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Category: Misogyny

  • Stretchy but rigid: the neoliberal complexities of yoga pants

    Raise a hand – or better yet, a leg – if you own a pair of yoga pants. Marketed largely to women in Western countries, these items began to appear after yoga became a globalized mainstream practice in the 1990s. Yoga pants are so successful because they are deeply invested in the utopian promise – and perhaps the neoliberal trap – of middle-class feminine flexibility.

    Yoga pants are socially versatile in many Western countries. We see them at the shops, the school pickup line, and the office in addition to the yoga studio. They accompany women throughout the day, moving from domestic work to paid labour to fitness, beauty and wellbeing pursuits. Yoga pants discipline curves and bulges into sleek and intentional shapes. They mix selective ideals of beauty with the moral high ground of the person who keeps fit. Such social flexibility is key to their appeal.

    But yoga pants’ ability to stretch in many directions speaks to the diverse demands placed on those wearers’ bodies and lives. Desk jobs raise health risks that prompt the need for a “third shift” of fitness work in people’s discretionary time. Schools end before many workdays do, leaving parents to figure out how to address that gap. Social media perpetuates myths of ageless beauty that can inspire anxiety about the value of one’s own looks in competitive markets.

    As a response to these multiplying challenges, the flexibility of the yoga pant ironically attests to rigid social structures that are beyond the control of individuals.

    How might we perceive and question such rigidities, even as we enjoy the most comfortable clothes many of us have ever owned? In a workshop at the Australian National University, participants and I cut up four pairs of yoga pants. Deconstructing the pants and looking at them through a magnifying glass, we reflected on the contradictory forces of globalised neoliberal life to which yoga pants so powerfully respond. Getting so literal with fabrics, textures, and threads allowed us to explore their hidden metaphors.

    As we sliced scissors down seams, we reflected on the history of the word “flexible” in English. For many years, “flexibility” was considered mainly a property of physical materials. Only later did it offer a way of thinking about the capacity of the human body. In the late nineteenth century, advertisements in colonial India promised readers the hope of becoming more flexible – by taking a pill. Military training helped to popularize the idea of bodily stretches instead.

    A photo of a remade yoga pant from the workshop. Picture: Supplied

    A photo of a remade yoga pant from the workshop. Picture: Supplied

    By the early twentieth century, as yoga scholars have shown, flexibility became seen as an ideal physical goal suitable for women. Unlike muscular strength, flexibility could be compatible with feminine norms of grace and beauty without upsetting gender hierarchies. Yoga pants inherit this history as they weave together flexibility with femininity.

    Such gendered norms surrounding the yoga pant also affect pressures on men. Participants in the workshop reflected that comfortable, stretchy, close-fitting tights marked to men are usually presented in relation to endurance sports, such as cycling, and sold as high-performance gear. Men are only supposed to wear these clothes “while they are actually working out,” one participant noted.

    This difference in the gendering of social norms suggests that men may be protected from some of the strains of needing to be endlessly flexible to the demands of the world around them. But this marketing difference also hints at how men may be pressured to maintain the illusion of boundaries across their own complex social roles.

    Shameem writes that yoga pants have become a way to underscore gender hierarchies and impose on women the idea that they should be flexible (as oppose to muscular). As you can see with this image, this notion is reinforced if you search for "yoga pants" in a stock photo library! Picture: Shutterstock

    Shameem writes that yoga pants have become a way to underscore gender hierarchies and impose on women the idea that they should be flexible (as oppose to muscular). As you can see with this image, this notion is reinforced if you search for “yoga pants” in a stock photo library! Picture: Shutterstock

    Looking at textile fibers up close, we reflected on the unending social expectations that pile up on yoga pants, and by implication, on those of us who wear them.

    “It’s not enough anymore for the pants just to be stretchy,” one participant said. “They have to do more, like wick moisture.” “There are yoga pants that suppress farts,” another participant noted.

    Unlike rigid fabrics, where changes in the wearer’s body become obvious (your pants feel too tight), yoga pants conceal the transformations of time. Similarly, many of us who wear such pants may feel that each year brings heightened expectations for us to “do more,” whether in our work lives, our social communities, our political actions, our family roles, or our personal care. It’s no wonder that we look for a piece of clothing to relieve some of that burden.

    As highly engineered textiles, yoga pants of the current moment appear designed to foster the illusion of a human body that never sweats, passes gas, or changes shape. This superhuman body reflects the fantasy of neoliberal self-perfection: the individual who can endlessly meet the challenges created by capitalist structures of work, racialized forms of inequality, and gendered divisions of labor.

    As we cut yoga pants into squares, triangles, tubes, and ribbons, we speculated on how we might transform the yoga pant and its meanings. One participant upcycled a pant leg into a gorgeous glove; another made a mask. Others experimented with texture and tone by weaving wall hangings with twine and string.

    Participants speculated on how the yoga pant could be reimagined to serve the needs of more diverse communities, such as transgendered wearers.

    They explored how the pant could become a place of artistic play, removed from the need to constantly produce an idealized norm. The yoga pant became a blank canvas for colourful drawing, a tapestry embroidered with bright thread, and a place of new, surprising, social connection.

    These experiments remind us that the practice of yoga, a diverse constellation of mental and physical practices tracing important roots to South Asia, has long been a practice of inquiry. In many parts of its history, yoga has been used to develop a closer understanding of the invisible structures that shape observable reality. Today, postural yoga often invites practitioners to expand their powers of observation by noticing physical or mental sensations they take for granted. Perhaps practicing yoga, no matter what we wear, can also help us notice and critique the pressures of the rigid social structures that lead us to buy those pants.

    • Please note: The picture at top is a stock photo from Shutterstock.

    The post Stretchy but rigid: the neoliberal complexities of yoga pants appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Banishing imposter syndrome: ‘I’m the real deal’

    Former Channel 4 Editor at Large Dorothy Byrne says lazy generalisations can make women feel disempowered and undermine their ambitions. She gave this speech at the recent national Women in Media conference on the Gold Coast. It’s published here with full permission. Read the original here. 

    I’m thrilled to be here among you at the conference of an organisation I admire very much for the support it gives women in the media. Organisations like yours are vital for women. I come here to bring you my personal perspective on what I feel are the key issues for women in journalism today. I’ve been a journalist for 46 years and I’m convinced these are great times to be a woman journalist.

    When I started out on a local paper, the number of women going to work in newspapers in the UK was slightly greater than the number of men.But, over the years women fell by the wayside until women were in the minority, to a significant degree, for a variety of reasons. In my early days, all the most important jobs were held by men.

    ‘I had no role models’

    Indeed, on my first paper the sexism was so bad that only men were allowed to cover major crimes. As a woman, if there was a murder, I was permitted only to interview the relatives of the victims while the male journalists got to investigate the murder itself. That lack of opportunity hampered the career development of women but the fact that the key roles on the paper were all held by men also restricted our ambition.

    I ended up as the Head of News and Current Affairs at one of the UK’s main public service broadcasters. That young woman of 24 on the Walthamstow Guardian in East London would never have dreamt such a thing could be possible. I had no role models. But today in the UK things are very different.

    Women starting out today can aim for the top

    The new head of news and current affairs at Channel Four Television, who replaced me, is a woman. The editor of Channel Four News is a woman and the editor of Channel Four’s main investigative current affairs programme is a woman. The chief executive of Independent Television News which makes news for both ITV and Channel Five is a woman as was her predecessor.

    And finally, the Head of BBC News is a woman as was her predecessor. So a young woman starting out in journalism today knows she can aim for the very top and get there.

    That is a big change but of course, there are huge barriers for women.

    Motherhood and the menopause

    Still too many women are dropping out of journalism at different stages in their careers.

    One of the key reasons is that work in many newsrooms and programmes is incompatible with motherhood but today I will also highlight an issue now at the forefront of debate among women journalists in the UK; the menopause.

    If you take away only one thing from my talk today, please take away the need for women journalists to lead the discussion in Australia about the menopause. As women journalists, we did that in the UK and it was so transformational that this year Britain ran out of one of the most popular forms of HRT.

    But first things first; the dire state of maternity rights and childcare in the UK. Of course, poor maternity rights have always been a major barrier for women but there is a specific issue making it worse for female journalists at the present time.

    A ‘physically overwhelming’ longing

    In the UK good maternity rights are tied to staff jobs but more and more jobs in journalism are freelance so fewer and fewer women journalists get proper maternity pay.

    I myself was freelance when I had a baby as a single parent. As such, I was entitled only to basic state maternity pay which was not nearly enough to pay even a percentage of my mortgage. So I had to go back to work when my child was less than six weeks old.

    It was terrible.

    My longing for my baby would be so physically overwhelming at times that I had to ring her nanny and tell her to bring my daughter to the office as a matter of urgency just so I could hold her.

    Too many women face a tough choice

    But note, I delayed having a baby until I could afford a live-in nanny. I was lucky to get pregnant at 45, once my career was established.

    Too many young women today feel they have to choose between building their careers or having a baby in their late 20s and early 30s when their statistical chance of getting pregnant is higher than when they are in their late 30s or early 40s.

    This issue is not talked about nearly enough because young women fear that if they talk about their desire to have a baby, it will affect their promotional opportunities.

    Dorothy Byrne has been a journalist for 46 years. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Dorothy Byrne has been a journalist for 46 years. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    A number of young women journalists have told me that they really want to have a baby soon but feel they just can’t afford it both financially and in terms of their career opportunities. They have asked me not to tell anyone about the conversation I have had with them because they fear it would prejudice their chances of promotion.

    That is scandalous and deeply depressing.

    Paying ‘lip service’ to flexible working

    I think older women should encourage open discussion of issues around fertility, pregnancy, and childcare in newsrooms to signal to young women that in a good organisation their right to have a child will not damage their career. Similarly, we need as women to insist major employers have proper policies on returning to work.

    Women in the UK are campaigning for proper statutory maternity and paternity pay for all women, not linked to a staff job, as a right. Until we have that, there will be no equality in the workplace.

    And all employers need to examine their working practises and investigate whether their current shift patterns are really necessary.

    Too often employers pay lip service to the notion of flexible working but don’t ask themselves basic questions such as, ‘Does everyone on the early shift really have to turn up at the same time? Could we stagger our shift systems better?’

    My first day in television

    Big policies are great, small practical changes are better. Female journalists also continue to suffer harassment and assault at work both from bosses and colleagues AND from men they are interviewing.

    But here there is some improvement. When I started out on local papers, women spoke openly in the office about being sexually harassed by police officers.

    I am not aware of a single instance in which an editor complained to the police.

    On my first day in television, my female boss told me that a director would take me out to show me the basics of filmmaking – and that he would sexually assault me. But I was not to take it personally because he sexually assaulted all the women he worked with. Sure enough, he assaulted me but who could I complain to as I had been told by my manager to expect this?

    I don’t believe that would happen now at a major employer, although I think young women especially are still vulnerable because so many people now work in very small companies where there is much less protection. Employers should not send women to interview men with a reputation for assaulting women.

    Some men with known reputations for sexual assault and harassment are being interviewed purely to publicise their films, books or other enterprises. Media outlets should refuse to send anyone to interview men who are known to prey on female journalists.

    Now bigger employers have sexual harassment policies and women journalists, some well-known, have started to talk publicly about having been assaulted.

    But journalism in the UK awaits its #MeToo moment. There are leading men known to have harassed and assaulted women who still have high journalistic reputations.

    ‘You probably don’t remember me Dorothy’

    If just a few of those top names were exposed, it would make a big difference. It would make men think twice. I myself, when a program producer, was assaulted in my own home by a man who ran a production company we were doing business with.

    Later, when I had risen to become a senior program commissioner at Channel Four, he had the gall to turn up at a session I held for production companies. At the end of my presentation, he stood to ask a question and, with a leer on his face, said, ‘You probably don’t remember me Dorothy.’

    I said, ‘On the contrary, how could I forget a man who sexually assaulted me in my own home.’ The whole room glared at him and he sat down and shut up.

    We need to warn such men. Tonight, you may see a woman as your victim, but she could be your boss tomorrow.

    It’s not for me to tell Australian broadcasters what to do but I can talk about my own country.

    In the UK broadcasters lay down a range of requirements for production companies supplying programs to them and I think they should include a clause stating that any production company proven to have tolerated or covered up sexual harassment would automatically be in potential breach of contract.

    But those are the negatives.

    My fear for women journalists now is also that we are not being sufficiently positive and that we may therefore inadvertently put off young women from entering journalism by failing to emphasise what a brilliant and exciting career it can be. We now expose the sexism women in the media face. That didn’t happen before.

    The wrongs done to us were accepted or relayed to each other in the evenings. They were not spoken out loud in the corridors of power by newsroom leaders. Now they are.

    But we also need to be careful to talk about what’s great about being a woman in the media. I am now the President of Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University.

    It’s a women’s college and quite a number of students are interested in a media career. I encourage them. One of my first points is that I am still a working journalist at the age of 70.

    In the past year, I have been executive producer on an international series about the sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, a major documentary on the Russian dissident Navalny and an expose of sex abuse in the Falkland Islands. I am currently working on a major series on Kevin Spacey.

    ‘I don’t think I will ever retire‘

    Almost all my friends in other professions retired several years ago. Some went into highly lucrative jobs in the City of London after university. They retired as soon as they possibly could. Most doctors and teachers I know retired early, in their mid-50s. In contrast, I don’t think I will ever retire as a journalist. Why would I?

    To be a journalist is to have the opportunity to explore the great experiences life has to offer and to expose the bad ones.

    Conference delegates applaud Dorthy Byrne. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Conference delegates applaud Dorthy Byrne. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Better rights for women

    To be a woman journalist is to have a wonderful opportunity to change lives for all women in society. In my career, some women have told me they don’t want to be pigeon-holed into being defined as someone who does so-called women’s stories.

    They want to be thought of as a journalist, not as a woman journalist. In fact, they shied away from doing so-called women’s stories. I get their point.

    I too don’t want to do just women’s stories. But I definitely want to use my role as a journalist to campaign for better rights for women.

    Telling women’s stories

    The first film I produced and directed was about rape in marriage, then not a crime in the UK. Husbands could be charged only with causing injury during the rape. That film was part of a successful campaign, which changed the law.

    Over the years a significant part of my work has been about women and girls -rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, the denial of education, poor maternity care, and the mental health crisis among girls.

    That sounds like a grim list but it’s been thrilling to see how issues I have raised have been taken up in public and political debate; to have been part of making life better for women.

    This has been work which has brought me great fulfilment in my life. I’ve been proud to be thought of as a woman journalist.

    I would ask women who worry about being pigeon-holed if we don’t raise women’s issues, do you think men will do so? If we as women don’t tell women’s stories, those stories won’t be told at all.

    We should be sure we tell young women thinking about a career in the media that being a woman journalist is a magnificent thing. I also think that we need to be careful in our language not to put ourselves down as women.

    There are enough men who want to put us down; we don’t need to do it ourselves. Over the years, I have often been asked if I suffer from so-called imposter syndrome and even more often I’ve heard women say, ‘We all, as women suffer from imposter syndrome’.

    I say to them, speak for yourselves. If you have imposter syndrome, that’s fine. I respect your perspective on life.

    But I certainly DON’T have imposter syndrome. I’ve been a journalist for 46 years, for God’s Sake. Why would I have imposter syndrome? I’m the real deal.

    I feel the same objection when I hear people say, ‘Women lack confidence. Women are always putting themselves down.

    ‘Women aren’t pushy.’

    Do I seem to you like a woman who lacks confidence or puts herself down?

    I don’t seek to be pushy. But if you push me, I’ll push back.

    Lazy generalisations

    What people really mean is that women are statistically less likely to, for example, apply for jobs when they don’t have all the qualifications, speak up in meetings, ask for a pay rise.

    We should talk about those statistics and about how we can encourage women. But we shouldn’t confuse learned behaviour with the false notion that women are inherently so different to men. We are different to men but a lot of those differences are instilled in us by a sexist society.

    Lazy generalisations in sentences that begin with the words, ‘Women are… ‘ can end up making young women feel disempowered and undermine their ambitions.

    In my experience in journalism, women have taken longer to get to the top jobs than have men.

    Women need to support each other

    We have had to work harder to get to the same place as a man. I’ve told my own daughter that my single greatest piece of advice to her is, ‘Don’t work as hard as I have.’ We want talented young women to have the same fast track to the top that their male counterparts have benefited from.

    To do that we have to imbue them with a sense of self confidence, not emphasise their lack of confidence. Organisations like your own are vital. Women need to band together to support each other and campaign for equality.

    ‘These people are wrong’

    There is a view that women’s organisations are no longer needed. I lead a women’s college at Cambridge University now, as well as being a working journalist.

    As far as I am aware in the UK, there are only two all-female higher education institutions left; Murray Edwards College which I lead and another at Cambridge. People say to be that the idea of a women’s institution is outdated.

    But when they tell me that I always say, ‘Wow! Equality for women has been achieved and I missed it! I must have been locked in the toilet or out shopping or having my legs waxed. Who knew?’ Of course, these people are wrong.

    Same degree, different outcomes

    While the percentage of women entering higher education in the UK is now equal to the percentage of men and slightly greater in some years the percentage of women going on to further degrees is lower than the percentage of men.

    Statistically, women with the same degrees as men are likely to have less good jobs.

    It reminds me so much of my time starting out in journalism – equal numbers of women at the start – and the gradual attrition.

    As a women’s institution, we can campaign publicly about these issues, and highlight some of the reasons for this inequality. And that’s what a great organisation like yours does.

    We need to hold onto women’s organisations and encourage more. Thinking back, I would have benefited greatly if there had been an organisation for young women journalists when I started out.

    In defence of ‘women’s pages’

    I also think that all the newspapers which got rid of women’s pages should think again. Women still suffer from some specific hardships and prejudices.

    I am not confident that these issues are dealt with in general pages as well as they would be in a weekly women’s page.

    Dorothy Byrne sees value in women’s pages. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Dorothy Byrne sees value in women’s pages. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    I used to turn first to the women’s pages in newspapers because I knew there would almost certainly be something there relevant to my life. In the UK, the Femail pages in the Daily Mail are really popular. Women’s Hour on the BBC is also hugely popular.

    And it never feels that it is excluding men; it raises issues that are of interest and concern to anyone interested in women and girls.

    Sexist remarks about older women at work

    When women journalists use their experience of being women, they can transform society. And I want to give you a brilliant and concrete example of this.

    Until a few years ago, the menopause was not recognised as being a major issue affecting women’s lives and careers in the UK. Women going through the menopause and suffering significantly didn’t dare talk about their problems at work for fear of prejudice.

    Some men made horrible sexist remarks about older women at work, generally in my experience because those women were better than they were. If an older woman criticised a man, he would scoff to his friends, ‘It’s her hormones!’

    A ‘proud old lady’

    Companies which had good maternity policies had no policies about the menopause at all. Three years ago, at the Edinburgh Television Festival, I made a major speech in which I highlighted the problems I myself had experienced with the menopause.

