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Category: Book

  • Stepford Wives anniversary: Suburban living turned women into robots

    On August 26 1970, 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in a Women’s Strike. Organised by feminist activist Betty Friedan, the march highlighted the fact women still performed the vast majority of domestic work.

    The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “unpaid domestic servitude at home”.

    Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.

    Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?

    The 1972 original cover. biblio.com.au

    The 1972 original cover.
    biblio.com.au

    Dramatising women’s suburban alienation

    Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives offered a bleak answer: women themselves would be replaced. Levin powerfully dramatised women’s suburban alienation and men’s resistance to feminist change.

    The Stepford Wives begins with Joanna Eberhart, a wife, mother and photographer, who moves with her family from Manhattan to the suburban town of Stepford. She is interested in tennis, photography and women’s liberation. Joanna and her husband Walter have a happy, respectful marriage. Yet Walter joins the mysterious Stepford Men’s Association, where the men of the town spend their evenings.

    Joanna finds it hard to make friends in their new home: all the women of Stepford are too busy cooking and cleaning. In the 1975 film adaptation (directed by Bryan Forbes, with a screenplay by William Goldman), Joanna and her only friend, fellow newcomer Bobbie, begin a consciousness-raising group – designed to raise women’s feminist awareness – which is derailed by an intense discussion of the merits of Easy-On Spray Starch.

    The 1975 film of The Stepford Wives is as iconic as Ira Levin’s novel.

    The women of Stepford transform into glassy-eyed housewives within months of arriving. Watching one of them admiring her washing, “like an actress in a commercial”, Joanna thinks

    That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

    Joanna and Bobbie realise, with mounting horror, that the Stepford women have literally been replaced by robots, in a scheme masterminded by their husbands – and they too, will be similarly transformed. Bobbie is first. She tells Joanna

    I realised I was being awfully sloppy and self-indulgent. […] I’ve decided to do my job conscientiously, the way Dave does his.

    The women’s personalities have been erased, but their families don’t seem to mind – Bobbie’s son is delighted because his mother now makes hot breakfasts, while the husbands are thrilled because their “new” wives love sex and housework.

    Fearful that she “won’t be me next summer”, Joanne realises Walter has also changed. He tells her the women of Stepford have changed only

    because they realised they’d been lazy and negligent […] It wouldn’t hurt you to look in a mirror once in a while.

    Joanna agrees to see a psychiatrist, who prescribes her a sedative. But soon after, her voice vanishes from the novel, as she too has been transformed. At the story’s close, Joanna is gliding slowly through a supermarket, telling an acquaintance that she no longer does photography because “housework’s enough for me”.

    An extraordinary feminist horror novel

    The Stepford Wives is an extraordinary feminist horror novel. Its vision of a group of men who engineer housework-loving robots to replace their restless wives offered not only a satire of male fears of women’s liberation, but a savage view of heterosexual marriage. In this telling, a man would rather kill his wife and replace her with a robot than commit to equality and recognise her as a whole person.

    Sarah Marshall, co-host of the podcast You’re Wrong About, argued the novel dramatised a real problem of the 1960s and 1970s: suburban living did transform women into robots. Tranquillisers like valium were massively over-prescribed for women who were suffering from “suburban neurosis”, both in Australia and the US.

    The extraordinary 1977 Australian documentary All In The Same Boat suggested suburban women had to take drugs to cope because their husbands refused to shoulder their share of the burdens of home and family. In short, what was happening to the women of Stepford was happening to women everywhere. They were losing their identities in a sea of endless domestic labour.

    This 1977 Australian documentary shows that what was happening to the women of Stepford was happening everywhere.

    Joanna’s bafflement at her neighbours’ absorption in domestic chores echoed the feelings of many women of the era. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique resonated with so many white women in the 1960s because it articulated their dissatisfaction with the postwar gender order. Friedan declared:

    we can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.’

    Like many who joined women’s liberation, Joanna also wanted something more. The novel made it clear that “more” would be difficult for many women.

    From post-feminism to Get Out: cultural influence

    It is telling that in post-feminist 2004, the Joanna in the Frank Oz film remake of The Stepford Wives is not a woman seeking liberation, but a TV network president who creates crass reality TV programs. Women’s liberation had been transformed into corporate feminism, and the engineer of the scheme was not the Stepford Men’s Association, but an exhausted career woman who wants to return to a “simpler” life. The remake took a feminist premise and made an anti-feminist film.

    Women’s liberation was transformed into corporate feminism in the 2004 remake.

    Despite the dismal failure of the 2004 film, The Stepford Wives left a significant cultural footprint. The term itself entered the vernacular. Filmmaker Jordan Peele cited The Stepford Wives as a key influence on his horror film Get Out, also set in white suburbia. And Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, centred on a lifelike female robot who turns on her creator, was a biting critique of tech bro misogyny.

    In a post-Roe v Wade world, where many men still seek to control women’s bodies and curtail their imaginations, Levin’s novel remains as chilling as ever.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    • Feature image: The Stepford Wives (1975) IMBD

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  • The capitalisation and secrecy of the menstrual industry

    Cash Flow: The Businesses of Menstruation, by UK-based academic Dr Camilla Mørk Røstvik, delves into how much we know about the menstrual industry – its surprisingly patriarchal business model, how it has amplified menstrual taboos and adapted to change. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, put some questions to Camilla. 

    In a nutshell, what is your book “Cash Flow” about?

    The menstrual product industry has played a large role in shaping the last hundred years of menstrual culture, from technological innovation to creative advertising, education in classrooms and as employers of thousands in factories around the world. How much do we know about this sector and how has it changed in later decades? What constitutes ‘the industry’, who works in it, and how is it adapting to the current menstrual equity movement?

    Cash Flow provides a new academic study of the menstrual corporate landscape that links its twentieth-century origins to the current ‘menstrual moment’. Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival materials and interviews with industry insiders, each chapter examines one key company and brand: Saba in Norway, Essity in Sweden, Tambrands in the Soviet Union, Procter & Gamble in Britain and Europe, Kimberly-Clark in North America, and start-ups Clue and Thinx. By engaging with these corporate collections, the book highlights how the industry has survived as its consumers continually change.

    Cash Flow- The businesses of menstruation

    Cash Flow: The businesses of menstruation (cover image) 

    If we think back in history, periods have been subject to all kinds of strange myths and taboos around the globe (and in some cultures, this is still the case). Why do you think this is? How does feminism, patriarchy and capitalism fit in here?

    There are many complex reasons, including menstruation’s association with dirt, femininity, and reproductive cycles – all of which have been stigmatised in some cultures.

    Other scholars have written about this, recently Dr Josefin Petterson in Menstrual dirt – An exploration of contemporary menstrual hygiene practices in Sweden (2022).

    Since my book covers the industry, I can add that the Western corporations who produce menstrual products are really good at both capitalising on these myths and taboos (about menstruation being unclean and that menstrual blood should not be seen for instance), while also attempting to challenge other taboos (about buying menstrual products or talking about menstrual cups for instance).

    Recently I went looking for stock photos for an article about period poverty. And I was shocked at how sanitised and cliched the photos were. In the context of your book, how would you respond to this?

    For menstrual scholars and activists, illustrating our work has been challenging because of the continued taboo against showing menstrual visually, especially blood. Therefore, most work is illustrated by products – thus reinforcing the industry’s hold on the visual culture of this bodily event, and even acting as product placement.

    However, this is changing. I would recommend that everyone check out the open access free stock photo gallery Vulvani, a great NGO that has created free, creative and bold images of menstruation. (Editor’s note: Thanks Camilla for recommending this site! We got the feature image from there.)

    I use these in a lot of my work, alongside the existing archival material that exists from for example Wellcome Trust Collections and the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. And, of course, the work of artists like Judy Chicago, Bee Hughes, Jay Critchley and others challenge the visual gap with menstrual art!

    A classic example of the kind of stock image BroadAgenda editor Ginger found when she searched "menstruation." The stock image caption was listed as: "Hygienic white female pad." Source: Shutterstock

    A classic example of the kind of sanitised and unrealistic stock image BroadAgenda editor Ginger found when she searched under “menstruation.” The stock image caption was listed as: “Hygienic white female pad.” Source: Shutterstock

    How has the menstrual “industry” shaped the past hundred years of menstrual culture across society…everything from innovation, advertising, and even education in classrooms?

    The industry has changed menstrual culture by commercialising it from around 1920 onwards (more or less one hundred years, although earlier patents and products did exist). The shift from homemade solution to store-bought purchasing, however, is neither all good or a great evil.

    Many people were happy to start buying products and stop making/washing their own. It freed up time. For others, the additional cost – what we call period poverty today – was a challenge. Since we are talking about such a huge percentage of humanity, it’s difficult to generalise.

    In my book, I offer some lenses through which to see the industry through. Namely, as a Western-dominated system (the first key corporations all came from what we might consider the global north), that has subsequently exported both products and Western ideas about menstruation to the rest of the world.

    This includes the insistence of purchasing products, keeping bloodstains invisible, normalising euphemisms and advertising, and focus on negative aspects, for example premenstrual syndrome or PMS.

    Another lens is the industry as a massive employer throughout the world, historically mostly of women. As such we can see it as a core part of modern capitalism and labour history.

    A final lens to explore the industry with is its role as educator. The education it has given through the decades is not always of good quality, but they have at times stepped in when no-one else did. As such, the industry remains complicated and kept under surveillance of its own users: menstruators are both users, critics and moderators of this industry and its technologies.

    Dr Camilla Mørk Røstvik

    Dr Camilla Mørk Røstvik believes it’s important to examine the menstruation industry, in order to create more transparent systems for scholars and consumers. Picture: Supplied

    Things are currently changing. How? And how is the industry responding? 

    Menstrual issues are on the agenda due to the work of activists in many countries. They put the spotlight on period poverty, menstrual health, menstrual education, pain and disease related to the cycle, period positivity (in the words of Chella Quint) and menstrual rights.

    This has been amplified by the industry, which has both appropriated and spotlighted these messages in advertising since about 2015.

    But the industry also has a much longer history of trying to engage with menstrual activism, seen as far back as in the start of its work when core messaging revolved around liberating women from this ‘curse’ and inconvenience.

    From you view is this increased visibility of menstruation a move towards social equity, or simply and increased business opportunity to sell new products?

    Probably both, and historically this has also happened.

    You suggest the industry is secretive and unexamined. Please unpick this for us.

    Like any corporation that is still operating, the core brands in this space do not let independent scholars in (with some exceptions).

    This is not unique to this industry, but happens here too.

    It’s perhaps a bit more important in this industry, since there is a lack of trust between some consumers and brands. The TSS (toxic shock syndrome) issue lingers on, and the #MyAlwaysExperience debate a few years back is a reminder that it still happens. And also because the industry collectively fronts a message about being a good friend to its consumers.

    You forensically look at a number of specific menstrual brands. Why is it important to see this as a corporate business that makes money?

    Hopefully, it is part of creating a more transparent systems where scholars and consumers understand more about the industry. The industry’s own market research (paywalled and very expensive) documents every little detail about the consumer, so I think it’s only right that the consumer and scholar document the industry’s history.

    • Dr Camilla Mørk Røstvik is Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art History at Aberdeen. She specialises in 20th and 21st century visual culture, with a longstanding research interest in the history, cultures, and art of menstruation. Her interests include feminist art history and art projects, environmental humanities, medical humanities, feminist Science & Technology Studies, and Norwegian/Sámi art histories.

     

    Please note: The stock image at top came from Vulvani.

     

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  • Be grateful we don’t shoot you

    This is an edited extract from Jo Dyer’s Burning Down the House: Reconstructing Modern Politics, released this month as part of Monash University Publishing’s In the National Interest series. In this part of the book, Jo delves into her friendship with the late Kate Thornton, who made sexual assault allegations against former Attorney General, Christian Porter. This text is published with full permission. 

    In her Quarterly Essay ‘The Reckoning: How #MeToo Is Changing Australia’, Jess Hill provides a compelling overview of the #MeToomovement in Australia. She describes its false start, and how it was nearly derailed by our anomalous defamation laws and News Corp’ssloppy pursuit of Geoffrey Rush. But by March 2021, everything had changed. As Hill writes, ‘three women— Kate Thornton, Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins—would trigger a resurgent #MeToo movement in Australia, and a citizen-led insurgency against the Morrison government’.

    The 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame is a remarkable force, a young woman who has lived through great trauma, a survivor of carefully planned and devastating sexual abuse who has emerged as a poised, powerful advocate for fellow survivors. Equipped with killer lipstick and one-liners, she is articulate and unapologetic, describing her own abuse, and, importantly, the grooming that preceded the assaults themselves, and thereby changing the conversation around child and sexual abuse. While her impressive advocacy only inspired the Morrison government to review the way our Australians of the Year are selected, in others it fuelled courage.

    One of those galvanised was former political staffer Brittany Higgins, who, watching an emotional Tame accept the Australian of the Year award from Morrison in January, was sickened by the hypocrisy of the Prime Minister lauding Tame for her bravery in speaking out when his government had sought to silence her.

    Higgins had told her boss, then defence minister Linda Reynolds, of an alleged criminal violation at the hands of a colleague, Bruce Lehrmann. It was alleged to have taken place in Reynolds’s ministerial office when Higgins passed out on a couch after a drunken night out. The way herallegation was handled by Reynolds, by her subsequent boss Michaelia Cash, their boss Morrison, and the many, many people who were told ofthe alleged crime committed against her, subsequently came under damning scrutiny.

    Higgins was consistently treated as a political problem to be managed and silenced, rather than as a valued colleague. Despite the ever-growing list of people aware of Higgins’s story, including senior members of and trusted fixers in Morrison’s office, and despite the fact thatjournalist Samantha Maiden had submitted an extensive list of questions to that office the week prior, on 15 February Morrison told parliament with a barely straight face that he, along with the rest of Australia, only became aware of Higgins’s allegations when he read them in the press that morning. No-one believed him. He then proudly reported that he’d needed his wife to impress upon him the seriousness of what had allegedly happened, describing the game-changing conversation he’d had with Jenny as if his ignorance and lack of empathy were commendable. The distress Brittany Higgins allegedly suffered was to Morrison relatable only in the context of the possibility his daughters could suffer a similar fate. If he’d been childless, presumably he would have remained indifferent, and if he’d had sons, well, who knows wherehis sympathies might have lain.

