Silver Belles

Musical modays: Treaty

2009-09-21T12:55:00.000+10:00

I heard this song a lot when it first came out. I was in primary school and my mum was passionate about Indigenous Australian's rights and played it a lot. Being a kid I had no idea what the lyrics meant, I mean I understood the general idea I think, but watching the video and listening to the song again, as I have been a bit this week has been a very different experience.

I keep getting this feeling that something is very wrong with this country. I feel like some people ware their appreciation of Indigenous art like a fauxgressive badge designed to distract (white) people from their deeply held racism. But most people don't give a shit. Most people don't even bother with the pretence becasue they're that racist. I know that's my privilege to have only just realised this, but it's infuriating to realise that fuck all has changed in the collective attitude of white Australia from invasion to now.

Musical Mondays: From little things (a bit late)

2009-09-14T23:42:00.004+10:00

From little things, big things grow- Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly (with John Butler here)

Scientifically certified orgasm actually patriarchaly certified orgasm

2009-09-14T18:02:00.008+10:00

Excelent news from the twiterverse today! A new study of (abut 1000 individual) female('s) orgasms conducted by someone in a white coat and sensible shoes from The University of West Scotland has found that vaginal orgasms are more frequent when a woman's partner has an unusually large, quivering member! Call me a shrieking feminazi, but I think this sounds kind of familiar? Also sorry about the run-on sentence.

As my beloved, pinko ABC points out there are criticisms that various Australian scientists have of this study (fancy that!) Including worries that the methodology (participants self-reporting) isn't the most scientific thing ever and that pressure from pharmecuical companies means that studies of human (especially female) sexuality is rarely unaffected by corporate pressure to pedal female viagra etc. But my favourite part of this article has to be the following gem:

The study also claims that women who have experienced vaginal orgasms "have a greater satisfaction with their sex life, mental health, relationships with both partners and friends, and life in general."

But Associate Professor Rosemary Coates, also of Curtin University of Technology and president of the World Association for Sexual Health, believes that such assumptions are "reverting back to Freudian assumptions about female sexual responses," saying that "some form of clitoral stimulation is almost always required to trigger orgasm."

The study authors dismiss this view as "clitorocentric" and blame it for the "destruction of human pleasure."

The destruction of human pleasure? Seriously? Women who experience clitoral orgasms exclusively and don't get on the vaginal stimulation of a cock are somehow responsible for the misery of the human race now? To call a spade a spade: this is just patriarchal policing of women's sexuality dressed up as a scientific study. Women ought to be sexually passive and the penis is of ultimate importance during sexytime. If a woman's orgasm isn't the accidental by-product of male orgasm then it is EVIL! Labelling women who achieve orgasm clitorally as sad, mopey bitches is old-school. Cry me a fucking river, study, because you're destroying human pleasure by perpetuating a hierarchy of pleasure and trying to make women who don't achieve orgasm through your heteronormative, phallocentric Approved Method feel insecure.

Give a girl a chance, obscure scientists! Not only do we have to battle the slut-shaming if we're not appropriately coy in seeking out sex (hint: you can never be coy enough, girls), and the cultural norm of objectification and rape influencing the sex we do have, your study implies that if we do get off (difficult considering those last two factors) it has to be a man who brings our passive, frail lady bodies to orgasm. Not us actively stimulating ourselves! Oh no that's so obviously about orgasm, and ladies have to pretend that that's just a side-dish and that the main course is the "emotional intimacy" of holding our man close. Not us actively, unabashedly communicating what feels good to our partner. Heavens! That might make a d00d feel bad and give him the impression that we're better at getting ourselves to orgasm than he is! No, the one, Scientifically certified mode of achieving orgasm is dick penetrating vadge. Clitoral stimulation is selfish.

Thanks for clearing that up, medicine man!

Join me next week as I write a letter to The Enlightenment to break the news that science & rationality didn't actually deliver us from ignorance after all!

Musical Mondays: xKingdomx

2009-07-27T15:23:00.003+10:00

More screaming, angry ladies for your listening pleasure.

The drums in the intro are worth it, and if you really can't stand hardcore (or whatever sub-genre this is) then once again, skip to the breakdown at aprox. 2:25.

I'm so angry 'Violent Femmes' is already taken. By dudes!

2009-07-26T16:52:00.009+10:00

Just so you know, this one isn't so much gin & tonic as break-your-arm-in-the-mosh-pit & break-someone-else's-trying-to-get-out. Which is great if you like that sort of thing. Which I do. I love it.
If you don't just skip to about 2:30 for the breakdown.