    I made a deliberate decision to use my experiences to speak out. I introduced myself in the speech as a proud ‘old lady’ and described how my kindly male boss sent me home because I had a ‘fever’ when all I had was hot flushes.

    He clearly didn’t recognise a hot flush and I was too embarrassed to put him right. I named him in my talk. I won’t do so again because he’s suffered enough.

    ‘The menopause’

    He certainly knows about the menopause now.

    I then gave statistics for the number of women who had considered giving up work because of the menopause – government statistics at the time indicated that about a quarter of women had considered giving up their jobs because of their symptoms.

    Somewhat to my surprise I admit, just mentioning the menopause gained huge publicity. Soon afterwards, Channel Four became the first British broadcaster to have a comprehensive menopause policy.

    One of my last acts before leaving Channel Four was to commission a film about the menopause presented by the popular presenter, formerly presenter of Big Brother in the UK, Davina McCall who admitted her own problems when she went through early menopause.

    Some in my office said the program would get poor ratings as only older women would watch it.

    Suddenly everyone was talking about it

    I pointed out that there are an awful lot of older women.

    In the event, it gained a good audience and a follow-up program was also commissioned.

    These programs told the British public the facts about the effects of the menopause.

    A survey for Channel Four and the Fawcett Society revealed that 77% of women had experienced one or more symptoms of the menopause they described as very difficult. Forty-four per cent said their ability to work had been affected. A tenth employed during the menopause had left work due to the symptoms. Fourteen per cent had reduced hours or gone part-time and 8% said menopausal symptoms had prevented them from applying for promotion.

    Suddenly, everyone started discussing the menopause – men and women – and more companies instituted policies that included training for all staff, medical advice sessions and women being given the right to work less if they felt unwell.

    All long overdue.

    ‘Who’s to blame for this?’

    The fact that women have babies was recognised in employment legislation decades ago.

    The fact they stop having babies and their bodies change was not mentioned. A major portion of both programs was devoted to giving the facts on HRT – revealing that many women were given poor or erroneous information by doctors whose own knowledge was way out of date.

    As a result, there has been a huge surge in demand for HRT by women no longer prepared to be fobbed off and told, ‘It’s natural so you have to live through it,’ or even more offensively, being put on inappropriate anti-depressants. Indeed, this year, one of the most popular forms of HRT started to run out in Britain. As it happens, it’s the form I use.

    I got really angry one day when I was told that no pharmacy near me had any and exclaimed inwardly, ’Who’s to blame for this?’ Then I realised it was me.

    Power to prompt change

    I am pleased to say the crisis has now eased and supplies are coming through again.

    I go into some detail about this because I believe the menopause is a major reason older women are leaving the workplace. In the UK, it was because women journalists, using their own personal experience, exposed the issue that women across the country rose up and demanded both HRT and proper policies.

    I think it’s a great example of the power for change we have as women journalists if we band together and speak out. We should expose the negatives but we should also shout loudly about our successes.

    I’ve been told about some of the exciting plans for your brilliant organisation and I will follow your progress with great interest.

    I just wish my 24-year-old self had known a great bunch of women like you.

    This is an edited version of Dorothy Byrne’s address to the 2022 Women in Media national conference.

    • Feature image at top: Dorothy Byrne addresses delegates at the national conference. Photo: Meg Keene.

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    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Iran on fire: Women forcing change

    On Sept. 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in Tehran, Iran, while in police custody. Amini was arrested by the Guidance Patrol, the morality squad of the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran that oversees public implementation of hijab regulations, for not wearing a hijab properly.

    Soon after the news of her death was broadcast and a photograph emerged on social media of her lying in a Tehran hospital in a coma, people throughout the country became enraged.

    Amini’s death starkly illustrated the systematic violence of police and highlighted particularly the brutality of the regime towards women and minorities. She was Kurdish, a member of one of the most oppressed minority ethnic groups in Iran.

    All Iranian women who are routinely humiliated because of their gender can empathize with her. But Kurds and Kurdish women in particular understood the political message of her death at the hands of police and the state’s subsequent violent response to the protests.

    The huge wave of protests in Iran following Amini’s death represents a historic moment in Iran. People have taken to the streets shouting slogans against the compulsory hijab and denouncing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

    Protests have raged in 31 provinces, including Kurdistan and Tehran as well as cities such as Rasht, Isfahan and Qom, among Iran’s most conservative communities. Dozens of people have been killed by security forces and hundreds more have been arrested.

    A large crowd and cars are seen on a tree-lined city street, smoke billowing in places.
    In this photo taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, on Sept. 21, 2022.
    (AP Photo)

    The Girls of Revolution Street

    Although the current uprising may seem unprecedented, it is in fact part of a deep-rooted and longstanding resistance movement by women in Iran.

    In what is widely seen as a punishment to the hundreds of women who participated in the anti-regime protests leading to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the hijab became compulsory two years later in 1981.

    Consequently, publicly removing hijabs became a challenge to the regime in Iran.

    Decades later, in 2017, Vida Movahed climbed onto a platform on Enghelab (Revolution) Street in the centre of Tehran, took off her headscarf and waved it in the air as a sign of opposition to compulsory hijab.

    She was followed by other women and the movement quickly became known as The Girls of Revolution Street or Dokhtaran-e Khiaban-e Enghelab.

    The Girls of Revolution Street represented a fundamental challenge by younger women to Iran’s compulsory veiling laws. Their actions resulted in an increase in the number of women who braved the streets without hijab in defiance of the state.

    Unsurprisingly, when religious hardliner Ebrahim Raisi became president in the contested 2020 election, the message was clear: Women would be further oppressed.

    Zan, Zendegi, Azadi: Woman, life, freedom

    This recent uprising is a link in a chain of protests that together have the potential to bring about fundamental change in Iran.

    It began with the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009 followed by popular uprisings in 2018 and 2019. The Green Movement was largely peaceful, but the uprisings grew increasingly more confrontational with each wave of repression.

    Women have been in the lead in all these protests, posing a real challenge to the regime. They’re the leaders of transformative change, the vanguard of a potential revolution, challenging the legitimacy of the current government..

    The current protests are focused on two main demands: dignity and freedom. Both have been absent from political life in Iran, and both have a prominent presence in almost all slogans during this uprising, particularly “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

    A woman holds a sign that reads Women, Life, Freedom at a protest march.
    Members of the Iranian community and their supporters rally in solidarity with protesters in Iran in Ottawa on Sept. 25, 2022.
    THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

    The recent uprising makes it clear that the demand for radical change in Iran today is strong and significant.

    With every wave of protest, the desire for freedom gets stronger, the voices get louder and success is within reach. Once again, Iranian women are at the forefront of demanding transformative change.

    With the strong support this time of men, political and ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups, they may be leading their country closer to a freer and more just society.The Conversation

     

    Feature image: Protestors take part during a demonstration in front of the Iranian embassy in Brussels, Belgium on Sept. 23, 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini. Photo: Shutterstock

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  • Want to do a PhD about cyberhate against female athletes?

    Remember when AFLW Carlton forward Tayla Harris got predator trolled simply for doing her job? 

    In case your memory needs jogging, back in 2019 a photograph taken by AFL Media senior photographer Michael Willson depicted Harris’ powerful kicking style, became subject to floods of vile online commentary.

    At the time, Harris correctly identified the harassment as “sexual abuse on social media“. In other words, she was sustaining an injury in an unsafe workplace. And this made what happened an occupational health and safety issue – not just for her, but potentially for every athlete. 

    For anyone interested in enrolling in a full-time PhD from February 2023, the University of Canberra is offering a scholarship to research ‘Online trolling and e-safety: Women athletes and women working in the sports industry’ together with Sport Integrity Australia.

    The Information session on the Women in Sports Industry partnership scholarships, will be held in person and on-line.

    Where: Clive Price Suite (1C50) @University of Canberra When: 27 September 5:30 until 7pm AEST

    What: Meet our industry partners and researchers, hear about our research in Women in Sport, and discuss your career goals

    Register your attendance by emailing UCSportStrategy@canberra.edu.au 

    Cyberhate in Australia is no small matter. The nationally representative polling I commissioned from the Australia Institute in 2018 found the upper cost of cyberhate and online harassment to the Australian economy is $3.7 billion. That figure only counts lost income and medical expenses — so the real cost is far greater.

    The same polling also showed women were more likely to report receiving threats of sexual assault, violence or death; incitement of others to stalk or threaten them in real life; unwanted sexual messages and publication of their personal details.

    Research around the world also repeatedly finds people of colour are attacked more. It further illustrates that being both a woman and a POC makes you extra vulnerable on the Internet. 

    As I discuss in my best-selling book, Troll Hunting, we know women in the public eye – people including but not limited to: journalists, politicians and sportspeople – are frequently subject to extreme and ongoing cyberhate that leads to real-life harm. In the most egregious cases, they may be killed. 

    Once I started investigating and reporting on cyberhate in the Australian press back in 2015, Aussie women in sport started telling me their own stories of being hunted online.

    These women were not just elite athletes like Tayla, but also female umpires, sports journalists and administrators.

    Heather Reid was the former CEO of Capital Football in the ACT. She gave up her career because of extreme and sustained cyberhate, and her organisation did very little to support her. 

    Although Reid had her day in court and won, her life was impacted in ways the justice system could never repair. She moved away from Canberra – a city she loved – with her partner. Reid also suffered extreme, ongoing health impacts as a result of stress associated with the vitriolic and homophobic online hatred against her.  

    Back in 2015, she told me: “This is my workplace and nobody should have to put up with abuse or harassment at work.”

    One last example: Freelance sports journalist and academic Kate O’Halloran has been the target of trolls on numerous occasions. At one stage, the predator trolling was so severe, O’Hallaron found herself afraid to leave the house. 

    Like Reid, she cops abuse that not only targets her gender, but her sexuality.

    Myself and my colleagues at the University of Canberra concur with Harris, Reid and O’Halloran; we do not believe your gender – or sexuality – should make you unsafe at work (or destroy your career).

    What we would like to know is: What’s the scale of this abuse against female athletes, non-binary folks and those working in the sports industry? What forms does gendered abuse take online? Most importantly, how can we stop it?  

    Dr Catherine Ordway lectures in sports integrity and ethics at the University of Canberra. (She’ll also be your primary supervisor if you successfully win this scholarship to investigate cyberhate against female and non-binary athletes. I’m also on the advisory panel!)

    Dr Ordway says: “Cyber violence against women and girls has now being recognised as, not only a work, health and safety issue, but a broader human rights issue.  Sport was designed by and for men. 

    “The deepest level of toxic, misogynist attacks are reserved for women who ‘dare’ to play, watch and work in sport – particularly if they are non-white, non-binary, and/or non-conformist in the cis heteronormative mould of femininity”.

    C’mon. Use the email address above to register your interest. You know you want to! (And it’s important you do.)

    This PhD research is proudly supported by the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation at the University of Canberra (home of BroadAgenda, publisher of this article!)

     

    Feature image at top: Women soccer players in a team doing the plank fitness exercise in training together on a practice sports field. Picture: Shutterstock 

     

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  • Leaning Out: tackling women’s Great Exhaustion

    In the new book ‘Leaning Out’, respected journalist Kristine Ziwica maps a decade of stasis on the gender equality front in Australia, and why the pandemic has led to a breakthrough. This short excerpt is published will full permission. 

    How do we begin to tackle the Great Exhaustion? (Editor’s note: Earlier in her book, Kristina defines ‘The Great Exhaustion’ as “…the absolute overwhelming feeling of emotional exhaustion like there’s nothing left in the tank.”)

    Part of the answer lies in changing the conversation. We need to move away from lean-in ideas that posit the solution rests with individual women alone, who should devote more time and energy to their ‘wellbeing’ and simply shore up their resilience. Beware corporate ‘feminist wellness’, selling a soothing balm of herbal tea and scented candles – faux feminist Prozac to help women recover from the uniquely gendered impacts of the pandemic – instead of structural change.

    Many are fond of quoting the late activist Audre Lorde, who once wrote, ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’ And while that is absolutely true – and they are wise words for a growing army of feminist activists who are now taking to the streets in pursuit of gender equality – self-care as an idea and now an industry has been twisted beyond all recognition from Lorde’s original meaning.

    This is ‘feminist wellness’ or self-care as a kind of escape, not, as Lorde intended, a restorative practice to give those seeking deeper, collective change the energy and resilience to persevere. This kind of feminist self-care is, at best, devoid of meaning in its attempt to move product or, at worst, a cynical attempt to divert women from the task at hand.

    No one ever said, ‘Nevertheless she persisted with her daily regime of scented candles and massage therapy.’ (Though if I close my eyes and listen, I can almost imagine Gwyneth Paltrow uttering those words.)

    Kristina is speaking tonight (Wednesday, September 7, 2022) at the ANU. Book tickets here. 

    The rise of the wellness industrial complex, particularly in relation to women, is mirrored by the way neoliberalism infected feminism in the 1990s. No structural inequalities to tackle collectively here, folks. This is an individual problem. But as Angela Priestley, the founding editor of Women’s Agenda, told me, ‘this isn’t something more lunchtime pilates will fix’.

    This is not what we need at this critical juncture.

    ‘It’s really important that we look at the higher-level factors that have led to all of this,’ Dr Adele Murdolo, the executive director of Australia’s Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health, told me. COVID caused lots of stuff, but it also just exacerbated a lot of inequality that was already there. It showed it up and it made it more apparent to everybody.

    ‘We need to have a look at gender and race discrimination in the workplace and develop policies and programs that are knocking that off at the source, which is a big job and not something you can fix in a month because it’s something that’s so embedded in our workplaces,’ added Murdolo.

    Cover of "Leaning Out: A Fairer Future for Women at Work in Australia." Picture: Supplied

    Cover of “Leaning Out: A Fairer Future for Women at Work in Australia.” Picture: Supplied

    Lisa Annese, CEO of Diversity Council Australia, has said that ‘inclusion at work is an antidote to the great resignation’. She points to new research from DCA that demonstrates the link between non-inclusive behaviours and workers’ intentions to stay. Workers in inclusive teams are 4 times more likely than those in non-inclusive teams to report their workplace has positively impacted their mental health, and they are 4 times less likely to leave their jobs. ‘So you are investing in the wellbeing of your people, and making your business more resilient.’

    We need to develop policies, legislation and programs that change not only workplace cultures and attitudes, but also the way that workplaces are structured; at the moment, workforces are really about the full-time, unencumbered male employee. We need to look at making workplaces really flexible.

    Not flexible just for employers in terms of insecure work, but flexible for what people in families really need. We need childcare so that women are able to actively participate in the workforce. We need to tackle the gender pay gap, and not just as it relates to gender alone, but also taking into account ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation … all the intersecting forms of discrimination that make the gender pay gap even larger for some than others.

    ‘Bigger structural issues: pay equity, equal jobs of equal worth (particularly for women in undervalued caring jobs), childcare, giving people permission to voice the good, bad and the ugly is also part of the healing process,’ Leisa Sargent, the senior deputy deanof UNSW’s Business School and the University’s co-deputy vice-chancellor Equity Diversity and Inclusion,told me. ‘But I also think that making sure that employees are engaged in the decision-making process coming out of the pandemic is really important. We went through two years of being told what we had to do and how we had to do it, which is very disempowering.’

    We now need to create opportunities where people feel they have a say in how things get done, in flexibility, in opportunities to work in different parts of the business and to be stimulated.

    ‘And it’s also about a fundamental redrawing of the boundaries,’ added Sargent.

    Research from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work suggests why a redrawing of boundaries may be particularly necessary, as the pandemic has only exacerbated the trend towards the intensification of work and highlighted the costs of insecure work, where women are heavily concentrated. The research found that the average worker did

    6.1 hours per week of unpaid overtime in 2021, a substantial increase on 2020.

    ‘Let’s make jobs plentiful, safer, secure and invest in social institutions that support people, in particular women, to work’, Alison Pennington, a senior economist at the Centre for Future Work, told me was the quite simple, yet powerful, prescription.

    ‘The treadmill of insecure work fuels anxiety and makes planning for a decent life nigh impossible. The reality is that the human cost of unchecked employer power is enormous. And there are multiple indicators that this power has deepened over the pandemic.’

    The solutions are structural and collective, going far beyond self-care, and even beyond direct psychological treatment for women’s mental health, though this is undeniably necessary and should be addressed with more targeted and innovative mental health support. At the time we spoke, Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, for example, had just opened Australia’s first dedicated mental health centre for women, a specialist model she would like to see replicated elsewhere.

    As we endeavour to ‘build back better’, we need these types of broad, wide-ranging proposals as part of the wider debate about women and work. The changed conversation around women’s workplace burnout and the factors driving that will play a significant role in moving the conversation forward from the lean-in feminism that has so far dominated the Australian landscape to something better, something more impactful and meaningful. If that happens, then women’s collective suffering during the pandemic won’t have been in vain.

     

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  • Exclusive: “Man Who Has It All” bares all

    Wooohoooo! BroadAgenda has obtained an exclusive interview with social media smash hit, The Man Who Has It All (MWHIA).
    We’ve teamed up with social media expert Dr Catherine Archer – who has deep interest in women’s online engagement – to give us the low down on why “The Man” has a cult following and not only makes us laugh until our bellies ache, but turns the patriarchy on its head. 
    Who is MWHIA, you ask? Read on. We’ve got you covered. Grab some tissues in case you cry laughing. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

    Catherine: The ‘Man Who Has It All’ is a self-described ‘busy working dad of three’ who apparently, ‘has it all’, including: kids, work outside the home, luminous skin, happy eyes, barely there legs, a simple but stylish home and voluminous cheeks. With more than half a million ‘friends’ (on Facebook, that is), including 12 of mine, 245k Twitter followers, a best-selling book and an online shop, this ‘dadpreneur’ appears to be winning at life.

    By now, you may have guessed that the Man who Has it all (MWHIA) is a parody social media ‘persona’, that takes our/society’s impossible expectations for women in general – and mothers in particular – and handballs them across to men.

    The Man’s identity is a closely guarded secret, but through his publicist, BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman managed to get some exclusive comments (in character) from him.

    Ginger: Tell us a bit about yourself? For those who don’t know, who are you?

    MWHIA: I’m bossing it as a busy working dad of three. I started a Twitter account called Man Who Has It All in 2015 to give men tips about how to have it all.

    Ginger: You say you have it all. What exactly is “it all”?

    MWHIA: When I say, “it all”, I mean kids, work outside the home, luminous skin, happy eyes, barely there legs, a simple but stylish home and voluminous cheeks.

    Ginger: How do you stop your social media popularity going to your head?

    MWHIA: I think it is so important that men are able to accept compliments about their work. I am proud of what I have achieved. With the right mentoring and tone of voice, men can actually succeed in business on their own merits, without playing the ‘man card’ to get ahead.

    There is so much advice out there now for dadpreneurs, boy bosses and male leaders on how to dress for your body shape and how to communicate more like a woman to succeed at work. It’s up to men to embrace it and be their best version of themselves.

