Breasts Or “Boobs”?

A little ‘think piece’ for the feminist grammar freaks/etymology fans/word nerds out there: am I the only person who prefers my colloquialisms and neologisms and my “proper” language, at least in the context of journalism, kept separate?

Consider this news.com.au story about a German court’s ruling that medical insurance funds shouldn’t have to cover elective breast reduction surgeries (in cases of back pain and hindrance of movement, the denial of which is arguably fodder for another whole Chorus entry). Watch what happens to the wording about halfway through:

A COURT has ruled that insurance companies do not need to cover the cost of breast reduction surgery.

The court ruled ruled that having a large bust is not a medical problem and as such insurers will only have to pay to correct breasts which are deformed.

The case was brought by a 38-year-old woman who suffered orthopaedic and physical problems due to the weight of her boobs, bild.com reports.

Yes, “boobs”. The term is used a handful more times in the piece, and let’s not ignore the headline:

German court rules big boobs are not a medical problem

Shonky journalism or something deeper? Or no big deal?

It’s possibly due to the fact that “boobs” has never been one of my favourite euphemisms for breasts (it seems too hard a word, like “tits”), but I question its appropriateness in this context (i.e. a news story, which should as such be straight “reportage”).

True, certain words do enter the vernacular – witness the rise of the (in my view, insipid and infuriating) “vajayjay” – and boobs is certainly not new, and its usage is obviously widespread. But just because it’s in common usage, as is the aforementioned “vajayjay”, doesn’t mean it should necessarily be freely used in this context. After all, imagine a report about, say, increasing amounts of labiaplasty operations saying, “The number of women electing to have cosmetic procedures on their vajayjays has increased by 17% in the past five years.”

What do you think? And how do you feel about the supposed uncomfortableness of the word “vagina” (and I guess to a lesser extent, “breasts”) that leads to the apparent need for nonthreatening euphemisms?

Little Mommy: Where Early Gender Conditioning Meets The Anal Phase

Watching Australia’s Funniest Home Videos just now (don’t hate, I bet you were too), I was horrified by the following commercial for (storied feminists) Mattel’s Little Mommy “Gotta Go” potty-training doll:

I’ve always had a problem with baby dolls (i.e. since early childhood, when I was given one and left it in the garden until its “sleepy” eyes rusted shut) , largely because on many levels they say “This is what you have to look forward to” to young girls by contributing to the idea that women are first and foremost baby-makers and that the ultimate career is motherhood.

But combining that with near-obscene levels of infantilisation (“A teeny tiny poop”?!) and the idea that a mother’s lot is spent flushing the toilet for her lazy children surely makes this one of the most troubling in the long line of weirdo baby dolls that began with the creepy Baby Born.

I appreciate – or perhaps more correctly, will one day appreciate – the need, occasionally, for ways to make potty training less stressful for children, but Little Mommy isn’t about potty training the child. Am I the only one who is freaked out by this “playset”?

When Violence Against Women Is “Odd”

Readers of the Fairfax newspaper stable will be familiar with the OddSpot, the long-running and beloved paragraph at the bottom of the front page, where you can usually find stories about cats who called 911, potential Darwin Award-winners, people with spiders growing in their ears, and so on. It’s occasionally moving, sometimes hilarious and, generally speaking, a bit of light “human interest” reading amongst the – at least as the MX likes to put it – doom and gloom.

Not today’s effort, however:

A man who says he eats 10 Mars bars a day has claimed a lack of sugar prompted him to attack his girlfriend when she wore big, Bridget Jones-style knickers instead of a G-string. Marco Fella, 38, from Cornwall, admitted two common assaults. His sentencing was adjourned.

Ho ho, very “odd”, isn’t it? So, let’s recap: a man loses his shit and assaults his girlfriend a) because she dared not to wear bum floss (presumably she tended to wear them, considering he took umbrage with her decision not to wear them, for his delectation) and then b) blames it on the fact that he hadn’t stuffed his face with junk-food that particular day?

That’s not “odd”, that’s fucked.

Pink Stuff Is For Girls

We’ve had debates on this blog before about princess culture, and to what extent the toys and pop culture that little girls grow up with determine their values as women. South Korean photographer JeongMee Joon has dramatised this stuff in a portrait series of girls and boys with their stuff. She calls it Pink And Blue.

Startling stuff, eh? In an interview with illustration blog Lost At E Minor, Joon says:

“The project began from my five-year-old daughter, who loved the color pink so much that she wanted to wear only pink clothes and play with only pink toys and objects. I discovered that my daughter’s case was not unusual. In the United States, South Korea, and elsewhere, most young girls love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon is widespread among children of various ethnic groups, regardless of their cultural backgrounds. Perhaps it’s the influence of pervasive commercial advertisements aimed at little girls and their parents, such as the universally popular Barbie and Hello Kitty merchandise that has developed into a modern trend. Girls train subconsciously, and unconsciously, to wear the color pink in order to look feminine’.”

