Win for women is the biggest issue here

Great news over on The Big Issue website – the magazine has received $1.2 million to assist homeless and marginalised women.

Homeless women across the country will be given the opportunity to gain financial independence and take control of their lives thanks to an announcement made today by the Australian Government to grant The Big Issue $1.2million to address a critical social need in Australia; employment opportunities for homeless and disadvantaged women.

…

The Women’s Subscriptions Enterprise will initially employ 90 disadvantaged women and six professional staff through a model selling subscriptions to The Big Issue magazine, a long standing and quality product that currently reaches more than 130 000 Australians each fortnight.

I’m a huge fan of The Big Issue for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the magazine always features a range of interesting articles that address social justice issues, and generally the writing is a lot more balanced than what you find in the daily newspapers. But the most satisfying thing about buying The Big Issue is understanding the benefits to the vendors, beyond the fact that the vendor receives half of the $5.00 sale price for each unit they sell. From The Big Issue’s website-

Findings from our research indicate that selling The Big Issue Magazine has a positive impact on Vendors’ lives. The impact is felt in a number of areas including:

- Social connections, skills and opportunities to engage with the ‘mainstream’ public through selling The Big Issue Magazine.

- Improve and enhanced health; which includes nutrition, general physical health, decreased and less problematic substance use and improvements in emotional wellbeing as a result of being engaged in meaningful activity.

- Improved housing and accommodation experiences, including a decrease in primary homelessness.

- Enhanced personal factors such as confidence and self worth through enacting the valued role of being a Vendor.

- Improved quality of life by being able to afford non-necessity items and engage in regular citizenship activities within contemporary Australian society.

I have been working in the city for the past couple of years and have only ever been sold The Big Issue by male vendors. I actually bought the magazine from a woman for the first time a couple of weeks ago – in Smith Street, Collingwood. I think many people assume that homelessness is primarily experienced by males and perhaps the lack of women selling the magazine means that people subconsciously believe this. But the reality is quite different.

I found these statistics under the Homelessness tab on The Big Issue’s website.

• There are more young women that are homeless than young men.
• One in every 50 young women aged 18–19 will stay in a homelessness assistance service this year.

xkcd On ‘Porn For Women’

My rage at the abominable “gift book” (you know, those irritating little confections that litter bookstore point-of-sale areas) Porn For Women is still so white hot, years after its release, that every time I’ve tried to write something about it the keyboard combusts.

Thank god, then, for the wonderful xkcd, whose take on the topic I stumbled upon today:

Finally, I can breathe out.

Lara Bingle, Michael Clarke and Peter Roebuck sitting in a tree

The Age online today published another in the list of its growing collection of out-dated and apparently un-subbed features. And it wasn’t even in Ask Sam or Essential Baby, it was right there on the front page (by Peter Roebuck): “Michael Clarke needs to choose between a fraught personal life and his career in cricket.” As far as pullquotes go, that one is a doozie.

Firstly, it was amazing to see that for the first time this reader of The Age has ever seen such an old fashioned denial of ‘having it all’ directed at a man. Rife in Australia (and echoed in rom-coms, chick flicks, chick lit, and other rhyming forms of entertainment) is the belief that for a woman to be super successful in her career she must sacrifice. Sacrifice any chance of a functioning marriage (certainly no man could want to be groom to some power-suited, heartless, soulless, manlike Career Woman); sacrifice a family (not enough hours in the day to hug a child and write emails); sacrifice her looks (surely one can’t be both attractive and clever unless witchcraft is involved). This was the first time a man was told he had to sacrifice. So I clicked and read the rest of the article. Speculation and sexism ensued.

Behold:
“He [Clarke] is locked into a love affair with a beautiful young woman…. Lara Bingle stumbles from public relations disaster to public relations calamity. Restaurateurs complain about her manners and the poor company she keeps. Fashionistas talk of her headstrong ways and dubious customs. Moreover she seems intent on boosting the sales of all those magazines purchased by the female of the species. In short, she craves attention and courts controversy. Yet Michael, the class act of the pairing, seems besotted. Beauty and danger have always been a potent combination.”

“She stumbles from public relations disaster to public relations calamity” – seems unfair: the cancelling of the Where The Bloody Hell Are You? campaign wasn’t her fault, she didn’t write the script; and she certainly wasn’t to blame for Fevola’s behaviour int the camera phone fiasco. “Locked in”? “Beauty and danger”? He may as well have called her a Black Widow and Photoshopped a Scarlet Letter on her image. The unsubstantiated claims about her manners and “dubious customs” have little or nothing to do with the Fevola scandal or Clarke and Bingle’s relationship and have no place on the homepage of a newspaper. Adding that Clarke is the “class act” of the coupling was just another immature and transparent dig.