I found Walls of Jericho while compiling my Hottest 100 Women list this week. I've been going out of my way to find and include female-fronted hardcore and metal bands. Not just the punk Riot Grrrrls (that I love), but bands who are making music now or have been in the past few years.

I love this kind of music. I love bands like Parkway Drive, Norma Jean, Gallows, Carpathian, Refused and Enter Shikari. I love the shows they put on (when I can be fucked to get to them). I especially love the aggression and energy these bands bring to songs that are technically complicated and require a lot of leet skilz (oh, I went there!) While it's not something that ever made me feel unsafe, this scene is pretty dude-heavy and often actively marginalises female fans and musicians.

I think it's due largely to physicality and aggressiveness still being seen as not ladylike, or something that women can't pull-off convincingly. In my experience there's an assumption amongst the people who listen to this music that girls who go along to shows are primarily interested in dressing up and catching themselves a boy with lip piercings and a fringe rather than the music.* It's not exactly an innovative to try an exclude women by telling us that we're fundamentally incapable of appreciating or participating in an activity. It's the same excuse that's been used historically to dismiss women from engineering, maths, formal logic and, yep, Triple J's Hottest 100 of All Time. Neither is it surprising that female screamers are dismissed as poor substitute for a person with a big, swinging dick. Our society has a proud history of telling women to fuc of back to the kitchen and let the boys deal with things. I'm not suprissed, but I am angry.

I wanted to find more angry, screaming front ladies for a couple of reasons. One- contrary to a lot of the excuse-making that went on just after the Hottest 100 list was released, women don't just make pop music and cutesy indi love songs. Women rock the fuck out. We've got a lot to be angry about and that anger ought to be listened to and honoured, not caught at the 'bitch filter' or dismissed as over-emotional crap.

Two- Telling women to sit, waiting for the opportunity to catch a husband, on the side line of any activity is not on. Ever. The heteronormative, narrow definition of womanhood restricts us all even if we don't adhere to it and every single person we interact with knows we don't adhere to it. In our world, our sex and gender precede us and shape our experiences. It doesn't matter if we manage to escape it as individuals, it' still there on an institutional and systemic level.

Three- Telling women to play by a different, more restrictive set of rules than the boys becasue we're wired differently or need protection is not on. Ever. As a young woman I'm insulted when I hear people saying that I don't have the brains or balls to appreciate or participate in something because I'm too fragile/ vain/ passive (which would be that pesky sex/gender thing preceding me, btw). There are some things I need protection from, like rape and unconscious bias or systemic inequalities in hiring practices. I don't, however, need protecting from my own taste in music, or from my anger.

I fully appreciate that some people (male or female) won't be into this noise. I get it. It's all loud and confusing and the vocals are basically (well controlled) screams. that's cool. I'm not saying women who rather heels to hardcore are dupes of the patriarchy. I'm saying that drawing the line between people who can appreciate hardcore and metal and people who can't along gender lines is sexist, problematic, annoying and makes me wanna front my very own aggressive metalcore band.

*As an aside, the implication that hardcore dancing is used as a way for girls to pick a dude is kind of disturbing. The undertones of ye olde "women like a violent man", whether intentional or not, don't help the fight against rape culture. Especially when there's an attitude, from some, that girls ruin the pit and ought to hang back an be eye candy/ groupies.

Musical Mondays: Nellie McKay

2009-07-20T20:24:00.002+10:00

May I suggest a gin and tonic with this one?

xo

MasterChef Australia (& I baked cupcakes)

2009-07-19T15:45:00.013+10:00

This show has been on my mind this week. As Chris, who was the favourite to win, was eliminated from Masterchef the final is going to be between two women over the age of thirty-five. It's not a reality show that's determined by audience votes, so I'm not about to claim that this reflects any shift in the Australian culture towards the appreciation of women, but I think the way this was been marketed is really telling. Astoundingly, and happily, there hasn't been any mention of a catfight or any attempt to manufacture hostility between the two women. Hooray! Someone at Masterchef seems to have gotten the message that female competitiveness isn't a deviancy of some sort that needs to be fetishised and trivialised. Obviously I celebrated this by making cupcakes:

And yes, I totally made those and took about 50 photos. Cos I'm just that narcissistic. Anyway, I saw an interesting column about MasterChef in the sun-herald today which wasn't on the interwebs and which I'm going to retype in full. Cos that's the sot of time-wasting, article-thieving lass I am:

The Winner is... talent and, oh, a woman
Macho antics have been left on the backburner , writes host Sarah Wilson.