    The third name Hill cited, Kate Thornton, belongs to a friend of mine. We became friends as precocious teenagers at that pivotal time when intense relationships are forged—some lifelong, some more transitory, but all invoking that seminal period when you feel you are on the edge of your life, preparing to take off, hoping to fly. Despite her brilliant mind and great talent, Kate never took off as expected. When we reconnected in July 2019, she told me why.

    She had fallen prey to a trauma that had not only kept her grounded but devastated her. She said she had been raped by attorney-general Christian Porter as a teenager in January 1988 and, despite her efforts to bury it, to move past it, she’d never recovered.

    Kate had not told me of her suffering at the time, nor in the intervening decades when we’d fallen out of contact, but she was ready now to act, and she intended to report the alleged assault to the police. I was sick with fear for her about what lay ahead and the retributive intrusivemedia she would confront from the government’s News Corp allies but offered her my unconditional support. She spoke to other friends from the time, marshalling her army. She engaged legal representation, the heroic team at Marque Lawyers, and had a preliminary meetingwith NSW Police that led to the formation of Strike Force Wyndarra in the Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Squad. But upon her return to Adelaide in March 2020, her interac- tions with NSW Police stalled after deputy commissioner David Hudson refused the request of Wyndarra officers to travel to Adelaide to take Kate’s statement, despite the travel having already been approved by three levels of the police hierarchy.

    The impact of the delay, coupled with Kate’s distress at hearing of the success of George Pell’s High Court appeal, another case of historic abuse relying solely on the testimony of the victim, contributed to the deterioration of Kate’s mental health. She died by suicide in June 2019. The day prior to her death, she con- tacted the police to tell them she would not be continuing with her complaint. Sheneither withdrew nor resiled from her allegation. In the months leading up to her death, cognisant of the toll it was taking on her mental health,she secured undertakings from some close to her that, should the burden become too heavy for her, they would continue a posthumousfight for justice on her behalf.

    Kate’s story became public eight months later through the tenacious reporting of Louise Milligan and Four Corners. Although Milligan’sstory referred only to allegations against a Cabinet minister, as the story became one of the biggest political scandals of contemporary times,Porter identified himself as the accused perpetrator and wept at a press conference, denying everything.

    I don’t know what I thought would happen next. That a semblance of sanity and integrity would prevail, I suppose, and Porter wouldimmediately stand aside while a confidential inquiry of some sort was conducted. The High Court conveniently presented a recent and relevant example with their inquiry into justice Dyson Heydon’s behaviour. While Kate’s devastating death meant her central testimony could not be heard or tested in person, she left behind two detailed signed and dated statements—admissible in legal proceedings under the precedent of Snyder v The Queen in the Victorian Court of Appeal (April 2021).

    The cover of Jo Dyer's book: Burning Down the House -Reconstructing Modern Politics

    The cover of Jo Dyer’s book: Burning Down the House – Reconstructing Modern Politics.

    There were also sworn affidavits from witnesses that corroborated key details in Kate’s statements and threw doubt on Porter’s dismissivecharacterisation of the nature of their relationship. As I and other friends of Kate’s became caught in a political and legal maelstrom that continues in fits and starts to this day, what I didn’t expect to happen was nothing at all. I didn’t anticipate that the only response would beuntrue statements from the Prime Minister asserting Porter’s exoneration from a police investigation that never began,33 and meaninglessrepetition of the phrase ‘the rule of law’ as he determinedly did nothing about the fact that one of his senior ministers had been accused of rape. For all the talk of listening to women, it was the voice of the indignant accused that was heard on this matter, not that of his alleged victim, from her grave.

    Morrison is simply ill-equipped to handle sensitive matters relating to gendered violence. He is uncomfortable around powerful women and oblivious to, and unconcerned about, sexism and inequity. In her biography of Morrison, The Accidental Prime Minister, Annika Smethurst writes of his attitude to women that ‘broadly, he just doesn’t seem to work constructively with them’. One female Coalition frontbencher described him to Smethurst as a ‘deeply ingrained chauvinist’. Another male colleague said Morrison ‘couldn’t stand’ some of his female colleagues, including Julie Bishop and Kelly O’Dwyer. There was consensus among several government ministers that ‘Morrison simply prefers to work with other men’. When, in March 2021, the women of Australia marched in their thousands demanding justice and freedom from violence, he told parliament how lucky we were that we were not being ‘met with bullets’, as we would be elsewhere.

    It’s the small things, I guess.

    The disgust many women felt at the sleaze that engulfed the government showed up in a significant drop in their support in the polls, driven largely by women abandoning them.35 Confronted with potential electoral fallout, Morrison finally took note and much was made of a hastily established and snappily titled new Cabinet Taskforce on Women’s Equality, Safety, Economic Security, Health and Wellbeing, which comprised every female Cabinet minister, Morrison, Treasurer Frydenberg and, latterly and incredibly, Barnaby Joyce. At the time of thetaskforce’s formation in April, Morrison spoke volubly and emptily about its turbocharged agenda before giving the ladies a brief turn to talk.At the time of writing, it has achieved nothing. Later, the Morrison government rejected the central recommendation of the Australian HumanRights Commission’s Respect@Work report: the ‘positive duty’ clause that would give employers a legal obligation to prevent sexual discrimination and harassment in the workplace, similar to the provisions of workplace health and safety laws intended to prevent injury. We currently wait with bated breath for their response to the Set the Standard report into the workplace culture of Parliament House. They’ve assured us that they will be ‘taking action on all the recommendations,’ which is unlikely to be the same as implementing them.

    • EDITOR’S NOTE: We note Jo Dyer is an independant candidate for the Federal seat of Boothby. BroadAgenda is not affiliated with any political party or candidate. 

     

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  • Banishing body shame: ‘Ladies, We Need To Talk’

    ‘Ladies, We Need To Talk’ (the book) breaks the stigma around everything women are thinking but not saying. Author and presenter Yumi Stynes and health reporter and digital editor Claudine Ryan cover all the trickiest taboo topics from their hit podcast of the same name…from bodies and mental health to sex and relationships.

    In this Q and A BroadAgenda’s editor, Ginger Gorman, asks Yumi few pithy questions about what readers can expect.

    The book ‘Ladies, We Need to Talk’ is based on your hit podcast of the same name. Let’s go back to the start. Why and how did it begin?

    It started more than 5 years ago when Claudine Ryan, who is an experienced health journalist and very dearly loved boss lady at the ABC, wanted to pitch a podcast to the powers that be at the ABC. She needed a host who was a little bit out-of-the-mould for ABC. She reached out to me and we hit it off immediately.

    Why DON’T we talk about things like ageing vulva, female incontinence and clitoral orgasms? 

    There are lots of reasons – but the biggest one is shame! We’re taught from very early on that our bodies are shameful, embarrassing, and “weird” – just for being what they are, which is female bodies! If, for instance, menstrual fluid is so disgusting and shameful that we couldn’t possibly talk openly about it or show it on TV, then how are we going to be able to talk to our doctors and lovers about it? How are we going to robustly seek out the best ways in which we can manage it?

    If, for instance, we’re never told that urinary incontinence can be a common side effect of pregnancy and aging, then we’re led to believe that we’re the only ones experiencing it – that we’re defective, broken, and disgusting.

    Clitoral orgasms are wonderful things – but to talk about them? That would be to admit that women experience pleasure, and actually quite like it. And that, to some people, is fucking terrifying.

    When you look a bit deeper at why we are not talking about these things it comes back to gender inequality, especially in medicine and medical research.

    Why is it important to change that? 

    It’s important to talk about what we go through as people living in these funny bodies because we’re ALL situated on the spectrum of human experience, no matter how goddamn “perfect” we may appear to be from the outside. And all our bodies do weird things sometimes. And our minds. And all our relationships are sometimes whacky and all our behaviour is sometimes the result of trauma, hardship, pain, mistakes and misinformation. Cherishing ourselves, our spirits and bodies through better understanding is a feminist act.

    A really tangible example of why it is important to get comfortable talking about our bodies.

    Yumi Stynes (left) and Claudine Ryan

    Yumi Stynes (left) and Claudine Ryan with their book “Ladies, We Need to Talk.”

    Also given that so many topics you cover are taboo, how hard is it to get experts and case studies to speak out? 

    It’s the easiest thing in the world! It’s a universal desire to help others by sharing knowledge. Once the podcast ‘Ladies, We Need to Talk’ was established back in 2015, people knew it was a safe space. Their stories would be handled with gentleness and respect. Most people who come in to record their stories start by saying, “I wish more people knew this!” They’re ready to unleash. It’s quite a thing to behold.

    What was the most surprising thing you’ve learned both making the pod and writing the book? Can you please give a specific example or quotes/colour here…we want people to get a taste of the book + your wonderful writing style. 

    I loved talking to women about opening up their relationships to polyamory. There’s a lot of science backing up why women get bored of having sex with the same partner year in, year out, and while I like hearing from experts who study this stuff, it was hearing from women whose pussies are literally engorged and practically AFLAME from having hot additional partners and the kind of sex they actually WANT rather than bullshit obligation sex – that really thrilled me and made me think, “Oh my God, I know NOTHING!”

    I could just picture it, and their storytelling was so vivid. It made me think that this idea of being loyal to one partner is as flimsy and light as a helium balloon. The women I interviewed let go of their balloons. The balloons floated away. Oh, guess what? You can fu** who you want. No one cares. It’s your body. Do what you want with it. Have the fun you want. Feel the pleasure. Be greedy for it. Those rules? That shame you’re meant to feel? It floated away.

    So brilliant. If I were you I’d flick straight to the chapter on polyamory. And also listen to that podcast episode. I spoke with different people for the book than for the podcast. As soon as I put a call out for polys – among my own friendship group – my phone started pinging. It’s mainstream, but invisible to a lot of us. I mean, I’m exhausted just thinking about it, but also swollen with admiration.

    This book as adamantly feminist and refreshingly focuses a lot on choice – and thinking things through from many angles. Why did you write like this? 

    We’re all products of the society we live in, and it’s enlightening to question if we’re doing certain things because we want to – or because we’re expected to? Our culture isn’t all awful – but there’s a lot of expectation that sets women up to bear the brunt of bullshit – working for less pay, having to spend more time and money looking “pretty”, putting up with bad sex, taking on unpaid caring roles – because why? Because that’s just how it is.

    Questioning how it is snatches the power back into our hands. 

    A classic example is the expectation that we all want kids. What if we don’t? Like, what if we actually choose not to have children? People love to give women the “choice” to have or not have kids, so long as they eventually choose to have kids! If they actively choose to remain childless, it’s a revolutionary act.

    You’ve deliberately made the book super accessible. Tell me about your motivations for that. 

    I’m the daughter of a migrant. I’m always checking in to make sure that what I am saying would make as much sense to someone who speaks English as a second language as it would to a Aussie-born university professor. You don’t win prizes for being an incomprehensible wanker. I’ve been a broadcaster on TV, radio and now podcasts for more than 20 years, and the guiding principle of what I do is to make sense and be understood and hopefully bring some clarity, new information or enlightenment to the listener. I save being a clever bit** for my friends! Ha ha. 

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  • The Super Woman Myth: Can we have it all?

    One of the challenges of being a woman in the modern world is that no matter how far we’ve come in equality, in a heterosexual relationship women still, generally, bear the burden of the ‘mental load’ of running a household, and/or managing a family. It can happen bit by bit. A small career break, a few years part-time, while our partner’s career is progressing and suddenly it’s the most logical choice for the woman’s career to be secondary to the man’s.

    Understanding this in more detail was our objective in interviewing hundreds of women and writing our book ‘The Superwoman Myth’ (just published!). In the book, we explore stories from women in relationships with men, women in relationships with women, single women, people with children and people without children. We have discussed trans and gender diverse individuals, cultural differences, and Indigenous Australians. One of our authors is in a same-sex relationship, while the other two are in traditional marriages, and all three have children. We have tried to be as representative as possible in our interviews, and the stories shared within the book.

    In a heterosexual union, it’s not always the way that the man’s career dominates – we’ve talked to plenty of females who are the main or sole breadwinner, too – but it seems to be a very common story when talking about juggling two careers. Even in relationships where the couple do not have children, there is the burden of the mental load that someone has to carry. It might be a little more equitable, although our research shows us that even in heterosexual relationships without children, women tend to bear the brunt of the mental load. The following are some quotes from some of the women we interviewed:

    “I carry 95% of the mental load to keep the household running.  At times it feels like my partner is deliberately forgetting so he doesn’t have to a take any load.  When I have asked him to be responsible for something he has forgotten it or has not placed as much importance on it as I would have and is incomplete or sloppy, so, I have stopped asking.”

    “At first my husband “chipped in” and initiated some household tasks and I was left to do everything else (even when it came to his son). Now my 66-year old mother lives with us and she takes on most of the cleaning and laundry. My husband does very little. I want to do more and be more in control of my household but I don’t have the energy or time. I take on 100% of the mental load.”

    “I definitely carry about 90% of the mental load, my husband the other 10%, usually about himself. All other tasks, responsibilities to do with our children, dog and            household fall to me. In terms of household tasks, it would be 80% me, 15% my husband, 5% my children. I would love them all to do more but they complain and don’t do it”.

    This juggle to do it all is how women have become known for multitasking! Also, when women carve out time for ‘deep work’ – a time for focused work on a particular project (We can be masters at cramming it in and getting whatever is needed to be done in the time required! The three authors of this book regularly draw on principles of deep work to get their tasks done – indeed, writing this book has occurred during many of our ‘deep work’ moments. We have been asked by many people how we actually managed to juggle it all to write this book, and our answers differ slightly from one another.

    The book begins by raising a thoughtful question, "Can women have it all, family, work and everything in between?"

    The book begins by raising a thoughtful question, “Can women have it all, family, work and everything in between?”

