Herald Sun website

Damir Dokic: Hitting Jelena Was “For Her Sake”

I’m sure I’m not the only person who was pleased to see Jelena Dokic’s comeback (and to have her come back to Australia) at this year’s Australian Open, particularly in light of her treatment at the hands of her father and “coach”, Damir; to see her remove herself from that situation and go on to professional and personal triumph was inspiring.

Well, now that Jelena has recently told of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father in addition to the bellowing and belittling that came to be known as Damir’s horrible trademark, naturally Damir has had to have his two cents, since he evidently lives in a magical world where violent men actually have a right of reply when their abuse is revealed:

“If I was ever a little bit more aggressive towards Jelena, it was for her sake,” Mr Dokic told the Serbian newspaper Vecernje Novosti.

In the latest Sport & Style magazine, published in The Age this week, the tennis star spoke in detail about the trauma her father caused and how she fled her family home in October 2002.

“When I was young, I was beaten by my parents,” Mr Dokic said, “and I am now thankful to them for that, because that helped me to become the right person. Anyway, is there any parent who didn’t do that at least once or twice — of course, for the sake of their children?”

That’s right, Damir – what frightened young girl hasn’t been beaten by and bellowed at by her father in order to keep her hitting those aces? Obviously Damir’s rantings are the sort of quote-fests the tabloids live for, but sometimes I question the value of allowing known abusers to speak freely about their crimes in this manner. I’m inclined to think that stories like these send an unfortunate message to women (or indeed, anyone) who’ve been abused, in essence that what they’ve suffered is terrible… but you know, we ought to let their abuser share their side of the story, too. What are your thoughts?