Online media outlet Crikey.com.au has been doing some audience research and is dismayed to realise that subscribers to its daily email service are 70 per cent male. Deputy editor Sophie Black points out today that this is despite a 50/50 gender balance in its editorial staff. Meanwhile, editor Jonathan Green says (tongue in cheek, I’d assume) that even the male staffers have “considered carefully the advances of feminism over the last few decades and placed ourselves within that context, while still pulling chicks.”
Initial fact-finding missions via Twitter uncovered a mix of potential reasons, which seemed to fall into recurring themes:
Women are too busy fulfilling myriad domestic responsibilities, on top of their work commitments and social lives, to sit around reading about Australian politics, media and business;
Women are not interested in the minutiae of party politics and the Canberra press gallery
While Crikey’s staff may have an even gender balance, freelance contributors are largely male
The editorial tone is blokey and macho, from the topics chosen to the way headlines are phrased
The industries covered in Crikey tend to be male-dominated
Women aren’t prepared to pay money for Crikey subscriptions, preferring to get Crikey’s emails forwarded from others, or getting their comment and debate for free on the web
I contribute occasionally to Crikey (and some of my writing at The Enthusiast gets picked up by their new aggregator-style website), and I feel a little embarrassed that my articles about stuff like fashion, media and advertising tend to look lightweight compared to the ins and outs of the Liberal leadership. Even though these are my professional interests, I feel worried that this kind of writing is considered “female-friendly” because, to be frank, many of my Crikey stories are deeply, gleefully silly. Although it’s come to seem that way, silliness is not “women’s interest”.
Crikey is considering starting a political blog written by women, possibly similar to Double X. But is the answer to its gender woes simply to increase its coverage of “women’s issues” – and to ghettoise these on its website – when the original problem was an imbalance among its email subscribers? Perhaps a more pertinent issue might be Crikey’s definition of ‘politics’ – and its subscriber model.
In general I find Crikey’s current policy-wonk focus quite dry and boring. For instance, it does not intrigue me in the slightest that “ASIC, normally the country’s most timid regulator, is calling for bans on commissions and a slew of tighter regulatory requirements to end conflicted advice and impose greater responsibilities on financial planners.” (from Bernard Keane’s story in today’s email, Canning advisor’s commissions would be super start to reform.)
Perhaps women are more interested in social, cultural and sexual politics – that is, real-world politics. These are not just issues directly involving women, such as sex crimes, workplace and media sexism, consumer culture and work/life balance. Instead I’d suggest that women also respond passionately and empathetically to human rights and ethical issues of all sorts, from the environment to policing tactics, health funding to drugs in sport. These are not abstract policy debates but rather humanist debates.
Crikey’s email subscription model is also a linear method of content delivery – it’s sent out to subscribers, who can write back with comments, which are then sent out in the next issue. However, Sophie Black cites studies showing that women are heavy users of blogs and social media technologies. These are not linear but use metaphors of networks and communities. (In the past, Crikey subscribers have vehemently rejected the jocular name for the site’s community, “the Crikey Army”.)
In my experience as a woman (but, sadly, not “as an athlete, and a mum”), women like to share information by emailing their friends and joining in discussions at favoured online locations, whether these be Facebook, Twitter or The Dawn Chorus. Perhaps Crikey does have more female readers – but its 30 per cent of female subscribers are forwarding the emails to their friends. Perhaps online debate among women is happening in places that don’t have paywalls.
Why do you think women aren’t subscribing to Crikey? What kind of politics do you think women want to read about? And if you don’t read Crikey, where are you heading for your political reading?
As has been widely reported in the last few months, French President Nicholas Sarkozy has the burqa in his sights. In June he announced to his compatriots that France would not accept a garment that made prisoners of the women who wear it. The latest controversy has seen a woman banned from wearing a burqini in a French public pool, ostensibly on hygiene grounds.
Sarkozy is the latest in a long line of politicians who have attacked aspects of Islamic dress in the name of women and their rights. These moonlighting feminists, by headlining their stance with a women’s lib tag, I think mask the true scope of their agendas – which in Sarkozy’s case could be to protect a certain aspect of a country’s cultural identity, or to marginalize another, or to assert authority.
As much as I dislike the burqa myself, vilifying the aesthetics of fundamentalist Islam – rather than say, focusing on the actions and beliefs of those who oppress women in the name of Islam – is a misalignment of energy and policy. Symi Rom-Rymer says it well in the Christian Science Monitor:
There are, no doubt, some women who are forced to wear this all-encompassing garment by their families, just as there are non-Muslim French women who are mistreated by their families in other ways. But to view the garment solely as a prison and as a symbol of male oppression, as Sarkozy does, oversimplifies a complex issue and may end up hurting the very women he’s trying to help.
If Sarkozy is truly concerned about the rights and dignity of these women, he ought to use high-profile speeches to discuss their needs, their concerns, and to focus on what they can contribute to and gain from French society, rather than on what they wear while doing it.
What will happen to women not permitted to wear the burqa in French public life (of whom there are reportedly 400 in France)? Will they happily cast it off and bare their exposed faces to shopkeepers and bus drivers? Will they enroll in university or vocational courses? Will they leave abusive husbands? Will it solve all their problems?
I have no definitive answers of course but I imagine that the result could be otherwise – could lead to further marginalization, could leave women further ostracized and isolated from the general community. As difficult as it is, if one is concerned about the rights of women wearing the burqa, it would be more useful to take a positive stance through giving those women support and fostering opportunities for their self-determination.
The wider Australian community also has a strained relationship with Islamic dress. The burqa perfectly manifests the other when held against Australia’s traditional cultural identity – laidback laconic larrikins living it up on the beach etc. The burqa threatens many people’s sense of self and of belonging. As Irfan Yusuf noted in July in The Age, Muslim women wearing the burqa provide the media a ‘potent symbol of Islam in the West’, one that is regularly exploited by news outlets.
When one Sydney Muslim man called for polygamy to be legalised, the Herald Sun website carried a photo of two burqa-clad women crossing the street. The website of its Sydney equivalent regularly carries photos of burqa-clad women in any story even mildly related to Muslims.
Julie Posetti, speaking at a forum at the ANU in July (which you can watch at ABC Fora), sums up my position pretty well. She argues that banning the burqa would be an oppressive move, and that much of the language used in calls against the burqa recalls cultural imperialism. She rightly says that the state has no place in a woman’s wardrobe. Imagine the government legislating against bikinis, or Catholic nun’s habits - it becomes an ethical minefield. Similarly murky of course is the boundary between cultural sensitivity, or regard for an individual’s rights, and cultural relativism.
Banning the burqa looks more like another symptom of France’s troubled relationship with ethnic minorities than a step forward for feminism and women’s rights. Policies of social inclusion and education would surely be more beneficial than those of prohibition and exclusion.
Last year we had cause in Victoria to reflect on women’s suffrage, as 2008 marked one hundred years since Victorian women were granted the right to vote in state elections.
Women – not just in Victoria, but also around the country and federally – remained under-represented in parliament right through until the eighties. I didn’t realise just how sparsely represented – during the early sixties there were only 15 women total in all Australian parliaments. Today there are 251.
The first part of the book constitutes a small history of second-wave feminism in Australia, through a political lens. The origins of the WEL, born from the burgeoning second-wave feminist movement, are fascinating, as are the group’s early strategies, campaigns and achievements.
During this time the number of women elected to Australian parliaments increased, with 19 women in Victoria elected in the 1980s and 20 in nineties. Grey (in her introduction) attributes this rise partly to the work of second-wave feminists who from the 1970s sought to put women’s issues on the mainstream political agenda.
The feminisation of politics, granted a chapter in Grey’s book, is an issue that continues to resonate – think the storm in a teacup recently after Sarah Hanson-Young had her toddler ejected from the Senate. And yet it is a nod to how much has changed that she is a Senator and a young mother and was able to have her child with her in Parliament House at all.
Despite the feminisation of politics, and the inroads made into changing the culture and practice of male-dominated politics in Australia, female parliamentarians are still treated differently. Look at Julia Gillard’s flak from Bill Heffernan regarding her decision not to have children. Likewise, I have heard Maxine McKew address her childlessness numerous times in the media and yet I have no idea if Greg Combet has no children or six.
The epilogue gives a view from 2009, appraising the performance of strategies to increase the representation of women in politics, as well as the reach of cultural and structural change and to what extent party politics constrain the scope of women’s success in parliament. Grey’s book includes lots of material from interviews with women who have served in Victoria’s Parliament, and the personal accounts are bracing.
I can honestly say I never thought the day would come when I found myself expressing my respect for Pauline Hanson’s handling of any situation; the One Nation leader has been racist, bigoted, infuriating and beligerent, but I never expected this. Some back-story for those who are confused: if you’ve read the Sunday morning papers today (or browsed the News Ltd online offering), you will have seen that an ex-boyfriend of Hanson’s, Jack Johnson, has released some “provocative”/”seductive” (Daily Telegraph’s words) photos taken when the pair were on a holiday some time between 1975 and 1977. Charmingly (though also, on some level, rather refreshingly – at least in the context of “former associates” who usually labour under false pretenses of “the public deserves to know…”), he has more or less admitted he only released the photos as he needed the money:
He said he was happy to give them back to the politician – “but sorry it’s come to this, sweetheart … that’s the way it is”.
It’s the same old sordid attempt to derail a woman’s political (or any) career – but what strikes me in this instance as notable is Hanson’s refusal to collapse into the usual press conference mea culpa expected of the victims of such “smear campaigns” (I use the air quotes because it always bothers me when apparently all it takes to derail a career is a healthy sex life – and for the record, I consider “healthy” anything two (or more) consenting adults decide to do together and don’t use it as a synonym for the greatly unhelpful “normal”). In fact, Hanson’s response – via her campaign office, in the Tele story linked to above – has been wonderfully brief:
Hanson was campaigning in Logan City south of Brisbane yesterday. Her campaign manager Bronwyn Boag said Hanson was too busy to come to the phone and they did not “care about photos”.
That is precisely the right response. Obviously politics is a field wrought with considerations of one’s electorate’s feelings and responses to anything that could spell a drop in votes, but how often do we see politicians selling out their lovers, sexual preferences and former associates solely for the ability to say, in essence, “but don’t worry, I’m okay now”? Saying “I don’t care” is the right response – because we shouldn’t care, either, nor should we be shocked or surprised.
The only person who should feel smeared by this rather sorry affair is Johnson; he’s the one who realised he needed to sell private photos in order to make a quick buck and descended into that grimy world himself. Hanson – while she should very much still feel ashamed of her politics, both personal and professional – should feel no shame at all. Perhaps she might wince at her mid-’70s choice of boudoir gear, or her hairdo (probably not), or her makeup, or remind herself why she didn’t end up staying with Johnson, but she should not – and, correctly, has not – fallen into a puddle of regret and hand-wringing simply to assuage the 1950s-worthy moral tut-tutting of the media commentators.
But the media needs to learn that women – even the ones we don’t like – have sex drives and sex lives. They vary infinitely from woman to woman, but the moral of the story is that revealing that a woman once took photos with an intimate partner (see also: Vanessa Hudgens, Jess Origliasso…) is not – or rather, should not – enough to derail a career. It is not “porn”, it is not a “scandal” – the only thing that brings such terms into play is the media itself, and the vultures feeding (and being fed by) the machine.
The Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States has charged the state of Niger the equivalent of AU$30,600 for neglecting to protect a woman sold into slavery at 12 years old. Adidjatou Mani Koraou, now 24, was sold for 330 euros (AU$673) and forced into domestic, agricultural and sexual labour without pay for the following ten years. The Age reported:
Adidjatou “served her master and his family for 10 years. She was never paid for her work and lived in a state of complete submission to her master, being subjected to regular beatings and sexual violence.
Her circumstances fall squarely within the longstanding internationally accepted definition of slavery,” [NGO Anti-Slavery International] said in a statement released ahead of the hearing.
The hearing and the conviction that followed mark an important moment for slavery in West Africa, this being the first time that the ECOWAS regional court has been asked to rule on a case of slavery.The result carries weighty implications for other West African states, and will hopefully be regarded as a benchmark case to be mimicked and built on hereafter.
It was very difficult to challenge my former master and to speak out when people see you as nothing more than a slave. But I knew that this was the only way to protect my child from suffering the same fate as myself. Nobody deserves to be enslaved. We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same… no woman should suffer the way I did.
What’s important to remember here is that slavery is not limited to those at the extreme end of the spectrum. Slavery today occurs in an alarming range of ways and affects an even more alarming amount of women (and men) all over the world. Anti-Slavery International defines a slave as anyone who is forced to work, owned or controlled by an employer and dehumanised or ‘bought’ in any way. Examples include (but of course are not limited to) bonded labour, early forced marriage, forced labour, slavery by descent, trafficking and child labour. See this section of Anti-Slavery International’s website for the full picture.
[And while you're there, send the automated e-mail - or adapt it into your own words - urging the President of the Phillippines to enact the Batas Kasambahay Domestic Workers Bill, which aims to pull Filipino domestic workers out of the private sphere and into the public legal system where their working conditions can be regulated and improved.]
The first Reclaim the Night rally took place in Rome in 1976 in response to skyrocketing numbers of reported rapes. Women in England marched in 1977, when a series of murders in Leeds led to women being advised to stay indoors. Australia’s first rally was in 1978, and similar events take place across the world wherever women want to protest violence against women, or rail against the ‘curfew’ mentality that leads to ‘commonsensical’ beliefs like the ones my mother is constantly spouting at me:
Women shouldn’t walk alone at night
Women should avoid dressing and behaving ‘provocatively’ at night
Women should avoid parks, dark streets and deserted places at night
Women shouldn’t get drunk at night because they’ll be more vulnerable to attack
Women shouldn’t speak to strangers at night
While I was definitely spooked last year after getting mugged around the corner from my house, generally it really pisses me off that women are expected to be personally responsible for potential violence against them, to modify their night-time habits and to feel worried and afraid whenever they venture out at night, whereas men can just do anything and go anywhere, unobserved, unharmed and uncriticised.
Of course, women don’t want to think of themselves as powerless or vulnerable, but at the same time there are also blasé attitudes about the things that happen to us in public. Sometimes we don’t interpret them as harassment or assaults, or we’re worried about looking silly, prudish or hysterical if we do. It’s easy to look at statistics (according to CASA, one in three women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime) and think, “That’s not me, I haven’t been raped”, but almost everyone has a story about being followed along the street, flashed at, groped at gigs, in bars or on public transport, or generally feeling creeped out by someone else’s treatment of you.
That shit is not normal. We don’t have to stand for it, and when I say that I’m not advocating taking arse-kicking classes to learn how to fight off attackers. These just feed into the attitude that violence against women is inevitable and it’s women’s job to anticipate it. We need to highlight the fact that everyone has a right to feel safe at night and that public safety is a consensual social contract, not the sole responsibility of one gender.
I say this because sexual violence isn’t only a concern for women, and it isn’t the only reason the night doesn’t feel safe. A (female) former workmate of mine got decked by some guy earlier this year in a fight over a cab, and on Caulfield Cup Day, my brother saw two men harassing a woman and when he told them to cut it out, he got bashed and ended up in hospital. A male friend of mine also has an eye-opening story of being stalked down the street late at night by a man in a car who was jerking off the whole time, and when he reported the licence plate number to the local police, this stalker was already known to them from several previous incidents.
Reclaim the Night takes place at the end of October every year. See if there’s an event happening near you: some are happening on Thursday, some on Friday. The Melbourne event kicks off at 7pm this Thursday at the State Library; the march itself ends up at Trades Hall, where there’ll be an after party from 8pm with free food, live performance from local musos, stalls and a zine fair. The march itself is for women and children only, whereas everyone is welcome at Trades Hall.
I must admit to being kind of ambivalent about these events, because they tend to take place in an ‘activist’ context that can seem daggy and offputting for people who don’t identify as activists, whereas this is an issue for everyone. At the same time though, I’m pleased to see the Bella Union bar used as a space of solidarity. I have been extremely unimpressed to see this historic site degenerate into just another indie and comedy club, with its labour movement heritage aestheticised for the appreciation of apolitical (yet left-leaning) local hipsters.
You will have read in the past week of Victorian MP Theo Theophanous’ being accused of rape, which led to his standing down from his duties. The media has followed the emerging case keenly – Theophanous was questioned, alone, for an hour at St Kilda Road police complex yesterday – as police have begun their investigations. Theophanous has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing as his accuser – the woman remains anonymous – stands by her claims.
Now everybody’s favourite columnist Andrew Bolt has offered his two cents on the matter (I no longer make a point of regularly reading Bolt’s work – it’s not good for my blood pressure – so thanks to Dawn Chorus pal Ben for the heads up). He begins by discussing the effect an accusation of rape – in particular a false one – can have on a man’s career; while it may seem unfair to discuss such matters in the face of a woman’s distress, it is true that false allegations can have devastating effects on a person’s family and professional life, even long after accusations have evaporated. But it is a fine line to walk in discussing such matters for the sake of balance as while false accusations are a huge problem for the accused, scandalously low rape conviction rates (or even report rates) are surely still a far more pressing issue, and giving air time to the former can seem to belittle the latter, particularly when you consider how many actual rapes (and unsolved/unreported cases) outweigh false accusations and their fallout.
However Bolt doesn’t stop at the impact the allegations will have on Theophanous’ career, which would have been difficult territory but at least an understandable (if not necessarily palatable) point to raise, instead going on to begin an efficient smear job on Theophanous’ accuser. Here are some highlights:
What’s more, Theophanous’s accuser – unlike him – has her identity kept secret by journalists who clearly know her name. She – unlike him – risks no public shame should her claims prove to be baseless.
Bolt conveniently forgets that the law protects rape victims, who remain anonymous precisely because of the implicit “shame” he predicts will befall Theophanous; why else would cases like TeganWagner’s become such high profile stories? Anonymity protects victims’ privacy and dignity, when so much of that has already been removed by the crime. Men may not want to be tagged as rapists, but I’d hazard a guess that not many people want to be known as rape victims, either. And who’s to say that these “journalists” know the woman’s name, either? He continues:
In a new interview with Cosmopolitan Magazine, Scarlett Johansson took a dig at the mainstream media for its sexist behavior towards Sen. Hillary Clinton during her primary campaign. In the article ScarJo says-
“Seeing how the media portrayed Hillary [Clinton] with unbelievable sexism – some of the things that people were saying were just so overwhelming. You just couldn’t believe the names that they were calling her!”
I think it’s great that Scarlett is drawing attention to something that I felt was rather unnecessary during the primaries. Unfortunately the sexism towards Hilary is still continuing, especially in the media’s silly comparisons of the ‘old’ and ‘tough’ Hillary to the ‘young’ and ‘hot’ Sarah Palin.
But are Scarlett’s comments really that surprising? You don’t need a degree in gender studies to have noticed the media’s sexist attitude towards female politicians. They seem to have been at it since women began moving into public office.
This video by the Women’s Media Center says it all. Brilliant!
You will most likely have read over the past two days that Victorian Labor MP Theo Theophanous (also one of the minority of Victorian MPs to vote against abortion law reform) has stepped down amid allegations of sexual assault. From today’s Agecoverage:
THE woman whose allegations have forced senior state cabinet minister Theo Theophanous to step down has told of being raped by him — inside Parliament House — in 1998.
The woman said Mr Theophanous sexually assaulted her after she accepted his invitation to show her around the Spring Street building late one night. Mr Theophanous denies the allegations.
In other words, it’s clear that – at this stage – the woman’s claims are allegations only. So why the need to bring out the judgy judgy quotation marks, eh, Age sub-editors?
The article makes it clear that the allegations are, as mentioned before, allegations, so there’s no need for the added punctuation. In the woman’s eyes, she was raped, plain and simple. She wasn’t “raped”, as though it’s some imaginary concept.
It may seem like semantics, but we have regularly discussed the use of passive and judgemental language in newspapers’ reporting of rape cases and I can’t help but feel they contribute, along with protracted and often nightmarishly unfair court cases, to the climate that makes women feel they can’t report rapes. Which, in this instance – where the woman spoke to The Age about having been too afraid to speak up about her alleged assault for ten years – makes the headline even more unnecessary.
So says Republican Media Consultant Andrea Tantaros, who – along with her colleagues – is up in arms about Newsweek’s latest issue, featuring a close-up photo of Gov. Sarah Palin (pictured at right, click through for full-size).
Speaking on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, the Republican media team – not to mention the show’s host – cried foul, suggesting that Newsweek have done Palin a gross disservice by failing to airbrush her into a palatable cover girl. As Tantaros says:
“It highlights every imperfection – that every human being has – but we’re talking unwanted facial hair, pores, wrinkles…”
Tantaros then suggests that Newsweek’s Obama covers have made him look “Presidential … flawless”.
(Briefly, to compare and contrast and provide some perspective, here’s a NewsweekJohn McCain cover, and a Barack Obama one. And, to even things up, here’s their Hillary Clinton effort, and Michelle Obama. You’ll agree there’s not a lot of airbrushing going on anywhere, and why would there be? It’s Newsweek!)
The host then barks:
“I mean, c’mon … Any respectable magazine should be doing a little retouching if you’re going to have the extreme close-up”
Fortunately Julia Piscitelli from American University’s Women & Politics Institute then offers some sage words (saying that Palin is clearly “beautiful” either way), before Tantaros cries out that the cover photo is “mortifying! … [Any] woman who sees this cover would be shocked and horrified“.
Really? Have we become so sucked into the airbrushed world that to see a woman unretouched is “horrifying”? As Piscitelli notes, Palin’s cover is the Newsweek ‘Women & Leadership’ issue, “which means that she’s one of the top women in leadership in the country” – what is more important here?