Is it interesting that whatever the outcome tonight, Australia's first MasterChef will be a woman over 35? I reckon it is.
And, please, I'm not straddling some haughty feminist hight horse. Surely we're beyond that.
Women don't win reality TV shows, at least not in the first season. I viewer-determined contests, the voters are mostly young women (a complex phenomenon, but true).
And women 35-plus? They certainly don't win reality TV shows.
But here we are, about to be delivered s winner in either Julie, a 38-year-old mum from NSW's central coast or Poh, a 35-year-old artist of Asian descent who cooks with stink beans.
People like this don't tend to make it to TV. But, as everyone I've spoken to this week has said- on radio, TV and that barometer of right-nowness, Twitter- they represent an aspect of Australia that is very right-now. Precisely because they're not what we've come to cynically expect.
This is interesting. And a bloody relief.
Now I could wade into a discussion about how Poh and Julie's victory is all the more poignsnt because they won a cooking show. Men dominate public culinary displays. Women cook (at home, behind the scenes); men chef. the Ramsays and Pierre Whites of the world theatrically create dinning experiences with fancy ingredients, propped up by cookbook-kitchenware-TV show empires. And they swear and behave like their privates have been too close to a hot burner for too long. I could wade, but I won't.
Because what's more interesting is that tonight's result celebrates a "right now" shift. It's a shift to more boys cooking at home, behind the scenes. It's a shift to new relationships with diverse role models. kids loved Sam, mum's loved Poh, my surfer mates loved Julie, tough radio jocks loved Chris, young women loved Justine.
It's a shift away from snarky, low forms of human behaviours we all ache to escape.
Julie of Poh win based on merit. I promise you this. It's a true, simple, emotionally relatable result. Nasty popularity-determining antics, that bring out regrettable behaviour in audiences, contestants and critics, were not required.
The best person wins and in the process a bag of ideas about men and women have been deemed defunct. Which is more than just interesting don't you think?
---

I think there's a good summary of why this show has been so popular at the end, but more importantly the first two thirds outline a pretty solid feminist analysis of the (heavily gendered) Chef/cook binary. Which is why I found Wilson's throwaway "feminist high horse" comment so perplexing, (and annoying becasue intelligent and critical women aren't on a "high-horse"). True she wasn't too critical of the show, and I have no idea what she was trying to get at with the shifting relationships argument. I'm not sure if she was thinking of shifting relationships in society or on the show, but I think word limits and editors got the better of her there.

I'm not surprised or angry that the host of the show is selling it, it's her job after all, but you could be far more critical of MasterChef. I had a discussion with a friend recently about how the mystery ingredients in challenges are usually very Western which marginalised and probably disadvantaged the contestants of non-Western decent. Which is an excellent example of institutional racism, where the game is set up to benefit the "neutral" white subject, and telling of Australian society in general.

And there's the question in the back of my mind that Poh and Julie might be escaping the cat fight treatment becasue they're both acting acceptably feminine by being amiable and non-combative. In the end though, I don't think that is central to what's going on here. As Wilson said MasterChef owes its success to the likeability of the contestants and the apparent lack of manufactured snark (see Big Brother for a counterpoint). The show is compelling partly because of the drama set up though the lighting, music, constant ad breaks etc., and partly becasue the people are all lovely and seem to really like each other and enjoy what we're watching them do. Poh and Julie weren't any more deferential, nice or vulnerable on screen than the other contestants, male or female, so I doubt it was acceptable femininity that got them to the finals so much as talent and acting like a mature human being.

If you think I'm missing something important though feel free to call me out. It wouldn't be the first time I went easy on something becasue I liked it.

These are a few of my favourite things

2009-07-18T13:50:00.000+10:00

Royksopp
Trentmoller
Art that turns the body/ anatomy in to something surreal and a bit unfamiliar

On the last point see also:

The Our Skin pool on Flikr
The Art of Anatomy pool on Flikr

Deliberately deceptive arguing (also, Mary needs a feminist shoulder to cry on)

2009-07-17T22:37:00.000+10:00

So, there's this man in the UK is considering suing Liverpool city council for flying a rainbow flag on International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. Apparently what's at issue here is that council mightn't have planning permission (which they would get from themselves) to fly the flag.

I have to admit that when I first saw this story I thought homophobia was the motivating factor here. I sort of assumed that this guy didn't like the idea of the rainbow flag flying above a council building reminding people that compulsory heterosexuality is complete bullshit and damages people in the LGBT community. But after looking into the work Stephen Gash has done with the British Democrats (a charming party who think immigration and "political correctness" pose a threat to English values, whatever the fuck that emans to a former colonial power, but hey) and the Stop the Islamification of Europe group (which speaks for itself) I realised this had less to do with the gehys and more to do with... pretty much everything else that threatens white heterosexual men (poor guys, my heart bleeds).