Asked whether the kids themselves demand pink stuff, or whether it’s the parents, she says: “Some children are just obsessed with pink things, and some children just like the color pink as their favorite. Some parents did not want pink colors, but the kids want it. Also, most boys did not have obsession about blue colors, but our society already divided their thoughts about gender for color’.”

Personally I don’t think the colours themselves carry damaging cultural meanings, although I’m aware of arguments like, “Pink is a watered-down version of red – how come boys get a strong primary colour?” A lot of the colours given to children are pale pastels anyway; and hot pink is arguably a more powerful colour than baby blue.

It’s the way these colours are coded to feminine and masculine stereotypes that is troubling. Also troubling is the sexist assumption that women are so nuts for pink that they can be persuaded to buy anything in that colour. Hence we see pink razors (same as men’s version; just different colour), pink power drills, pink mobile phones…. and of course, the orgy of pink consumerism surrounding breast cancer research.

Muslim Women In Australia: Fighting Back, Yes, But Not For The First Time

Pictured: Silma Ihram. Sourced from the Age website, photograph by Angela Wylie.

You may have read last week’s media reports on the current situation of Australian Muslim women, particularly the provocative headline, “Muslim Women Start Fighting Back.” The sudden interest in the situation of Australian Muslim women was sparked by last week’s conference held at the University of Melbourne’s National Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies. First of all, I must say I have a problem with the headline “Muslim Women Start Fighting Back”, for this to me implies that it is the first time Muslim women are fighting back, when Islamic feminism, a hotly debated topic in itself, has existed for a very, very long time.

One particular report funded by the previous government, and undertaken by the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council of Victoria, entitled, ‘Report of the community consultation of training of Muslim religious leaders’ provided some startlingly findings about the religiously sanctioned mistreatment and abuse of women in Australia.

The findings of the report are the result of broad community consultation, including interviews with police, lawyers, court workers, academics, and meetings with the Victorian Board of Imams.

As reported in the Age last week, according to the findings:

Women seeking divorces have also been told by Imams that they must leave “with only the clothes on their back” and not seek support or a share of property because they can get welfare payments.

And the report says some Imams knowingly perform polygamous marriages, also knowing that the second wife, a de facto under Australian law, can claim Centrelink payments.

Women Are Always To Blame, Part Two

Dawn Chorus blogger Caitlinate provided a recent sterling analysis of new governmental advertising to curb binge drinking, one advertisement in particular concerning a drunken teenage women who had sex due to the influence of alcohol (and possibly sexual violence).

Well the media again provides a replica of real life, as a 15 year old male has been charged with the rape of a 14 year old female after she passed out drunk at a party. According to the Herald Sun:

She first knew of the alleged rape when she was taunted at school during that week

Apparently a parent was home at the time but unaware, and there were 12 other teenagers at the party.

The male is yet to be sentenced, but let’s hope it will set a reminder and deterrent in the greater community that being unconscious due to alcohol is not an invitation to unwanted sexual acts. I’m not clear if the other youths in the house were aware of the act as it occurred or after the fact but taunting and teasing is deplorable and a hideous way to realise you’ve been sexually assaulted. Surely they should be put up as examples of those who condone sexual violence and be vilified accordingly.

Australian Art World, Meet the CoUNTesses

Who here knows about the Guerrilla Girls? These New York art activists have campaigned for over 20 years for a more equitable representation of women artists and artists of colour in galleries and museums.

Now Australia has its own band of anonymous, angry art ladies. They call themselves the CoUNTesses, and on their blog, CoUNTess, they point out all kinds of gender inequality in the Australian art scene. This is the sort of research that often goes on in university or government environments, and I for one find it exciting to see it out in the open.

One of the valuable things they do is number-crunching the gender representation in art world magazines: what proportion of male and female writers and editors work for them, and what proportion of male and female artists get cover stories, features and even just mentions. Dishearteningly, while male and female editorships are equal, and women art writers actually outnumber men, the contents are still distinctly skewed towards male artists.

They also talk about the startling discrepancy between the number of female art students and the number of women being collected in major art museums or holding major solo shows. Where are all the women going?

It’s great to have some hard statistics to begin talking about a kind of ingrained, systemic sexism that can be hard to tackle. Already the commentary at CoUNTess is focusing on whether women art critics need to focus on women artists, and whether mid-sized galleries need to follow the Australia Council’s example and provide precisely equal exhibition opportunities for men and women.

Ultimately this raises the contentious spectre of affirmative action. I’ve always found affirmative action difficult to defend in practice, because it favours one aspect of a person – in this case, their gender – over other considerations like economic and cultural capital, geographic location (perhaps 24HrArt gallery in Darwin exhibits more female artists because it’s seen as peripheral in the art world), and of course, the ‘quality’ of their ideas and of their finished work. And some people who might benefit from affirmative action find it patronising, and ultimately unhelpful because it leaves them open to criticism later in their careers (“you only got this far because we helped you, not because you’re any good”).

For now, I’d like the see the CoUNTesses get the resources to do the kind of in-depth content analysis of media, and qualitative social research in the art scene, that are necessary to show that gender inequality in art is a real problem and not just the whining of unsuccessful chick artists.