    Catherine: I am not sure when I started following him on Twitter, (where he began offering ‘advice’ to men in 2015) or when I befriended him on Facebook, but like many women I found his posts incredibly funny because they took all those self-help adages aimed at women and just made them for men.

    For those who have grown up pre-internet and read girls and women’s magazines like Dolly, Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Weekly, New Idea and Marie Claire, the advice from MWHIA seemed startlingly like the advice trotted out to women on a regular basis.

    What is even more depressing for me, is that as an academic studying women’s use of social media (in particular, mum bloggers, now more likely to be called ‘mumfluencers’), I have seen similar impossible advice and beauty standards (for women, of course) infiltrate Instagram and other social media from many of the ‘mumpreneurs’ I have followed.

    It is probably a no-brainer as to why MWHIA is so funny and popular but being an academic I do like to apply theories to these things (and besides, BA’s Ginger Gorman asked me to put an academic lens on him).

    Ginger: How do you keep your skin and figure so nice?

    MWHIA: I pared my skincare routine down during lockdown to just 18 products to create flawless skin that resembles glass. I get up at 6am and drink 2 litres of water with freshly squeezed lemon juice.

    Next, I use a jade roller on my face before applying my sunscreen and serums.  I follow the same diet as Prince William, after reading a feature called ‘What William Eats In A Day.”

    I also do Hot Yoga and dancing to keep my core strong. Before bed, I always remove all traces of the day; dirt, excess oil, pollution and unwanted skin cells. I take pride in the way I look. So much so that my wife has actually never seen me with unwanted skin cells on my face!

    Catherine: Ten years ago, I started studying mum bloggers and at the time, amongst the fashion advice and blogs with titles like ‘the organised housewife’, there were also incredibly funny and painful stories, with the women often sharing the double standards of child rearing using humour and pathos.

    I also noticed that mainstream media were particularly derisive of these women’s writing/’blogging’. When then PM Julia Gillard invited what were seen as the ‘influential’ mum bloggers, and other female writers, to a dinner at Rooty Hill RSL and morning tea at Kirribilli House, the reaction from mainstream media columnists was incredulous and sneering.

    I started my research in 2012 and it was at the beginning of what was then termed the ‘blogging revolution’ when it was thought that ‘authentic posts’ from real women would change the world. But then, the advertisers/brands caught on that women were reading these posts and, and what with the ‘Instagram aesthetic’, the once raw posts of unfiltered motherhood of the early blogging days, gave way to aspirational #blessed #filtered #sponsored influencers selling us all the anxieties that would encourage women to spend big on what mattered – you know, diet products, skincare and Botox.

    Of course, many of the early and later influencers have welcomed the attention of advertisers and have gone on to forge lucrative careers with their content, just as the MWHIA has done.

    So why is MWHIA so appealing? He has done what many of the mum bloggers and other influencers have also achieved, using social media to profit but in his case also poke fun at society’s expectations of women.

    Activists and artists have often used humour to highlight societal issues and hypocrisy, way back to court jester days, and the internet has been a great place to do this. Mum blogger themselves used to poke fun at their label and some embraced it while others felt it was cringeworthy.

    To find out why MWHIA appeals so much, I did what all good academics do – I did some research, well actually I asked my female friends (real ones and those who are online ‘friends’ in an all-female closed Facebook group). Fortunately, as this is a news article, I didn’t have to take six weeks to apply for and be granted ethics approval.

    The women’s response was quick….

    It’s a witty, light-hearted flip on (what is often a shitty) reality. And the comments are GOLD!

    I love it so much, as a solo mum most of my parenting it actually made me realise how I didn’t need to live through the double standard so much, clearly just up to me.

    It gives me a good giggle, but it also reminds me that my anger at how myself and other women have been treated is absolutely justified. It’s one thing to *know* the double standards are there but when you’re reading his posts with the gender roles flipped it makes you realise just how absurd and deeply ingrained in us they are.

    When you flip the standards imposed on women and apply them to men, it really highlights how gaslighty and ridiculous the messaging can be. There is also a lot of posts highlighting gendered language, gendered careers and subtle everyday sexism.

    It makes me laugh, and points attention to double standards.

    I love it. Cut through, accurate and very funny! I find it so reassuring given the constant tidal wave of double standards in media and public discourse.

    I reckon it could be used in gender studies.

    It resonates – and makes you stop, think, and challenge how deeply engrained some of those stereotypes really area. And yes, it’s hilarious.

    It’s astounding how satire – seemingly so simple – can have such complex impacts. Let’s hear direct form MWHIA again:

    Ginger: What’s the best way to get “me time” in your hectic schedule?

    MWHIA: I get up five hours earlier than my wife and kids to give me time to chill in the kitchen, complete my gratitude journal and put my first load of washing on. I find it hard to relax until I have made the kids’ lunches, fed and walked the dog, put the slow cooker on and laid out the kids’ clothes for the month. Sometimes I have five minutes to think about how I can be kinder to myself and to others.

    Ginger: How do you avoid being sexually harassed at work? What advice would you give?

    MWHIA: There were posters in the men’s toilets in my last job telling us to walk home in pairs or groups to avoid being sexually harassed. We were also told not to wear short sleeves or tight fitting trousers. I think this is good advice.

    After all, girls will be girls and if it’s served up to them on a plate, most women can’t resist. The vast majority of women, especially older women, unfortunately would harass an attractive young man if they knew they would get away with it. I’m really lucky, most women I have worked with have been really nice and haven’t so much as laid a finger on me. There are some good women left!

    Ginger: When women are being opinionated and aggressive in work meetings – and cutting you off and talking over you, how do you manage this situation?

    When this happens to me, I adjust my posture and lean in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make any difference and they talk over me anyway. I think the reality is that women and men have different strengths.

    Women are better at making decisions and chairing meetings and, like it or not, men are better at taking minutes, making drinks and taking the work tea towels home to wash at weekends.

    Ginger: You might have seen in the newspapers that some men are sick of being a minority in Parliament and they want quotas. They say the current system – where mostly women are elected – is not based on merit, but sexism. How would you respond to that?

    MWHIA: I don’t think men need quotas. I think men should get ahead by merit alone. Clearly the men currently in Parliament didn’t need a leg up to get there, so why should other men get special favours? Some men whine about structural inequalities, but I think these sort of men have too much time on their hands. Don’t they realise men in other countries have it worse?

    Ginger: How is your pitch to The Guardian for books by men that women should read going? (Women can’t help it if they’ve never heard of any male authors!)

    MWHIA: Unfortunately, I haven’t heard back from The Guardian. I just don’t think there is an appetite for male authors yet. Men’s Fiction remains a niche genre and you can’t expect everyone to be interested in such a narrow topic. Hopefully in another one hundred and fifty years we will start to see male authors being taken seriously.

    Ginger: Is there any other advice or thoughts you’d like to share?

    I’m encouraging everyone to comment on William’s parenting at the Jubilee Pageant in June if they haven’t already. Please wade in, especially if you didn’t see it.

    Say hello to a happy healthy summer (editor’s note: it’s summer in the UK!) and don’t forget to smile!

    Catherine: The marketisation of motherhood (and womanhood) in our neoliberal society and the ‘intensive mothering’ expectations placed on women, mean that sometimes closed Facebook groups can be one area where women remove the ‘mask of motherhood’ and share the humour, pain and frustrations where ‘having it all’ often means ‘doing it all’.

    I have researched this phenomenon with other academic colleagues, and we found that women sought these perceived safe spaces for guidance, connection, community, humour and to ‘vent’.

    The irony is that it takes a ‘man’ who has it all to shine a light on what female academics and feminists have been banging on about now for more than 50 years. In this case, it could be that mansplaining may be useful after all. It would be intriguing to know the real identity of MWHIA, but with this international man of mystery, ‘he’ gives us all a good laugh and also makes us think, and in these tumultuous times, that’s probably what we need right now.

    Finally, Ginger asked MWHIA what advice he would give to working women.

    His response was: “I think women have it easy to be honest. My wife gets home from work to a tidy house, gorgeous husband and happy kids. I’m lucky that she helps out. She’s very much a hands-on mum, especially now they’re a bit older. She takes them to the park on a Saturday morning for an hour so I can clean the house in peace. My advice to women would be to treasure and protect us; we are wonderful, mysterious creatures!”

    • Feature image: ‘The Man Who Has It All’. Picture: Supplied 

     

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  • 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 double-edged sword of gender in politics

    Gender is a double-edged sword. It can aid the rise to political power for women but can also limit their political ambitions, including what they can achieve for fellow women.

    The presence of women in politics is clearly on the rise in Australia. Women will make up 38 per cent of MPs in the House of Representatives while 57 per cent of the Federal Senate will be composed of women. A remarkable 19 women will be first-term MPs in the lower house.

    What will the political and personal lives of these new women MPs be like? Will life be better in the era post former prime minister Julia Gillard’s 2012 ‘misogyny speech’?

    What can we learn from the women leaders who have gone before them?

    My research on the few women who have made it to the lofty heights of head of government – whether prime minister or president – may offer some answers.

    The sex and gender of ‘Madam President’ has been a constant subject of political debate. In the rise of women to executive office, her sex is made overt, at times by the woman leader herself and often by those around her; gendered norms (re-emerge) in these debates and an evident battle ensues as to the relevance of a leader’s gender to national leadership.

    Battling assumptions about their gender has been a relatively common experience for female presidents and prime ministers globally. From Thatcher in the United Kingdom to ‘Africa’s Iron Lady’ Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia. From Chile’s Bachelet to New Zealand’s Shipley, Clark and Ardern, not to mention experiences in our very own backyard.

    Strong Female Lead - Julia Gillard

    Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard in the documentary, Strong Female Lead. Picture: Supplied 

    While Gillard’s speech and the offensive characterisations of her as a female leader will be the subject of her new book, it would be wrong to assume that her experience was particularly unique.

    Sri Lanka’s President Kumaratunga made constituents unhappy with her short hair and free will as an unmarried woman (in this case widow) in ways that trigger stark reminders of the media and public rebukes suffered by Gillard.

    If these experiences, where women become political objects of discussion and not subjects of the political process, are anything to go by, the decisions of our new women MPs regarding marriage and motherhood and their appearance may too quickly and wrongly become the central focus of the media and in turn, public attention.

    And yet we have seen how gender can aid a candidate’s rise to power. First, being a woman is a distinct trait that political campaigns use when there is a desire for change in the gender balance of politics. Liberian supporters were seen waving signs with, ‘Ellen, she’s our man’ at rallies, not perhaps a full shift in gendered expectations, but a shift.

    Second, being a woman can help capture some segments of the vote. It was fairly evident how the female vote swung Australia’s federal election in May.

    For women leaders as diverse as Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and the Philippines Corazon Aquino, a kind of hysteria (or ‘Corymania’) emerged as the ‘woman’s vote’ was mobilised in their favour.

    Third, being a woman candidate can bring political capital based on assumptions that contesting women benefit from. Women are generally perceived as less corrupt – what has been described as ‘a myth in the making’ – so in Australian debates about a federal anticorruption commission, being a woman may add some legitimacy to the proposal.

    Nonetheless few of the contenders in the recent election were explicit about a gender equality agenda. We might even wonder if prioritising gender equality explains, in part, the defeat of Jane Caro who ran for the Senate or Sheneli Dona, who ran for the house. I would like to think it gained them more votes than what was lost, but, perhaps that is not the reality.

    Gender is indeed a double-edged sword.

    What does this political reality mean for the women who made it? They have entered a political landscape where too few women have gone before and gender can be used as much for as against political success?

    Will being ‘female’ stifle the potential for these women MPs to make a difference?

    Can they still help ensure that the Albanese government will be able to generate the women-friendly legislative and policy outcomes that many of us are hoping for?

    At this stage, it is probably safe to expect three things:

    First, these women are role models and may better represent women’s issues. A greater diversity of Australian women can feel represented by parliament, with women from such distinct backgrounds as Sally Sitou, Zaneta Mascarenhas, Cassandra Fernando and Michelle Ananda-Rajah. I certainly feel better represented as an Australian woman of Asian origin. Not, as Sitou said, because of diversity for diversity’s sake but for what a diversity of parliamentarians can bring.

    These women’s successes may also have the role model potential to inspire future generations of Australian women politicians. My research shows that the utterance of ‘She’ or ‘Madam’ means far more than a simple shift in gender pronoun.

    Second, if the experience of other nations is anything to go by, women’s groups mobilise more resources and at a faster pace to exploit the window of opportunity that exists when women are in decision-making roles. We might see the kind of co-beneficial alliance building between women’s groups and women’s parliamentary bodies that we know this context gives rise to. And the outcome? Hopefully more women-friendly policies and across a much broader spectrum of issues – finance, the environment, corporate governance – because after all, all policies matter to women.

    Finally, at the very least, the tone has been set right. Katy Gallagher, Australia’s new Minister for Women, has also been appointed Minister for Finance and Minister for Public Service. This is a far cry from the ‘feminine’ or low-prestige portfolios too often given to women cabinet members.

    •  The Woman President by Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa is out now.

     

    The post The double-edged sword of gender in politics appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Sexist stock photography, lesbian sisters, and androgyny

    Recently, I stumbled across a “lesbian” stock image where the two women looked almost identical. Were they supposed to have shared a womb or were they dating? This sent me down a stock photography rabbit hole and prompted me to see how misogynistic and heteronormative stock photography can be. 

    As it turns out, mainstream stock photography businesses are home to many harmful representations of womanhood and queerness. A shock, I know.

    I saw biases towards women and queer folks in action. I’ve collected three images, which serve as a window into the biases that seem rampant in stock photos. 

    Some aspects of stock photos are puzzling. Why is lesbian sex depicted between two people who could be mistaken for twins at first glance? Why do photos of non-binary people almost exclusively represent androgyny?

     

    Lesbian sisters
    White lesbian couple wearing matching sunglasses. Picture: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.

    White lesbian couple wearing matching sunglasses. Picture: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.

    The women in this photo embrace in such a way that could be read as romantic, but is casual enough that a person could see them as sisters or best gal pals. Their sunglasses, expressions of shared laughter, even the necklaces they both wear are small signifiers of similarity that quickly add up.

    They are both thin and white, and their hair is even parted on the same side. These similarities make it easier to read their relationship as familial or platonic, as well as romantic.

    There has been extensive research on the merits of the idea that people seek out romantic partners who look similar to them. There is even a word for it: ‘dopplebanger’. 

    It’s one thing to joke about a friend’s tendency to date partners with the same hair colour as them, but the genre of ‘lesbian sisters’ stock photography doesn’t exist in a vacuum of quirky or harmless dating stories. 

    This photo, and others like it, insist on relationships between women as something that can slip under the commercial radar. The most ‘universal’ relationship between women is a non-relationship, it seems.

    I spoke to writer and researcher, Dr. Gemma Killen, whose research focuses on queer life, popular culture and community online. Their PhD was about queer women and popular culture, with a chapter on women in stock photography. Gemma confirms my hunch that vague depictions of relationships keeps the photo as commercially and widely useable as possible: it is “much easier” to create “generic” stock photos when intimacy is not explicitly romantic. 

    This reminded me of a time a man said to me (very unsolicited), “God, we’ve come a long way. Yuck, how disgusting!” after seeing a book with two boys holding hands on the cover. 

    My heart broke when I heard that. Clear depictions of queer relationships are still belittled or outright vilified, and this is reflected in the ‘safety’ of stock photos that supposedly depict lesbian couples.

     

    Lesbians, definitely not sisters
    White lesbian couple on a bed, original Shutterstock caption began with "Photo of dream desire naughty horny two people lesbians..." Picture: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock.

    White lesbian couple on a bed, original Shutterstock caption began with “Photo of dream desire naughty horny two people lesbians…” Picture: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock.

    The only thing that differentiates these two women is the colour of their lingerie, which reminds me of how most sets of twins I knew as a kid went through a phase of wearing the same clothes, just in different colours.

    There can be no illusion that the relationship between these two women is familial or platonic. However, even in a photo that explicitly caters to the male gaze, the two women look alarmingly similar. 

    “What’s interesting is that we don’t look at a stock photograph of a man and a woman with similar features and assume they are siblings, even though this might be the tendency for pictures of same-sex couples”, says Gemma. 

    There is still an instinct to point out their similarities, to code their relationship as familial or, as in this case, ‘weird’ because the women look alike. Gemma tells me that “the assumed audience for most stock photography is heterosexual, white and male.” 

    A 2021 study “revealed that lesbians found media portrayals mostly negative and stereotypical, in that they were hypersexualized and for the male gaze, with lesbian relationships portrayed as temporary.”

    I could have reflected on how uncomfortable I felt looking at this photo, and how I felt detached from my own identity and sexuality when I saw it consumed through the male gaze. My instinct, even as a queer woman, was to interrogate the relationship presented to me based on how well I perceive it to serve the male gaze. 

    Women loving women, as it is shown here, is not actually about women loving women at all.

     

    The androgyny assumption
    White non-binary person against a grey wall. Picture: Kseniia Perminova/Shutterstock.

    White non-binary person against a grey wall. Picture: Kseniia Perminova/Shutterstock.

    When I searched ‘non binary person’, pictures of white, androgynous people flooded my laptop screen. This reinforces the idea that body ideals in stock photography remain “rooted in white European ideals”, and reveals the biased assumption that non binary people ‘owe’ others androgyny.

    Androgyny typically refers to “Identifying and/or presenting as neither distinguishably masculine nor feminine.” To be non-binary is to not identify with the binary understanding of gender as ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Some people conflate these two ways of being, and project this singular understanding of what being non-binary looks like onto non-binary people. 

    Representing non binary people as androgynous is not inherently bad, especially because androgyny provides many non binary people with the necessary freedom and self expression they need to authentically inhabit their bodies. It’s also “hard to signal something as complex as gender with a simple photograph that is designed as an empty signifier”, says Gemma.

    The issue arises when this is the only representation, because “stock photography of non-binary people leans towards simplistic understandings of androgyny as vaguely masculine, but not threatening/aggressive”, continues Gemma. 

    It is limiting and disheartening when media communicates a narrow view of queerness. If you don’t fit that one idea, you can feel lost and invalid, as if there is a wrong way to be yourself. 

    One young a-gender person interviewed in a study about androgynous body ideals spoke about how dressing androgynously is the only way other people will recognise them as a-gender. They said, “I want any shape of body to be androgynous-enough, but I know I have to stereotypically androgynize myself in order to keep living. Having a non-normative body for me is about survival.”

    After trawling through pages and pages of stock images, I saw how stock photography is simply another form of media communication that reinforces harmful norms and biases. This is not to say that every image I came across perpetuated ideals of whiteness, thinness and able-bodiedness. 

    But Gemma points out: “stock photography deals in a rhetoric of sameness that perpetuates a myth of ‘sameness’.” How do we combat ideas about “identity and aesthetics” in stock photography when those same ideas are flattened out into the one dimensional images we use in our articles everyday?

    • Feature image is a stock photo. Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock.

    The post Sexist stock photography, lesbian sisters, and androgyny appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Ten more Black women have accused Tim Westwood of sexual abuse

    This article includes discussion of rape and sexual abuse

    Ten more Black women have spoken out to accuse former long-time BBC Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood of sexual abuse. This includes one woman who claims that Westwood repeatedly raped her when she was 14 years old. These further allegations come after seven Black women spoke out in April, accusing the celebrated DJ of “predatory and unwanted sexual behaviour” taking place between 1992 and 2017.

    An open secret

    In April 2022, the BBC and the Guardian released a joint investigation based on seven Black women’s allegations of sexual abuse against Westwood. The alleged abuse spans a period of more than two decades.

    Although this is the first time these allegations gained mainstream press coverage, Westwood’s predatory behaviour has long been one of the music industry’s worst kept secrets.

    This makes Westwood’s longtime employers complicit in his abuse of young Black women and girls. Rather than investigating the allegations against the DJ, Westwood’s employers – including the BBC and Global – maintained Westwood’s platform and protected his reputation.

    For a number of years, journalists – mostly young women of colour – have tried to investigate the historical allegations against Westwood. However, they came up against extreme resistance when seeking information and trying to raise awareness about Westwood’s misconduct.

    Following the release of the BBC and Guardian investigation in April, journalist Nadine White shared:

    Others had their pitches repeatedly rejected by news outlets, reflecting the mainstream media’s tendency to protect powerful white men while silencing marginalised young women. Sharing her frustrating experience of this, journalist Iman Amrani tweeted:

    Highlighting one of the ways Westwood’s employers protected the DJ against sexual abuse allegations, journalist Lorraine King said:

    Still avoiding accountability

    Responding to the joint BBC and Guardian investigation into allegations against the DJ in April, the BBC‘s director general Tim Davie stated that he had “seen no evidence of complaints” made to the corporation against Westwood.

    However, in July, it was revealed that the BBC had in fact received a number of sexual misconduct complaints against Westwood, including one that was referred to the police.

    Responding to this news, actress and public speaker Kelechi Okafor tweeted:

    Westwood’s alleged actions are heinous – but the BBC is also complicit. Rumours of the DJ’s sexual misconduct have been an open secret for many years. Rather than investigating the allegations, Westwood’s employers protected the DJ and helped him to maintain his powerful position in the Black British music industry, which he used to abuse and exploit Black young women and girls.

    Statutory rape of a minor

    The BBC‘s gross mishandling of the situation continues. In its story revealing the further allegations made against Westwood, the BBC states that Westwood stands “accused of sex with a 14-year-old“.

    This language is incredibly harmful. Because a child cannot consent, adults engaging in sexual contact with children under the age of consent is statutory rape. Calling it anything else simply normalises, sanitises, and excuses child sexual abuse.

    This reporting reflects the widespread adultification of Black children, who tend to be treated and regarded as adults. This bias has tangible consequences. It leads to the inadequate protection and safeguarding of Black children, opening the door to a host of children’s rights abuses.

    Clarifying this, psychologist Guilaine Kinouani tweeted:

    Explaining the gravity of such a misuse of language, the Rowan Project – a specialist sexual abuse service provider – posted in February:

    Still no accountability

    Highlighting the ongoing lack of action being taken against Westwood, PR consultant Ronke Lawal said:

    This continuous inaction speaks to some of the reasons why Black women and girls who are affected by sexual violence are so reluctant to report abuse and seek support.

    In this society, Black women and girls are not protected from violence. And they are not believed when they speak out about the harm they have experienced. This is rooted in a culture of racism and misogyny which sexualises and adultifies Black girls and young women.

    This is exemplified in the revelations of Met Police officers strip searching Black schoolgirls. Other officers took and shared dehumanising photos of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry. Meanwhile, public services still fail to meet the needs of Black women and girls, and often put them at further risk of harm.

    This is precisely why Westwood’s alleged victims were afraid to speak out. We must listen to these women, amplify their stories, and hold all those who contributed to their abuse accountable.

    Featured image via Rory/Wikimedia Commons, CC by 2.0, resized 770 x 403 px

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Stealthing: Most people don’t know it’s rape

    When it happens to you, it can be devastating. Violating. Traumatising. But did you know it’s also rape?

    I’m talking about stealthing – the non-consensual removal of a condom during sex.

    Elena, who was 24 when she experienced stealthing says: “If stealthing was criminalised at the time of my incident, it would have provided me with the opportunity to take control of a situation where I had none.”

    Abbie, 39 today but 26 at the time of her assault said, “I didn’t know then what had happened was rape.”

    Both these women showed tremendous courage last Thursday by telling their stories to a national roundtable of law makers and leaders who are working together to change the law – and change the conversation – around stealthing and consent.

    The violating practice is widespread: one in three women and one in five men who have sex with men have been victims of stealthing, according to a 2018 study by Monash University and the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre. Yet community awareness and education around the issue is limited.

    The lack of awareness around stealthing is something that sexual consent advocate and Director of the Australia Institute’s newly established Centre for Sex and Gender Equality, Chanel Contos wants to change; Chanel convened the roundtable.

    (You might recall that Chanel first hit the national headlines at the start of 2021 when she launched a viral online petition calling for holistic sexual consent and sexuality education.)

    Chanel Contos

    Chanel Contos continues to be a vocal advocate for consent and gender equality. Picture: Supplied

    In her opening remarks at the roundtable, she said: “By bringing together lawmakers and victims of stealthing we hope to identify how nationally consistent legislation can prevent stealthing and increase public awareness about consent.”

    She later went on to say: “Stealthing is most commonly perpetrated out of ignorance and entitlement rather than malice. This means that it is preventable. It is preventable through public awareness about this specific type of consent, and legislation is a powerful way to define what is acceptable and what is not in our society.”

    Also present at the event were Attorneys-General advisors, shadow Attorneys-General, Supreme Court Judges and members of state and territory legislative councils who came together to hear from survivors about their experiences of stealthing.

    Law reform on stealthing has gained momentum recently. Two weeks ago, the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce released the second Hear Her Voice report. One of the taskforce’s 188 recommendations was to amend consent laws to include legislation around non-consensual condom removal during sex.

    Currently, stealthing is a crime only in the ACT and Tasmania.

    Last year, Canberra Liberals’ Leader Elizabeth Lee introduced the Crimes (Stealthing) Amendment Bill 2021, which makes it illegal to remove a condom during sex or to not use a condom at all, in circumstances when condom use was previously agreed on.

    “I am incredibly proud that the ACT has passed nation-leading laws to specifically criminalise stealthing,” said Elizabeth Lee during the roundtable.

    Tasmania followed suit in June, passing the Criminal Code Amendment Bill 2022, which includes stealthing as another circumstance that negates consent.

    New South Wales’ affirmative consent reforms, which also came into effect in June 2022, strengthen laws by confirming that if someone consents to one sexual act, they have not consented to other sexual acts, providing stealthing as an example.

    Following NSW’s approach, the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce report recommends amending the definition of consent and providing stealthing as an example.

    A review in Victoria has also recommended that stealthing be criminalised, but legislation has not yet been implemented. The Victoria Law Reform Commission’s Improving Justice System Response to Sex Offences report recommends an amendment to the Crimes Act to include stealthing as another circumstance in which consent is negated. The Victorian Government has agreed to the recommendation to criminalise stealthing and the reform is expected to come into effect later this year.

    The criminalisation of stealthing is fundamental to increasing community awareness and education about sexual safety and consent.

    During last week’s roundtable Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Justice at RMIT University, Dr Brianna Chesser said, “…by bringing the law into line with community values, future incidents of stealthing and the harm associated with that behaviour may be prevented.”

    The current ambiguity around the legality of stealthing may reinforce a victim’s feelings of guilt and shame. As well as increasing awareness and deterrence, national law reform on stealthing will arm survivors with the language to describe what has happened to them and the knowledge that it was wrong.

    Last week’s roundtable was an important milestone on the path to tackling stealthing. As someone who was in the room, I’m hopeful that best-practice law reform and community education campaigns are just around the corner.

     

    • Feature image: Sexual consent advocate and Director of the Australia Institute’s newly established Centre for Sex and Gender Equality, Chanel Contos. Picture: Supplied

    The post Stealthing: Most people don’t know it’s rape appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Diane Abbott receives abuse for referring to rumours of the PM ‘assaulting women’

    On Sunday 3 July, Diane Abbott told a BBC radio programme that Boris Johnson is:

    rumoured to be one who likes assaulting women.

    Corporate media, of course, didn’t like this at all. The London Economic called the claim “extraordinary“, and the Daily Express called it a “horrific attack..” Is it though? Let’s take a look at Johnson’s documented treatment of women to see what we can find.

    Chequered past

    In 2019, journalist Charlotte Edwardes claimed that Johnson groped her thigh, and that of another woman seated at their table. As Business Insider wrote, Johnson was Edwardes’ boss when the incident took place. Unfortunately – and unsurprisingly – Edwardes was derided at the time. The Guardian reported that “insiders” called the claim “bollocks.”

    However, Edwardes’ disclosure also led to comedian Shappi Khorsandi saying that Johnson squeezed her hand under the table on BBC Question Time after knowing her for “for roughly 20 seconds“. Khorsandi said:

    It was not assault, and I’m not saying it was a sexual advance. But it was a gesture by a man who is not used to giving women the same respect he grants to a man. He would not, for example, have held Nish Kumar’s hand when he was on Question Time. And in my experience, if a man is that comfortable holding the hand of a woman he doesn’t know, then I believe the other woman who says he grabbed her leg at a party.

    Johnson has also had a number of allegations of misconduct against him. Businessperson Jennifer Arcuri has admitted to having a four-year affair with the now-prime minister. Investigations are ongoing as to whether Johnson abused his position as London mayor in order to benefit Arcuri.

    Look away now

    But wait, there’s more. A few days ago, the New York Times (NYT) ran a story about how the Times had published and then removed an article. According to the NYT, the original article was about Johnson and his then-staffer Carrie Symonds (now his wife):

    The article reported that Prime Minister Boris Johnson, when he was the foreign secretary in 2018, proposed appointing his mistress at the time, Carrie Symonds, as his chief of staff, with a salary of 100,000 pounds ($122,000). Ms. Symonds married Mr. Johnson in 2021, but in 2018, he was still married to his previous wife, Marina.

    Private Eye picked up a lot more than this, though. One social media user shared a screenshot with more details:

    Does all of this add up to a picture of Johnson as somebody who respects women? Or does it sound like someone who sees no problem with using women, and who will abuse his position for power?

    Culture of misogyny

    Many will be familiar with other examples of Johnson’s misogyny. When he said Muslim women wearing niqab looked like “letterboxes”, incidents of Islamophobia rose by 375%. He had to apologise for calling Emily Thornberry “Lady Nugee” in reference to her husband. And Johnson has also claimed that “voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts.”

    Surely, all this would mean that everyone just took Diane Abbott’s comments as fairly reserved, given the context? After all, Johnson’s actions and words speak for themselves. Well, no. We’re not going to bother repeating them here, but instead social media users bombarded Diane Abbott with sexist and racist comments.

    In fact, Abbott has received more abuse than any other MP. Research from Amnesty International showed that almost half of all abusive tweets sent to female MPs during the 2017 election were sent to Abbott. She’s also spoken about getting death and rape threats every day. Yet media hacks and people on social media are more ready to have a go at Abbott for drinking a mixed drink on a train than for anything so mundane as holding Johnson to account:

    Abbott is a dark-skinned Black woman who was the first Black woman ever elected to the House of Commons. She was the first Black Labour leadership candidate. She was the first Black Shadow Home Secretary. And she was the first Black woman to represent her party from the dispatch box during Prime Minister’s Questions.

    Abbott gets more hate and abuse than any other MP because of racism and sexism. Specifically, because of misogynoir. She’s broken barriers for many, and is experienced enough that if she has something to say about Boris Johnson, we would all do well to listen to her.

    Featured image via screenshot YouTube/BBC News

    By Maryam Jameela

  • Kurdish radical women journalists will not be silenced in the face of Turkish repression

    We are in the midst of a global attack on women. Right now, this patriarchal onslaught can be seen in the criminalisation of abortion in many US states, the fact that almost 1 in 3 women and girls experience sexual and/or physical violence in their lifetimes, and that on average 137 women are killed every day by a partner or family member. This misogyny can also be seen in the form of the Turkish state’s attacks on the Kurdish women’s movement.

    The Turkish state is engaged in a massive campaign of repression against the Kurdish Freedom Movement – one which has been dubbed a political genocide by the movement. There are currently 10,000 political prisoners being held in Turkey on charges related to the movement.

    Recep Tayyip Erdoğan‘s dictatorial regime is both socially conservative and deeply misogynist. Erdoğan has said publicly that women are “not equal to men due to their delicate natures”, and that Islam has “defined a position for women: motherhood.” The patriarchal nature of the Turkish regime is reflected in its vicious attack on Kurdish women.

    The women of the Kurdish Freedom Movement have paid a high price. For example, Ayşe Gökkan – spokeswoman of the Free Women’s Association (TJA) – was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2021. And Leyla Güven, the co-chair of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), was sentenced to 22 years in 2020. The state has opened a new case against Leyla in an attempt to extend this sentence even further.

    An attack against women’s autonomous media

    This attack has widened to the targeting of women’s news agencies. Earlier this month the Turkish state arrested 20 journalists – including several from the women’s media organisation Jin News. 16 of them were remanded in prison.

    Days after the mass arrests, radical journalist İnci Hekimoğlu was detained in a dawn raid on her home in the Turkish city of Izmir. The arrest was reportedly due to İnci’s social media posts.

    However, the state’s attack on radical Kurdish women’s media has been raging for a long time. Women’s news organisations have been censored and criminalised, and female journalists have been targeted.

    In 2016, Turkey was listed as the world’s most frequent jailer of journalists, and the country is still locking them up in huge numbers. But the repression is strongest against Kurdish women.

    Threatened with 20 years in prison for radical journalism

    Over the past six months, I have been part of two grassroots political delegations that travelled to Bakur – the part of Kurdistan within Turkey’s borders – in solidarity with the movements there. The delegations included people from UK anti-repression organisations, Kurdistan solidarity groups, a radical trade union, and three journalists from The Canary.

    Our delegation interviewed radical journalist Nurcan Yalçın about the state’s attempts to imprison her for her involvement in autonomous women’s media.

    When we met Nurcan she had been sentenced to three years and seven months in prison. She was awaiting the judgement of Turkey’s court of cessation (in Turkey, defendants do not normally serve their sentence until their appeal has been processed).

    Nurcan is banned from travelling abroad, and has had to surrender her passport to the police.

    Nurcan has been involved in women’s autonomous journalism since 2013. She started off by working for JinHa women’s news agency. JinHa has been made illegal by the Turkish state – but was relaunched as NuJINHA (which means ‘new Jinha’). Later on, Nurcan began working for the Jin TV production company. Jin is the Kurdish word for ‘woman’.

    Nurcan explained that, at Jin TV, all of the roles are carried out by women, whether it’s presenting the news to camera or doing the technical work behind the scenes. She said that Jin TV is run democratically, and all of the journalists and members make decisions together.

    “We try to make the voice of women heard”

    She said that the Kurdish radical media combats elitism by sharing skills amongst its journalists and not relying on formal educational qualifications. Nurcan herself never went to university.

    Nurcan said that at Jin TV:

    We try to make the voice of woman heard all around the world. We want to be the voice of women who are oppressed, who are subjected to violence, who face domestic violence.

    She added that Jin TV focuses on women’s traditions and culture, and politics relating to women.

    In Turkey, all non-mainstream journalists are targeted

    The Turkish state opened an investigation into Nurcan in 2015, for ‘making propaganda for a terrorist organisation’. She said that all non-mainstream journalists are targeted by the state, but this is worse if you are a Kurdish woman:

    If you are not a journalist working for mainstream media then you are targeted. If you are a woman journalist or Kurdish you will surely face more challenges.

    Nurcan told us that the state had started the case against her after she was involved in reporting for JinHa from Northeast Syria. She also reported on the uprising in Bakur – where people in many cities declared their autonomy from the Turkish state. A further charge was brought against her because she posted photos of her family members who were killed taking part in the uprising.

    Secret witnesses

    Finally, charges were also brought against Nurcan for joining Rosa Women’s Association, an organisation set up for women’s empowerment and to combat all forms of violence against women. Rosa Women’s Organisation has been heavily criminalised, and many of its members have been arrested and sent to prison accused of ‘terrorism’.

    Nurcan told us that the prosecution relied entirely on secret witnesses, who could not be cross-examined by her defence lawyers. She said:

    It is common for people to appear in court because of the statements of secret witnesses. You cannot ask any questions to them. My lawyers wanted to question the secret witnesses, but they [the witnesses] were never brought to court.

    Arrested while trying to do her job

    Nurcan said that she had previously been arrested in 2019, in the town of Mardin, while trying to report on the Turkish state’s sacking of the town’s elected co-mayors, who were part of the radical People’s Democratic Party (HDP). The HDP mayors were being replaced by a state appointee – a process that has been repeated all across Bakur. Nurcan told us:

    we had our cameras and everything, so everyone knew that we were journalists, but the police detained us – me and four other journalists. I was held in detention for eight days.

    The five of them were eventually charged with obstructing a police officer. They were all eventually acquitted of the charge.

    “We ask you to make our voices heard”

    Nurcan told our delegation that Turkey’s radical journalists need international solidarity. She said:

    When foreign people [like you] come to Kurdistan, then you see what kind of challenges we face, as both male and female journalists. We have faced many challenges here. We ask you to make our voices heard all around the world This will be a great support for us.

    The featured image is of Nurcan Yalçın, via NuJinHa

    This interview was carried out collaboratively with other members of my delegation.

    This is part one of a series of interviews The Canary has carried out with Jin News journalists about Turkish state repression. You can read our previous interview here.

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The myth of working-class men blocking gender equality

    As a kid, I was brought up in relative poverty on a working class council estate, and part of that upbringing involved experiencing and witnessing profound violence perpetrated by several working class ‘dads’. And yet, as a researcher of men, masculinities and social class, I have over the last decade or so been interested to challenge the ways that working class masculinity has been framed in popular, media and academic discussions.

    In terms of our everyday imagination, working class men are, perhaps, often the figure that comes to mind when many people think of the impediments to gender equality – a lower-educated man, maybe from a regional town or the ‘less desirable’ city suburbs, perhaps a tradie or factory worker.

    An adherent to regressive, traditional and harmful masculine ideals that perpetuate gender inequality in terms of divisions of domestic labour and enacting violence towards children, women and gender diverse people. In light of the recent revelations of the disgusting prevalence of sexual assault and harassment in Western Australian mining industry, this image might have been further underscored.

    I want to suggest, though, that the image of working-class masculinity operates as a convenient foil that works to obscure or minimise more privileged men’s significant contribution to gender inequalities.

    In a way, it’s strikingly obvious that powerful, wealthy, elite, professional-class men are also significant threats to the autonomy and safety of women and gender diverse people. Such men are the common thread in the evidence brought to light by the now global #metoo movement, 2016’s revelation that Donald Trump self-advocates for non-consensual ‘pussy grabbing’, and last week’s frankly grotesque US Supreme court decision to overturn the rights to abortion.

    Closer to home, we also need look no further than the accounts of misogyny and rape culture in our own seat of government as well as in some of Australia’s elite boys schools.

    Despite these attacks on the rights and bodies of women, as individual and collectives, by more privileged men, the negative stereotype of working-class masculinity remains stubbornly ingrained.

    My colleague, Karla Elliott, and I have recently attempted to illustrate how this remains the case in a lot of academic research, where violence, sexism, and homophobia are often understood as a response to relative (economic) powerlessness and status deficit that is inherent in the lives of working-class boys and men.

    Our individual previous research and collective ongoing studies centres the lives and voices of working class and other ‘men on the margins’.

    Our data has further undermined the idea that men in the margin somehow lag behind the real vanguard of progress: white, middle-class men.

    In particular, the interviews we have conducted in the UK and Australia in the last 18 months or so regularly reveal evidence of, among other things, what is sometimes called ‘caring masculinities’, i.e. ‘masculine identities that reject domination and its associated traits and embrace values of care such as positive emotion [and] interdependence’.

    This does not deny that problematic aspects of masculinity continue in the lives of working class or marginalised men – just as they do in the lives of more privileged men. Rather, the point to stress is that the biographical narratives we uncovered are replete with the commitments to egalitarian gender relations and other practices often passed off as being the domain of educated and/or otherwise privileged men.

    This includes what some academics call ‘lived egalitarianism’ – a significant if often understated contribution to household labour and childcare that is necessitated by the realities of working-class life that demands a dual-income.

    In contrast to working class men, middle class lives are often (though of course not always) characterised by ‘spoken egalitarianism’, where men can easily talk a good game on equality of household tasks, made all the more achievable when a proportion of the domestic and childcare duties are outsourced to poorly paid women domestic workers, often minority ethnic and immigrant women.

    To be clear here, oftentimes even a smaller gender gap in time allocated to childcare duties, or seeming evidence of ‘involved fatherhood’, is not a simple good that reflects middle class men’s commitment to equality, but is bound up with the problematic use of a marginalised workforce that are part of ‘the coloniality of labour’.

    Zooming back out from our own research, the picture of working-class masculinity as a key driver of a stalling gender revolution is complicated further when we factor in that studies repeatedly show that well-educated women, employed in high-earning professional occupations report higher levels of gender discrimination than their working-class peers.

    Coming back to a point above about a common thread: it’s the presence of professional-class men in such organisations!

    Feminism has, in the words of the esteemed cultural theorist Angela McRobbie, become ‘a ubiquitous force in everyday life’.  It has inspired new possibilities for gender relations, evident in the supposedly counter intuitive narratives that Karla and I have found in our interview data.

    Its ubiquity has also, though, been met with ferocious backlash with grim consequences, including the attack on reproductive rights in the US and the possible threat of what is to follow.

    We would do well to keep at the front of our mind that masculinity is centrally implicated in the latter, but we ought to resist any suggestions that it is specifically a product of working-classness. This is not an effort to engage in a form of ‘whataboutery’, but rather to ensure we can train our attention to the core of the problem – the powers, people and structures that sustain and expand gender inequalities.

     

     

     

     

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  • Bra-burning to Hollywood – trailblazing women in film

    In an electric event held at the ANU last month, some of Australia’s best female film makers and experts shone a light on a tough, sexist industry. The battle continues for female film practitioners and their supporters in policy, media, activism and academia to not only celebrate their achievements but also to address the ongoing challenges still facing the underrepresentation of women in Australian cinema. Here Professor Lisa French reflects.

    Since the 1970s, each decade of women’s work in the moving image in Australia can be read as a significant cultural location. One of the most momentous in Australia was the 1970s, which saw the emergence of feminist culture and the revival of the film industry.

    This year, the Pamela Denoon Lecture, Australia’s longest running and most prestigious feminist lecture, shone a spotlight on this era, and a significant event in 1973 called Womenvision. Organised by The  National Foundation for Australian Women, it was presented as a panel of trailblazing women who looked back and joined the dots to 2022, to review the status, participation, and experience of women in Australian film and television today.

    That panel: Womenvision Revisited, hosted by award-winning social justice journalist and author Ginger Gorman, recognised the significance of the 1973 event as “the first major [national] enterprise of the women’s movement”.

    In 1973 there was barely an industry and women found it difficult to make films, but Womenvision created a momentum for change. From this time women stepped up and demanded and lobbied to be included. And according to panellist, writer director Kim Farrant, “so many women have shown their talent, and that’s just that cream rising to the top, they just keep having an incredible voice”.

    Leaders of industry, and women who attended the 1973 event joined the panel: director/writer Kim Farrant (Strangerland, The Weekend Away ); producer Sue Maslin AO (The Dressmaker, and Executive Producer of Brazen Hussies); producer Sheila Jayadev (Way out West, Ali’s Wedding); Professor Lisa French (author and leading authority on women in Australian film and editor/ co-author of the book WomenVision), director/cinematographer Jane Castle (60 Thousand Barrels, When the Camera Stopped Rolling) and Director/ Producer Pat Fiske (Rocking the Foundations, When the Camera Stopped Rolling).

    Pat Fiske described the atmosphere of the event, the energy and excitement.

    Sue Maslin observed the debt that women in the industry owe to these trailblazers: “I completely owe my career to those women …[who] realized that we were not going to have women’s stories in our culture unless women did get the cameras get the sound equipment and just get out there and make the work”.

    It was a completely different era but according to the Maslin, today, “the debate is just as valid”, and “diversity is central to our storytelling”. As Fiske noted, the event caused significant momentum, notably spawning women’s groups and then some of those women organized the first International Women’s Film Festival in Australia, showcasing female creativity and offering a context for women’s cinema.

    As a woman of colour, Shelia Jayadev reflected on the personal and structural barriers, in particular fighting against the idea that diverse stories are ‘niche’ rather than something that the general public wants. Although Australia is diverse, she said “we’re not seeing those stories reflected on screen as much as we should’. The biggest fight for her is to shift thinking, to get the exhibitors and the distributors on board to “reflect what Australia looks like”, to be able to make films at the same scale rather than with a micro budget because it’s niche. Being female as well as looking different makes it harder to break through.

    Farrant argued for intersectional considerations because: “if we’re not seeing ourselves reflected the colour of our skin, our gender, our sexual preference, our disability, our fullness, all of it, then how can we rise a sense of self-worth that healthy self-worth that we all need?”

    Diversity seen this way is essential for an individual to mature, and for social cohesion and the range of identities we can inhabit.

    Women in careers such as cinematography have had a harder time than some other crafts. Cinematographer Jane Castle has experienced great success but knows that change is slow. Her mother, Lilias Fraser (the subject of Castle’s When the Cameras Stopped Rolling), single-handedly shot her first film in 1957. The ABC picked it up and were “screening it every night but when she went to apply for a job as a cinematographer, … they just laughed out of the room”. According to Castle, “we still have this dreadful statistic of how few women’s cinematographers are shooting feature films”.

    Kim Farrant, who is working currently in Hollywood, and whose film Weekend Away (2022) was number one on Netflix, acknowledged how significant mentors are. She also outlined the challenge women directors encounter up against male dominated teams, a lonely and often alienating journey if you are one woman with thirty men. Castle also spoke of women having to work harder to gain respect from male crew. Women’s issues such as the experience of violence, are not regarded by gatekeepers as what audiences will want to see, despite the large percentage of women who have encountered such violence. The panel discuss a breadth of issues such as wellbeing or childcare. An innovative solution to the childcare dilemma was that of sharing a job to achieve a doable work life (family) balance.

    The panel pondered what is being done now to improve the position of women in film, which for features in Australia has women as around 34% of producers, 16% of directors and 24% of writers. Maslin was the founding president of the Natalie Miller Foundation, which offer screen industry career fellowships, and both Maslin and French have been on Screen Australia’s Gender Matters Taskforce, an initiative to support women’s careers and creativity. Gender Matters has increased the gender balance in creative teams, supported women’s businesses, funded storytelling and attachments, whilst achieving soft results such as increasing women’s confidence submitting applications and changing funding agency and film industry practices. These initiatives are valuable and have an outcome, but there needs to be a whole of industry commitment to change to achieve equality and equity. It is not about fixing women but that fairer film and television workplaces must be built.

    The panel concluded with calls to action: listening to women, including women as leaders and gatekeepers to improve their autonomy over their work and enable women’s voices to be heard. Industry leaders must commit to inclusion. A recording of this event, which includes video material played, is available here: Womenvision Revisited video

     

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  • ‘The effects of this toxic industry are everywhere’

    Content notification: This post discusses sexual violence and trauma. 

    ‘Body Shell Girl’ is a memoir in verse about the first two years of a decade that Australian Rose Hunter spent in the sex industry in Canada. Rose hoped she could do only what was required of her, without expereicing trauma or side effects and leave the industry on her own terms. But she was shattered by what unfolded. Her book portrays a dehumanising, destructive and misogynist industry. BroadAgenda’s editor, Ginger Gorman, asked Rose a few questions. 

    1. Tell us a little bit about who you are in a nutshell?

    I’m a sober and basically optimistic woman with a persistent streak. After a tumultuous existence as an active addict for most of the first forty years of my life (I had an eating disorder already as a child)—in my forties I found a way of living in peace with myself, and I’m grateful every day for it.

    Rose Hunter

    Author Rose Hunter.

    1. You’re Australian. How did you end up in the sex industry in Canada?

    As a young person I thought Australia was one cause of my unhappiness, and my eating disorder, and I thought life would be different if I could be somewhere else. So I got a working visa for Canada, which I was able to get as a recent university graduate.

    The visa was for one year, but I left with a firm desire never to come back. Some people call this “doing a geographical.” That is, moving geographically in an attempt to change the (inner) self.

    As most people who aren’t addicts know, this (moving) doesn’t work. I was not the picture of mental health before I got into the industry.

    1. I’m interested in the contrast of what you hoped you’d achieve in the sex industry vs what actually happened. What was your initial dream? What did you imagine?

    The first thing I imagined was being able to pay my rent that month. A bit later I thought I’d use this industry as a way of “getting ahead” so to speak. It was my dream to work in film (behind the cameras), and I thought the sex industry could pay for the education I thought I needed to get into my dream career.

    1. You thought you could only do what was required of you. But your experience was very different from this. What actually unfolded?

    I got deeper into the industry than I intended. Crossing over from the massage parlours into what the industry calls “full service” (how this came about is described in the book), felt like stepping through a one-way door—that and being raped shortly after, and the fact that I didn’t graduate from film school. More and more the impression I got—which was reinforced with every misstep I took—was that there was no other way I could make enough money to support myself, and there never would be.

    1. Your book is highly unusual because you’ve chosen to tell it in verse. Why? (I’m interested that folks have used words like “tender” and “visceral” to describe this work…)

    I was poet before writing this book. I’ve had several previous books of poetry published that largely don’t touch on this theme. My aesthetic is to approach a piece of writing as art first, and trust that if there is an accompanying message, it will emerge truthfully from the material. That is what happened with this book.

    But it took me a long time, and many failed attempts. Once I started writing this version of the book, I realized I was interested in what sort of different telling of my story poetry might be able to accomplish. I was also aware that there were already quite a few prose memoirs on the topic, and I had a desire to do something different, form-wise.

    Additionally, I wanted to write a specific kind of poetry for this book. I wanted it to be narrative and entertaining; to move more like prose—but still be poetry, with literary poetry values. I wanted the book to be enjoyed both by poetry readers and by people who didn’t ordinarily read poetry. This was a difficult thin line to tread. But it seems I got there. People who haven’t read a book of poetry since high school have messaged me to say they loved the book. That really warms my heart.

    Tender? Well, I can see that too, perhaps in poems like “Rick,” or “Aquarium,” which have what I think are more sympathetic men. Unfortunately, my narrator (me-then) lacks tenderness for herself in the book. But I do feel there is implied tenderness—me-now feels tender towards me-then these days.

    This self-compassion really came about during the writing of the book, and I believe it comes through in some of the dark humour, for example, and in the portrayal of my narrator’s idiosyncratic and sometimes immature (young in the mind) thought patterns and habits.

    Body Shell Girl Cover Image

    Body Shell Girl Cover Image

    1. Your incredible book of verse discusses an industry that’s dehumanising and misogynist. Tell me about that.

    Well, how can I count the ways! There are too many, for this word length.

    This is an industry in which men “order” what they want, off what is often called a menu. They are incredibly specific. Every feature of a woman or girl is atomized. Age, race, skin colour, weight, measurements, bra size, real or fake boobs, shaved or trimmed, and also very important: how convincingly will she pretend that she wants it? Or is she one of those ‘bitches’ who dares to admit she is only there for the money, or who watches the clock? How violent and degrading can you be with her? How much can you get from her for your money?

    It is easy to be critical of the worst ‘Johns‘ (as clients sex workers are sometimes called), but the fact is that supposedly “nice” men discuss women in the sex industry in ways similar to this, openly in internet forums and among each other, as well as with women who aren’t their wives, and who they think won’t rat them out.

    Part of the reason they think it’s OK to talk like that is because there is an increasingly mainstreamed place where it is perfectly acceptable and normal to talk like that, and to act it all out, and that is the sex industry.

    The effects of this toxic industry can be seen everywhere.

    1. What traumas did you suffer in the industry? How have you healed? Ginger’s note: If you feel comfortable, I’m interested for your to discuss IPV, addiction and recovery here too.

    I was raped, as well as assaulted on very many occasions, none of which registered as assault at the time, because it was just business as usual.

    Eventually I drank to excess daily and took tranquilizers to cope with it all, and I got involved with violent men (I am also a survivor of intimate partner violence).

    There’s so much I could say about the healing process (it’s such a large topic for me)—but the main thing I can say here is that healing for me started when I got sober, and free of my pill addiction and eating disorder as well.

    1. What do you want readers to take away from your work? 

    I hope I’ve written a book that has many different takeaways, depending on the reader. But one major one I can point to is that I set out to create a vivid and emotional experience. I wanted readers to be able to step inside the existence of someone who was in this industry for an extended period of time, and experience some part of what that was like.

    Having had the experience of my book, readers can then ask their own questions, about whether they should call up that escort tonight, for example, or whether they think so-called “sex work” is really a job like any other that should be endorsed by our laws and popular representations.

     

    Please note: Feature image is a stock photo 

     

     

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  • Who will call out the misogyny and abuse undermining women’s academic freedom in NZ universities?

    ANALYSIS: By Richard Shaw, Massey University; Andrew Dickson, Massey University; Bevan Erueti, Massey University; Glenn Banks, Massey University; John O’Neill, Massey University, and Roger McEwan, Massey University

    Threats, intimidation and misogyny have long been a reality for women in public life around the world, and the pandemic appears to have amplified this toxic reality.

    Aotearoa New Zealand is led by one of the world’s best-known female prime ministers, Jacinda Ardern, and was the first country in the world to grant all women the right to vote.

    Yet even here today, attempts to silence, diminish and demean the prime minister, female MPs and other prominent women have plumbed new depths, leading to calls for more robust policing of violent online and offline behaviour.

    Unfortunately, the phenomenon extends well beyond elected representatives and public health professionals into most workplaces, including academia.

    Women working in universities, including those in positions of academic leadership, are also routinely subjected to online vitriol intended to shut them down — and thus to prevent them exercising their academic freedom to probe, question and test orthodox ways of making sense of the world.

    One of the commonest defences of abusive or threatening language (online or not) is an appeal to everyone’s right to free speech.

    And this has echoes within universities, too, when academic freedom becomes a testing ground of what is acceptable and what isn’t.

    A duty to call it out
    The international evidence indicates that almost all of this behaviour comes from men, some of them colleagues or students of the women concerned.

    The abuse comes in various forms (such as trolling and rape or death threats) and takes place in a variety of settings, including conferences. It is enabled by, among other things, the hierarchical nature of universities, in which power is stratified and unequally distributed, including on the basis of gender.

    As male academics we have an obligation not just to call out these sorts of behaviour but also to identify some of the corrosive consequences of the misogyny directed against women academics, wherever they may work.

    We need to use our own academic freedom to assess what can happen to that of academic women when digital misogyny passes unchecked.

    Whose freedom to speak?
    Misogyny in university settings takes place in a particular context: universities have a statutory obligation to serve as producers and repositories of knowledge and expertise, and to act as society’s “conscience and critic”.

    Academic freedom is what enables staff and students to carry out the work through which these obligations are met. This specific type of freedom is a means to various ends, including testing and contesting perceived truths, advancing the boundaries of knowledge and talking truth to power.

    It is intended to serve the public good, and must be exercised in the context of the “highest ethical standards” and be open to public scrutiny.

    A great deal has been written about threats to academic freedom: intrusive or risk averse university managers, the pressures to commercialise universities’ operations, and governments bent on surveilling and stifling internal dissent are the usual suspects.

    But when women academics are subjected to online misogyny, which is a common response when they exercise academic freedom, we are talking about a different kind of threat.

    Betrayal of academic freedom
    The misogynists seek to silence, shut down, diminish and demean; to ridicule on the basis of gender, and to deride scholarship that doesn’t align with their own preconceptions of gender and body type.

    Their behaviour is neither casual nor accidental. As journalist Michelle Duff put it, it is intended to intimidate “as part of a concentrated effort to suppress women’s participation in public and political life”.

    Its aim is to achieve the obverse of the purpose of academic freedom: to maintain an unequal status quo rather than change it.

    It is to the credit of women academics that the misogynists frequently fail. But sometimes the hostility does have a chilling effect. For a woman to exercise her academic freedom when she is the target of online threats to rape or kill requires considerable bravery.

    Women who continue to test perceived truths, advance the boundaries of knowledge and speak truth to power under such conditions are academic exemplars. They are contributing to the public good at considerable personal cost.

    ‘Whaddarya?’
    The online misogyny directed at women academics is taking place in a broader context in which violent language targeting individuals and minority groups is becoming increasingly graphic, normalised and visible.

    We do not believe the misogynistic “righteous outrage” directed at academic women is justified under the statutory underpinnings of freedom of speech.

    Freedom of speech — within or beyond a university — is not absolute, and to the extent that it is invoked to cloak violent rhetoric against women, existing constraints on that freedom (which are better thought of as protections for the targets of misogyny) need strengthening.

    Men who engage in online misogyny almost always speak from an (unacknowledged) position of privilege. Moreover, by hiding their sense of entitlement behind core democratic notions, their self-indulgence does all of us a disfavour.

    With academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to challenge misogyny and not stay silent. What so many women across New Zealand’s tertiary sector are subject to poses a challenge to men everywhere.

    The kind of conduct our women colleagues are routinely subjected to is the sort of behaviour at the heart of Greg McGee’s seminal critique of masculinity and masculine insecurity in New Zealand, the play Foreskin’s Lament. In the final scene of the play, the main character stares out at the audience and asks: “Whaddarya, whaddarya, whaddarya?”

    He might have been asking the question of every man, including those of us who work in universities.The Conversation

    Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics, Massey University; Dr Andrew Dickson is senior lecturer, Massey University; Dr Bevan Erueti, senior lecturer — Health Promotion/Associate Dean — Māori, Massey University; Dr Glenn Banks is professor of geography and head of school, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University; Dr John O’Neill, head of the Institute of Education te Kura o Te Mātauranga, Massey University, and Dr Roger McEwan is senior lecturer, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • Gordon Campbell: On gendered perceptions in Aotearoa politics

    COMMENTARY:  By Gordon Campbell

    In recent weeks, barely a day has gone by without Christopher Luxon demonstrating the chasm of ability that exists between the leaders of Aotearoa New Zealand’s two major political parties. When his latest gaffe (on public transport funding) was politely pointed out to him by a NZ Herald journalist, Luxon replied: “I haven’t really thought too deeply about it, to be honest.”

    Maybe that should be National’s next election campaign slogan: “Thinking Is For The Liberal Elite: Vote National!” For a party that claims to disdain mediocrity, National appears to have elevated a prime specimen of it to its top position.

    Before the public transport gaffe slides down the memory hole, it is worth keeping in mind what Luxon actually said. As he told the NZ Herald: “Fundamentally, it [public transport] has got to stand on its own merits…”

    When reminded public transport has been heavily subsidised in modern times, Luxon admitted he had not thought deeply on the subject. “I haven’t thought too deeply about it, to be honest. I think the bottom line is, we want to encourage more mode shift,” he said…

    ”Public transport needs to stand on its own feet, it can’t be subsidised or underwritten right? It has to be able to build its own case.”

    What are we to make of stupidity on this scale? Leave aside the fact that public transport already stands on its merits, by providing a public service, and by helping to combat climate change.

    Leave aside the fact that roads and politicians — and Air New Zealand, both now and while Luxon was CEO — are also all heavily subsidised.

    Look instead at the extra costs the public would be facing from what Luxon is proposing. Transport Minister Michael Wood has spelled out some of them:

    “Under Luxon’s plan a multi-zone bus fare in Auckland would go from $12.60 to $31.50, in Christchurch a $4.70 trip would become $11.75, a train ride in Wellington would go from $19 to $47.50, and superannuitants would no longer be able to use their SuperGold Card to catch off-peak and weekend public transport.”

    In all likelihood, Luxon would not really follow through and do what he just said. His modus operandi is gradually becoming clear. It follows this basic pattern: what Luxon says is almost beside the point, since the gaffe (once it has been detected by other people) will be quickly followed up by a scrambled attempt to conceal the meaning his words plainly conveyed.

    Essentially, the details are merely the window dressing for the slogans that take up most of the rentable space inside his noggin. Such as: Government Bad, Private Sector Good. Regulations Bad For Business, Open Slather Good For Business. Unions Bad. Farmers Good. Landlords Very Good. Climate Change Hurt My Head.

    Footnote: All the same, Luxon is posing as the champion of the people fighting the cost of living pressures. Yet that pose is wildly inconsistent with what he has actually been advocating, and opposing.

    As Clint Smith has pointed out, the list includes :

    Luxon’s cost of living policies: – oppose the Winter Energy Payment – oppose the minimum wage hike – oppose the benefit increase – oppose Fair Pay Agreements – increase public transport prices – $2 tax cut for typical Kiwi taxpayer – $18,000 tax cut for him.

    Gendered double standards
    The double standard involved here is breathtaking. If a female politician said something as laughable as Luxon’s proposal on transport subsidies and defended it on the basis that she hadn’t thought about it too deeply, she would never survive the fallout.

    She would be roundly damned as a scatterbrain and a show pony, and deemed plainly unfit for higher office.

    Yet because Luxon is a man in a suit, and because he is the leader of a National Party that has always been suspicious of conspicuous intelligence, he is being enabled to continue on his bumbling way.

    Jacinda Ardern on the other hand, is held to a different standard. Obviously, there is and should be a range of opinions on whether her government is doing the right thing. Even people who routinely vote Labour criticise it on the details and pace of change it is currently overseeing.

    However, much of the most vehement criticism levelled at Ardern has little to do with policy detail and a lot to do with her gender. Her competence — which includes a command of detail across the whole range of government activity, and an ability to communicate the details succinctly — is commonly held against her.

    In an excellent article on Stuff last week, Michelle Duff tackled that issue head on:

    Two years into the pandemic, there is talk about the new normal. Here’s what that looks like. It is open misogyny, visible on every platform and supported and promoted by upvotes on Reddit, laughing emojis on Facebook, comments about “that woman” on LinkedIn, and someone who looks like your Aunty referring to the PM as “Cindy” and calling her a “c…”.

    It is targeted and increasingly violent misogynistic abuse and threats – illustrated by but not limited to the escalation in gendered hatred directed towards Ardern – being directed at public-facing women from central and local body politicians to journalists, public servants, academics and chief executives.

    Ardern is (a) the most prominent and (b) the most consistent target of the gendered hatred that Duff is talking about. Yet as Duff reports, the abuse and the escalating threats have a wider context:

    The amount and tone of gendered disinformation and misogynistic abuse online has exploded since last August, constituting both a national security threat and a human rights issue that authorities are struggling to combat. It appears to be part of a concentrated effort to suppress women’s participation in public and political life, borne from far-right ideology designed to oppress women that has spread to a more mainstream audience.

    “There’s an increase in the amount, and there’s an increase in the intent, and that’s to control and punish women who challenge male dominance, the Prime Minister but all women,” says Disinformation Project lead Kate Hannah. It is worse for women of colour and wāhine Māori, gender minorities and disabled women, she says.

    It is a spectrum of abuse, and at one end it begins with the denigration intentionally conveyed by the use of the term “Cindy” to refer to the Prime Minister. As Duff says:

    Some might find this funny, but its aim is to diminish. Massey University senior lecturer Dr Suze Wilson, who studies leadership, says no-one called John Key “Johnny,” or Chris Luxon “Chrissy,” in an attempt to infantalise or belittle them. “Right from the outset you had people saying, ‘I don’t want to be told what to do by that woman,’ with an element of ‘how dare she tell me what to do.’ That had to pre-exist for this to be possible.”

    But that was petty compared to now. “What’s really tipped it is the more violent rhetoric. The straight out abusive terms, the c-word, the horse-face, the threats to kill. “It comes from this idea that if any woman comes into a position of power she’s not acting as a ‘good’ woman should — and that’s why this doesn’t only come from men, it comes from people who cleave to more traditional idea around gender roles…”

    Like most of the rhetoric that characterises the anti-vaxx movement, the gun lobby and other parts of our public discourse, these extremes of politicised misogyny have been imported here from the United States — a country where religious beliefs permeate the perceptions of what are seen to be the appropriate gender roles.

    I’m not implying that this alarming trend — and the double standard it entails — is the fault of Christopher Luxon. But he is definitely a beneficiary of it. Because if politics was a level playing field, Luxon wouldn’t be standing a chance against Ardern. On every conceivable measure of ability, he simply isn’t in her league.

    Footnote: On that point, Luxon is often dismissed as being a John Key clone. That’s a mistake. Because what Luxon has been proposing are very hard right policies, and not the moderate centrism that enabled Key to be seen as an amiable, grinning placeholder acceptable to a wide range of voters.

    Instead, Luxon and David Seymour are trying to inject policies into the political mainstream that over the past 30 years, have enjoyed only about 5-10 percent support at most. It isn’t a stretch to regard their “small government” extremism as having more than a little in common with the “That bitch can’t tell me what to do” extremism mentioned above.

    Gordon Campbell is an independent progressive journalist and editor of Scoop’s Werewolf magazine. This article has been republished with the author’s permission.

  • Sabina Nessa killer jailed for at least 36 years for sexually motivated attack

    Warning: this article contains graphic description of assault

    A sexual predator has been jailed for at least 36 years for the murder of primary school teacher Sabina Nessa.

    Koci Selamaj, 36, travelled to London from the south coast to carry out the premeditated attack on September 17 last year.

    The garage worker targeted 28-year-old Ms Nessa as she walked through Cator Park in Kidbrooke, south-east London, to meet a friend at 8.34pm.

    CCTV footage captured the moment Selamaj ran up behind her and hit her over the head 34 times with a 2ft-long metal traffic triangle. He carried her unconscious body up a grassy bank and out of view. He then pulled up her clothes, removed her tights and underwear, and strangled her before covering her body in grass.

    Ms Nessa, who taught a year one class at Rushey Green Primary School in Catford, was found nearly 24 hours later near a community centre in the park.

    Days later, Selamaj, from Eastbourne, East Sussex, was arrested in the seaside town and pleaded guilty to murder in February.

    Jailed for life

    On Friday, Selamaj refused to come to the Old Bailey and was jailed for life in his absence. Mr Justice Sweeney set a minimum term of 36 years for the “savage” sexually motivated attack.

    He said Ms Nessa was the

    wholly blameless victim of an absolutely appalling murder which was entirely the fault of the defendant.

    Her death added to “the sense of insecurity” particularly felt by woman walking through the city at night.

    He said:

    She had every right, as her family said, to be walking through the park all glammed up and out to enjoy herself after a long week at work…

    The defendant robbed her and them of her life.

    No remorse

    The judge noted the defendant’s guilty plea and lack of previous convictions. But he added:

    It is a striking feature of the defendant’s case that, clearly deliberately, it is not suggested by him that he had any remorse for what he did to Sabina Nessa.

    The judge said it was “cowardly” of the Albanian national to refuse to attend his sentencing but said he had no power to force him.

    Earlier, prosecutor Alison Morgan QC said Selamaj had been violent towards his ex-partner in the past, including throttling her a number of times.

    Three days before the attack on Ms Nessa, the defendant booked a room at the five-star Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, East Sussex, just five minutes from his home.

    At about 2.20pm on September 17, hotel staff alerted police via 101 after Selamaj checked in to his £325-a-night room. Police said they had been concerned about his demeanour and the fact he lived close by. Selamaj went on to contact his former partner in a failed bid to persuade her to have sex with him. She said in a statement that he appeared “very agitated” when they met in his car near the hotel.

    The defendant then drove his Nissan Micra to Brighton and on to Kidbrooke in south London. He used his bank card at Sainsbury’s to buy a rolling pin, chilli flakes and an energy drink. He rejected the rolling pin as a weapon in favour of the traffic triangle, which he was to use to attack Ms Nessa.

    Sabina Nessa death
    CCTV  of Koci Selamaj in Sainsbury’s buying a rolling pin before the murder (Met Police/PA)

    Ferocious attack

    He entered Cator Park shortly after 8pm and lay in wait for half-an-hour before Ms Nessa arrived en route to The Depot bar where she was due to meet a friend.

    Ms Morgan said Ms Nessa had expressed concern about being in the park after dark but decided to use the cut through that night because she was running late.

    In grainy footage played in court, Selamaj was seen running up behind Ms Nessa and launching a ferocious attack with the 2ft long traffic triangle. As he carried her up a grassy hill, they went out of shot for 20 minutes.

    Before leaving the park, he picked up pieces of the warning triangle and used wet wipes to clean a park bench near to where he launched his initial attack.

    En route back to the south coast, Selamaj dumped the warning triangle in the River Teise in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

    Police said Selamaj appeared to be “calm and collected” on his arrest.

    On being cautioned through a translator, Selamaj said:

    What will happen if I open up now and say everything?

    In mitigation, Lewis Power QC had said Selamaj had provided no explanation for why he killed Ms Nessa, adding:

    He simply accepts that he did it.

    ‘You are not a human being, you are an animal’

    Addressing her absent killer on Thursday, Ms Nessa’s parents Abdur Rouf and Azibun Nessa said in a statement:

    You had no right to take her away from us in such a cruel way.

    The moment the police officer came to our house and told her she was found dead our world shattered into pieces.

    How could you do such a thing to an innocent girl walking by, minding her own business.

    You are not a human being, you are an animal.

    Ms Nessa’s family hugged supporters as they left court.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • A (feminist) love story saved by radical empathy

    It’s something each of us might sometimes wonder. How do you change someone’s mind? This unexpected love story is the ultimate lesson.

    It could easily have been one of those Tinder-dates-from-hell you so often read about, or the opening scene of a Hollywood rom-com: an outspoken, staunch feminist meets her online match and discovers he’s a former editor of Playboy magazine. There are so many ways this date could have gone wrong. And yet, three years later, staunch feminist, Dr Niki Vincent and former Playboy editor, Chuck Smeeton, are still together and going strong.

    In a world in which there is so much heated division, the way in which Niki and Chuck negotiated a way through their differences provides a master-class in radical empathy. To the uninitiated, this is a concept that encourages people to actively consider another person’s point of view.

    “I don’t think Chuck appreciated exactly what kind of a bombshell it actually was at that time,” says Niki, 59, who serves as the Commissioner for Gender Equality in the Public Sector in Victoria. Chuck, 58, is now Chief Operating Officer for the Royal Institution of Australia.

    For some, it may have been a ‘deal-breaker’. But Niki, a psychologist, processed Chuck’s revelation in the context of all the other things she had learned about him during, and in the lead-up to, their first date.

    As they connected over lunch, Niki found Chuck interesting and engaging – and, she concedes, good looking. But mostly, she was taken by his willingness to talk about his kids. She liked his attitude towards them.

    “I have lots of kids in my life – loads. In fact, more than most,” Niki explains. You get the sense that if Chuck wasn’t into kids, it would have been more of a deal breaker than being a former Playboy editor.

    Niki and Chuck

    Chuck says it was Niki’s energy that struck him most, “There was a lot of communication … It was just the energy and excitement … and her eyes. You know, amazing.”

    The point of approaching someone with radical empathy is that if someone raises a red flag, instead of following your natural inclination to wrap them in it and bury them, you try to understand how they came to be waving it.

    Niki’s personal and professional experience has taught her not to judge people based on their opinions and biases – not to write people off just because you disagree or disapprove of some of the things they say.  She explains:

    “I’ve realised that people with different – very different – views from me don’t get up in the morning thinking, ‘I’m going to be evil.’ They just have different views. And they think they are good people.”

    So, while their opinions might make her “a bit cross” she says, “I approach them as good people with different ideas.”

    Not only has this approach allowed Niki to date different kinds of people, she believes it has helped her to have some influence on their attitudes. She laughs, “My team used to joke that I was trying to save the world one man at a time – sort of hang out with them and help them understand feminism and my perspective.”

    It can’t have put them off because she remains friends with most of the men she dated after her divorce.

    During this time Niki began to realise that many men’s attitudes weren’t coming from a place of misogyny, but from a lack of perspective. When feminist perspectives were introduced in a non-confrontational way, many of the men Niki dated had the grace and intelligence to accept they just hadn’t looked at things from a woman’s perspective. That’s not to say they all became feminists, but they came to appreciate her point of view.

    “They’ll occasionally send me inappropriate jokes, just to, you know, give me a jab or whatever.”

    But, she says, even that indicates they’re looking at those jokes through a different lens.

    Given those experiences, says Niki, when Chuck raised a red flag with a Playboy bunny on it:

    “I just thought he was like other guys that don’t get this stuff. But, I could also see that he was a guy that was open to exploring things. We had such an easy conversation that I felt I would be able to give him some stuff that he’d probably go away and think about it. I don’t think I analysed it that much at the time. I just hoped he’d be open to it.”

    Chuck certainly didn’t think of himself as a misogynist, and it would be unfair to cast him in that light. In fact, most of his time at Playboy was spent as a journalist, and he remains proud of that work.

    “You know there is the old story about Playboy, where the quality of articles is what it’s all about,” says Chuck, “It’s true, Playboy has excellent journalism, but in a wrapper that isn’t quite as acceptable.”

    Chuck insists:

    “I never thought of myself as a bad person. Obviously, you know, I thought I was a good person, but I didn’t understand a lot of those unconscious biases that came from my background, from the things that I’ve done.”

    When he became editor of the magazine in the mid-1990s, Chuck had no sense that women were being exploited. In fact, he took pains to give models complete control over which images were published. Now, he concedes, “I was very blind to what the publication was.”

    Through Niki, Chuck has come to understand that many people have an unconscious bias – attitudes they really haven’t reasoned out or given a lot of thought to. Sometimes, challenging those biases is just a matter of learning to look at things from a different perspective. As their relationship progressed, says Chuck, “I started to look at my unconscious bias with a new sense of awareness.”

     

     

    Niki and Chuck 2

     

    While it would be inaccurate to say Niki and Chuck’s differences never caused frustration and arguments between them, it was their determination to respect each other, keep the lines of communication open, and really understand each other that formed the foundation of their relationship.

    “You know,” says Chuck, “Niki asked me a lot of questions about what I did. And once I got over my defensiveness – making excuses and trying to justify my actions – and just started listening to the questions I was able to say, ‘Yeah, that’s really interesting to think about because whilst I was doing ‘x’, I see that may not have been the right kind of thing.’”

    Niki gives Chuck a lot of credit for remaining open and receptive throughout their conversations:

    “Although he was a bit defensive, I knew that he was interested. And I understood that feeling because, I’ve been challenged about my commitment to intersectional gender equality and I’ve felt defensive about that  – and he pointed that out to me.”

    To bring down the barriers between them, both partners needed to employ radical empathy.

    Chuck appreciates that Niki didn’t just rail at him, but asked questions, pointed him towards resources, and gave him the space to work things out for himself. Niki appreciates that while Chuck sometimes felt he was being personally blamed for the sins of the patriarchy, he’d mull over it and then come back and say, “OK, I think I get it now.”

    And, for both of them, the secret ingredient that made it all work was that, for the most part, they kept their exchanges light-hearted and fun.

    Throughout this process, Chuck has come to appreciate the transformative power of asking questions:

    “When you’re asked, ‘What do you think about this situation?’ there can be an incredibly powerful thing where you hear yourself utter some words and you think, ‘What a dickhead, mister!’ And you know, it’s this kind of approach that we found worked best with anti-vaxxers in my work with the Royal Institution.

    You can’t just be ‘told.’ It’s harder to be told. It’s much easier to discover and find those pathways that you want to go down.

    Encouraging people to ask questions would be my number one recommendation for changing attitudes.”

    Chuck’s attitudes have changed since Niki started asking him questions on that very first lunch date, three years ago. Playboy has been expunged from his LinkedIn profile. He is no longer proud of the association.

    Now, Chuck considers himself a ‘feminist-in-training.’ Niki likes the description because it reveals Chuck’s willingness to keep learning and his humility in recognising that, no matter how much he learns about feminism, “… it’s just something I think, as a man, you can’t ever fully ‘get.’”

    Neither Niki nor Chuck would ever suggest that their experience provides a blueprint for solving the problems of the world. But, there is a lot to be learned from using ‘radical empathy’ to break down barriers between people. It means looking beyond someone’s opinions, and seeing the whole person. It means being willing to engage openly and respectfully with sincere curiosity about what has formed the other person’s views.  It means asking questions rather than giving sermons. And it requires a commitment from both sides, not necessarily to change, but to challenge. their views.

