Lovett Rape Hearing: Once Again A Woman Is Asked What She Was Wearing

It’s a grim fact of life, it seems, that whenever a high-profile – or even one that doesn’t involve “celebrities” – rape hearing or trial is underway, details will emerge about the cross-examining of the alleged victim that are enough to lead you to think it’s not actually the 21st century, and instead 1950.

As the hearing regarding the alleged rape of the woman by sacked St Kilda Saints player Andrew Lovett continues, the media was today given access to the woman’s statement and a transcript of her cross examination – and what a surprise it was to read this detail:

Under cross-examination on Tuesday from Lovett’s defence counsel David Grace, QC, the woman agreed that on the night she met Lovett, she wanted to make herself look attractive and was interested in meeting men.

She agreed that she drank four vodka, lime and sodas and two shots at the Royal Saxon hotel that night but said she did not intend to get drunk.

Let me break this down very clearly to those who still, as it appears the defence counsel does, subscribe to archaic notions of what clothing or behaviour blurs the lines of what sexual behaviour is acceptable on the part of men:

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF SHE WAS DRESSED UP, IT DOESN’T MATTER IF SHE WAS DRUNK OR ON DRUGS, IT DOESN’T MATTER IF SHE “WANTED TO MAKE HERSELF LOOK ATTRACTIVE AND WAS INTERESTED IN MEETING MEN”, NONE OF THAT IMPLIES CONSENT IF SHE HASN’T VERBALLY GIVEN IT.

Julia Gillard Is Australia’s New Prime Minister

We’ll write more once the fallout from the spill has settled and we’ve had time to gather our thoughts, but – regardless of how it happened – Australia now has its first female Prime Minister. From The Age:

Julia Gillard has become Australia’s first female prime minister after Kevin Rudd stood aside at the last minute before this morning’s historic leadership ballot.

Ms Gillard was unelected unopposed, making her the nation’s 27th prime minister and its first female leader. She has chosen Treasurer Wayne Swan to be her Deputy Prime Minister.

Ms Gillard had the numbers – reportedly 74 of the 112 caucus votes – and the majority support of the party.

Yes, it would be nice – in an ideal world – for our first female Prime Minister to have been voted in by the public rather than a secretive party ballot, but Kevin Rudd has ended up a disappointment (not to mention certain election promises, like same-sex marriage, that evaporated completely) while Gillard has worked hard behind the scenes and will no doubt reinvigorate the party and government.

But quietly, we’re thrilled and moved that our first female PM will be sworn in by our first female Governor General, no matter how it happened.

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.

Does This Ad Make YOU Want To Read Essential Baby?

How much do I not want to click-through to Essential Baby today? Let me count the ways:

So, for those keeping score, that’s a faceless/objectified (pregnant) woman, wearing “sexy” lingerie, referred to as “like mini-vans”, under the banner “Pregnant women: hot or not?” and all within an ad roughly the size of a credit card. I believe that’s some sort of a record!

Yes, that is precisely how they are advertising Fairfax Digital’s parenting site via sidebars on TheAge.com.au. The ad links to “Essential Baby blogger” Joseph Kelly’s blog entry on whether or not he found his wife – the aforementioned “transportational unit for conveying children” (which isn’t as offensive as the decontextualised excerpt might suggest).

Stay classy, Essential Baby!

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.

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:

Forget The “Sex Predator”, How ‘Bout His Wife, Eh?

A brief MediaWatch-ish post for you this morning. I was reading “the papers” online and when I reached the bottom of the page, noticed Fairfax’s ‘Top Stories’ lists for their various interstate publications. This headline was holding the #1 spot in the BrisbaneTimes.com.au “charts”:

Naturally, I clicked on the story, detailing the sentencing of Luke James Colless, who pleaded guilty to “five counts of rape, five counts of assault with intent to commit rape, six counts of sexual assault and two counts of assault occasioning bodily harm, over the attacks on 11 women”. Well, you might not assume as much given the story’s headline, but the “wife” in question rated a mention that lasted for less than a sentence; she wasn’t even noted by name. Here’s the full extent of the rapists’ wife’s appearance in the article:

Colless’ barrister Tony Kimmins said despite his offending, his client was supported by his wife and family.

And that’s it. In other words, out of the 556 words in the article, approximately 17 made any reference whatsoever to his wife.

What gives, brisbanetimes.com.au? Exactly which champion is coming up with your headlines? This may seem like subeditorial semantics, but there’s something particularly insidious about this headline that ignores the full horror of Luke James Colless’ crimes and, instead, makes some sort of Tammy Wynnette-esque comment on his wife standing by her man.

I hope I’m not the only one who thinks a simple “Sex predator faces life in jail” would have sufficed.

Guest Post: Kyle & Jackie O & Rape Victims & The Public’s Reaction

This guest post is from Rachel Hills, a journalist and blogger who writes about gender, politics and culture.

A couple of months ago, when the Matthew Johns/Clare/gang rape/group sex scandal was all over the media, I wondered what circumstances would be required for the general public to give a rape victim the benefit of the doubt.