    For Jennifer, she allocated time on weekends, while her husband looked after their child. For Raechel, she wrote mostly in the evenings, or during two hour chunks of time she blocked out in her calendar over the lunch time. In some ways the pandemic helped us – surprisingly so! For Rebecca it meant her husband was not travelling for work, so she managed it whenever she had spare time, even if it was just an hour at a time. For Raechel, the pandemic meant her children were home, but so was her partner. Still, she carved out time for ‘deep work’ whenever their  toddler napped. Deep work means planning the task in advance, avoiding distractions, and working solidly for a time period. The three of us are also very fortunate to all have supportive partners who are willing to step up.

    The data tells us that women today are doing more than our mothers did. We all know that more women are in the workforce than ever before. More women are working full time than ever before. Less than a quarter of women worked in the early 1970s, compared to two thirds today. Women are also better educated and are ‘catching up’ to men in terms of post-school education.

    The good news is that this results in many women in better careers. Despite all of this, the kids still need to get to school (when a woman has children, that is!), dinner still needs to be on the table, lunches need to be made, groceries need to be purchased, and as we have already shown you, women still tend to carry the brunt of that, even though men are, increasingly, stepping up. This means our lives are busier than ever before.

    You may have also heard that women today are spending more time with their children than women in the 1970s – this potentially surprising finding was reported by women in a survey in 2011. They indicated that they spent more hours with their children than their mothers had. While this may be the case, we need to consider why it may be the case. Children in the 1970s were more likely to roam the streets, playing with friends in the neighbourhood, and organising impromptu sporting matches. When they had extracurricular activities, they took the bus, or went on foot, and parents were not necessarily expected to attend.

    These days, parents generally organise ‘play dates’ for their children, through back and forth phone calls, text messages and calendar checking, something that was never really the case thirty or forty years ago. Parents today drive their children to sport and other extracurricular activities. They are present when the child is signed up, and often attend matches and classes. Yet, when we really examine the data, we can see that mothers today have much more ‘sedentary’ time compared with mothers in 1965. Mothers today are more likely to spend time in front of a computer, the television, driving, or ‘supervising’ children at their sports matches or play dates. In contrast, in 1965, mothers were more ‘active’ – cooking, cleaning, playing with children and exercising. While women still cook, clean, play and exercise, the increased use of technology (e.g., dishwashers, cooking appliances… and screen time!) has reduced a lot of the ‘activity’ component of these tasks.

    Nevertheless, data indicates women today spend more time with their children than mothers in the 1970s did, and regardless of how the data is interpreted, women are busy. Women are generally trying to do many things at once, and it is essential that for partnered people, tasks need to be shared to support the increasing roles of women in the workforce.

    “As women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home”). This needs to be happening now – women should not be carrying the lion’s share of home duties if a couple has dual careers.

    • This is an edited excerpt from “The Superwoman Myth: Can Contemporary Women Have It All Now?”. It’s out now!

     

     

     

     

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  • Review: Rape culture and silencing survivors

    Content notification: This post contains discussion of rape culture, sexual assault and silencing victims. 

    I’m back again to review two more books from the In the National Interest series – the bite-sized deep dives from Monash University Publishing.

    Sticking with the theme of exploring the hellscape that is life in Australia for women these days, I read System Failure: The Silencing of Rape Survivors by Michael Bradley and Rape Culture by Louise Newman.  I want to acknowledge up front that these are heavy going topics, and both books needed a trigger warning – System Failure includes graphic depiction of rape, while Rape Culture includes detailed accounts of the psychological distress of survivors.

    System Failure: The Silencing of Rape Survivors

    Michael Bradley says we offer rape survivors a stark choice: go to the police, or remain silent.

    Like those I reviewed earlier, these books are easy to get through. System Failure especially is a good starting point for those wanting to know more, or who are thinking about these issues for the first time. Unlike the other books, though, System Failure deliberately does not propose any solutions, rather,  Michael Bradley states ‘What I want to point out is that the failure exists, that it is profound, complete and absolutely known.’

    The book does an excellent job of laying out the historical origins of rape as a property crime against men (!), the system’s inability to deal with nuance and contradiction in intimate relationships, and the traumatizing – and often fruitless – process of justice seeking.

    But with no solutions posed, we’re not offered anywhere to go with all this. I suppose there are some people who don’t know the system is cooked and so need to hear this – but I am not one of those people and so I was deflated from spending more time dwelling on the horror.

    I would have liked more unpacking of how the intersection of ‘the system’, patriarchy, and gender norms act on men and women to normalize sexual violence, to make consent so tricky, to heap shame on women, or of the particular challenges faced by diverse women, and trans and non-binary people, but at 85 pages there’s only so much that can be covered.

    Overall, if you don’t yet realize that the whole damn system is wrong, this is a great place to start. But if you are acutely aware of this, maybe give this read a miss.

    I thought there might be some of the exploration I was seeking from System Failure in Rape Culture, but no. Rape Culture is more about the psychological trauma of experiencing sexual violence and living in rape culture than it is about unpacking rape culture itself.

    When I realized this, I was excited to dive into an exploration about the need for psychological theories that recognize that humans, especially minoritized and marginalized humans, live in political, economic, and social systems that can be traumatizing and cause psychological harm.

    Rape Culture

    Yet again, women’s testimonies are discredited, says Louise Newman.

    The book left me wanting more – though again, at 82 pages, and attempting to connect some big ideas, it was only ever going to skim the surface. And while I’m not sure that the connection always lands, Louise Newman does offer important solutions, summed up as ‘We need gender-specific models of care and treatment for the enormous range of mental disorders and psychological issues stemming from rape culture…’ Can I get an AMEN?

    Engaging in this material requires some radical self-responsibility – knowing what our limits are at any one time and establishing some supports for ourselves when we do engage. So, I would exercise caution in whom I recommended these to – these are thought provoking contributions, but you will have to deal with those thoughts. Ultimately, these authors clearly care deeply about their subject matter and write engagingly and it’s comforting to know that these passionate people are out there doing their thing.

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  • When misogynist cyberhate turns you into international news

    QAnon is a far-right conspiracy movement, which revolves around false claims made by anonymous individuals, much of it online.

    In this edited excerpt of her new book ‘QAnon and On’ Van Badham details misogyny and gendered hate within this cohort. 

    Anita Sarkeesian was a graduate student at York University in Canada. Her research critiqued the representation of women in genre tropes across popular culture, and she maintained a website with a YouTube channel, Feminist Frequency, that documented her work.

    In June 2012 she launched an online Kickstarter fundraiser to make a series of videos that extended her analysis to video games. ‘I love playing video games but I’m regularly disappointed in the limited and limiting ways women are represented,’ Sarkeesian wrote in her pitch asking for contributions.

    To make Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, she needed six thousand dollars to cover production costs.

    ‘[T]its or back to the kitchen, bitch,’ came one comment.

    ‘LESBIANS: THE GAME is all this bitch wants,’ came another.

    They continued: ‘You are a hypocrite fucking slut’; ‘I’ll donate $50 if you make me a sandwich’; ‘She needs a good dicking, good luck finding it though’; ‘I hope you get cancer :)’; ‘Back to the kitchen, cunt.’

    And more. Thousands and thousands more, across all platforms where Sarkeesian had a presence – two thousand within a week on her YouTube channel alone.

    A post on Feminist Frequency reported that a ‘coordinated attack’ had mobilised, trying to get Sarkeesian’s accounts banned, sending her torrents of abuse – including rape and death threats – even editing her Wikipedia page to describe her as a ‘cunt’ and transforming her profile picture to porn. On her Tumblr, Sarkeesian identified that ‘a dozen or more different people were working together to vandalize’ the Wikipedia entry alone.

    The abuse of Anita Sarkeesian was so intense, it became an international news story.

    French website Madmoizelle pegged the blame for the attack squarely on ‘a bunch of 4channers doing everything on the Internet to destroy her’.

    It seemed that someone had brought Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter to 4chan’s attention, as they had abuse victim Jessi Slaughter and so many other targets before.

    The joke at the time was that 4chan did more to resource a feminist critique of gaming than Sarkeesian could have ever managed on her own. In the wake of publicity about the abuse, donations made in solidarity with Sarkeesian flowed into the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games fundraiser. She had asked for $6000. She received $158,922.

    The videos got made but laughs for the woman herself were thin on the ground.

    Anita Sarkeesian’s life was transformed: the engaged and eager 28-year-old academic became a woman made famous for her public abuse, because that abuse didn’t stop when she surpassed her fundraising goals, or even when she made her videos. The attention from 4chan had made her into a new kind of internet celebrity: the online feminist folk villain.

    Over the next few years, the abuse and death threats continued, and there were ongoing attempts to hack her accounts, shut down her sites and dox her. The attention had made her videos hugely popular, but while she was provided with international platforms in the media and at conferences to discuss her work, she was subjected to bomb and mass shooting threats at public appearances. She was falsely reported to the FBI and IRS for investigation.

    Cover - QAnon and On

    In QAnon and On, Van Badham delves headfirst into the QAnon conspiracy theory, unpicking the why, how and who behind this century’s most dangerous and far-fetched internet cult. 

    She was sent images that depicted video-game characters raping her and had a video game made about her. It was called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, and in it the player punches an image of her face until it is misshapen, cut and bloody.

    She was also the subject of conspiratorial, crowd-funded amateur documentaries. Two men behind these films, Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini, worked sometimes together, sometimes apart, but shared a mission to prove Sarkeesian was a fraud and manipulator.

    Their most infamous project was a crowd-funded documentary called The Sarkeesian Effect.

    Aurini self-identified as an ‘intellectual’ and shared propheavy white nationalist opinions on a YouTube channel and on Reddit. He was rumoured to hang out on 4chan’s /pol/ board.

    Owen was also a YouTuber, as well as a gamer, and a composer of ‘modern orchestral dance music’. Both men were enraged that Anita Sarkeesian had been recognised for her feminist advocacy at events like the Game Developers Choice Awards and denounced her in The Sarkeesian Effect as ‘a bully like [the video game industry] had never encountered before, a bully that used guilt and political correctness to have her way’.

    Their films and public comments repeated the online myth that her stories of harassment were a lie – a pity-eliciting grift to propel her to fame and riches – even as their own projects actively harassed her.

    For all the exuberance of their attempts to have Anita ‘cornered’, the only major revelation of Aurini and Owen’s film was that she got her correspondence delivered to a post-office box rather than a street address. An insistence of Aurini’s that she had lied about reporting her harassment to the police turned out to be incorrect.

    When the police located her harassment reports, Aurini retorted online that this news merely ‘compounded’ his questions rather than answering them. His reasoning for this was without explanation.

    Writer David Futrelle from the anti-misogynist website We Hunted the Mammoth followed the story of the Sarkeesian films and blogged about it. He saw a genuine desperation within these projects for ‘the terrible things people say about Sarkeesian to all be proved true’.

    For a start, there was the issue that they were sourcing money from people on a promise to validate the energy ‘half the internet’ had put into hounding her.

    There was also, Futrelle observed, a monstrous, sometimes admitted, envy of Sarkeesian among these people. She was able to raise more money from her projects than they could for theirs. She was invited to game industry parties when they were not. Her work was influencing a mainstream conversation.

    Futrelle described a pressing, psychological need he saw in Jordan Owen to delegitimise her. Any suggestion that Anita Sarkeesian may not be the creature Owen wanted her to be, wrote Futrelle, ‘actually seemed to plunge him into something close to an existential crisis’.

    Around these men, their projects, the online movement against Anita Sarkeesian and forums like 4chan, a new ecology was growing. The internet is the technology that offers the vastest storehouse of humanity’s learned truths in all our history, yet the accessibility of internet communities, their global reach and the rapidity of their communications were creating spaces where participants could affirm and reaffirm wilful myths to any audience that was eager to believe them. Years later, this phenomenon would be called post-truth’.

    When it came to the likes of Anita Sarkeesian, the scheming ‘SJW’ villain her antagonists wanted her to be was a far more compelling story than the video-game-playing feminist academic she really was. The same keyboards and screens used to demonise her as an agent of a ‘politically correct’ conspiracy were ones on which a mere few clicks could establish she was not a demon at all. The very proximity to empirical evidence made the deliberate choice to ignore it more conspicuous – and disturbing.

    Feature image: Anita Sarkeesian” by theglobalpanorama is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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  • 1960s women: beyond sex, drugs, rock n’ roll

    Female baby boomers came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and changed the world forever. It wasn’t just about hippies, flower power, anti-war demonstrations, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

    Even more fundamental changes were taking place.

    The sexual revolution, underpinned by widespread availability of the pill and a dramatic rise in women going to university, started a long-term decline in fertility rates that continues to this day.

    This is one of the things I discuss in my new book, Population Shock.

    Abul’s latest book, Population Shock, is out now.

    Abul’s latest book, Population Shock, is out now.

    My interest in this topic goes back to my time in the Department of Immigration where for over a decade I had responsibility for migration and temporary entry policy.

    While initially affecting developed nations, the long-term decline in fertility rates has extended to just about every nation on the planet.

    As a result, the global population growth rate peaked in the 1970s and has steadily declined since.

    In its 2019 revision of the world’s population prospects, the United Nations reduced its projected peak in the world’s population by 300 million.

    Its forthcoming 2021 revision, which has already been delayed over four months due to its contentious nature, may reduce that peak by another 300 to 500 million with the peak in human population being reached well before the end of this century.

    The 1960s and 1970s also started a boom in workforce growth, not just because male boomers started entering the work force in huge numbers, but career opportunities also opened up for female boomers.

    Double income families, which had been unusual through the 1950s, started to become the norm.

    They earned wages and started spending money like never before – unlike their parents who had been children of the depression and war years.

    Surging private consumption and rapidly growing wages due to the strength of a highly unionized workforce meant we faced the combined effect of rising unemployment and runaway inflation.

    Governments acted by ‘fighting inflation first’, ‘putting a lid on wages’ and ‘disempowering unions’.

    They also started flattening income tax scales, increasing consumption taxes and reducing company and inheritance taxes – thus setting in train a long-term rise in wealth and income inequality.

    But as the boomers begin to retire and die out, we enter a new era. The next step of course is for deaths to begin exceeding births.

    The world’s oldest population, Japan, reached that point a number of years ago. Its population is shrinking by around 500,000 per annum. This may rise to 1 million per annum by the end of this decade.

    Over the next 10 to 15 years, many other nations will join Japan with a shrinking population. These include China, Russia, Italy, Spain, the Ukraine, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Greece, Poland and many others.