    It may be that the key to dismantling the barriers that divide us is just a question of empathy.

    The post A (feminist) love story saved by radical empathy appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • The “weather event”: Australia’s stormy #MeToo movement

    The #MeToo movement has powered an insurgency against sexism and sexual violence in Australia. From once-isolated survivors to political staffers, women everywhere are refusing to keep men’s secrets. 

    In an electrifying Quarterly Essay, journalist and author Jess Hill traces the conditions that gave birth to #MeToo and tells the stories of women who – often at great personal cost – found themselves at the centre of this movement.

    Jess recently joined Virginia Haussegger, Founder of the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, “In Conversation” live at the ANU to talk about this work.

    The “weather event”

    The Australian #MeToo movement may only be five years old, but the build-up to it was decades in the making.

    In her hard-hitting Quarterly Essay, journalist and author, Jess Hill deftly traces the confluence of events in recent history that led to the seismic shift in how we talk about sexual violence.

    From Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against the U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” child sexual abuse investigations, the child abuse allegations against Rolf Harris in 2013, Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista killings and Rosie Batty being named Australian of the Year in 2015 – the list of sordid tragedies is longer than anyone cares to imagine. And it begs the question: why now? What was different in 2017 than in all those years before?

    In her Quarterly Essay, Jess Hill traces the conditions that gave birth to #MeToo.

    In her Quarterly Essay, Jess Hill traces the conditions that gave birth to #MeToo.

    Jess Hill refers to this as the “weather event”.

    “Sometimes with these types of cultural phenomenon, we tend to think in terms of linear progress, when in fact, actually what’s happening is multiple feedback loops.”

    “What I was trying to understand is: What is it that fundamentally lodged in the public mind that was not lodged there before? And how was our public mind ready to hear that?”

    Since the global social media traction in 2017, the #MeToo movement has spawned thousands of articles, events, scholarly investigations – and of course, legal action – a fact that did not escape Ms Hill’s notice.

    “When I first got invited to write this essay, I thought to myself, ‘What more there is to say that we don’t already know? … It’s been written about so much, what am I even going to add?’”

    “Partly what I decided to do with this essay was to go, ‘Let’s just like take it from the beginning.’ In four years, a lot of preconceptions can build up. So, let’s like try to take apart those preconceptions [and] get them back to their original components and analyse them. Is what we think about the #MeToo movement accurate?

    “What’s amazing about writing this essay is realising what a different culture we live in to the one we lived in in 2017, when sexual harassment was barely ever talked about…when it was presumed… that sort of stuff just doesn’t happen here [compared to the US].”

    “But the progress that we are making year on year…is quite seismic.”

    The cultural shift

    Jess Hill’s essay starts with the moment when, in the wake of Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s is holding a press conference supposedly showing the world he cares for and understands women.

    He tells the press pack that violence and abuse of women “must be acknowledge and it must be stopped”.

    Just moments later, however, in response to a Sky News reporter’s question, he changes tact and warns those in the room that people in “glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. He goes on to erroneously claim that there has been a harassment complaint inside News Corp about a specific journalist.

    “The prime minister is not just making a veiled threat to the gathered reporters…he is sending a chilling coded message to one woman in the room: the journalist who broke the story of Brittany Higgins being allegedly raped in parliament house, News Corp’s political editor, Samantha Maiden,” Ms Hill writes.

    In front of the ANU crowd, Virginia asks her what this says about the Prime Minister.

    Jess Hill with Virginia Hausseger. Picture: Mary Kenny

    Jess Hill with Virginia Hausseger. Picture: Mary Kenny

    “That he is a machine,” she replies without hesitation. “He’s just all about utility. Like, ‘What will keep me in a position of power?’”

    At its heart, #MeToo is all about the power. The Harvey Weinstein allegations had laid bare the sinister reality of the patriarchal structures of the workplaces around the world. As Hill writes in her essay:

    “This was a rare moment of structural weakness in patriarchy: a vulner­able piece of flesh had been exposed, and it was as though women all over the world received a subliminal message that now was the time to draw back their arrows and shoot.”

    Speaking to Ms Haussegger, Hill draws links to the increasing media attention to child sexual abuse in the church: “This is starting to lay the groundwork to overturn…a presumption that people in power, particularly men in power, would never do what we consider to be depraved behaviour.

    “There was a whole institution of silence and cover up that permitted them to go on and do it again and again.”

    Reflecting on the many #MeToo stories that resulted in the victim getting attacked in popular discourse – including that of Tessa Sullivan – Ms Hill critiques Australia’s culture of mates protecting mates.

    “Don’t let the law get in the way. Don’t let those bitches get in the way. You know, you’ve got to step in for your mates, it doesn’t matter what they’ve done.”

    The unfolding of #MeToo in Australia

    Australian television presenter, author and horticulturist Don Burke was the first target of Australia’s #MeToo movement. The story was uncovered injoint ABC/Fairfax investigation, and detailed claims from a number of women who worked with Burke in the late 1980s and 1990s.

    Quoted in the essay, lawyer Michael Bradley explains: “The textbook example of how to do it was the Don Burke one, which was really a replication of the Weinstein approach: bury him in volume, so he knows that there’s no point – he’s done. There’s a tipping point, and it’s a game of bluff, right? [By contrast, actor] Craig McLachlan took the other course: call the bluff. He went after them and sued one of the victims.”

    New Corp journalists hoped to deal a similar blow against actor Geoffrey Rush, when they published allegations against him in November 2017. Instead, Rush won a defamation case against the publisher.

    Michael Bradley further explains: “It was the [Geoffrey] Rush case specifically that “scared the shit out of everyone. It was just such a game-changer,” Bradley says. “If that hadn’t happened, if they’d done their homework properly . . . I know that Fairfax and ABC had a queue of stories lining up they were going to run. Everyone just ran for the exit. It stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks.”

    Ms Hill is scathing about how this unfolded. She writes: “Let’s be clear: The Telegraph’s story on Rush was an epic failure of journalistic ethics – by far the most egregious example of ‘trial by media’ in Australia’s #MeToo era.”

    She further explained at the ANU event: “They were just desperate, because they didn’t have a #metoo story. And it was the biggest story going.”

    “They’d heard second-hand that Eryn Jean Norvill had made this complaint, but they did not go to her [for comment] and she had expressly said she did not want to go public with it.”

    The Telegraph, Ms Hill says, then published front page story: “[W]e can say what we like about defamation laws, but it was very clear that what it was saying about Geoffrey Rush, and did not substantiate it.”

    In her essay Hill describes this as “sloppy ‘gotcha’ journalism’. Recounting the advice of Michael Bradley to the ANU audience, she argues: “You have to prepare these stories and the people who are the victims, survivors, like they are witnesses going to trial.”

    “You need to do that not just because of defamation laws, but because that’s actually what good investigative journalism does.”

    “There’s a real question mark around whether Australia’s defamation laws would have crushed the #MeToo movement, had it not been for this catastrophic error that News Limited made.”

    “Anyone who has allegations against them…when you launch a defamation case, all of that evidence is going to be brought to bear. Do you want that? And they know how many potential accusers there are. So, it’s a game of bluff.”

     

    Feature image: Supplied.

     

     

     

    The post The “weather event”: Australia’s stormy #MeToo movement appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Metropolitan Police officer charged with sexually assaulting colleague on duty

    A serving Metropolitan Police officer has been charged with sexually assaulting a colleague while on duty.

    PC Joseph Demir is from the the North West Basic Command Unit. On 9 March, he was charged by post with sexual assault, the force said in a statement.

    Misogyny

    The force has recently come under extensive scrutiny for its apparent culture of misogyny. This is following the kidnapping, assault and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met Police officer Wayne Couzens, and officers sharing images of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.

    Domestic violence charity Solace Women’s Aid said on Twitter:

    The alleged incident

    The incident is alleged to have occurred on 10 March 2020. At the time, Demir was a student officer at Hendon Training School. The offence was reported on 1 July 2020, and it appears that Demir has carried out his duties as normal during this time.

    Demir has not been suspended. However, he has been placed on restricted duties. He was charged following an investigation by the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards.

    He’s due to appear at Willesden Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday 5 April.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • It’s time to root out racism, misogyny and homophobia in the trade union movement

    Former National Education Union (NEU) Policy Specialist (LGBT+ and Race Equality) Camille Kumar has resigned from her role due to her experiences of discrimination on the grounds of her race, gender, and sexuality within the union.

    As exemplified by radical, grassroots United Voices of the World (UVW) Union’s recent victory securing full NHS contracts for Great Ormond Street Hospital cleaners, trade unions still play a vital role in ensuring fair wages and conditions for workers. But Kumar’s experience within the NEU – an enormous, mainstream union – reflects the institutionalised racism, misogyny and homophobia that remains unaddressed within the trade union movement.

    Pushed out

    In January, Kumar resigned from her NEU role on the grounds that the union subjected her to interpersonal and institutional racist, sexist, and homophobic discrimination.

    Upon returning to work from maternity leave, Kumar noticed that her work was being “discounted, side-lined and undervalued”. Speaking to her “demoralising” experience of “deskilling and gaslighting”, she explained:

    Every single piece of work I was directed to undertake during my pregnancy has not been used and some that were initially published on the website have since been removed or superseded by work commissioned by (white male) consultants.

    She adds that her work – such as extensive LGBTQ+ inclusion guidance for schools – was replaced by less radical work by white colleagues. The union removed other pieces of Kumar’s work from the NEU’s website while she was away without consulting her.

    This reflects the pregnancy and maternity discrimination that many working people still encounter when they decide to start a family. But also the ways in which white voices are often prioritised in workplaces and social justice movements, while racially minoritised women are often overlooked and undervalued.

    In an email explaining her resignation to comrades within the union she said:

    I have been increasingly disheartened by the NEU’s cynical approach to the BLM movement – releasing multiple statements in support of BLM but in practice actively shutting down Black workers’ activism.

    Kumar added:

    I raised these issues among others with my line manager and AGS [assistant general secretary] and have been met with denial, incomplete truths and obfuscation. When I expressed my feelings of confusion, hurt and upset I was accused of being ‘aggressive’, a word too often used to describe women of colour in the workplace.

    Indeed, this is a racist, misogynistic stereotype frequently used to silence and marginalise assertive Black women.

    A spokesperson from the NEU told The Canary:

    The NEU takes all complaints of discrimination seriously. The particular issues raised by this ex-member of staff are currently under investigation in accordance with agreed confidential processes so it would not be appropriate to comment further.

    A wider issue within the union

    As reported by The Canary in November 2021, Black NEU members spoke out about “feeling let down by the Union in race discrimination cases“. In an open letter expressing solidarity with Kumar, the Black Educators Alliance said:

    Just like the projects that Camille worked on, Black member led projects, such as Decolonising the Curriculum, were discontinued without the consultation of Black members. Motions presented to and passed at the Union’s Annual Conference by Black members are routinely dismissed.

    In April 2021, NEU members voted in favour of a campaign for a moratorium – a temporary legal ban – on school exclusions to give vulnerable and marginalised children returning to school a chance to adjust to the ‘new normal’. Despite the campaign’s success, union leaders have yet to commit to the vote’s result.

    In their open letter, the alliance added:

    Decisions on issues affecting Black members are made by senior white NEU staff without any comradery to Black members. It is a most condescending act of betrayal that we continue to endure over and over again in both our careers and within our union activism.

    A spokesperson from the NEU told The Canary:

    The National Education Union takes its commitment to bringing about positive change for race equality and LGBT+ equality seriously and works actively to ensure this is achieved. The NEU works with external organisations on equality issues as well as producing our own materials for use in schools and colleges. Training sessions for members and union staff are also regularly undertaken.

    Beyond the NEU

    But the NEU isn’t the only union at fault. In February, UNISON’s National Officer of Race Equality Margaret Greer launched a claim against the union on the grounds that she has ‘been subjected to race discrimination and victimisation‘.

    Greer has been an active anti-racist trade unionist for 34 years. She alleges that despite her longstanding commitment to the movement, UNISON deemed her ineligible to be considered for the position of general secretary due to a rule which demands that applicants have 5 years’ “continuous” membership or employment in the run up to their candidacy.

    In January, an employment judge stated that the rule could be interpreted to either reflect the union’s interpretation, or Greer’s understanding ‘that a person needs to have at least 5 years’ membership’. Greer adds that there is “no reference to the term “continuous” in the rules in relation to membership”.

    Greer alleges that:

    The Union has tried to use all its muscle to strike out certain aspects of my claim, including my allegation that I was eligible for elections; however, they have been unsuccessful with this.

    Calling for institutional change, she said:

    I have dedicated my life to the trade union movement, but they too need to change like all sectors and organisations. In the history of the trade union movement there has only ever been three General Secretary’s of BME background.

    Greer is raising funds to cover the cost of her legal battle. The main hearing is due to take place in June and July 2022.

    An institutionalised problem

    These are not isolated incidents. A 2019 survey commissioned by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) on racism in the workplace suggested that racism remained widespread within the movement.

    Many respondents reported experiences of racism from trade union members and officials. Others highlighted incidents of members, managers and employers working together to cover up racism in the workplace.

    Further, as reported by the report’s co-author Stephen Ashe:

    a considerable number of people reported that trade union officers were reluctant to get involved in incidents where the perpetrator(s) was also a trade union member(s), as well as being indifferent towards, if not dismissive of, participant’s experiences of workplace racism.

    These responses reflect Kumar’s experience, and demonstrate the extent to which interpersonal and institutional racism operates within the trade union movement. TUC’s report shows that despite campaigns to address entrenched inequalities in other workplaces, the trade union movement is yet to confront its own institutionalised racism and other forms of discrimination.

    Time for action

    The Black Educators Alliance is hosting a fringe event at the NEU’s national conference in April. Here, they intend to address institutional racism within the union as well as the education system at large.

    The alliance is urging supporters to sign its open letter calling on the NEU “to nourish and maintain a positive working environment” for Black, LGBTQ+ and female staff and members. The group’s demands include the establishment of an anti-racist working group to address structural and interpersonal racism at the NEU, and greater oversight for equalities seat holders.

    They are also calling for the provision of specialist support for victims of discrimination. And a formal investigation into racism, misogyny and homophobia at the NEU led by an independent barrister.

    If the trade union movement truly seeks to protect and further the rights of all working-class people, it must take urgent action to address and root out all forms of discrimination in its ranks.

    Featured image via Clay Banks/Unsplash (Cropped to 770x403px)

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Personal safety alarms blare at women’s protest against Met Police

    Hundreds of protesters have filled the streets of Westminster with the deafening shriek of rape alarms as part of a demonstration against the Metropolitan Police.

    Feminist campaign group Sisters Uncut led the protests. Activists blocked traffic, released bright blue smoke flares, and chanted “our streets” as they marched from Scotland Yard to Charing Cross police station in central London.

    The march marked just over a year since serving officer Wayne Couzens abducted Sarah Everard. And protesters told the PA news agency that they were demanding “radical change” from a “rotten to the core” Met.

    Sisters Uncut protest
    Protesters from feminist action group Sisters Uncut march from Scotland Yard to Charing Cross police station in central London (James Manning/PA)

    Sisters Uncut said 1,000 rape alarms were activated at the police station, following emotional speeches from protesters.

    ‘Radical change’

    Patsy Stevenson, who was arrested at an impromptu vigil for Everard last year, called for home secretary Priti Patel to resign. Stevenson spoke to the crowd at Charing Cross police station as dozens of officers watched on. She told PA she’s calling for “radical change from the whole of the policing system”.

    When asked how the Met can restore public trust, she said:

    First thing is accountability, holding your hands up and admitting you’ve done something wrong.

    Secondly they need to understand there needs to be radical change from the whole of the policing system.

    At the moment we don’t even need police, and that’s not how it should be.

    Sisters Uncut protest
    People attend the protest organised by Sisters Uncut (James Manning/PA)

    When asked whether she thought new leadership following Met’s commissioner Cressida Dick’s resignation would amount to change, Stevenson said:

    Just because she’s out doesn’t mean anything is going to change.

    Wiping away tears as she spoke to the crowd, Stevenson said Patel should resign next. She said:

    Cressida Dick – thank god she resigned.

    Priti Patel is next by the way, let’s not forget who’s in charge.

    That vigil was a vigil for Sarah Everard, and so many women are murdered at the hands of men.

    How dare they tell us to stay indoors.

    Patsy Stevenson has called for Home Secretary Priti Patel to resign at a feminist protest led by Sisters Uncut in Westminster (Laura Parnaby/PA).
    Patsy Stevenson has called for Home Secretary Priti Patel to resign (Laura Parnaby/PA)
    Police Bill

    Protester Marvina Newton described the police as “a corrupt system that’s rotten to the core”.

    “The bigger system is broken,” she told PA. She added:

    We want to kill the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill, we want to make sure that our children’s children should be able to have the democratic right to fight an oppressive power.

    Marvina Newton at the Sisters Uncut protest (Laura Parnaby/PA)
    Marvina Newton at the Sisters Uncut protest (Laura Parnaby/PA)

    If passed, the bill would give police greater powers to control protests. They would be able to impose start and finishing times, set limits on noise, and fine protesters who break rules up to £2.5k.

    Educate men, not women

    Revisiting advice given following Everard’s murder, activist Jill Mountford said women “should never, ever be told again that the answer is to carry a rape alarm”.

    Mountford is a community worker from Lewisham, south-east London. She told PA:

    First of all, they (the government) need to stop the cuts that are happening to local authorities…

    We should never, ever be told again that the answer is to carry a rape alarm or to stay indoors.

    The answer doesn’t lie with us, it lies with men in society, it lies with the Government and the cops and the police particularly.

    Jill Mountford, 61, at a Sisters Uncut protest on Saturday (Laura Parnaby/PA)
    Jill Mountford at the protest (Laura Parnaby/PA)

    Breach of protesters’ rights

    Saturday’s protest also comes one day after High Court judges found the Met had breached the rights of organisers of the vigil for Everard. The court said the Met failed “to perform its legal duty” to consider whether they had a “reasonable excuse” for holding the gathering amid coronavirus (Covid-19) restrictions.

    Sisters Uncut protest

    The Sisters Uncut protest began with a blockage on Victoria Embankment road outside Scotland Yard (James Manning/PA)

    Reclaim These Streets held the vigil for Everard near to where she went missing in Clapham, south London, in March 2021.

    The Met has been contacted for comment.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Sarah Everard vigil organisers win High Court challenge against Met Police

    The Metropolitan Police breached the rights of organisers of a vigil for Sarah Everard with its handling of the planned event, High Court judges have ruled. Reclaim These Streets (RTS) proposed a socially-distanced vigil for the 33-year-old, who was murdered by former Met officer Wayne Couzens, near to where she went missing in Clapham, south London, in March last year.

    The four women who founded RTS and planned the vigil brought a legal challenge against the force over its handling of the event, which was also intended to be a protest about violence against women. They withdrew from organising the vigil after being told by the force they would face fines of £10,000 each and possible prosecution if the event went ahead, and a spontaneous vigil and protest took place instead.