A quote from the Freedom of Information request this guy submitted to find out whether the flag was raised illegally (I got the following quote from this article, I don't have access to the original request):
"I wish it to be known that I have no problem with flags being flown from public buildings provided the required planning permission has previously been granted and paid for.

"What I do object to is people being harassed for flying national flags perfectly legally from their dwellings or places of work, for which planning permission is not required, and being ordered to take them down."

TRANSLATION:

If you think you can flay your rainbow flag when I can't fly my national flag to signify my English Values (tm) in my country you should think again, because I might just sue you if I can find a technicality to do it on!

Fucking disgusting. I need to take a shower after reading the websites for those two organisations. I heard someone sprouting this crap when I was coming home on the bus one night. Some English guy in his 20s was talking to a group of younger kids from around my area. I missed most of the conversation but caught him concluding that the politicians who allowed immigrants to enter the UK on humanitarian grounds had obviously forgotten "our working class and our employment opportunities". Between that kid's embellished, twisted recounting of history, the newspeak on the websites I deliberately didn't link to and Gash's bizarrely built argument it's obvious that the hatred and racism of fringe groups is preached disguised as reasonable concerns in order to get otherwise indifferent people on board.

And i have no fucking idea how to react to that. Part of me (a rather small part, the philosophy student) wants to attack these arguments premise by premise, exposing how fallacious they are, and how damaging their view of the wold is becasue it normalises and privileges their experience at the expense of other people's. What's your initial reaction to this shit when you're unfortunate enough to happen across it? Do you also get into that mode that automatically analyses the validity and soundness of an argument and then just itches to write an counter-argument and if so do you think it's wasted on these arseholes?

Who knew I was so attached to reason, I always thought the enlightenment was a wild, privileged goose-chase, but that's another post, I still need that shower.

Eurythmics

2009-07-16T23:44:00.004+10:00

What does it all mean?

Not sure, but Annie Lennox could probably sing from a phonebook with a synth line in the background and I'd be alright with it.

On feminists pushing their ideas on "everyone"

2009-07-14T22:45:00.006+10:00

A lot of the time when I try to engage with people about feminism or share a feminist opinion, I get told that feminists always push our ideas on other people, that we should shut-up and stop trying to force the people around us to do things our way.

Aside from the obvious mistakes of treating feminism as a monolith and having a poorly informed knee-jerk reaction to what they've picked up about feminism the people who have said this to me are clearly buying into attitudes that women who are not submissive, intellectually lightweights are pushy and fail at femininity (and therefore humanity), this is a. But that's not why I'm so ssick of this silencing tactic.

I'm sick of it because feminists/ womanists are not reserving the right to force people to think the way we do when we point out inequalities, we're reserving the right to critique the assumptions about gender and sexuality that underlie societal attitudes, cultural products, institutions and anything else we think might have faulty reasoning. This isn't overreacting, taking things to seriously, or wasting our efforts of trivial matters, it's a critique of an argument. A basic fact of debating.

And if there exists nothing meaningful outside of discourse, if the personal is political, then feminists have the right to critically analyse these assumptions.

Yes it's tiring to hear that something we thought was fine actually isn't. But not becasue the person whose saying it is tiresome to be around or listen to. It's tiring becasue that means there are a lot of people have be hurt and are still being hurt by those assumptions.

For those dedicated to social change, equality and respect it's tiring becasue we recognise the person talking is right, and that there is a lot of work to be done to change things. Actual work, on how we interact with people, not petty manipulation for the sake of seeing others do things our way.

Our Bodies, Our Art: Vanessa Tiegs

2009-07-13T18:20:00.005+10:00

In the series Menstrala Vanessa Tiegs uses her menstrual blood to create a visual journal. I love that she collects it and uses it to paint paintings- gorgeous, expressive paintings- rather than hide it away as soon as possible.

Menstruation isn't often celebrated in our culture. A lot of women find it uncomfortable, painful and inconvenient, especially if they have endometriosis or any other number of medical conditions that make it especially difficult and painful, but a lot of that has to do with the revulsion other people feel over this process. Blood is so often associated with death and vaginas... yeah, they're disgusting and easy to shame.