    So many major nations with shrinking populations is unprecedented in human history.

    While shrinking populations may appear to be a positive for the environment, shrinking economies make it much more difficult to afford the cost of transition to a less emissions intensive economy.

    Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi are desperately trying to encourage families to have more children but with very little success.

    The pill may have started this trend, but we need to act now to prevent our fertility rate falling too much further and accelerating our rate of population ageing. Better childcare policies and publicly funded early childhood education may be not just good social policy but also good economic policy.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Will the Australia of tomorrow be more equal?

    The future lives of women have changed drastically. As a growing number of women agitate for change, this new book, edited by Jamila Rizvi and Helen McCabe, contends it is time to demand what women want. Through the lenses of work, love, and body, this powerful and essential essay collection asks: Will the Australia of tomorrow be more equal than the one we were born into? Or will it be a country where women and girls remain left behind?
    I’ve hit Jamila up here with a few pithy questions about this new work. 


    What is the premise of Work.Love.Body.? What need did you see for this book? 

    We know that in the wake of cataclysmic global events, incredible progress is often made as governments seek to invest for the future. Australia can use this opportunity one of two ways; we can either strive towards gender equality or ignore the problem. Work. Love. Body. sets out what the opportunities are for Australian women if our governments, businesses, and community see fit to invest in their potential. It also reflects on the varied experiences of women during the pandemic to draw out the need for policy approached that respond to that diversity of experience. We hope very much it will be read by governments, policy makers and opinion shapers, as well as women who want to find solace in the shared experiences of others. Will the Australia of tomorrow be more equal 

    Helen McCabe (right) and Jamila Rizvi (left)

    Helen McCabe (right) and Jamila Rizvi (left) are the editors of Work. Love. Body.

    Covid magnified many gender inequalities which already existed in our society. Tell me more about that, as it’s explored in this work. 

    We spoke to dozens and dozens of women for Work. Love. Body. Each of them generously shared her story in the hope that it might ultimately help others. Jane was perhaps one of those whose experience most interested me. Jane is a single mum with two children and finds it tough to make ends meet. She was almost embarrassed to admit that 2020 was a better year for her. She was able to make rent, to pay her bills in advance and take advantage of the discounts that come with that. She could get food on the table even in the days immediately ahead of receive her income support payments.

    The increased funding from government during 2020 for people who were out of work made Jane’s life manageable for the first time. She was freed from the stress and anxiety of financially making things work and that left her able to properly search for work.

    What this tells me is that while the pandemic has magnified gender inequalities, our response has also shown what is possible. If only governments had this kind of will in ordinary times, to look after our most vulnerable citizens.

    My worry is that women ALWAYS postpone looking after themselves and take care of others first. How does your book address this?

    The data shows – and the experiences of women we spoke to for Work. Love. Body. affirm this – that women were the first ones out of the workforce when the pandemic hit. While the unemployment rate is very low right now it hides a multitude of problems, including that women are underemployed and many have exited the workforce – and the search for work – entirely. Why women have stopped working is unsurprising. It is not about the availability of work but the availability of their time. Women are picking up the lion’s share of unpaid housework, childcare and home schooling. Santilla Chingaipe explores in her essay the fact that taking care of themselves becomes not so much a priority but a laughable proposition. We were shocked and worried by how many women we spoke to were close to or at the point of burnout. As well as the sad reality that the pressure on psychological and counselling services means getting the help they need is hugely difficult.

    As well as bearing the brunt of the huge domestic load, women were also the frontline workers of the pandemic. How did this play out? 

    The pandemic is a single life changing event that has impacted us all but our experiences of it are quite different. This is true for women also.

    While most people who lost work during the pandemic were women, they were also most workers on the front line who continued to leave the house each day to do their jobs. The caring professions have always been dominated by women and the pandemic showed us just how critical that work is. While childcare, aged care, disability care and nursing are all woefully underpaid and undervalued, they are also quite literally essential. Even in a deadly pandemic, we could not do without them.

    Jane Gilmore considers in Work. Love. Body. whether this will change the status of caring work into the future and sadly conclude that is unlikely to be the case. The country is likely to revert to the status quo of considering these as jobs which are done for ‘love’ and therefore don’t deserve the same financial compensation. This is a narrative we have to end.

    Sometimes gender inequality seems like such an intractable problem. What hope and/or joy does your book offer?

    Work. Love. Body. offers a surprising amount of joy given the heavy subject matter. Women have been remarkable contributors during this difficult time in history and their stories of supporting one another are heart-warming. Importantly, the pandemic has been a time where things governments and businesses told us were ‘impossible’ were suddenly deemed possible. Childcare was provided free of charge to parents for a period of several months and guess what? The sky didn’t fall in. Women who were sleeping rough were given the opportunity to live in hotel accommodation, without charge, to keep them and the community safe. And women who had asked for flexible work arrangements and been denied them for years because it was ‘just too hard’ discovered it was completely fine. The challenge for this country is to learn from these experiences as we move forward.

    I notice this book is essentially a collaboration of five female writers and editors. And this is generally how you do things at Future Women (which produced the book!). Why do you choose to work like this? What statement are you wishing to make?

    Future Women is an organisation that prides itself on bringing incredible women together. In our community every day new support is offered between working women, new connections are made, and new lessons imparted. We want to practice what we preach. We hire, contract and work with diverse women with a range of experiences and backgrounds. We know that creating a book using multiple women’s voices means it is more likely to be inclusive, expansive and illustrative.

    WLB_cover3D

    Never before has change been thrust so abruptly on modern Australian women. This book explores how 2020 impacted our working lives, relationships and our health and wellbeing. Work. Love. Body. is out now from Hachette.

     

    Please note: Feature image of a childcare worker is a stock photo

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  • The age old profession where women reign

    ‘The Psychic Tests: An Adventure into the World of Believers and Sceptics’ is a new book by award-winning journalist, Gary Nunn. He investigates psychics, mediums and astrologers to understand their uncanny, under-investigated and unregulated power.

    I was lucky enough to read Gary’s book when it was in manuscript form. And I was surprised by many things, including how feminist the work is! Why you ask? Well that’s exactly what you’re about to find out. I hit Gary up with a few questions of my own…

    What’s your book about? How do you respond to people who think it’s “oogie boogie”? 

    It’s a two-year investigation into the world of believers and sceptics: part gonzo, part investigative, part memoir, part historical, part analysis of the post-truth world we’re living in, and the dangers of being seduced by pseudoscience and misinformation.

    Whether you believe in them or not, psychics, mediums and astrologers are likely to at some point impact who will date you, who will trust you, who will hire you and even who will fire you. You’ll read fascinating and staggering case studies for each of these scenarios in the book. But you’ll also read about the nuance, the value and the humanity in this realm.

    Up until this point, books on this subject either focused solely on ‘believer’ or ‘sceptic.’ Most books which sold well spoke to those towards the believer end of the spectrum by teasing their curiosity.

    The Psychic Tests

    The Psychic Tests is a moving examination of trust, faith and connection.

    For the sceptics, there’s always just been just one test: is this real? Can psychics see into the future? Can mediums speak to the dead? Does your star-sign denote your personality traits and compatibility with others?

    In fact, to this day, you can win $100,000 from the Australian Sceptics if you can prove you have psychic or paranormal powers. The $100k has been on offer since 1980; nobody has passed that test!

    No one, though, has focused on the manifold other tests within this mystical world. That’s why each chapter is a different test. Can psychics boost confidence, stroke egos, alleviate loneliness, decode mysteries, unstick catch 22s, create lifelong romance, harm, heal, help or hinder?

    (The answer to every question is yes.)

    What inspired you to write it? 

    Two people: my sister, and the Chairman of Australia’s biggest stockbroking firm, BBY.

    My younger sister Taren was really into psychics and I used to poke fun at her about it. In the book we step into each other’s worlds. She’s the voice of the believer in the book and I’m the voice of the sceptic.

    We found our middle ground through grief, and the very different worlds in which we retreated to process it. Our dad died suddenly in 2015. For a long time I refused to allow myself to feel sad. About 10 months later I started behaving irrationally then just broke down and cried for three days solid. It was pretty scary, I thought I might drown in my own trauma. I now understand this as the unseating of a form of denial, the very first phase of grief.

    My sister was ahead of me. She was at phase two: bargaining. She sought out the services of several different mediums. Each time she’d tell me they brought dad through, and she’d remark on the things she believed were accurate. It’s like he wasn’t dead. She was still speaking to him.

    It creeped me out. I grew concerned her vulnerability and perhaps her gullibility were being exploited by grief vultures.

    Then, a year later, I reported for the Sydney Morning Herald on a story that floored me.

    Glenn Rosewall, the Chairman of Australia’s biggest stockbroking firm, BBY, had hired a psychic, Nevine Rottinger, to advise him. She counselled him on where to invest, who to hire and even who to fire. This went on for four years till the firm went bust: the biggest stockbroking firm collapse since the Global Financial Crisis. $61million was owed to the clients.

    It gave me a new hunch. Maybe those who hire psychics aren’t vulnerable or naive. Maybe they’re like Glenn Rosewall: powerful, authoritative and responsible for hundreds of people and millions of dollars.

    After all the research you’ve done, what don’t people understand about psychics and healers (and this world in general)?

    How high up this goes. Psychics advise powerful people in secret: world leaders from Ronald Reagan to Hitler; CEOs from Glenn Rosewall to (former Australia Post CEO) Christine Holgate.

    People genuinely believe supernatural miracles will save us from eternal damnation, the perils of uncertainty and, very possibly, the destruction of climate change.

    Public money gets spent on charlatans and pseudoscience. My FOI request showed the NSW police used psychics at least 19 times between 2003 and 2019. They’ve even paid their expenses.

    But bodies remain missing and our biggest stockbroking firm has collapsed.

    Gary receives a tarot reading. Picture: Supplied

    Gary receives a tarot reading. Picture: Supplied

    It’s a very feminist book. Can you explain to me?

    This is one of the world’s oldest professions, historically dominated by women.

    In World War One and Two, there was a fear psychic mediums would impede national morale, with so much death around. Police – mainly or exclusively men – would operate clandestine raids on psychics then arrest them. In response, many psychics banned male clients, and that hangover effect has led to this being, to this day, a female dominated industry.

    Academic Alana Piper has done some fascinating work in this area, showing the gender differences. Men, according to Piper, sought advice on investment opportunities or locating lost property. Women, on the other hand, were mostly preoccupied with romance and gossip.

    Then there were the fears about their power and influence.

    “It was joked that housemaids would quit their jobs on the basis of prophecies of rich husbands soon to come. Marriages were said to be breaking down as clairvoyants confirmed wives’ suspicions about their husbands’ infidelity, or counselled them that separation would bring brighter prospects.”

    Piper also highlighted how it was an innovative way for uneducated widows to earn money in a world which denied them the same opportunities as men.

    “It was an occupation that women could embark upon with few business costs while working from home. Deserted wives and widows with children to support featured disproportionately in those prosecuted for fortune-telling. So did older women, particularly those with ailments that meant they could no longer undertake more physically taxing work in factories or domestic service. Newspapers voiced resentment that women – particularly working-class women – should be earning good money at a trade that was technically illegal.”

    All this informed my chat with Felicity Carter, a former astrologer who used to give tarot readings in The Rocks in Sydney. She has since revoked it and said she made it all up.

    Carter was the first to discourage me from laughing at psychics and their believers.

    She framed it as a spiritual realm in which women – so often shut out from positions of authority in the hierarchies of major religions – can empower themselves, have agency, feel seen and feel listened to. I’d previously underestimated the power of that.

    You make it clear that psychics and healers are often dismissed BECAUSE it’s seen as a female activity. Why do you think this is? 

    The stubborn stereotypes of men being rational and women being irrational persists. It is dispelled, though, by the leading female sceptic activists and the male psychic practitioners.

    However, the very human anxieties and need for reassurance and fear of uncertainty plague us all.

    I think Rosewall for example was feeling imposter syndrome, often associated as a toxic side effect of patriarchy. When you have nobody above you except for the divine, and it’s left wanting, you want someone to validate your juggernaut decisions. All these men doing it in private – Rosewall, Reagan, Hitler, senior police sergeants – are terrified of their leadership skills being questioned. Perhaps some women are more open and honest and own their uncertainty and vulnerability, which creates solidarity, intimacy, trust and ultimately, strength and success.

    • The Psychic Tests: An Adventure In The World Of Sceptics And Believers by Gary Nunn (Pantera Press) is out now.

     

    Feature image: Gary receives a tarot reading. Picture: Supplied

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  • Inflate life jackets: reckoning with trauma in journalism

    What follows is an extract of Lisa Millar’s new book, Daring to Fly: The TV star on facing fear and finding joy on a deadline. It’s a story about a girl from country Queensland who found a way to conquer fear, to see (and report on) trauma and horror, while still holding on to joy.

    I never expected trauma and fear would be the dominant themes of my working life. The trauma was something I experienced second-hand, as a witness to the aftermath of school shootings, earthquakes and suicide bombings. The fear of flying I suffered from was very much a personal battle that lasted a little over a decade. But both are intrinsically linked.

    I’d spent two weeks waiting outside Changi Prison in December 2005 for the young Australian Van Nguyen, caught trafficking drugs, to be hanged. It had left a mark. When I got home the ABC was just beginning to investigate a new way of helping staff.

    I was flown down to Sydney to be a guinea pig in a focus group early in the new year.A psychologist stood at the front, gauging whether this exercise was going to be a lost cause with the hardened journalists in the room that day who’d spent years in the field. Her name was Cait McMahon and she ran the Asia–Pacific branch of an international organisation called the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, a group none of us had heard of.

    When Cait began talking about the impact long-term trauma could have, one seasoned war reporter who’d spent the previous few years in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, sat with folded arms and an expression on his face that read ‘what would you fucking know?’.

    Cover Daring to Fly

    ‘Daring to Fly’ is Lisa Millar’s new book about finding courage and joy.

    Cait was convinced trauma was misunderstood by media organisations. The statistics were clear about the damage that could be done. Substance abuse and broken relationships were more common among people in the media than they should be. She saw it as a problem that could impact on the freedom of the press. ‘Trauma silences people. It silences societies, individuals, communities.

    ‘If a journalist is so traumatised and so burned out by what they’ve been exposed to professionally and can no longer work, or chooses not to work because they’d just have to go and do flower shows because there’s been too much of the dose of trauma, they are silenced as much as someone like Peter Greste who was physically silenced when he was jailed in Egypt.’

    It reminded me of my time at The Sun in Brisbane in the early 1990s, when I worked on police rounds. I used to ring police stations around Queensland to see what had happened overnight and then meet up with a photographer at whatever fire, death, murder or kidnap had happened within driving distance to carry out a ‘death knock’. It didn’t always involve a death but it did involve knocking on a victim’s door and speaking to them or the grieving family.

    I was twenty-one years old and would be lying to say it wasn’t confronting. The photographer was an old hand at it, a middle-aged man with a sensitive heart who indulged in black humour on the way to an assignment to alleviate the stress. One day we were sent to Ipswich, about forty minutes west of Brisbane.

    The paper had been following the case of a missing 22-year-old woman. I’d written a front-page story the day before about the discovery of her broken-down and abandoned car. She’d rung Queensland’s roadside assistance company RACQ at 8.30 pm from a public phone box a four-minute walk away. And then disappeared without a trace.

    Twenty-seven hours later police had found her, questioned her and sent her home. Police believed she’d been abducted and held captive. My job was to get her story.

    We had no idea what this woman had gone through as a captive and, as we drove out on that winter’s morning before dawn, we discussed our tactics. The photographer kindly said he’d be happy to back me up if I told the bosses that we’d knocked and no one responded. They called that a ‘grass knock’ because no one would hear it. But I knew I couldn’t carry off a lie like that and so we sat and waited in the winter fog, cursing that we hadn’t brought food as the temperature barely climbed past zero.

    Finally, a light went on and someone picked up a newspaper off the lawn. The house was awake. We walked up the wooden steps of the old Queenslander and only a few seconds after I knocked the door opened. The face that peered out belonged to a young woman. It was bruised and her eyes flickered as she tried to process who these early visitors were.

    Blame the cold, hunger or shock but the last thing I remembered was introducing myself to her before I fainted. When I came to, I was inside the house and she was offering me a glass of water. I pleaded with her to give me a few lines for a story, which she did, as long as we didn’t take her photo. She told me she’d been taken from her car on the highway and kept in a dark room with a bucket for a toilet.

    We rushed off to find a public telephone. I inserted twenty-cent coins into the phone to connect to the paper’s copy-takers, who would type my dictated story into the system. By the time we got back to the office, the paper was hitting the streets and my story and the photo was the front-page splash.

    When I walked in, one of the senior editors started applauding and others joined in. He handed me a cardboard cut-out of an Oscar that they’d dummied up which read ‘For Best Acting, Lisa Millar’. It struck me that they thought I’d deliberately fainted to get the interview. And they were proud of me.

    Years later, when the ABC began training staff to become more trauma literate – in not only the way we looked after ourselves but how we treated those we reported on – it was the start of an eye opening journey.

    Feature image: Supplied/Will Belcher

     

     

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  • How internet dating is empowering women, LGBTI folk

    If you’re over 40, you’ll probably remember when online dating was seen as something only ‘desperate’ people did. Now, it’s as popular as toilet paper at that first mention of “lockdown”.

    Today, says marriage celebrant, Yvonne Adele, 70 per cent of the couples she marries met online.

    This month, on the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia’s “Seriously Social” podcast, I asked some experts whether online dating, and the platforms we use to do it, are shifting the power-balance in dating relationships.

    There’s no denying the online dating scene still has a reputation for breeding toxic behaviours like racism, ageism, sexism, misogyny and harassment. Nearly every woman who’s tried online dating has a hair-raising story to tell. But there’s another side to that coin, and it’s a positive one. Something’s changing for women and some LGBTI + folks when they meet men online, as opposed to at the pub or nightclub.

    On dating apps, women can take back some of the power. According to Sydney-based dater Melanie who spoke to me for the podcast, she went from questioning her currency and attractiveness as a potential partner, to suddenly becoming the one to do the picking once she started using dating apps. (That’s not always the case in real life – especially for older women who were acculturated to “wait until you’re asked.”)

    Chris Beasley is Emerita Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations, with an interest in gender and sexuality, at the University of Adelaide. Chris is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Traditionally, the pace of dating has traditionally been controlled – or steam-rolled – by men. But in researching their new book,  Internet Dating: Intimacy and Social Change, Chris and her co-author, Mary Holmes, discovered that women feel safer when technology, and a degree of anonymity, allows them to ‘take the reins’ and control the speed of the relationship.

    Chris and Mary were also delighted to find some older women are smashing stereotypes and using internet dating for casual sex. Chris explains:

    “Freed from the risks of, possibly, pregnancy, or their social environment telling them not to do this … older women are having much more casual sex than they’ve probably ever had before. Internet dating provides them with that opportunity.”

    Chris Beasley

    Chris Beasley, Emerita Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Adelaide, says online dating can be an empowering experience for some older women. Picture: Supplied

    LGBTIQ people have also found internet dating empowering. Online, there’s usually no doubt about who will welcome an advance from a same-sex or trans or non-binary partner and who won’t. And, if you read the signals wrong, it’s far less dangerous than in real life. It takes a lot of angst out of that first approach. For Bee*, a bi-sexual, finding love in the ‘real world’ was “like looking for a needling in a haystack.” But, after a few months online, she met her future wife.

    According to Chris, people with physical disabilities also benefit from the convenience of online dating. They can meet a lot of people within a wide geographical area, without the physical barriers (and now, health concerns) inherent in bar-hopping. For those who feel anxious or uncomfortable in social situations, vetting potential partners online can make dating much less stressful.

    She also suggests online dating tends to lead to intimacy more quickly than the old-fashioned kind. But, it’s not just physical intimacy which happens faster. Online, you get to ask the kinds of interrogative questions about interests, attitudes, values and expectations – even sexual preferences –  that may feel inappropriate if you’ve just met someone for the first time at a pub. And, if you don’t like the answers, you can close down the conversation safely, without fear of being harassed or followed.

    Of course, dating ‘online’ is only a preliminary to meeting up in ‘real life.’ But, it gives women a broader range of candidates and a better filtering process. Hopefully, changing what happens at the ‘front end’ has the potential to overcome some of the issues women experience during and after that first face-to-face meeting.

    If online dating is making women feel more empowered, Chris thinks it’s also making men think more carefully about how they present themselves online.

    “On dating apps, the most common language that men use to describe themselves is ‘easy going,’ says Chris.

    “I think that’s a kind of shorthand language for saying, ‘I know that I just can’t get my own way.’”

    As dating apps boom in popularity, specialist apps have entered the marketplace. Bumble, for example, was set up with the express aim of giving more power to women. Features like photo verification have been added to assure women they’re talking to a real person whose identity has been verified. Apps like Bumble and Hinge are designed to encourage conversation over presentation – also, arguably, a safety feature.

    Marriage celebrant, Yvonne Adele, says some of the couples she’s married spoke for months before they actually met in person.

    Lucille McCart is the Asia Pacific Communications Director for Bumble. She says: “I think that a platform is never going to be the single answer to solving the gender issues that prevail throughout most Western societies and many other societies as well. But, I think the original philosophy of Bumble that still stands today is that if you can encourage a woman to make the first move on a dating app – it’s a very small experience, but it’s an empowering experience.”

    Lucille thinks that once women find their confidence and power in dating, it can translate into other areas of their lives. But she sees bringing gender equality into dating as something that serves all sexes.

    “It’s not about making the world a better place for women,” says Lucille. “It’s about making the world a better place for all people, and helping all people try and find more healthy and equal relationships.”

    Feature image: Created by Anna Dennis for the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Used with permission. 

    • Written with Kim Lester and Sue White

     

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  • New book: The vitality of human rights in turbulent times

    “If attention is directed towards the dynamism of social movements and human rights activism around the world, a different set of views of the cathedral emerges“ says Gráinne de Búrca on 9 September 2021 about her book “Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era“.

    Cover for Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era

    In the book, she examines a number of human rights campaigns around the world and their degree of success as well as their limitations. “I argue that even in a very turbulent and difficult era when human rights are under challenge from all sides, human rights approaches not only retain vitality and urgency for activists, but have also delivered substantive results over time. I suggest that if attention is directed away from a predominant focus on a handful of prominent Global North NGOs, and towards the dynamism of social movements and human rights activism around the world, a fuller set of views of the cathedral—of the landscape of human rights—emerges. The book advances an experimentalist theory of the effectiveness of human rights law and advocacy which is interactive (involving the engagement of social movements, civil society actors with international norms, networks and institutions), iterative (entailing ongoing action) and long-term (pursuing of social and fundamental changes that are rarely rapidly achieved).“

    Yet there is little reason for complacency or sanguinity. These are highly challenging times for human rights, and for human rights defenders, activists and advocates everywhere. The tide of illiberalism continues to surge around the world, and liberal democracy is in an increasingly unhealthy state. Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated existing inequalities, corporate power continues to grow and to elude governmental control, while powerful new alliances of religious and political actors have been moving not only to repress the rights of disfavored communities and constituencies, but also to try to reshape understandings of human rights in highly conservative, exclusionary and illiberal directions. Repression of civil society, and of freedom of assembly, expression and protest continues apace, with the number of killings of environmental and other activists growing each year.

    At the same time, long-standing critiques of human rights from the progressive left have become popular and mainstream, with influential books in recent years deriding the weaknesses, failures and dysfunctions of human rights, and their complicity with colonialism and neoliberalism. Many of these critiques have been powerful and important, and several have prompted reflection and proposals for reform on the part of human rights practitioners and scholars. 

    But several of the most prominent critiques go beyond a call for rethinking or reform. They argue that the age of human rights is over, that its endtimes are here, that human rights law and the human rights movement are ill-suited to address the injustices of our times, that the failure of human rights approaches to seek or bring about structural change or economic justice highlights their deeply neoliberal character or companionship, and that human rights advocates should perhaps no longer seek to preserve human rights, but should make way instead for more radical movements.

    In my book, I argue that some of the more damning critiques are exaggerated and partial. Like the proverbial view of the cathedral, several of the sharpest criticisms focus only or mainly on one particular dimension of the human rights system, and tend to caricature and reduce a complex, plural and vibrant set of movements to a single, monolithic and dysfunctional one. At the same time that the most pessimistic of the critics are writing obituaries for human rights, multiple constituencies around the world are mobilizing and using the language and tools of human rights in pursuit of social, environment, economic and other forms of justice. From #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Climate Justice and Indigenous movements to reproductive rights marches in Poland, Argentina, and Ireland, to protest movements in Belarus, Myanmar, Nigeria and Chile, the appeal of human rights at least for those seeking justice (even if not for academic critics) seems as potent as ever.

    None of this is to suggest that human rights advocates should not constantly scrutinize and reevaluate their premises, institutions and strategies. On the contrary, hard-hitting critiques of human rights for failing to tackle structural injustices and economic inequality have helped to galvanize change and a reorientation of priorities and approaches on the part of various relevant actors and institutions. Human rights activists and movements should exercise vigilance to ensure that they serve and are led by the interests of those whose rights are at stake, that they do not obstruct other progressive movements and tactics, and that their approaches are fit for the daunting and profoundly transformative challenges of these pandemic times, including accelerated climate change, digitalization, ever-increasing inequality and illiberalism. With attention to these risks and dangers, the diverse and heterogeneous array of actors that make up the international human rights community have an indispensable role to play, in a turbulent era, within the broader framework of progressive social, economic, environmental and cultural movements.

    https://www.openglobalrights.org/grainne-de-burca/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Listicle: Books and TV programs showing great Dads

    I’m not sure if you caught the recent opinion piece by stay-at-home Dad and journalist Rob Sturrock. It stuck a huge chord with our readers! He argued that the way Dads are portrayed in popular kids’ culture – like TV shows and children’s books – really matters.

    He said in part:

    All men are capable of providing the physical and emotion support children require to develop into skilled, confident and socially adjusted people. Yet one of the great parenting myths is that men are thoroughly incapable and inattentive and women are instinctively more attuned to the needs of their children. We continue to feed this misconception to our children, on a daily basis since it is strongly embedded in our pop culture and children’s entertainment.

    If you haven’t already devoured his words, I recommend you go ahead and read the whole thing. (Linked above.)

    This got us thinking, though. Which children’s books and TV programs DO actually in fact show dads sharing the load? Ginger, our Editor here at Broad Agenda went on her Twitter page and asked her  Twitter followers what their opinions were and was inundated with suggestions. Here are our favourite picks.  Can you think of any others? Share it with us on @BroadAgenda5050.

    Bluey

    Bandit, at right, is a laid-back but resourceful dad who’s heavily involved in the day-to-day childcare. Image: Supplied/ABC 

    1. Bluey 

    We had a few people suggest the ABC TV show, Bluey. Bluey is a children’s TV program about an indestructible six-year-old Blue Heeler Puppy. Bluey loves to play and transform ordinary family life into spectacular adventures, using her imagination as well as her mental, physical and emotional endurance. Bandit is the Dad in the show and he’s been described as “the ultimate guide to fatherhood“. Woah! High praise. The article I’ve just linked to describes him as “…a laid-back but resourceful dad who’s heavily involved in the day-to-day childcare.”

     

    Guess How Much I Love You

    2. Guess How Much I Love You  

    Our second popular suggestion was is a children’s book by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram called, Guess How Much I Love You. The story begins with two hares, Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare (the Dad). This story isn’t a complex one – it’s about a Dad’s love for his son. But it’s a lovely, reassuring message that this love can be supportive, enduring, and eternal. This one is a bestseller for a reason. The story of the Nutbrown Hares trying to find a way to measure the unmeasurable, and Big Nutbrown Hare’s heart-warming declaration to Little Nutbrown Hare, ‘I love you right up to the moon – AND BACK’, has helped this story become a way of saying ‘I love you’ all over the world.

    My Dad is a Dragon by Damon YoungPeter Carnavas

    My Dad is a Dragon,
    by Damon Young and Peter Carnavas.