But it gets better (read: worse).

“Maturity is the issue. From a distance the romance has all the traits of a schoolboy crush. Clarke has scored a stack of runs for his country, has travelled to many places, has seen and done a lot, has become accomplished. By now gilded youth ought to have given way to adult sensibility. Perhaps it has. Perhaps the problem is that Bingle remains the same waif-like figure supposedly in need of protection.”

So not only is Bingle a media whore, she’s also damsel in distress and Clarke is apparently some egghead sports-dude who has succumbed to her feminine wiles. As somebody who very rarely pays attention to the good bits of sport in Australia, even this moi can see that aside from being sexist, it’s neither an educated nor researched argument. All we know is that Clarke left a sports game to be with his fiance, whatever the reason. Quite the opposite of being some weak little boy, isn’t Clarke being a Real Life Grown Up by supporting his partner?

And then: “Her chivalrous partner rode to her rescue. Nothing in her life, though, suggests that she has ever emerged from the chrysalis of youthful beauty. It’s a dilemma. Clarke yearns to fulfil himself yet remains in thrall to a lass living in a celebrity time warp.”

Just, WOW. Mostly I like how he not only used the word “lass” but then accused her of being in a “time warp”. Oh irony, missed you. PS. You misspelled ‘fulfill’. [I'm wrong, that's the American spelling. My bad.]

In his article, Roebuck has painted Bingle (who may or may not be intelligent, kind, funny, whatever – we don’t know and doubt he does either) as a femme fatale, a Jezebel, an unstable, untrustworthy, unworthy, hysterical woman. Clarke got off lightly, he’s just been reduced to an juvenile simpleton who has been caught in a spider’s web, driven only by sexual desire and a Prince Charming complex.

What’s bigger than a trifecta? Quinella? Whatever it is, Roebuck got one in the worst possible way.

UPDATE: Here’s another charming screen-grab from The Age. Nice Photoshopping. From 11th March.

The stigma of abortion

I first heard of Angie Jackson over at Mamamia - [From Mamamia, which Mia found at The Frisky]:

“If I can’t talk about my first trimester abortion, which was legal and in my case life-saving, then who the hell can talk about her abortion? Or his abortion story, from the women he was with?…”

Angie has gained web notoriety for making her medical abortion public – on YouTube and Twitter. Aside from the issues that accompany such a public exposure of one’s private life, that sort of honesty takes immense courage, and like Angie says could help negate the stigma that surrounds pregnancy termination. I recently discovered a piece by Adelaide Advertiser columnist Clementine Ford written in 2008 defending her “pro-choice” views (although she calls it pro-life – focusing on the woman’s position in an unwanted pregnancy), and in it Ford writes freely about her own experience with abortion. 

My current views on talking about terminations in the public domain crystallised after reading Clementine’s column – and particularly this:

“I truly believe that women who have abortions are forced to feel shame over a decision that is both a) legal and b) so completely unconnected with the business of anyone else other than the woman and man involved.”

What else in our society is a legal act (in some states) and yet remains shrouded in shame? Public admissions of abortion are effectively taboo, and yet each year thousands of Australian women end unwanted pregnancy through termination.  I don’t recommend that women live-tweet their termination, but neither should they have to hide their decision under layers of guilt.

The abortion debate continues to incite extreme reactions from those against the practice, and it is inevitable that frank accounts like Angie Jackson’s further fan the flames of opposition. Tory Shepherd, for the The Punch, writes of a political party campaigning on an anti-abortion platform for the upcoming South Australian election, illustrating how controversial the issue remains in some quarters. In her piece Shepherd identifies one of the most frustrating elements of the abortion debate, which is that: 

“…the debate has not moved on in decades. The pro-lifers refuse to accept reality, and keep sparking these hate-waves, which in turn forces pro-choicers to reject their accusations, and so the vicious whirlpool goes.”

In 1971 French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir composed a declaration signed by 343 women (Manifestio of the 343) in response to laws in France prohibiting abortion, in which the signatories attested to having had a termination. Are personal admissions to having had an abortion, made in the public realm, like this and Angie Jackson’s, necessary to reduce the social stigma surrounding it? Are they ultimately helpful? I acknowledge that for some women the decision to end an unwanted pregnancy is a traumatic one that they will never want to disclose publicly, but how do we stop women who are comfortable with their choice fearing public shame?