I have to confess that I'm one of those annoying hippy-dippy, goddess worshiping women who really likes menstruation. Like... really likes it. I'm not sure if this is partly thanks to my stubborn inner (ha!) feminist, but honestly I've always sort of liked it, except for the first couple of years during which I either didn't think about it or wrung my hands over how the fuck to deal with it in various situations. There's somethings comforting about it for me... that's not a very good description I know, I've never really thought about why I feel the way I do, maybe I'll have to unpack it in another post. Until then, I'd love to hear your relationship to our favourite communist, Aunt Flow. (Especially if you have awesome period euphemisms).

ETA: I just noticed on a tab right next to this one I have a brilliant post titled Our Bodies, Our Neuroses by Pilgrim Soul at Pursuit of Harpyness. Ummm... thanks for the title inspiration PS! What can I say, the post was just so great I forgot all about the title as I read it!

Musical Mondays: Glass Ceiling

2009-07-13T10:00:00.002+10:00

Everybody needs a good tune to get them through their Mondayitis and in recognition of that I'm starting up Musical Modays; feminist music on a Monday... hopefully every Monday, but I'll settle for most of them.

Kick back, grab a cuppa (or whatever you fancy) and think about how awesome it would've been to be front and center at this gig:

Glass Ceiling by Metric

Only know what I'm told, only know what I'm told
Fast asleep daydreaming
Start to push, break your own glass ceiling
Can't count, can't catch the pieces falling

Who let it end up on the ground
How am I gonna know you're letting me down
How did I end up on the ground

Only do what I'm told, only do what I'm told
Last to leave cold calling
You're gonna lose your arms, amputate plasticine
There's no knight in silver armor shining

Who let it end up on the ground
How am I gonna know I'm letting you down
Who let it end up on the ground
How did he end up on the ground
Face down on the ground

Only go where I'm told, only know what I'm told
Inch to inches crowding
We can't leave, it's the last road open
Every speed on our knees is crawling

Ladies Household Toolkit (PINK! PINK! PINK!)

2009-07-12T18:08:00.010+10:00

Sorry about the rotten image quality, I took this on my phone and my heart was pounding! I was entirely convinced a sales assistant was going to ask me to leave or confiscate my phone and interrogate me in a back room of Myers (active imagination, I know).

Anyway I saw this product this afternoon while looking at teapots with my mum. It's a normal toolkit in every way except... it's pink... like the berries my lady ancestors picked (according to evolutionary psychologists, the discipline that failed sci-fi writers take up.) And personally I'm chuffed that masculine things like (big, swinging) tools finally come in pink, because now I can pursue the gendered pass-times I enjoy without having to fear that I will be considered less of a woman or somehow deviant, an exception to the universal rule of femininity.

It's just so pleasing to my little lady self that, according to the packaging, I can remain feminine while hanging a plate on the wall of my kitchen (it is Where I Belong, you see.) I can appease the male gaze AND hammer nails, all for the low price of $34.95! SCORE! This is exactly what I had in mind when I first decided to educate people around me about feminism and women's liberation; small concessions to women who want to engage in activities and domains traditionally the exclusive right of men, under the condescending, narrow and paternalistic conditions of PINKNESS and BE A PRINCESSES and CONSUME UR SASSY & SUBVERSIVE FREEDOM GURL!

Ironically I saw the Ladies Toolkit about 4 minutes after mum pointed out something like this:
...an old fashioned laundry wringer that some visual merchandiser though would look good in the towel section. Hint to the toolkits who thought up the 'just-add-pink' Ladies Toolkit; we've been engaged in backbreaking physical labour in the domestic sphere for fucking centuries. In fact our dirt cheap/ unpaid domestic labour has been alternatively exploited and targeted by companies, so please don't be hugely fucking condescending by offering us a little bit of Girl Power (not Woman Power, oh no... dropping the infatalisation concedes a little too much power) in shocking pink. Especially when it's in such a vile consumer context; it was often poor, uneducated women and women of colour who were forced to do this domestic labour and were employed by upper-class women. Honestly I'd be surprised (though tickled pink) if sweat shops weren't involved in the production of the Ladies Toolkit, ensuring that the price of some women's lessened oppression is the continued oppression of other women.

Thanks heaps, capitalism!

STI capaign; baby incubators get fearful, lesbian/ bi women get erased.

2009-07-10T19:56:00.000+10:00

Readers, I have some terrible news for you. It pains me to reveal that despite our attentive policing of women's sexuality, some girls are actually acquiescing to dudes putting the penis in the vagina. Or in the mouth. Or in the anus. It's all about the penis, hear people. No sexy times without it.