    3. My Dad is a Dragon 

    This next one is my personal favourite, a beautifully written children’s book called My Dad is a Dragon by Damon Young who’s a philosopher and writer. The message behind this children’s book is beautiful. The aim of this book was to portray dads in all different ways, and it certainly did just that. The book is visually very engaging with beautifully illustrated pictures by Peter Carnavas with lines that are lyrically very expressive and comic. I highly recommend this for a read for young children. It will delight them by exploring all the ways dads are unique. With lines written with beautiful flow and additional a comic factor, as well as the gorgeous pictures.

    4. To Kill a Mockingbird

    Another suggestion on Twitter from gender expert Dr Blair Williams was the classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Yes, we know this book isn’t strictly for kids. But we wanted to give it a shout out because it does a beautiful job in terms of how the father figure is portrayed.  The book is about Atticus Finch who is a very strong-hearted father, with a happy family. Atticus is a father of two children who lives with his family in the town of Maycomb Country. In the book Atticus teaches his kids a lot of different life lessons, including about white supremacy and racism. Atticus also shows fairness – he treats his children with respect and understanding. He also sets a good example and is a good role model by always being truthful. These three are very important components in being a good father!

    5. Finding Nemo 

    Another popular suggestion was the Finding Nemo, which is a personal favourite. This film was released in 2003, and I’m sure we’ve all heard of it; I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t seen it!  It’s about two clown fish named Marlin and Nemo. When Nemo is abducted from the Great Barrier Reef and taken to Sydney, Nemo’s father enlists the help of Dory, a forgetful fish. They embark on a mission to save Nemo and return him to his family. I adore this film not only because my favourite actress, Ellen Degeneres, plays Dory’s voice, but also because it’s such a beautiful story with such a beautiful message. Showing the great lengths a father will go to, in hopes to bring his son back home. Filled with laughs and amazing animation it’s a 100% a must see and I feel like this film will never get old!

    6. My Neighbour Totoro

    This one is a superb 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film. The plot centres around a university professor who moves into an old house with his two daughters to be closer to his wife, who is ill recovering in hospital. A few of our readers point to Tatuso, the father, who is warm and loving towards his daughters and despite them not spending a lot of time with, their father he still makes it a priority to encourage them and he never doubts them or their capabilities. He’s a beautiful representation of a father figure. However, at the same time he does in fact leave the kids to play on their own quite a bit…and not all of our readers were fond of that! Tatuso, does a beautiful job however at showing the lengths he goes to in order to still allow his children to see their mother while in hospital. So this brings hope and optimism.

    7. The Gruffalo’s Child

    Another recommendation by our readers is a wonderful book written by Julia Donaldson called, The Gruffalo’s Child. which is about Gruffalo, the father, and his child. The Gruffalo’s child is disobedient, not listening to the father. The child wanders in the woods in the middle of the night (even though Gruffalo’s father shares his terrifying experience with the animals in the woods. Despite explaining this experience to his daughter, she still sneaks out in the middle of the night. She sneaks out into the woods in hopes to find the big bad mouse. In this television program there is a strong emphasis on the father because it shows how despite Gruffalo explaining to his child the dangers of wandering off in the night, his child still disobeys his wishes. It shows how important Gruffalo’s role as a parent is to his child and the importance of always listening and to what your parent says. The book was made into an animation and I’ve embedded a clip for you above.

    8. Round the Twist

    This next one is an absolute classic. Although it was first a book by Paul Jennings, the text was later inspired a TV show. All of us kids born in 99’ will remember watching this one all through the 2000s while growing up. This show was by far one of my favourites. It’s about a guy named Tony Twist and his three children, his two 13-year-old twins Pete and Linda along with 7-year-old Bronson. They relocate from a chaotic metropolitan city to an abandoned lighthouse on Australia’s coast. Things turn for the worst when they find the lighthouse is haunted, and life starts becoming unpredictable. Since Tony lost his wife in an accident four years before, the main focus in the show is Tony as the parental figure. I highly recommend this one it’s a good watch, with some good laughs. It’s a refreshing change!

    Jabari Jumps

    “Jabari Jumps” is a book about a patient and encouraging father and a determined little boy.

    9. Jambari Jumps

    This fabulous book was written by Gaia Cornwall and published in 2017. The story is about Jambari, who tries to find the courage to jump off a diving board. According to the book’s publishers, “Gaia Cornwall captures a moment between a patient and encouraging father and a determined little boy you can’t help but root for.” With the lesson on overcoming your fears and showing how your mind can sometimes be your greatest barrier, it’s a sweet and encouraging book and shows just how important Dads are.

     

     

    These are just a handful of the suggestions we received on Twitter about items of kids’ culture that show Dads sharing the load. There were so many more! Do you have any you’d love to recommend?  Feel free to r our post and respond to our question on Twitter!

     

     

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  • Review: Boil your blood, focus your mind

    If you enjoy bursting into rage induced flame, but in pocket sized installments and with a glimmer of hope at the end, you can’t go past Kate Fitz-Gibbon’s Our National Shame: Violence Against Women; Jill Hennessy’s Respect; Fiona McLeod’s Easy Lies and Influence and Enough is Enough by Kate Thwaites and Jenny Macklin. Part of Monash University’s In The National Interest series, these four volumes by seriously credible women hit the spot in providing an accessible unpacking of major challenges facing Australia.

    I reviewed these books with the help of my daughter, third year university student Bridie. She read each one in a single sitting, while I read them in snatched moments between meetings or at night – and unusually for me, I managed to read these in bed without falling asleep.

    Each volume explores distinct issues of men’s violence against women, slow (but better than appreciated) progress on gender equality, the erosion of respect and empathy in public discourse, and the dangerous normalization of lies and corruption. While not intended as a set per se, they loosely converge on the intersecting issues of misogyny, violence, disrespect and corruption that undermine democracy and trust, and erode the human right to reach our full potential in a life free from violence, governed by those with our best interests at heart. It’s worth reading them together, as I found they spoke to each other in unexpected ways.

    Fitz-Gibbon, pictured above. critiques ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of seemingly endless violence against women while McLeod observes we are ‘paralyzed by the inability of institutions and government to self-regulate’ as we sleepwalk into normalized corruption. Thwaites and Macklin critique the myth of merit from the point of view of women’s representation, while McLeod suggests that corruption frequently overtakes merit in political and other appointments.

    Hennessy, Fitz-Gibbon, and Thwaites and Macklin all speak to way gender inequality undermines respect, potential and safety – recalling Rosie and Luke Batty, Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame, the March for Justice and Gillard’s Misogyny speech – familiar signposts in our recent history. At their core, all four books have a narrative thread related to decency and respect – for women, for each other, for democracy.

    And while all four are steeped in head-shaking despair, they also point to solutions or ways out.

    At 85 pages or less, Bride and I both felt that the books jumped around a bit – but in fairness, if you are going to cover the horrors of humanity in under 100 pages, you need to be nimble. But these books definitely deliver.  While Bridie felt these books fit into a library of information she already has, and so wouldn’t recommend them to those who are already well informed, she would certainly give them to anyone who was unclear or hesitant about the significance of these issues, including men.

    Conversely, as someone who thinks about these issues for a job, I liked the way these books easily consolidated the swirling thoughts and anger I have about these topics.

    And these books show the receipts, presenting excellent references as protection against any attempt to minimize or mansplain away the issues.

    As smaller books, they are less intimidating. As Bridie observed, “Books this serious should be this size because it makes them less threatening. Imagine if that was an A5 or bigger book – it would just stress you out.” And with a foldable front and back jacket to use as a bookmark, you can mark your place and put the books down any time it’s just too much.

    Worthy of discussion, read these with a friend or book club, or buy copies for the doubters in your life. They are an excellent contribution and well worth the read.

    In The National Interest book series

    In the National Interest is a new book series Monash University Publishing list that focuses on the challenges confronting Australia.

    With thanks to Bridie Milthorpe.

    • Amy Haddad gender equality and inclusion expert. She is the Director of Gender Equality, Disability and Social Protection at Tetra Tech International Development Asia Pacific.

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  • Joan’s story: Power triumphing over reason

    The Vetting of Wisdom is the gripping true story revered Principal Joan Montgomery —acclaimed nationwide as the leading girls’ school educator of her day—being assailed by a Presbyterian Church minority hell-bent on her dismissal and returning PLC to ‘bible-centred’ education. For author Kim Rubenstein, PLC alumna, Joan’s fall was her first experience of power triumphing over reason.  In this book, she intricately pieces together the puzzle of what made Montgomery such an inspiring role model and what led her detractors to think otherwise. What follows is an extract, re-printed with permission.

    Wednesday 7 May 1980. It’s a mild late autumn day in Melbourne but in the inner eastern suburb of Burwood a storm is about to break, one that has been gathering for more than a decade.

    It arrives at 1.45 p.m., announced by the heavy stride of Frederick Maxwell Bradshaw down the long corridor from the main entrance of Presbyterian Ladies’ College towards the office of the Principal. Max Bradshaw is a man, in his own conviction, on a mission from God. His critics, whose ranks are about to swell, paint him as a calculating and ruthless zealot.

    Those close to him revere a devout layman with, as one will say, “a steadfast industry in doing good with the skills which God had given him.”

    A few months shy of his 70th birthday, Bradshaw is thick-set, short of breath and has failing eyesight. Yet he still cuts a formidable figure. He is a leading barrister, a legal text-book writer, a historian and soon to be vice chair of the Scotch College Council.

    More than this, he is one of the most powerful men in the Presbyterian Church of Australia, and one of its most driven advocates of doctrinal orthodoxy. Appointed the Church’s Procurator, or chief legal officer, in 1959, he drafted the 1953 Act of Parliament which enabled the union of the three congregations of the Free Presbyterian Church of Victoria.

    That, however, would prove the limit of his appetite for church union. On this day, on a mission to impose his legal and moral will on the future of one of Australia’s most celebrated girls’ schools, Bradshaw is flanked by the younger, taller and fitter figure of the Very Reverend Ted Pearsons.

    At 43, Pearsons is Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, a position he will hold for a record 32 years. He is also in awe of Bradshaw, his mentor. “I was more like a son to him,” Pearsons would say.

    The two men reach the office, a floor above the school tuck shop, at 1.50pm and are promptly ushered in by the secretary. The Principal, Joan Montgomery, has been awaiting this moment for several years. After 11 years as head of PLC, the school she first attended as a student in the 1930s, Joan Mitchell Montgomery enjoys a reputation as one of Australia’s eminent educators.

    She is president of the Association of Heads of Independent Girls’ Schools of Australia and will drive its merger with the equivalent association of independent headmasters. She is an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and will become a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to education. And, most of all, she is loved and revered by generations of students and parents as an exemplary leader and a warm and compassionate woman.

    For the meeting with Bradshaw and Pearsons, Montgomery is joined by her deputies, Evelyn Tindale and Jan Douglas. All three will later file separate notes of the conversation.

    The formalities of arrival complete, Bradshaw begins with what he calls a proposition for Joan Montgomery but what effectively is a notice of her dismissal: “Given your (employment) agreement has five years to run, we suggest you seek independent legal advice on your agreement with the Trusts Corporation of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria.”

    Joan will respond calmly but firmly that her advice is clear: her employment contract transcends the upheaval that has riven the Presbyterian community and stands. But the end of her tenure as PLC Principal and her outstanding career is now only a matter of time.

    Through Kim’s own eyes

    I was 14 on the fateful afternoon of Wednesday 7 May 1980 when Max Bradshaw and the Reverend Ted Pearsons called on Joan Montgomery hoping to induce her early retirement.

    I was sitting as a Year 10 student in a nearby classroom, one of more than a thousand other girls at the school that day. But we had absolutely no idea of the meeting or of any of the machinations of the Camberwell Assembly and their wish to see our revered school head removed.

    Indeed, not only did we miss the opening skirmish in what was to become a five-year battle over control of PLC but, due to Joan Montgomery’s extraordinary composure, the unfolding conflict was kept well away from us. Remarkably, even though I had met with Miss Montgomery on a daily basis as School Captain in 1982, I learned nothing directly of the unfolding school drama that had been set in motion on that day in May 1980.

    My personal history at the school had obscured from me the possibility that PLC’s creed of female empowerment and religious ecumenism could be thwarted by narrow dogma with a sting of patriarchy and even, as I later learnt, a shot of long-remembered personal animus.

    For Max Bradshaw and Joan Montgomery had scrapped in much earlier days and Bradshaw had long nursed the perceived slight of Joan’s spirited independence. My own journey at PLC began in Year 4 as a nine-year-old transferring from Mt Scopus Memorial College, a four-minute drive up Burwood Highway.

    It was my mother, Sue, who sensed the opportunity PLC offered, recognising it as the school for girls. She was an MLC girl. My father, Leigh, went to Melbourne High. Both mixed easily with people from all backgrounds, cultures and religions and they were keen for their daughters, me and my younger sister Elana, to do the same.

    It was part of PLC and Joan Montgomery’s Old Testament welcoming of strangers that no-one batted an eyelid at the Jewish girl from Scopus. The PLC that I attended was a roomy place encouraging of faith and religious diversity.

    Joan Montgomery, left, with Kim Rubenstein as they review historical material for the book.

    Joan Montgomery, left, with Kim Rubenstein as they review historical material for the book.

    Judaism and Presbyterianism have a shared history and not by accident did Joan the student choose an Old Testament prophet as the subject of her prize-winning Bible essay in 1942. The two traditions have the same genesis, were aboard the same ark and afloat on the fundamental cultural raft of education, so highly prized in Jewish and Presbyterian communities.

    PLC’s ecumenical ethos was embodied and shaped by Joan Montgomery. Each year, the Parents’ Association gave every Year-12 girl a Bible on leaving PLC—a valedictory Testament. They were presented at a school assembly before speech night. I noticed, however, that my copy was different, a Sinai Publishing House version, printed in Israel in 1977.

    Yet, importantly, it shared the same bookplate as all the others—the PLC crest ‘Lex Dei Vitae Lampus’ (the law of God is the lamp of life) on the inside cover and underneath the inscribed emblem: “Presented by Senior School Parents’ Association, Combined Women’s Groups.”

    How did this come about? Well, Joan had driven to a Jewish bookstore in Acland St, St Kilda, and bought a Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, rather than give me the Christian version. It was a moving gesture and, during my years practising law, I would lift this Bible to swear affidavits, knowing that it was unique — a burning light that would not go out.