    Wayne Couzens court case
    Sarah Everard (Family handout)

    Breach of human rights

    Jessica Leigh, Anna Birley, Henna Shah and Jamie Klingler argued that decisions made by the force in advance of the planned vigil amounted to a breach of their human rights to freedom of speech and assembly, and said the force did not assess the potential risk to public health.

    In a ruling on Friday, two senior judges upheld their claim, finding that the Met’s decisions in the run up to the event were “not in accordance with the law”.

    In a summary of the ruling, Lord Justice Warby said:

    The relevant decisions of the (Met) were to make statements at meetings, in letters, and in a press statement, to the effect that the Covid-19 regulations in force at the time meant that holding the vigil would be unlawful.

    Those statements interfered with the claimants’ rights because each had a ‘chilling effect’ and made at least some causal contribution to the decision to cancel the vigil.

    None of the (force’s) decisions was in accordance with the law; the evidence showed that the (force) failed to perform its legal duty to consider whether the claimants might have a reasonable excuse for holding the gathering, or to conduct the fact-specific proportionality assessment required in order to perform that duty.

    A “threat” to police reputation?

    Lawyers representing the four told the court at a hearing in January that notes of a Met gold command meeting the day before the proposed event included a statement that “we are seen as the bad guys at the moment and we don’t want to aggravate this”.

    Sarah Everard death
    A woman holds up a placard at the bandstand in Clapham Common (Victoria Jones/PA)

    Tom Hickman QC, representing the four, said in written arguments:

    The most significant ‘threat’ identified was not public health but the perceived reputational risk to the (force), including in the event they were perceived to be permitting or facilitating the vigil.

    The Met defended the claim brought by Reclaim These Streets and argued there was no exception for protest in the coronavirus rules at the time, and that it had “no obligation” to assess the public health risk. RTS took urgent legal action the day before the planned event, seeking a High Court declaration that any ban on outdoor gatherings under the coronavirus regulations at the time was “subject to the right to protest”.

    But their request was refused and the court also refused to make a declaration that an alleged force policy of “prohibiting all protests, irrespective of the specific circumstances” was unlawful.

    Police handcuffed women on the ground

    Couzens, 49, was given a whole life sentence, from which he will never be released, at the Old Bailey in September after admitting her murder. The policing of the spontaneous vigil that took place drew criticism from across the political spectrum after women were handcuffed on the ground and led away by officers.

    A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services concluded the police “acted appropriately” when dealing with the event. But it also found it was a “public relations disaster” and described some statements made by members of the force as “tone deaf”.

    By The Canary

  • The glass cliff: why women lead in a crisis

    In 2003 I finished up my PhD at ANU and jumped on a plane (and then the trans-Siberian express train) to make my way to Europe. Within a month of arriving at the University of Exeter, my mentor and I stumbled upon a newspaper article from the front page of the business section of The Times that claimed that women were ‘wreaking havoc’ on company performance in the UK biggest companies. Their evidence suggested that the more women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies, the worse companies tended to perform on their annual average share prices.

    In response, we designed a archival study that demonstrates that the opposite is the case: poor company performance instead leads to the appointment of women into leadership positions.

    From this study, the term ‘the glass cliff’ was born to describe the phenomenon where women (and members of other marginalised groups) are more likely to occupy leadership roles in times of crisis. The metaphor captures the increased risk and precarity of leadership when things are going badly: a sense of being up high, yet teetering on the edge. 

    Since then, a global body of research, including case studies, archival analyses, and experimental studies, demonstrates poor company performance leads to the appointment of women into leadership positions.  The research has examined the precarity leadership positions in a wide range of contexts. Building on the original work in senior corporate leadership, the glass cliff has been demonstrated at all levels of politics, from council members, mayors, and members of parliament in poorly performing electorates, to Prime Ministers such as Theresa May and Julia Gillard. A racial glass cliff has also been found for coaches of sporting teams, such that Black coaches are more likely when the team has a poor winning record. Most recently evidence for the glass cliff has been found in the COVID-19 pandemic.

    EU2017EE Estonian Presidency, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

    Experts suggested former British Prime Minister Theresa May was left standing on a glass cliff, because she reached a position of leadership at particularly precarious time. Picture: (EU2017EE) Estonian Presidency, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    We see the glass cliff as a relatively new and reasonably subtle form of prejudice that occurs once women start to shatter the glass ceiling. The increased scrutiny and risk of failure makes such positions likely to be stressful and sub-optimal. Indeed, research also describes a parallel ‘saviour effect’, such that once all is going well again, those on glass cliffs are replaced by more traditional leaders.

    But that is not to say that glass cliff positions should be avoided altogether. Crisis situations may be seen by some women as opportunities. Indeed, there is evidence that gender stereotypes may lead to the perception that women have unique skills and abilities that make them particularly suited to dealing with crises. It may also be the case that women do not have the luxury of turning down a sub-optimal leadership position. Returning to the Theresa May example, it is likely that a Prime Ministership during Brexit was the best that she could hope for – she wasn’t in a position to wait around until a better opportunity came about, as Boris Johnson did.

    But despite the potential opportunity, we argue that glass cliff positions may be seen as a poisoned chalice. Indeed, that the precarity of the glass cliff may contribute to the stagnation of progress towards gender equality and equal gender representation in positions of leadership. If women are less able to demonstrate leadership success, or are apportioned blame for negative outcomes evident before their appointment, this may reinforce the pernicious stereotypes that women are not suited to leadership positions.

    Our more recent research has looked at the body of work as a whole suggests that while the glass cliff is robust, it is a complex phenomenon. It is highly dependent on circumstances, such as the broader social context, the nature and severity of the crisis, the resources available to overcome the crisis, and the previous leadership incumbent.

    The nuances and complexities of the glass cliff suggest that it is unlikely to have a straightforward solution. However, the fact that the glass cliff is so dependent on context suggests that change is possible. We can design interventions to reduce the likelihood that members of underrepresented groups will continue to face the glass cliff, including the transparency of the precarious nature of the leadership role, ensuring that adequate resources are in place to deal with the crisis, and insuring that leaders are evaluated fairly during a crisis situation.

     

    • Feature image from the SBS documentary “Strong Female Lead”/Supplied 

    The author of this article, Professor Michelle Ryan (bio below) is based at the ANU’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Find out more about their work here. 

    The post The glass cliff: why women lead in a crisis appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Celebration becoming resistance: feminist night marches in Turkey

    In Turkey, International Women’s Day is not celebrated only at corporate breakfasts and morning teas. It is celebrated on the streets and at night by marching, dancing, and chanting. At Feminist Night Marches, celebration also means resistance, writes Burcu Cevik-Compiegne.

    This year marks 20 years of Feminist Night Marches in Turkey. On 8 March International Women’s Day, women take to the streets in major cities to march, sing, dance and repeat their iconic slogan: “If you ever feel hopeless, remember this crowd”.

    “If you ever feel hopeless, remember this crowd”

    This is a simple yet powerful slogan, as it is not uncommon to feel hopeless in this country. At a time when femicide and transphobic crimes have skyrocketed, it is easy to succumb to feeling powerless. In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women and domestic violence.

    The Istanbul Convention, as it is known, saves lives by laying out the framework to deliver justice and support to women who have suffered gendered violence. When a presidential decree can undo years of work overnight – which is essentially what happened when Turkey withdrew from the Convention – it automatically raises the question: what is there to celebrate on the International Women’s Day in Turkey?

    Celebration takes on a different meaning in the context of contemporary Turkey. An increasingly authoritarian rule has systematically attacked women’s rights and freedoms in an attempt to shape society made up of families after its own image, featuring an unrestrained, vindictive and self-righteous male head of the household. The role that is defined for women in President R. T. Erdogan’s so-called New Turkey is one of the dutiful wife and mother.

    Against this background, claiming the streets and the night to perform their spiteful joy is a powerful response to neoconservative familism that aims to confine women to home, and their social and public life to the daytime only.

    Women take to streets at night on every 8 March to express a range of views and emotions. In the current political environment, the power of their actions cannot be overstated.

    The two emotions that stand out are anger and hope. Yet it is joy that links these two together and sets the atmosphere of the Feminist Night Marches.  When women are told not to laugh out loud in public by top government leaders and they are arrested for insulting the President by jumping to the rhythm, a joyful celebration at night on the streets gains a whole new meaning; it becomes resistance.

    The Night Marches do not use joy to tone down anger or smoothen the rough edges of feminism in a bid to make it more palatable. Women use music, dance and humour to create an atmosphere where they feel united, strong and untamed in equal measure. The witty and dark sense of humour that comes through the placards is not to please the outsiders. One often used slogan suggests “We don’t want a dictator, we want a vibrator”. Another advocates for “three orgasms per week” rather than the three children recommended by President Erdogan. These slogans intend to shock the sensibilities of the mindset that ties women’s sexuality to reproductive and marital duties.

    This resistance hasn’t gone unnoticed. The authorities’ response to Feminist Night Marches is loud and clear. Every year, the security forces put in place blockades to prevent women from marching, using intimidation and arrests as dissuasive measures. The very same women who ordinarily feel threatened on those same streets become perceived as a threat to an order that oppresses them.

    However, the reason why the authorities perceive the marches as a threat is not just about their challenge to the patriarchal order. Their unambiguously egalitarian ethos and the intersectional solidarity they foster are diagonally opposite to what an authoritarian regime wants and needs. Feminist Night Marches are the embodiment of resistance to authoritarianism.

    The legitimacy of authoritarian rule depends on the polarisation of society, and the creation of constant crises. In a highly polarised society, like Turkey where difference can be a matter of life or death, Feminist Night Marches do not just tolerate, but instead embrace and celebrate difference. Run by a coalition of diverse organisations, the press releases are broadcast in four of the most common native languages spoken in Turkey (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Armenian).

    Women can be seen carrying their placards in their native language, joined by the rainbow-coloured flags of the vibrant LGBTQI+ communities. Women proudly proclaim their identities as Muslim feminists, socialists or sex workers. Along with the Pride marches, Feminist Night Marches is arguably the only regular event that has achieved and nurtured such solidarity. And that in itself is worth celebrating!

    • Feature image: The feminist night march was organized to protest violence against women and defend women’s rights. Turkey Istanbul Beyoglu March 8, 2021. Picture: Shutterstock

    The post Celebration becoming resistance: feminist night marches in Turkey appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Holyrood protesters demand change one year on from Sarah Everard’s murder

    Women pledged to “put pressure on those in power” as they marked the anniversary of the murder of Sarah Everard.

    “Nothing has changed”

    Demonstrators gathered outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh a year after the 33-year-old was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a serving Metropolitan Police officer as she walked home in South London. Her killing in March 2021 sparked outrage across the country, but campaigner Rachel Chung said 12 months on “nothing has changed”.

    Protesters gathered to mark the anniversary of Sarah Everard’s murder (Family handout/PA)

    To applause, Chung said:

    We’re not here looking to become martyrs, I don’t want to be a poster, I don’t want to front a news campaign. I don’t want to die.

    I want to wake up in the morning and know that I am treated like a person.

    Together with Alice Jackson she was inspired to form Strut Safe in the wake of Everard’s murder, with volunteers from the group  providing a free service to help women walk home safely in Edinburgh, along with phone support in the rest of the UK. Speaking at the rally, Chung insisted:

    We’re punching up, we’re here to put pressure on those in power, and if those in power are not prepared to listen then we will leave them behind.

    As long as we are out here protesting, as long as I can look out into this crowd and see all of you come out here, then I have hope, I have radical hope that we will see change.

    Because we’re not going to give up. There are more of us than there are of them, and because we are stronger than they are.

    Demonstrators demanded change (Jane Barlow/PA)

    With politicians mingling with demonstrators among the crowd, one mother took the chance to demand change. Jessica Ross attended the rally with three of her children, who were carrying flowers to remember Everard. As they were photographed, she shouted:

    A picture is awesome, but I shouldn’t have had to drag them out and explain why [Sarah Everard] died.

    “We should be able to live our lives”

    SNP MP Hannah Bardell told the crowd that male violence “continues to be a huge and pervasive issue”.

    The Livingston MP added:

    We have a problem in society across the UK. If we continue to ask what a woman was wearing, how drunk the woman was, how the woman got home, we are not going to take on the challenges we face of misogyny and male violence in our society.

    As long as we blame women for the actions of violent men, rather than changing society to challenge the actions of violent men, women and girls will continue to live with the restrictions and fear of male violence.

    Because it doesn’t matter if we are just walking home, or out for a run in the middle of the night, or dancing down the street in our knickers, we should be able to live our lives without fear of being murdered.

    SNP MP Hannah Bardell
    SNP MP Hannah Bardell told the crowd that male violence continued to be ‘a huge and pervasive issue’ (Jane Barlow/PA)

    Labour MSP Monica Lennon said:

    We are here tonight to remember Sarah Everard, but I hope we are here tonight to rage against the system, to rage against the patriarchy, to rage against those men who make us feel unsafe.

    The Central Scotland MSP said the rally was “also about all the other women who don’t get a mention, the women who were murdered behind closed doors by the people that they loved and trusted”. She added:

    We say tonight ‘enough is enough’.

    Tonight we are here to show respect, we are here to remember, but we are here to rage against the system.

    Scottish Labour MSP Monica Lennon said ‘enough was enough’ (Jane Barlow/PA)

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • On anniversary of Sarah Everard’s murder campaigners are demanding change

    At a memorial protest to mark the anniversary of the murder of Sarah Everard, campaigners will be demanding change, organisers have said. The killing of Sarah Everard – who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by serving Met police officer Wayne Couzens as she walked home in south London – sparked outrage across the country one year ago.

    A rally is planned to remember Sarah, and other women killed by men, outside Holyrood on Thursday.

    A coming together

    Politicians including SNP MP Hannah Bardell and Labour MSPs Monica Lennon and Pauline McNeill are due to speak at the event, as well as Rape Crisis Scotland chief Sandy Brindley. Strut Safe founder Alice Jackson said the event has been planned as a “coming together to mark a year since the passing of Sarah Everard”.

    Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme, Jackson added:

    It’s not only demanding change and mourning the countless others lost to violence, but to demonstrate that progress is inevitable, it is the only path we will accept.

    It is to let those in Holyrood and wider society know that there is no place in our society for those who perpetrate violence, for those who protect the people who perpetrate it and encourage it.

    So we are just asking people to join us, to come together with us.

    Strut Safe was set up in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, with volunteers providing a free service to help women walk home safely in Edinburgh, along with phone support in the rest of the UK.

    Jackson also said that Sarah Everard’s murder in March 2021:

    exposed the gravity of the situation in terms of how much misogyny there is in our culture, the brutality of misogynistic violence that many of us are constantly threatened by and suffer

    She added:

    It has served as a reminder for many and a wake-up call for so many of us that we are not protected or valued by some of the institutions that claim to do so.

    In the year since her passing we have lost so many more to violence, despite promises after her murder that her death would incite meaningful change.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Sarah Everard’s murder was ‘a watershed moment’ but the government failed to act

    The impact of Sarah Everard’s murder was a watershed moment for women’s safety that was wasted by the government, a campaigner has claimed.

    Jamie Klingler from Reclaim These Streets spoke to the PA news agency. She said that misogyny in the Metropolitan Police, Britain’s biggest force, must be rooted out with a full public inquiry.

    ‘A watershed moment that they wasted’

    Everard, 33, was raped and murdered by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens as she walked home in south London on 3 March 2021.

    Couzens had remained an officer despite twice being accused of indecent exposure. Once was in 2015 while working for the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), where colleagues nicknamed him “the rapist”. And he was accused of indecent exposure a second time in the days before the murder.

    Sarah Everard, 33, whose murder by a serving police officer sparked public outrage
    Sarah Everard, 33, whose murder by a serving police officer sparked public outrage (Family handout/PA)

    Klingler said:

    It was a watershed moment and it was a watershed moment that they wasted.

    It was a watershed moment that could have changed our lives, that could have made our daughters safer, that could make us safer.

    And there were choices made for it not to be a watershed moment.

    “This isn’t one bad apple”

    Campaigners including Reclaim These Streets are part of a legal bid to try to force the government to hold a statutory public inquiry to investigate misogyny in policing.

    Currently, dame Elish Angiolini is leading the first part of a non-statutory inquiry. It looks at how Couzens was able to work as a police officer for three different forces despite concerns about his behaviour. Couzens worked for Kent police, the CNC and the Met.

    Following this, there are plans for a second part that would look at wider issues in policing.

    The Met has also commissioned its own review of the culture and standards at the force. This includes Couzen’s former unit – the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command.

    Klingler said:

    We absolutely continue to demand a statutory inquiry of police treatment of women, not of Wayne Couzens, not of a single person in a single act.

    We need to overall understand the deep levels of misogyny within the Met, and they need to be exposed and accounted for.

    If there’s not a statutory inquiry, police aren’t required to testify. The families aren’t given legal representation as interested parties. Reclaim These Streets are not given legal representation.

    It just becomes the bogeyman of Wayne Couzens.

    This isn’t one bad apple and there’s no way to fix the force without rooting all of this out.

    Misogyny from Met officers

    The Metropolitan Police are facing serious concern over the behaviour of officers.

    In the wake of Everard’s death, one officer faced misconduct proceedings after sharing a highly offensive meme relating to her kidnap.

    Moreover, constables Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis were jailed for taking photographs of the bodies of murdered Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman and sharing them on WhatsApp.

    Two police officers were jailed after sharing WhatsApp images of the bodies of Bibaa Henry (left) and Nicole Smallman.
    Two police officers were jailed after sharing WhatsApp images of the bodies of Bibaa Henry (left) and Nicole Smallman (Victoria Jones/PA)

    And, earlier this month, the police watchdog published disturbing misogynist, homophobic and violently racist messages shared by Charing Cross Police station officers between 2016 and 2018.

    The fallout led to the resignation of commissioner Cressida Dick after London mayor Sadiq Khan said he wasn’t satisfied with her response to the scandal.

    An epidemic

    Klingler described violence against women as “an epidemic”.

    The past year has seen a number of high profile alleged stranger murders of women. They include the deaths of PCSO Julia James and teachers Sabina Nessa and Ashling Murphy.

    Another case saw labourer Valentin Lazar jailed for life for beating Maria Rawlings to death after a chance meeting on a bus.

    Klingler said:

    The idea that we can’t just get home safe and alive is insane for half the population.

    It isn’t that we’re harassed once in our lives and then we have a horror story to tell, it’s a constant decision tree of, ‘How do I avoid conflict? How do I not get noticed? How do I avoid putting myself in harm’s way?’

    There’s a woman killed every three days and nobody’s doing anything about it.

    This week police are expected to be told to make tackling violence against women and girls as much a priority as fighting terrorism, child sexual abuse and serious and organised crime.

    Commenting on the move, home secretary Priti Patel said the safety of women and girls is an “absolute priority”, adding:

    I do not accept that violence against them is inevitable.

    The government is also launching an advertising campaign focusing on “targeting and challenging perpetrators and harmful attitudes”, the Home Office said.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.