Now, don't be alarmed, I too was shocked, but, our friends in the public service have helpfully provided us all with an STI advertising campaign to alert us of the dangers involved with sex. Unfortunately it's really vexing me. You see, it's obsessed with dick-centric sex, erases sex that doesn't involve penis and has this annoying aftertaste of female sexual submissiveness and a vague "SHE'S IMPURE! THREAT! RED ALERT! NON-VIRGIN WOMAN!" thing that I really don't dig.

I'm not against getting this information out to young people, in fact I've written about how important sex education is in the past, but by pitching condoms as an STI panacea as the STI Questions section of the website does, this campaign invalidates young women engaging in same-sex lovin and puts them in jeopardy by withholding facts about how to have safer lesbian sex (hint: barrier methods like dental dams, cutting fingernails). That whoever put this campaign together failed to include this information is mind boggling and makes me really fracking angry.

Even the answer to the question If I only have oral sex can I get an STI? fails to mention barrier methods pertinent to women getting eaten out; seriously- you're already talking about sex here, is there really a special level of obscenity-hell reserved for women being pleasured by their partners orally? Plug your ears and sing la-la-la for this next bit if you're squeemish about female orgasms- but cunnilingus happens. In fact it's probably happening in a relationship near YOU! Straight or otherwise! Shocking hey?

The second disconcerting thing about this campaign is the print material thats been showing up on buses and train stations (and, conveniently, at the top of this post). The women, pictures of heteronormative innocence, are in positions of diempowerment- hiding behind their boyfriend or facing away from the camera. They are passive victims, for example in both the first and third poster one woman is staring moodily out a window and the other is wide-eyed leaning on her male partner. They're also potential carriers of STIs who are scared and ashamed to learn they might be putting their lover at risk (the combination of images and text in the third poster shows this particularly well, she's a damsel in distress who looks like she's about to bust into tears). However in the second poster the text and the images frame the man as an active subject- you see his face, you're told about the pain the STI is causing him (significantly, the pain it's causing his dick- again with that pesky penis-centric notion of sex!). He's almost in that "Thinker" pose and his brow is furrowed because he is actively engaged with, and concerned about, his health.

If you are at all inclined to dash off a note pertaining to the conspicuous absence of safer sex info for Lesbians and Bi women then you can! sti.campaign@health.gov.au

Responsible Service of Arsehole

2009-07-01T18:39:00.007+10:00

I did my Responsible Service of Alcohol course today, which means I now know how to tell when people are too shitfaced or young to drink alcohol and can work in a pub. Actually it would be more acurate to say I know how to avoid getting fined if I accidentally serve someone too shitfaced or young to drink alcohol.

But this post is not about legalities! This post is about the stand up misogyny and the following conversation:

INSTRUCTOR DUDE: Bouncers are really cool, especially female bouncers who-
AUDIENCE DUDE: (sorting "under his breath", loud enough for everyone to hear) Uhh female bouncers...
INSTRUCTOR DUDE: (Haha? I'm not sure where you're going, but you seem alright) Oh, you like female bouncers?
AUDIENCE DUDE: (incoherent snorting that's clearly SHOCK! that all 20 people in the room aren't laughing heartily at the punchline. Cos everyone knows FEMALE BOUNCERS are such a great punchline!!11!)
AUDIENCE DUDE'S FRIEND: He luvs female bouncers, don't you?
INSTRUCTOR DUDE: Ah cool you're going our with a female bouncer are you?
AUDIENCE DUDE: Nah (gawf gawf gawf) ... But... most of them have shorter hair then I do!!!1!!!eleventiez!1 (BOOM TISH! ammiright.. eh? huh? imtotallyrighteh??? haw haw haw)
INSTRUCTOR DUDE: Yeah... Well.. Female bouncers are a really in demand becasue (etc.)

And he honestly though everyone would find this hilarious and endearing.

Because... apparently women with short hair are laughable? They're not actually women cos they (obviously!) don't fuck men? They're falling short of an essential criteria of womanhood if they fail to give men hardons? Hairstyle is intrinsically linked to membership of the human race? Physical strength and the ability to command respect (attributes I imagine bouncers need in their work) are irreconcilable with being a woman?

Ahhh... veiled homophobia, sexism, uninvited comments about women's appearance. Truly it is the throwaway sexist comment that just keeps giving!

Cock Rock on the Radio

2009-06-30T16:01:00.015+10:00

So The Hoydens have a pretty awesome conversation going at the moment about Triple J’s Man Week and the lack of, dare I say it, Cunt Power in the brief history of post 60s music someone-or-other has compiled on their website. Man Week (although creepily named) seems to be mostly something that the triple J news program Hack is doing. They often have weekly themes to stimulate discussion and report on and to be honest this one doesn't offend me that much because some of the conversations they're having are really important like talking about prostate cancer and mental health. I mean, I think we spend enough collective time wringing our hands and worrying about men in what is essentially a male-authored world, but I'm not going to begrudge any person getting info about their health.

But honestly, I do begrudge the exclusion of women from the writing of histories, including pop culture histories. I mean, seriously? Is this list the best Triple J could do to represent the 1960s- 2000s to the youth of Australia, who were not there and probably never find out about it except from them? orlando is thinking of writing a letter, which triple j obviously need to read, but triple J’s defence of this list is inevitably going to be that while female artists have contributed to music since the 60s they were never the avant-guard, and that they always followed the lead of male artists in terms or creative risks and commercial success. No doubt they’ll make some sort of blanket statement about the list being "incomplete" and remind her the judgments made by those who complied the list are subjective, and hey why not vote for yourself! It'll be totally sweet maaaaan. I've seen this defense used by shitloads of academics to defend thier phallocentric history of philosophy and art history, and it's disingenuous and lazy.

Mostly because this list-making business is always necessarily arbitrary and imprecise (very different to subjective), no matter how much you've studied music history. Who is deciding where hardcore ends and metalcore begins stylistically? When glam rock started chronologically and the difference between 'foreshadowing' a genre and it's proper 'beginning'. When grunge became insanely popular did it also become a different genre (popgrunge? I don't know) from underground grunge or not? And why the fuck is the Riot Grrrl movement (presumably) a subset of punk according to Triple J? We're going to tell this story based on the way it's been told before and the way we like to see the world. Genres are lines in the sand, and as such are a pretty imprecise way of drawing up the list. But if Triple J were to do it differently how would they measure it? Rely on the market and collate a list of commercially successful artists? Who the author personally likes? There's nothing objective about this list and in the absence of facts Triple J are just falling back on patriarchal yardsticks.

The problem with this list is that it relies too unreflectively on the way this story has been told before. Living in a patriarchal world means that all the tools we use to interpret and order that world value men over women, white over black, hetero over LGBT, cis over trans, able bodied over PWD. Individuals and institutions not being critical and deliberately mindful of that valuing and ordering is what perpetuates the patriarchy. And phallocentric histories are undoubtedly patriarchal. Even if this list wasn't utterly arbitrary (actually, precisely becasue it is arbitrary) it's such a fail on Triple J's part not to examine why women are underrepresented on it. They could've looked at how they are implicated in the marketing/ consumption of female musicians as either
1) untalented wank fodder (jokes about Brittany Spears)
2) talented women whose sex life is more interesting than their music (BUT WHAT IS MISSY'S HIGGINS' ORIENTATION!!???), or,
3) talented female musicians who are presented as a novelty (Bjork, P J Harvey, on and on).

But of course reflecting on sexism, internalised and institutional, is an inherently feminist thing to do and... opps got left off the list.

Snazy new layout..

2009-04-05T00:09:00.001+11:00

...and a snazy new product to boot!

I've decided to lump some of my art in here as well. At the moment it's running very parallel to my feminism, so hopefully the biggest difference you lovely people will notice is the presence of far more pictures and snarky warnings that I will hunt down anyone who rips those images off without reference.

Who knows, maybe I will even post more frequently then once a month? As a hopeful sacrifice to the spirits of procrastination I give you this;

A detail of a palimpsest/ book autopsy/ some book art I did for a project last year and am revisiting at the moment at Uni. No title as such, just cool shadows and a little fedora tip in the general direction of the amazing Brian Dettmer whose glory is so large I can only gaze longingly at him every morning on the 7:02 bus, never screwing up the courage to say hi or even make eye contact.

Comments are now enabled for non-gmail/ live journal users, so feel free to shit your thoughts out just as I have shat mine.

Always,
mary, mary

QLD elects a female premier.

2009-03-21T21:50:00.000+11:00

Anna Bligh is now QLDs premier and Pauline Hanson didn't win the seat of Beaudesert, though she did get almost 22% of the vote somehow.

Mmm, can't say I'm too familiar with QLD politics so I'll leave the commentary to people who know about that (and don't spend their saturday nights blogging in a cardigan with a good cup of tea.)

Vaginarama!

2009-03-20T22:56:00.000+11:00

Today I was checking out Dodson and Ross, which is the site Betty Dodson runs with a fellow pro-sex feminist Carlin Ross, and found a link to an amazing project called Beautiful Cervix. A doula and student midwife took photos of her cervix every day of her cycle and both pre- and post-coitus to show how it looks in various healthy states (none of which are Vagina Dentata, above.)

Christ on a cracker it's insane! I've gone back several times today just to look at the pictures again. I'm not going to lie- for me they have the same abject, repulsing/ fascinating thing going on that all photos of the inside of the human body have. Having said that, the fascination was generally a lot stronger than the repulsion. Vagina Pagina has the somewhat similar Everyday Bodies Project, and a recent post at Homebirth: A Midwife Mutiny came with photos of a baby being born that completely blew my mind.

Projects like Midwife Mutiny, Beautiful Cervix, The Everyday Bodies Project and even the galleries at Dodson and Ross are so important. The shame and lack of understanding that many women have of their bodies is one way that patriarchy uses to control us and prevent us from becoming a threat. This shame/ ignorance combination is a really effective tool. It's carried out by limiting the opportunity for honest, woman-to-woman discussions about what it's like to have a vagina and disseminating misogynistic myths about how unhygienic and gross they are. This is all overlaid with a narrative of moral obligation and threats to those who don't keep in line. In my own experience it can all become completely overwhelming and a bit of an obsession at times. When I was a little younger, less comfortable with my sexuality and didn't have anyone to talk to about vaginas and sex I thought my vag was broken. It wasn't pink enough or the discharge wasn't right or it was all dry and wrinkly looking. I thought it was sick, sick, sick!

One of the problems here is secrecy. I'm convinced that until we teach meaningful sex education to kids in school that goes beyond anatomy and advertising opportunities for tampon companies (another post in itself) there will always be girls who think and feel this way. We need to let kids know that it's ok to explore your own body yourself and tell them what they need to consider when exploring it with other people (including how to make sure it happens on their terms, physical safety and emotional safety). They also need to know that talking about this stuff is positive becasue sex and bodies aren't shameful or mortal pleasures that we'll suffer for sooner or later.

Of course ending shame and secrecy relating to sex and our bodies isn't just for the classroom. I'm continually in awe of bloggers like Renee from Womanist Musings and Deborah at Strange Land who openly talk about raising children as a feminist, a difficult thing which is essential to eradicating hierarchies of oppression (as well as simply being worthwhile and valid in its own right).

These attempts to empower women with understanding and images of their vaginas in different states is important. We need to let people know that vaginas are not obscene, gross, evil or the copyrighted property of men.

Mary, Mary, why ya bloggin?

2009-03-15T22:43:00.001+11:00

Welcome all, to my gooey, blogy delightfulness, where I will entertain you with vitriol and bravado masquerading as principals and character. Come in, take a seat, and stroke your goatee for there is work to be done.

There are two reasons for the existence of this delightful corner of the web;

I think I have something to say and learn about feminism in Australia and the people at the RSL have told me they're sick of listening to me endeavour towards that end.
I want the sort of debate I can sink my teeth into. I don't like it when I bring my feminist perspective to discussion where everyone politely cocks their head a little like I just mispronounced a French word.

As well as opening up another space for feminist conversations to take place I selfishly want to do this as a way of empowering myself and being angry (and celebrating) in the company people who also give a damn about feminism. I'm not good at making my feminism subtle and palatable and I'm sick of having to try to in order to get people to listen when I talk.

I feel like I've always been told, and instinctively knew, that I was expected to be pleasant at all costs. It wasn't till I started identifying as a feminist and listened to feminist discussions that I realised that this was because I was a woman, that there were other women who felt this way, that it was something we all experienced because we were all oppressed. Actually we still are, unless Femzilla HQ failed to cc me in on some RE:Patriarchy thwarting last thurs email, in which case someone surely owes me a post-patriarchal G&T. But I digress all this pressure to please, appease and not rock the boat that we don' have anything resembling an equal stake in has ensured that we don't have the power to speak or be listened to. If we've internalised patriarchal values enough then it doesn't even occur to us to rock the boat because as women we're taught, through the public and vehement disapproval of other women's behaviour, to seek our own happiness after everyone else's and blame ourselves before everyone else.

Of course this is just my experience, but if anyone tries to spin me any crap about my weak constitution and isolated cases then I'll a) scold them for ignoring my posting guidelines and b) scoff at them. Women get paid less then men, get shown in art galleries less then men, are raped more than men and told we inherently posses devalued and undesirable attributes.

We live in a world which tells us to act a certain way or we'll be sluts, bitches or dykes and neglects to mention that all of society is constructed to be really difficult and nasty to people who act that certain way. Yes well, that bugs me Patriarchy, it bugs me in a big way and this blog is my way of letting my little, dissident light shine.

Right

Out

My

Arse.