    The Tanach is central to orthodox Jewish practice; the Bible to understanding the Presbyterian Church. The Church’s approach to it distinguishes Presbyterianism from other Christian denominations and this was part of the reason for the Presbyterian schism during the formation of the Uniting Church in Australia.

    As a Jewish student and an elected School Captain, my own position may have been emblematic of what the Continuing Presbyterians thought was wrong with PLC. In their view, it had veered too far from a strict orthodoxy and narrow scriptural reading of the Bible and was overly concerned with producing well-rounded girls ready for university and for taking their place alongside men in the professions and leadership positions ahead.

    There is no doubt that the complex history of Presbyterianism and the beliefs and practices of the Continuing Presbyterians and the Camberwell Assembly were critical to the story of Joan Montgomery and the fight for PLC. Yet broadly the saga is reducible to an alliterative formula—power, patriarchy, property and, perhaps critically, personality. Indeed, force of personality, in particular the personality, character and zealous convictions of Max Bradshaw may be the key, the one factor making the critical difference and without which and whom the story would have ended differently.

    For me, as for so many, Joan Montgomery was an inspiration, and it was unfathomable why anyone would seek to curtail her tenure as PLC’s head. Max Bradshaw saw things differently.

    The Vetting of Wisdom is out now. Buy it here.

    The post Joan’s story: Power triumphing over reason appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Ex-MP Julia Banks describes horrifying culture of misogyny

    An audible murmur of discomfort ripples through the audience at the Australian National University’s Kambri Cultural Centre as former Liberal MP Julia Banks describes being verbally abused and told she was a “pighead,” by a male Liberal staffer inside her own home.

    Her son Sam, who was upstairs studying at the time, was so worried about the tone of the abuse and his mother’s wellbeing, he came running downstairs to check she was alright.

    Speaking at first public event to promote her new book Power Play – a work that delves into the toxic workplace culture in Parliament House and misogyny inside politics – Julia tells host Virgina Haussegger similar verbal abuse occurred on numerous occasions after she won Liberal preselection in the Federal seat of Chisolm. She went on to win the long-held ALP seat in 2016.

    According to Julia, one branch offical told her she’d be a “fucking hopeless MP” because she refused to lie to constituents. Along the similar lines, Virgina pulls out another anecdote from Julia’s book and notes: “One of the young fellows told you to stop acting like a fucking CEO.”

    “Yes,” Julia agrees, reflecting that as someone who came from both the corporate and legal worlds, she made the mistaken assumption that “…the Liberal Party would be a slick corporate machine, and would have some semblance of governance.”

    According to Julia, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most horrifying incidents in her book describes the moment Julia found herself in the Prime Minister’s suite with all the other MPs eating and drinking, waiting for a late-night vote. Before she knew it, a male minister put his hand on her knee and ran it up her thigh.

    “It was astoundingly brazen,” she recalls, “I just froze.”

    After taking a moment to gather herself on that horrific evening, Julia did manage to remove herself from the situation. But she couldn’t sleep that night: “I just thought: ‘Imagine what happens to other staffers or press gallery journalists who don’t have the position of status I have’.”

    Since the publication of her book, some journalists have been pressuring Julia to reveal the identity of this man. “I was never going to name the person,” she says and goes on to explain that if she did go public, the perpetrator would likely deny it and she may well come under legal attack for defamation.

    “I don’t have the stomach to put myself [and] my family through legal proceedings,” she says.

    Then a moment later she reflects: “I’m sure this sort of behavior happens…in Parliament every single sitting day and night. I have no doubt about that.”

    Attracted to the “progressive, centrist views” of Liberal politicians Kelly O’Dwyer, Malcom Turnbull, Julie Bishop, Julia left her successful career in the legal and corporate worlds and initially joined the Liberal Party back in 2015. After all, the party was calling for more women.

    But after her pre-selection in Chisolm, Julia tells the Canberra audience that very quickly, young male apparatchiks swept in and started ordering her around, demanding she stop talking to her constituents about the economy and instead focus on toilet blocks, shopping centres and being the ‘barrel girl’ for local raffles.

    Virginia summarises this to the audience as: “Shut up and smile more [and] be a good girl.”

    In the face of this pressure, Julia claims she “never stopped advocating” for her principles of multiculturalism and gender equality in the face of the constant pressure from within the party to take more hardline political views.

    Despite her passion for quotas, she was asked by those inside the Liberal Party not to publicly mention the “Q-word” because they were “a :abor thing”. In response to her support for marriage equality, she says State Liberal MPs wrote Facebook posts suggesting “these Canberra politicians don’t know what they’re doing.”

    In her book, Julia describes Prime Minister Scoot Morrison as “menacing, controlling wallpaper” – commentary that has attracted a tonne of attention from the public, the press and the ABC’s “Mad as Hell” comedy program hosted by Shaun Micallef.

    By way of explaining what she means, Julia adds that she found the Prime Minister “intense and almost suffocating.”

    She tells the audience Scott Morrison’s office tried to control her resignation from the Liberal Party in 2018. He wanted to control the timing of her departure and see her exit speech – both requests that she refused. He told her: “Julia, you can’t do this. You’ve got to wait two months.”

    When she again refused, he allegedly said to her on the phone: “Julia,  I AM THE PRIME MINISTER.”

    Julia did agree to give Scott Morrison 24 hours to gather himself and write his public statement – something she now realises was a tactical mistake.

    She details how the PM’s office used this time to background against her to the media and spin a public narrative that she couldn’t cope and was emotionally unstable. He repeatedly told the press he was “supporting” Julia and “giving her every comfort and support for what has been a pretty torrid ordeal for her.”

    In reference to this backgrounding, Virginia jokes: “We all know, thanks to the Prime Minister and others, what a sensitive little petal you are. And how fragile you are”

    “And that I can be manipulated by not just [former Prime Minister] Malcolm Turnbull, [but by] the entire Labor Party apparently,” Julia adds.

    Julia Banks’ book Power Play

    Julia Banks’ book Power Play: Breaking Through Bias, Barriers and Boys’ Clubs describes a toxic workplace culture in politics.

    • Julia Banks’ book Power Play: Breaking Through Bias, Barriers and Boys’ Clubs is out now.

    The post Ex-MP Julia Banks describes horrifying culture of misogyny appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Biodesign Challenge’s New Book Highlights The Role Of Biotech In Sustainability

    3 Mins Read Artists, scientists, and Biodesign Challenge alumni come together in a new book in the emerging role of biotech in sustainability.

    The post Biodesign Challenge’s New Book Highlights The Role Of Biotech In Sustainability appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Biodesign Challenge’s New Book Highlights The Role Of Biotech In Sustainability

    3 Mins Read Artists, scientists, and Biodesign Challenge alumni come together in a new book in the emerging role of biotech in sustainability.

    The post Biodesign Challenge’s New Book Highlights The Role Of Biotech In Sustainability appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Hardcover And PDF Release Of “Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers”

    My 2017 part-poetry, part-graphic novel book Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers is now available in hardcover! And it is such a beautiful thing. The softcover is like a dog-eared, back-of-the-jeans pocket book that you take out in a quiet moment on the train. In hardback, it’s more like a full-color bedtime book for adults. So to celebrate, I’m also releasing it as a pay-as-you-feel PDF for the digital, the curious, the skeptical, and the empty of wallet.

    Here are a few reviews from people who bought it:

    From Daniel King:

    Amazing body of work from an absolute genius! You can feel the life Caitlin breathes into her poetry coming off in waves as you read through this book. Great illustrations also – beautifully artistic and add to the world she’s creating in with her words! A real artistic achievement. Let’s hope this works…

    From “Missing-Snowman”:

    Seriously trippy. Caitlin is either extremely woke or rabidly well read. I suspect both. Most won’t get this book but if you’re reading this then don’t hesitate. This is one of the very few belongings I would grab when exiting my house if it were on fire. The artwork is inspired, the poetry is consensus conscious breaking, the end result is nothing short of magic.

    From Stephen:

    I love Caitlins usual writing, and was aware before purchase that this wasn’t her usual fare. It differs very much from the writing on her blog and on Medium, but it’s still very good. It’s a modern poem, to ‘waking up’, being self-aware, and desiring more than we’re getting from the world (not in a material sense obviously). If you’re expecting reams of studied prose, change your expectations. Be open to a different form of writing though, and you’ll love it. It’s definitely a poem for dreamers, and those who believe the world can be better.

    From “The Amazing Morse”, author James Rozoff:

    Somewhere within the bowels of an ivy-covered university building sits a professor engrossed in a book written by a long-dead master of language and thought and emotion, oblivious to the fact that there is one among us now who is every bit as worthy of such attention. Were he to become aware of Caitlin Johnstone, he would likely not appreciate her worth, so alienated from what the words he reads once meant as applied to what once was the here and now. His is the enjoyment of a pubescent boy reading articles in the Penthouse Forum who would flee in fear from a real live female in the flesh. His is the view of one who sits upon a hill to watch as armies battle for supremacy, quite certain of what side he is rooting for but far too comfortable to enter the fray. He would not appreciate this book, though his spiritual ancestors will someday read it from the safety of their libraries and recognize its brilliance.

     

    This, this is the sort of book which led humanity to create printing presses. This is the kind of work which inspires, which illuminates, which transcends. This goes on the top of your bookshelf, sitting next to the elites which you have spent a lifetime searching out. And if you are fortunate to have spent a lifetime being introduced to the works of the great thinkers, great writers, and great souls, you will gaze at that top shelf and figure out which one will have to be bumped in order to fit Woke on that shelf.

     

    Don’t worry, it is quite a small book. No need to demote War And Peace or Les Miserables to a lesser position. But surely there is something you read in your youth, something that once moved you but will appear not quite so worthy after you have read Woke. Or perhaps you need not worry about where to fit it on your shelf: despite its modest size, it is a possession you will want to keep near you, like a beloved pet or a copy of Waldon. It is a constant source of joy even though it is a reminder of the sorrow that exists and the impermanence of all things. Beauty and sorrow are inseparable, but there is more of the former than the latter to be found here.

     

    You will cry often. Or rather, I cried often. I don’t want to project my reaction onto you, though I deeply hope and wish that you share a similar appreciation of this book. I cried tears of sadness, and joy, tears of rage, and amazement. Quite often I cried tears of laughter, though I wasn’t always certain what had caused it. More than anything, I cried the sort of tears you shed when staring at something too brilliant to behold for more than brief moments (But the blurring of my eyes allowed me time to reflect upon the revelations and savor their sweetness, so that worked out fine).

     

    This is a book that looks unflinchingly at who we are as a species, the good and the bad, the hopes and the fears. Caitlin recognizes, more clearly than anyone else seems to recognize, the situation as it now stands, and appeals to our better angels to rise above the miasma in which we find ourselves.

     

    Woke speaks to the entirety of a human being, speaks to the child within us as well as the more mature aspects of who we are. Perhaps if you have not allowed yourself to continue to learn and grow as you’ve aged, this might not appeal to you. Or perhaps those who have completely lost that wonder we are capable of as children might not appreciate the affinity for awe and miracles this book contains, despite the fact Caitlin sees the darkness and danger quite clearly. Woke is the work of a human being in touch with the myriad aspects of what it means to be human. It is sophisticated, mature, playful, profound.

     

    I imagine a great round table in Heaven where the writers and thinkers of the ages gather round to discuss all the issues that absorbed them while on Earth. Jack London calls out for another drink and Oscar Wilde seconds the notion, wondering when that brew bottled by Socrates millennia ago and still sitting on the shelf is going to finally be opened. Chuang Tzu sits quietly, while Victor Hugo, newly arrived from purgatory, is sufficiently chastised so that he feels it is not his place to say anything. But Plato reminds him that it is reserved for the time that Caitlin arrives to join the discussion. Oscar’s eyes lose their familiar glint of irreverence and expose the soul behind the wit for a moment. Indeed, there is a bit of a hush about the table as they realize what is at stake for the humanity for which so many of them have struggled and sacrificed for. Although they long for the day when Caitlin can claim her seat among them, they realize the import of her work in this crucial moment of human history. And then Erasmus cracks open a copy of Woke and begins to read to the others. It is part of a far larger book written by countless authors who felt the need to observe and chronicle the human story. And everyone at the table knows they can turn to the last page at any time they want to see how the story ends. But they are storytellers, and they appreciate the beauty of a story well-told. They appreciate such notions as pacing and story arc, and they are acutely aware that they have arrived at a crucial part of the story.

     

    They are the woke, and they are eagerly anticipating that the rest of humanity finally joins them in this chapter.

    You can get this book in paperback or hardcover by clicking here, and you can get the PDF by clicking here.

    _________________________

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Excerpt From My New Book, Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    I’m so stoked to get people reading my new book that I’m sharing part of “Chapter Two: Power and Narrative Control” for free. Enjoy!

    ~ CJ

    •

    In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the affairs of men are dominated by a cabal of wizards who understand the esoteric art of using language to manipulate reality in a way that advantages powerful rulers — Oh wait sorry that’s regular earth I was thinking of. That’s what happens here.

    •

    Some conspiracy-type people say the world is messed up because we’re ruled by illuminati or reptilians, but I’m way more out there than that: I say our entire society is made of imaginary thought stories with little relation to objective reality, and some clever manipulators have figured out how to exploit this.

    •

    The real underlying currency of our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it. Everything always comes down to this one real currency. If you look at what all these think tanks, NGOs, media outlets and grant making networks that billionaires pour their money into actually do, it ultimately boils down to controlling the dominant stories that people tell about what’s going on in their world.

    •

    Real change won’t come until people rise up. People won’t rise up as long as they’re successfully propagandized. People will remain successfully propagandized until they evolve minds which can’t be manipulated. Our world will change when our relationship with narrative changes.

    •

    Most of humanity’s problems boil down to an unhealthy relationship with narrative. Individually our suffering ensues from believed mental narratives about self, other and world, and collectively our destructive behaviors are driven by the propaganda narratives of the powerful.

    Most people’s lives are dominated by mental story, so whoever can control those stories controls the people. The good news is that all we need to do to reclaim our world from the controllers is to reclaim our stories. The barrier between us and freedom is as thin as a fairy tale.

    •

    The world is messed up because powerful people think in terms of narrative control, and ordinary people don’t. Change that and you change the world.