Women Are Always To Blame

I’m pretty tired right now so this may not be the best written post ever. But! We’ll try anyway!

The government has a new anti binge drinking campaign out – aimed at the 15 – 25 age demographic. The Age refers to the campaign as ‘graphic’ and had an article about it in the Saturday paper which can be found online here. The link also has the actual advertisements embedded in the article.

The campaign theme is “don’t turn a night out into a nightmare” and is based on showing ‘regrettable’ behaviour you might get up to whilst binge drinking. The intent, it seems, is to embarrass teenagers into not binge drinking!

Nonetheless, the campaign in itself is probably necessary and I haven’t reflected enough on the overall idea to either criticise or praise it at length. Overall. One element though does make me really, really, really angry.

One of the ‘embarrassing’ things one might get up to when drunk is “be filmed having drunken sex”. Says The Age:

One advertisement depicts a teenage girl getting drunk at a house party and eventually having sex on the lawn while being filmed by laughing party-goers. It finishes with a reminder that one in two teenagers will do something they regret while drunk.

Sorry, what?

Creative directors found that girls were more susceptible to a message that social embarrassment could be caused by regretted sex acts than any health risks caused by alcohol.

This [section of the] underage drinking ad is meant to be from the perspective of the female. You see a hand with a cup of – presumably alcohol – repeatedly raising to the camera, a male enters frame and speaks to the camera/girl and then finally we see the girls feet on the ground and her underwear being removed, with the male standing above her unzipping his pants. This is followed by the text ‘one in two Australians aged 15-17 who get drunk will do something they regret’.

This is so wrong in so many ways.

Not only does it imply that only the girl will regret it or get herself into that ‘kind of situation’ it also says that she is responsible for what happens to her when she is intoxicated. No questions about consent (particularly when in the ad the guy seems to be more sober than her, though the fact apparently only girls can have this happen to them is also problematic). No public campaign about how having sex with someone who is so drunk they can’t make rational decisions is, oh, rape. No condemning of the people standing at the sidelines and laughing and taking pictures rather than helping. Just condemnation heaped on the girl for drinking so much she got herself into that situation in the first place! Once again! Women to blame for their own rape!

Disgusting.

Weird Body Anxiety Products

(Cate’s previous post about bizarre ‘helpful’ fashions has inspired me to post this extended riff on the October instalment of the pop-culture column I write for jmag. In the course of researching this column, I trawl through various weird products and trends off the internet.)

Coined in the wake of Janet Jackson’s infamous Superbowl boob-flash, the term “wardrobe malfunction” now refers to the indignity and public humiliation we face if our clothes go “wrong”. But some supposedly helpful products are less about preventing wardrobe malfunctions than making money from women’s anxiety about their bodies.

This is the entire rhetoric of the “fashion problems” that are endlessly discussed in magazines. Rather than questioning commonsensical ideas of how a woman should look, move through space, and invite or repel the gaze of others, we spend money on unnecessary – and sometimes uncomfortable – products simply to help us feel okay about ourselves while we conform to those ideas.

It’s such a seductive industry. I wish I could get back all the money I’ve spent over the years on trying out a new trend in tights, or a supposedly revolutionary bra technology, to see if it helps me feel better about the way I look. Still, I would not spend any money at all on the following retarded products:

Deep breath, arms in

In case you haven’t got enough body image problems, here’s one from the world of the ridiculous…

Do you have upper arms? Yes, me too. Apparently we need help. According to the information I have before me:

For decades, women have hidden this trouble spot under baggy blouses and oversized blazers, cringing at the thought of clingy tops or, GASP, sleeveless tanks. Well, now you can bid farewell to dowdy sweatshirts and kiss your husband’s old polos goodbye!

Our saviours in America, Jax & Jewels Inc. are proud to present FLABuLESS, the first-ever arm shapewear for real women! Yes you read right, the product is called Flabuless! Here’s some pictures:

 

Funnily enough, the before and afters don’t look all that much different to me.

I’m not sure how they’d go with a strappy summer dress, but the idea of a compression garment for arms is kinda hideous. Compression garments (aka foundation garments) contain mega strong elastic (and perhaps other materials of a magic capcity) to effectively contain and reshape bits of flesh that you’d like flatter and smaller. Apparently they were a huge hit in the recent Spring Racing Festival under slinky dresses where you don’t want to show lines. This is one thing, but when they are used to reshape your body altogether so you fit into smaller clothes, there’s something about it that’s a little sinister.

I got third degree burns on my right arm and hand quite a few years ago. I ended up having to wear a compression garment to help with scarring. Those things are thick, hot and uncomfortable. They also restrict your mobility.

There’s something about the idea that women’s body are unruly if they are curvy and need to be ‘held in’ and ‘contained’ (perhaps as some kind of punishment for not fitting the idea of the body beautiful?) that I find disturbing. Why are curves and flesh so bad to many fashion trends? What if ‘race wearing’ garments (and the like) oh I don’t know, came in a variety of cuts and sizes for different shapes? What if designers started making women’s shirts and dresses to accomodate different upper arm sizes. Seriously, can you imagine a guy wearing arm compressions?