In Kyle and Jackie O, it seems, we have our answer. The Australian public has, quite rightly, responded with disgust to the breakfast radio duo’s on-air questioning of a 14-year-old girl about her sex life, a questioning which culminated with the revelation that she’d been raped when she was 12.

Like Johns before them, Kyle and Jackie O have been stood down from their roles (temporarily, at least). But unlike the Johns case, this time everyone is on the victim’s side.

Now, as some of the people I’ve spoken to this about have pointed out, these are quite different cases. In one we’re talking about a girl in her early teens, who was questioned about her sexual history on a high rating radio program by an unsympathetic mother who knew she’d been raped. In another, we’re talking about a woman in her twenties who spoke out about her experience at the hands of a popular football and television star in her late teens, seven years after the event (she also spoke out about it at the time – to both the media and the police – but no one listened and most people don’t know that).

Matthew Johns and his Cronullla teammates were accused of sexual assault; Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson were accused of being insensitive, exploitative dickwards. Matthew Johns was quite – his support groups suggest very – well liked; Kyle Sandilands is pretty widely despised. We have audio evidence of Kyle and Jackie’s offence; for the Cronulla players, it’s essentially one person’s word against another’s.

But those factors aside, I think the public reaction to the two incidents reveals a lot about our treatment of rape survivors, and who is and is not permitted to wear the mantle. Most people are sympathetic to rape survivors in the abstract (or at least, I hope they are!), but the proportion of people who implicitly trust the victim seems to go way down whenever we begin to deal with specifics.

In these two cases, part of the discrepancy comes from who’s delivering the message. The girl on the Kyle and Jackie O show was a child, was presumably a virgin at the time, and was cajoled by her mother and a pair of media celebrities to talk about it on one of the most popular radio programs in the country. It’s almost impossible to shame her. Would we have seen the same response if she was five years older, if she wasn’t a virgin, if her rapist wasn’t an anonymous figure but someone she already knew.

Why is it that the only sexual assault victims we, as a public, trust are those who have been most obviously, black and white, wronged? The virgins, the children, the young women attacked by strangers while jogging at night.

Sydney Morning Herald writer Lisa Pryor touched on the “gray rape” issue in a recent column, responding to a South Australian judge’s comments that a man who “continued sexual activity with a woman after she passed out drunk” had committed only “technical rape”.

“I would put this offence at the lower end of the scale because the sex act began as a consensual one before the victim passed out and became incapable of consenting,” he said.

“To mark this man with the grave offence of rape for the rest of his days will stop him travelling to some countries and prevent him getting jobs.”

Lisa argued that “ghastly as it is for the victims”, some rapes were worse than others; and “[that] the public clamour for higher sentences for certain types of crimes – higher for gang rapes compared to other rapes, higher for murders of police officers compared to other murders – also suggests the public recognises the need for nuanced sentencing.”

I understand what she’s getting at, but it deeply disturbs me that, as a society, we seem to consider any rape bar the most brutal as “gray” or ambiguous. For woman to be “rapable” she has to be considered capable of inspiring lust (think the treatment of Diane Brimble by her attackers), and simultaneously lacking in desire herself. As soon even the possibility of desire enters the equation – if she was on a date, if he was famous, if she was drunk or wore a low-cut top or had engaged in casual sex before – we cast doubt upon her claims.

It’s great that the Australian public has so clearly communicated that Kyle and Jackie’s behaviour is unacceptable. But it’s a shame we can only muster that empathy for the most uncontroversial of victims.

Kyle Sandilands: “Rape Happens”

As Caitlin yesterday noted, Kyle and Jackie O – and, by extension, 2Day FM – have been embroiled in a particularly distasteful “scandal” after a 14-year-old girl they cornered (at the request of her mother) and forced to take a lie-detector test live on radio yesterday revealed she’d been raped at the age of 12 – to which Sandilands’ response was “Right… and is that the only [sexual] experience you’ve had?”

On today’s show – and via the News Ltd stable – Sandilands and Jackie O have responded to the fury that rightly exploded within both the media and broadcasting industry and from rape counsellors, and child psychologists (and, and…). Prepare yourself to be enraged/appalled/mind-blown by Sandilands’ defense of his behaviour on-air (emphasis mine):

“It is just one of [those] things, unfortunately rape happens in society.”

Incredible. Not only has the poor girl had her rape revealed on live radio (and then played and replayed on various media sites) – not to mention being in the “care” of a mother who evidently knew about the rape but did nothing about it, and forced her to discuss her sexual activity and drug use on live radio – but now she has Sandilands essentially shrugging and saying “shit happens”.

No, Kyle, it’s not just “one of those things” – and I dread to think where we’ll end up as a society if people think that “rape happens”. Get this idiot off the air, NOW.

Update: tigtog from over at Hoyden About Town has set up a comprehensive site, Sack Kyle & Jackie O, which offers all the background information you need on the debacle, plus instructions as to how to lodge a complaint – the latter being particularly important, as ACMA won’t formally investigate 2Day FM over the matter unless written complaints are sent to the broadcaster first.

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?