    •

    The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human condition are (1) consciousness itself, (2) the way compulsive thought patterns shape our experience and our lives, and (3) the effects of mass media propaganda. In that order.

    •

    The primary reason people are so vulnerable to propaganda is that hardly anyone clearly sees just how much human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. There’s a night and day difference between reality and the stories minds tell about reality. Manipulators exploit this.

    Most people assume that the mental stories in their heads are an accurate reflection of what’s happening outside their skull, and that simply isn’t the case. Manipulators know they can just feed people stories—narratives—about what’s happening and they’ll accept those narratives as reality.

    Manipulators know they can trade a bunch of convincing words in exchange for all sorts of real valuables: money, sex, deals, loyalty, votes, political power. Humanity’s deluded relationship with narrative means you can get real, concrete treasures in exchange for pure illusion.

    Most of the things which consume your attention are pure narrative constructs: religion, philosophy, culture, politics, the economy, even what you take to be your very self. But few ever take the time to sift these narratives apart from reality, so we’re hackable by manipulators.

    The difference between what’s happening and what the babbling mind says is happening could not possibly be more different. Until our species evolves a new relationship with mental narrative which allows a real relationship with the real world, we’ll keep moving toward extinction.

    •

    For as long as there has been language and power there have been narratives circulating to advantage the powerful. Much of our so-called “culture” is just ancient power-serving protopropaganda deliberately interwoven into our ancestors’ worldviews.

    •

    If people truly understood the extent to which mental narrative dominates their experience of life, propaganda, advertising and all other forms of psychological manipulation would be regarded by our society similarly to physical assault or property theft.

    •

    Propaganda is the root of all our problems; people consent to inequality and injustice because they’re manipulated into doing so. And propaganda is only effective because we’ve got an idiotic societal taboo against acknowledging that we can be fooled. That our minds are hackable.

    Manipulation only works when you don’t know it’s happening. Those who think they’re too clever to be manipulated (which would be the majority of people) are the most vulnerable to manipulation. If we just made manipulation more shameful than being manipulated, this could change.

    You cannot form an accurate worldview without accounting for the fact that powerful people have invested a great deal in manipulating that worldview, and that to some extent they have probably succeeded. Because being manipulated is considered shameful, most don’t look at this.

    I have been manipulated and fooled. So have you. It happens to all of us. There’s no shame in it. The shame belongs solely to those doing the manipulating and deceiving. Fraud is a crime for a reason, and the one they charge for that crime is not the victim, it’s the perpetrator.

    Conmen will always try to convince you that it’s your fault you were conned. If they can do that, they get away with the con. This is true of all manipulators, and it’s why you should never blame the gullible. Being gullible isn’t a crime, being a conman is.

    •

    Nobody who is being successfully manipulated is free, and our world is dominated by mass-scale manipulation. It doesn’t matter how many “rights” you have on paper, if you’ve been manipulated into supporting or consenting to the agendas of power you might as well be in a cage.

    As long as the powerful are propagandizing the people, the people aren’t truly operating with free will. Anyone who’s escaped a relationship with a manipulative abuser understands that you’re not really operating with much free agency while you’re being psychologically dominated.

    •

    Manipulation is a necessary component in long-term abusive relationships, because people don’t tend to stay in abusive situations unless they’re manipulated into it. This is true whether you’re talking about significant others or globe-spanning power structures.

    •

    People have been manipulating each other since the invention of language and manipulating each other at mass scale since the invention of government. All that’s changed is the mass scale has gotten much larger and the manipulation much more sophisticated.

    •

    The world would be so much better if everyone just watched people’s actions and ignored their stories about their actions. It would radically change politics, it would prevent abusive relationships, it would stifle manipulators, and it would transform human civilization.

    •

    If you ever feel unimportant, remember that rich and powerful people are constantly pouring effort and wealth into trying to manipulate the thoughts in your head.

    •

    Hi I’m Sleazy McPundit with WMD News. To explain why more internet censorship is needed to fight disinformation, here’s a panel of millionaires who are paid to lie to you.

    •

    The mainstream worldview isn’t mainstream because it is more fact-based, logical, or makes better arguments than other potential worldviews, it’s mainstream because vast fortunes are poured into keeping it mainstream.

    •

    Mainstream news is just advertising. You watch advertisements for maintaining the plutocratic status quo, then you watch advertisements between those advertisements for useless crap to make plutocrats even richer. It’s all just different layers of marketing. When I was getting my journalism degree they used to talk about journos selling their souls and going into marketing, going into PR. It’s like, bitch, you’re already doing that.

    •

    Without extensive marketing it would never occur to you that Mountain Dew is something you should put inside your body or that endless war is something you should accept as normal.

    •

    War is the worst thing in the world. By far. If the rank-andfile public could see past the veil of propaganda and distortion and objectively see war for the horrific thing that it is, ending it would immediately become everyone’s foremost priority. Hence all the war propaganda.

    •

    It’s such a trip how opposition to mass-scale murder and oppression is the single most self-evidently correct position anyone could possibly take, yet so few take that position in a clear and unequivocal way. The reason is of course generations of propaganda brainwashing.

    Nobody comes out of the womb demanding to go to war. Left unmolested it would never occur to a normal human brain that strangers on the other side of the planet need to have explosives dropped on them by overpriced aircraft. The problem isn’t people democratically voting for warmongers and consenting to military mass murder of their own free will, the problem is propaganda.

    •

    People only ever think you’re wrong to reject mainstream politics and media because they have no idea how fucked things really are.

    •

    It only takes a rudimentary understanding of human psychology to manipulate someone. Edward Bernays was recruited by the US government to study the science of modern propaganda in 1917. This science has been in research and development for over a century. Don’t underestimate its power.

    •

    Propaganda is so advanced that rank-and-file members of the public will openly cheerlead their government’s imprisonment of Assange so that their government can continue to lie to them.

    •

    The dawn of political insight is when you realize propaganda isn’t just something that is done by other countries and other political parties.

    •

    To be a real journalist you must ask inconvenient questions, shine light in inconvenient directions, refuse to parrot establishment narratives, and be indifferent to the approval of the powerful. To be a rich and famous journalist, you must do the exact opposite of these things.

    •

    Step 1: Be the billionaire class.

    Step 2: Buy up all news media.

    Step 3: Structure outlets to elevate voices who defend the status quo.

    Step 4: Smear non-plutocratic media who don’t protect the status quo as crazy conspiracy theorists and Russian propaganda.

    Step 5: Dominate the narrative about what’s going on in the world.

    •

    If you’re liking what you’re reading, you can buy Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by clicking here or here, or you can buy a cheap PDF by clicking here.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • New Book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    I’ve got a new book out, which you can order by clicking here or here, or download a cheap PDF by clicking here.

    It’s called Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, and like the ongoing series of essays I’ve been putting out of the same name it’s mostly comprised of short, pithy quotes about what’s wrong with our world and what we can do to fix it.

    This book is my best attempt at articulating what I see as our dilemma as a species and what we can do to address it, both outwardly in the world and within ourselves. It sums up the perspective upon which all my work is based, and can serve as a kind of primer for all the rest of my writings.

    Here’s the description I put on the back of the book:

    We each inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world, and the narrative world.

    The real physical world of matter, of atoms and molecules and stars and planets and animals wandering around trying to bite and copulate with each other often has very little to do with the narrative world, which is made of stories and mental chatter.

    Powerful people have long understood that if you control the stories people tell about themselves, then you can control their resources and their reality. From priests to politicians, CEOs to the architects of war, all have deeply understood the importance of maintaining control of the narrative.

    We have reached a crisis point where the disconnect between narrative and reality is threatening all life on earth. The narrative world is getting more and more chimerical while the real world is headed toward disaster due to the military and ecological pressures created by our status quo. There are only a few ways this can possibly break, with the most obvious being mass scale ecological disaster or nuclear war.

    There is also the possibility that the human species goes the other way and adapts, and wakes up to the way narrative has been used to manipulate us into consenting to our own extinction. Throughout recorded history, all around the globe, wise humans have been attesting that it is possible to transcend our delusion-rooted conditioning and come to a lucid perception of the narrative world and reality. There are many names for this lucid perception, but the one that caught on most widely is enlightenment.

    We all have this potential within us. It has been gestating in us for many millennia. As we approach our adaptation-or-extinction juncture, we are very close indeed to learning if that potential will awaken in us or not.

    This book rests on the meniscus of that possibility.

    Again, if you’re interested you can order Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix here or here, or you can download a cheap PDF for five bucks by clicking here.

    Enjoy!

    _____________________________

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A new book is aiming to show how we can have ‘life-changing’ conversations about race

    Confer Books publishes material that’s “designed to deepen our understanding of psychological, relational and emotional processes”. And on 4 March, it released a new title named, The Race Conversation: An essential guide to creating life-changing dialogue.

    This fascinating read dives into a world of new vocabulary coined to initiate conversations around race. And it seeks to discuss “the race construct” which keeps “the discomfort of race oppression out of white people’s minds and bodies”.

    Author Eugene Ellis is the director and founder of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network (BAATN). It’s the UK’s largest independent organisation of its kind. Trained as a psychotherapist, Ellis focuses on “body-orientated therapies” such as body awareness, mindfulness, and healing. Narratives in the book explore “race and mental wellbeing” through an alternative non-verbal lens which doesn’t always involve speaking.

    Credit: Confer Books

    Ellis told The Canary:

    Since George Floyd’s killing, people with mixed families have been pressured to have [race] conversations they might not necessarily have had as a family before. A lot of people feel an ethical pull towards dismantling racism in their workplaces or institutions.

    Just last week, the reaction to Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle showed how rife racism is in Britain.

    “Being colour conscious”

    Opening the discussion with everyday racism, Ellis shows how today’s political and social climate has forced race conversations to the forefront. Whether we like it not, topics of race have become unavoidable as the media has suddenly taken an interest in pursuing race-related coverage.

    Ellis wrote:

    Talking about race had always been hard work, but, after George Floyd’s killing, it had somehow become hard work not to.

    Black Lives Matter protests took place across the world in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. Millions gathered to protest for justice, with 15-26 million people in the US alone according to the New York Times.

    On 13 March, CNN reported that Floyd’s family accepted $27m after Minneapolis city council voted to settle the lawsuit.

    The report also said:

    Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to second-degree unintentional murder and second-degree manslaughter charges. He has also pleaded not guilty to third-degree murder, which was reinstated in the case on Thursday.

    For many People of Colour (POC), the global shift to support anti-racism has been a confusing time of feeling both liberated and overwhelmed. Ellis wrote:

    I went through a phase of dislocation and mourning, even paranoia as these narratives played out on the world stage

    Credit: Confer Books
    Mindfulness

    Examining the impacts of racism, the book talks about how trauma can occur “on a mental and physical level due to just existing in a racialised society”.

    Mindfulness is a technique that involves a “body-mind” connection. Ellis said it can be used as a way to “almost retune your body” to lessen the fear that arises when speaking in race conversations.

    And in this race conversation, he wants to include everyone’s experiences. He wrote:

    I also experienced first-hand that, even though white people embody conscious and unconscious race privileges, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are free from pain and suffering.

    White guilt and suffering from racism are often shunned, but Ellis said:

    That’s a taboo area you can’t talk about but why? I genuinely believe that suffering is across the board. You can’t talk about it because the race construct says you can’t. For it [the race conversation] to move [forward] that aspect needs to come in.

    Another concept deployed in the book is how “the race construct” influences individuals to “attend to white people’s hurt and pain before the hurt and pain in people of colour”.

    “It was whiteness on display”

    It’s natural that frustration weaves its way into these conversations. In comparing ‘black rage’ and ‘white rage’, Ellis wrote:

    White rage steps forward when people of colour step forward to take control of their lives and their financial circumstances. It is predictable, brutal and unforgiving.

    People of colour understand that if they put their foot on the accelerator of their lives, they can only get so far before they run the risk of losing their reputation, their possessions or even their lives.

    The recent increase in news outlets covering topics of race has put a spotlight on racism in the US. This has also sparked people in Britain to dig deeper into racism here.

    Ellis said:

    The storming of the Capitol and the US elections… I was absolutely gripped by the whole thing. It was whiteness on display. It’s easy for us in the UK to say, ‘oh it’s not like that over here’. In the US racism is brash, big, bold and the UK is a little more subdued. There’s more of a conscious effort in the UK to keep it hidden.

    Some institutions have put in place initiatives at certain times to speak about race. In the book, Ellis refers to the “dreaded race day”. He said:

    For race or any oppression there should be conversations around that all the time. It shouldn’t be for one day; you need to reflect about it and that’s not enough time.

    Mental health services have a responsibility to engage in race conversations

    Mental health services that work with Black, Asian, Ethnic Minority and POC also have a responsibility to actively engage in race conversations.

    An article written for the Guardian addresses the problem that Black and Ethnic Minority communities “are more likely to develop mental health conditions but less likely to access counselling – or find it fit for purpose”.

    Ellis wrote about his thoughts on the problem which is “the internal discomfort of mental health professionals, and their profound feelings of not feeling safe during the race conversation”.

    In the book he mentions that POC who then seek mental health services notice this discomfort. He said:

    For a lot of people of colour, a big part of their mental health experiences are not necessarily [impacted by] their families but in society by political structures and systems of oppression. This needs to be included as a part of psychotherapy, training and counselling.

    Then if their client wants to talk about race, they will feel that the therapist is available for it and most of the time, that’s not how it feels.

    PAUSE … and breathe

    If creative language, thought-provoking theories, and an honest breakdown of how we can all participate in race conversations is what you’re after, then this is the read for you. Its forward-thinking narrative aims to normalise conversations about race, highlights the significance of historical oppression, and proposes different solutions to healing from race-related trauma.

    “PAUSE … and breathe” is noted throughout the chapters and is a respectful reminder to all that taking a break from race conversations is ok; in fact it’s healthy.

    Confer UK and Ellis are holding a live webinar specifically for psychotherapists to talk about “racial divides in our society” on 20 March, and they’ll be running another event in June as a part of their Summer Programme 2021.

    You can find other publications from this author here.

    Featured image Confer Books / Thomas Allsop via Unsplash

    By Aaliyah Harris

    This post was originally published on The Canary.