Announcement: Meet The Team!

After a good month of posting, I feel it’s time to formally introduce you to the team of diverse and inspiring women who make The Dawn Chorus the multifaceted wonder that it has grown to be.

If you look up the top, you will see a new tab entitled ‘The Chorus‘ – click on that to learn a little bit about each of the Dawn Choristers and what makes them tick, feministically speaking (and yes, I just made that word up).

The Dawn Chorus team is not a royal “we”; each post is infused with the individual feminist stance of the post’s writer – though just like the dawn chorus that inspired us, we may be singing different parts, but they harmonise and come together to create one powerful whole.

Anyway, I’ll leave the school choir metaphors for now, and hope you enjoy getting to know your fellow Choristers a little better. I for one am proud to call them my colleagues!

x Clem

Only Chicks Believe In Horoscopes

The other day I had an excellent horoscope from the Sydney Morning Herald:

LEO: Happy Birthday. If you were to start a new (love) relationship today it is probably going to be very intense and feel almost other world-ish as if it were meant to be. Try not to jump in too quickly. If a money matter has been niggling at you, then you should face it and sort it out once and for all. Your love life should be intensely passionate today and you should be looking forward to a night of fun and frivolity.

I’ll tell you what I had to look forward to: working on the latest batch of freelance stories until about 8pm, hiding from some charity collector who knocked on my front door, Chinese takeaway in front of a repeat episode of NCIS, and going to bed alone.

It shouldn’t be surprising at all that my horoscope lied to me; we all know they’re just made up. Merely being born in a given span of days definitely doesn’t give someone certain personal qualities; nor can the millions of people who share birthdays have similar experiences. Thing is, there’s a gendered quality to this ‘commonsensical’ knowledge.

All Women Love Chocolate, Right? Especially On Their Naked Bodies

Remember that Age story about Melbourne’s young sommeliers, inexplicably illustrated with a photo in which the only female sommelier was topless? It was a tie-in (apparently) for a gig they were putting on at the Food & Wine Festival – and now another Melbourne food festival seems to think that objectifying women is the order of the day.

Here’s an excerpt from a feature on the Abbotsford Convent’s Chocolate Rush Chocolate Festival, from The Age (again) today:

[Festival co-organiser Simone] Gordon is especially excited about the hands-on classes, the championships and a special sealed section (held in a restricted area) for adult chocoholics. This, she promises, will incorporate chocolate body paint, “naughty” chocolates and chocolate wrestling. (Gordon is quick to point out that although this part of the program is a little risque, the festival remains a family event.)

Among those appearing in the sealed section is professional jelly wrestler Beth Sait, a woman both excited and nervous about stepping (or sliding) outside her comfort zone. “Wrestling in chocolate is very new for everyone.

We’re all a bit nervous,” she says. “Chocolate is quite a bit different to jelly. I don’t know if it’s going to be slippery or not. It’s going to be a lot messier, I reckon. I’m really pumped about it though. It will be a lot fun.”

And here’s the picture they are using to illustrate the piece:

While I have no problems with the Chocolate Festival itself, or even the fact that there is an “adults only” component, I do have an issue with the fact that, inevitably, such events end up as a circus of sexism. Why do we not get to see a hot dude painted with chocolate to illustrate the piece? How about some “naughty” chocolate dicks?

The piece doesn’t specify, but I think we can safely assume that the “chocolate wrestling” will feature semi-naked women rather than men. Jelly wrestling is traditionally a “sport” watched by men, featuring women in various stages of undress duking it out in the slop. There has been a hipster revivalist movement that sees dudes get in on the act, but jelly wrestling’s roots are in the strip clubs and bucks’ nights.

On top of all this is the fact that chocolate is always, always pitched as something women like, whether it’s Tim Tams or Dove Chocolate – all women love to “indulge”, don’t they? At least, that’s what advertising tells us. (Men aren’t safe from the chocolate industry’s sexism, either – witness “manly” chocolates like Viking and Mars Bar.)

Does the idea of “chocolate wrestling” make you want to attend the Chocolate Rush Chocolate Festival?

Get The Joke? Male Politicians “Love” Women

In yet another case of a male politician making jokes at the expense of female politicians, this week East-Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta scored funny points by telling Andrew Denton and his audience how in 2004 he unsuccessfully tried to ’seduce’ then Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Amanda Vanstone.

The sickeningly smooth Ramos-Horta couldn’t help but score some easy laughs with his tale of political unrequited love, Denton and the audience loved it, not to mention the media, with outlets such as The Age and News.com.au reporting this ‘revelation’ under headlines like this one from News.com.au, “President fails to seduce Vanstone”: