One of the things I really love about Melbourne...

... is that when toxic fuckwittery and mindless, destructive, dangerous shite like American-style "beauty" pageants (ie competitions) for lipstuck, fake-tanned, bumping and grinding six-year-olds (have a look at the one in the second photo, I mean just look at her) threatens to take hold in the city, they read its horrible cultural signs correctly and resist it for all they're worth. I love Melbourne for its thoughtfulness and its substance when I see this kind of thing. For some reason it's a city that contains a high enough ratio of ordinary thoughtful people (to, well, the other kind) for an effective number to dig their heels in and protest the house down when the more demented aspects of western culture show their faces. And it's right across assorted demographics and suburbs, from Northcote or Prahran where you'd expect resistance to Balwyn or Vermont where you wouldn't, so much. Go, Melburnians. Run this diseased crap out of town on a well-designed rail.

Because everyone knows you've got a right

A British backpacker has "defended" himself against the breach-of-privacy charges laid against him for covertly filming a young woman in a 'uni-sex bathroom' at a Queensland resort by saying 'I just wanted to see her naked.'

Spot the weasel word here. Yes, that's right: 'just'.

'Just' as distinct from what? The unavoidable implication here seems to be 'I only wanted to see her naked, which is my perfect right as a man and anyway what's the harm, I didn't rape her or anything so what are you all going on about?'

His lawyer calls his actions 'a lapse in judgement.'

Me, I'm off to the bottle shop to see what Scotland has to offer. Somehow a glass of wine just isn't going to cut it, after that.

That old chestnut

I see the addiction to alliteration persists when people are trying to dream up catchy titles. The meeja seems particularly addicted to putting the words 'feminism' and 'failed' together, as indicated by the title of this forum, 'Has Feminism Failed?' I suppose we should all be grateful that there's a question mark.

But 'Has feminism failed?' is a completely meaningless question. Has feminism failed what? 'Feminism' is not a person with agency and volition. Feminism is the name of a set of strategies for viewing, analysing and dealing with the world. Strategies don't 'fail', only the people trying to use them to achieve some stated goal. And that's usually because some actively anti-feminist entity or force has intervened, whether it's John Howard quietly dismantling the government programs for women, or some single-digit IQ footballing nuff nuff who thinks any woman who's come home with one of his mates must be fair game for whoever happens to be passing, or a rabidly reactionary female journalist explaining how awful it is for the poor menz to be accused of sexual assault, or some blogger explaining how women just don't understand that men have Urges.

Putting the words 'feminism' and 'failed' together in this manner is nothing more than a fairly transparent strategy, complete with begged question (as in 'When did you stop beating your wife?), for bagging feminism and trying to make women turn away from its principles.

But if people feel they just absolutely must put those two words together in a title or a headline, here's an alternative suggestion. Instead of asking whether feminism has failed us, how about a feature article or public debate called 'Have we failed feminism?'

In the words of the First Dog on the Moon ...

Australia, what have you done?

Get off my lawn

No specifics, for reasons that will be obvious to frequent users of the interwebs, but various little events recently have reminded me how much I dislike it when people I've never met or heard of try, with varying degrees of blatancy and barefacedness, to use my and others' blogs to publicise their own, or to publicise or advertise other things.

This is not okay behaviour.

Not even when the material isn't obscene/illiterate/ideologically unsound.

That is all.

It's only words

Tony Abbott's argument against the formal acknowledgement of traditional owners at public gatherings is that it's 'tokenistic'. (Note to Tone: the people who do it do usually actually mean it. If they didn't, they wouldn't bother to do it. QED.)

He seems to be offering this, as so many concern trolls do, as a good argument for not doing it at all. I note that, monarchist and Catholic that he is, he's not making the same argument for acknowledging any monarchs or vice-monarchs present at the beginning of a speech, or for Parliamentary prayers.

Yet surely the same argument applies. I bet there are more people in Australia working hard for the improvement of Aboriginal people's lives than there are working hard in the cause of retaining the monarchy, for a start. And I bet there are a lot more people who find the prayers and the nods to governors that they are obliged to make 'tokenistic' than people who feel the same about acknowledgement of traditional owners.

But that line isn't really worth arguing with anyway; nor do I have anything to say about Wilson Tuckey except that he and people like him are the price we pay for democracy. I'm more interested in the widely-held assumption behind Abbott's pronouncement that 'mere' words are worth nothing.

This from a politician, and one who's worked as a journalist and written several books to boot, is particularly ironic, but that's by the way as well. What floors me is that even people whose stock-in-trade is language seem to feel quite happy about trashing language as essentially worthless. It's nothing more than intellectual laziness: an acceptance of the notion that words and deeds are somehow the opposite of each other, each with a clear moral value and no prizes for guessing which is which. The lure of the false dichotomy is strong, I know -- it makes opining so much easier -- but you'd think a Rhodes Scholar would have been taught at some point in his education how to avoid its simplistic snares.

Because speech is an act, and so is thought, and so is decision-making about how you will behave. To acknowledge traditional owners at a public function is to remind everyone present of Aboriginal history and culture. It's a small reversal of erasure and a little raiser of consciousness. Recognition is an act, and so is the expression of respect.

Um, no

Reading my emailed online Age this morning I was a bit shocked to see at the top of the Top Stories the headline 'Praying for twins Trishna, Krishna'. The article itself was a perfectly workpersonlike report on the progress of the surgical team in Melbourne working on the separation of the conjoined Bangladeshi twins. No mention was made of prayer, nor was any subject attached to that verb 'praying'.

But be damned if the Adelaide Advertiser, as I found out later in the day, wasn't doing almost the same thing: on the front page, with a large photograph, there appears the headline: 'Nation prays for Trishna and Krishna'.

Now look. I wish those children nothing but well. They're out of surgery and into intensive care, now, after a 27-hour operation. According to the most recent news updates I can find, they are still okay and that is fabulous. Every time I heard an update about the surgery on the news last night and again today, I wished the surgeons and the littlies well, and marvelled, recalling some of the unforgettable 19th century things -- including a number of skeletons of conjoined twins -- that I saw in specimen jars in Vienna's Museum of Pathological Anatomy, at what is now surgically possible.

But I wasn't "praying" for either the surgeons or the children and I'm damn sure most of the rest of the country wasn't either. This kind of thing provokes the same shudder of irritation that passes through me whenever the Prime Minister uses the word "evil" in a public speech. The discourse of Christianity belongs in the churches and the homes of Christians. When you use it in public life you are effectively saying that its concepts are real for everyone, and you are forcing non-Christians into active resistance, which may not be the effect you were trying to achieve.

Australia is, or is supposed to be, a secular country. As one of its citizens, I believe in mindfulness, in suffering, and in the alleviation of suffering. But I don't believe in prayer and I don't believe in evil, and being spoken for by politicians and newspapers as if I did believe in them makes me want to spit in somebody's eye.

Bonding: just some slurry in bunny ears

Mere days after the volcanic explosion of a giant and pulsating boil on the muscular Aussie arse (otherwise Sarah Ferguson's 'Code of Silence' on Four Corners on May 11, including an interview with the girl who was pack-raped by involved in so-called "group sex" with a number of players and staff from the Cronulla Sharks in Christchurch seven years ago) and the resulting dismissal by Channel Nine of former player and 'personality' Matthew Johns in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy by a TV station that has done more to promote and legitimise misogyny and sexism than any other single entity in the country (I originally mistyped 'Bonding' as 'Boning' in the title field up there)... Mere days after said explosion, as I say, with blood and pus still dripping from the walls of TV studios and football clubrooms everywhere, a Melbourne non-league Australian Rules football team has been fined $5,000 for hiring a stripper to perform before a game, as -- and this was how I heard it described by a club official on the radio -- 'a team bonding exercise'.

A team bonding exercise?

Some of us think it's more just a variation on the theme of bukkake. Or possibly not even a variation. And they'd probably think that was a team bonding exercise as well.

I mean, 'bonding'? How does that work in this case, exactly? You get together to degrade a woman; that much is clear. From the Four Corners transcript (this is a different woman, talking about another different woman):

SARAH FERGUSON: There is an even more sinister side to this technology, Charmyne claims to have been shown a video recently, by a young player on his mobile phone.

CHARMYNE PALAVI: He goes we picked up this one girl and there was like seven of us on her and everything and he goes to me, and we um, but I said you're going to get in trouble for that type of thing, like you can't do that. And he goes, please, he goes we just filmed her to say that she consented to it.

And that freaked me out. This girl was actually in her 20's and told me what they did to her. He said they made her put bunny ears on cause Easter's coming up and made her give head to all of the players one after the other. Made, like I don't understand the term, like we "made her do it."

SARAH FERGUSON: Yeah, and do you know who she is?

CHARMYNE PALAVI: No, I asked him who she was, not knowing that I would even know her, and he goes oh just some slurry from around Cronulla.

So, you get together to degrade a woman ... and that gets you together? Que? How does that work? Apparently the idea of the stripper was to 'gee them up', or, as some commentator unselfconsciously but hilariously put it on the radio last night, 'pump them up', which would seem to support what some of us have suspected all along: that sport is really only a slightly more organised substitute for the raping and pillaging that all manly-men would want to do all the time if only there weren't a lot of silly laws against it.

I was offered a unique insight into the way a certain kind of male mind works when some slurry from around North Adelaide (and a total stranger to boot) came up to me in the pub one night many years ago and said, and I quote, 'Do you f*ck?'

Not 'Where have you been all my life?', 'Hello', 'What's your name?', 'Nice haircut' or even 'Nice tits', but 'Do you fuck?' The correct reply to this, which I gave, is 'Not with the likes of you, shithead,' but I later gave this question and its wording a great deal of thought. To a certain kind of man, there are only two kinds of women. A woman either 'f*cks' or she doesn't. And if she does, she f*cks everybody. Which is, like, consent, right?

And in the meantime, given the height, weight, strength, fitness, world view and subcultural norms of most rugby players, and Charmyne Palavi's own, erm, unique take on these matters, there's one thing of which I am very sure: it's only a matter of time before she finds out what "made" means.

There must be some kind of psychoanalytic logic to this 'team bonding around the degradation of one woman' business, but I'm too tired and too revolted to work it out, so I offer Prahran and Cronulla this truly charming, subtle and hilarious little video instead. I'm sure they'll just love it, and it'll give them some great new ideas.

Pants on fire

The 'notifications' on Facebook, once a simple mechanism to let you know when some Friend or other had done something or other, now mostly consists of meta-Facebook self-promotion exhorting you to use some application or other, presumably so that more advertising will get more exposure.

Perhaps the most deceptive of these applications are the ones that lure you, including by the use of carefully designed weirdly-behaving links and the exploitation of people's unfamiliarity with the way Facebook works (not least because they keep changing the way it works), into trying to find out what your so-called Friends have been saying about you using those sinister applications designed for the very purpose of bringing out the worst and most malicious in the unwary who see no reason not to commit all manner of reckless remarks to cyberspace.

What these applications really do -- both the ones where you say what you 'really' think about your 'friends' and the ones where you find out what your 'friends' 'really' think about you -- is first to feed, and then to feed on, the naiveté, out-of-controlness, emotional insecurity, uncertainty and paranoia of the young, who are, of course, Facebook's main target. For Facebook is mainly a massive market research tool, hunting the baby dollar. Observe, for example, the 'notification' that has just popped up this morning:

Good friendships are based on honest opinions! Are you curious to know what your friends really think about you?

Good friendships based on honest opinions? Are they serious? In my by now rather extensive experience, good friendships rely on the occasional and loving suppression of honest opinions.

(Note also the heinous valorising of opinion as such -- which is perhaps the single most overrated commodity of our time -- that has taken over most of what used to be intellectual life and wrecked newspapers forever. The MSM ought not to be blaming The Internet for its own demise, but rather its own foolishness in having drunk the Opinion kool-aid. Facts, dudes. Analysis. All the good, disciplined, clear-eyed, neutrally-expressed, non-visceral things you used to do so well.)

But I digress. Am I curious to know what my friends really think about me? No I am not. I love and trust my friends, would never expect them to give me a perfect report card, and flatter myself that if anything about me is seriously annoying them then I will probably be able to tell. (Possibly not to do anything about it, mind. But certainly to tell.)

Look at the evilly paranoia-inducing vulnerability-creating-and-exploiting wording of that question, with that word 'really' implying that your friends 'really' think something quite different from what they're saying, that you are being lied to and betrayed, that your friends are not really your friends at all but rather acting on some cruel and horrid secret motivation in pretending to like you. We, Facebook, are your only true friends. Want to find out The Truth and stop being the pathetically deluded patsy that we know you really are? Why, just click on this handy link, and we'll take you straight to a site where you have to enter your mobile number to proceed and then you will never, ever be free of us or any of the people who are paying us all will be revealed.

One aspect of contemporary education that gives me real hope for future generations is the rise of media studies: kids are a million times more aware and critical of the media's manipulations, especially in advertising, than was the case a generation ago. I don't know whether the same kind of techniques for critical analysis are now being taught with respect to new media, but I hope they are. I'd like to think that the kids being targeted by Facebook have actually got its number.

And speaking of bottom-feeding scum-sucking swamp life ...

The big political group blog Larvatus Prodeo gently, habitually and rightly mocks the style of outraged righteous indignation adopted by many right-wing commentators by running a regular Condemnation (Or Loud Denunciation) Thread in which readers are invited to condemn whatever is annoying them this month.

Loud Denouncers of all stripes have been in overdrive this week, calling the Victorian arsonists mass murderers and terrorists, inventing ever newer and more grotesque punishments for them. This mindset has been fed by the commercial media, for whom an invasive, lingering close-up of some poor sod in tears passes for good reporting, and for whom the whipping-up of righteous indignation in the audience is their chief raison d'être.

At the risk of attracting abusive comments from people who think that if I'm mocking these attacks then I must somehow be defending the arsonists, and yes there are indeed many people whose string and clapper arrangements above the neck minds do work that way, allow me to loudly denounce the loud denouncers (and if any of my Wednesday editing workshop class is reading this, I trust you picked up the deliberate split infinitive there).

Unfortunately this kind of thing isn't the exclusive preserve of conservatives. I have been particularly saddened to hear the PM joining in this chorus; like SA's Premier Mike Rann, Rudd is given (witness his behaviour during the Bill Henson uproar) to making calculatedly populist pronouncements with the same aim as the commercial media: lead the chorus of righteous indignation in order to make the people feel that they are the virtuous and you are at their head.

This is particularly nauseating when politicians do it, because, like some journalists (though fewer and fewer, these days; are journalists getting dumber and dumber or am I just over-exposing myself to the Adelaide Advertiser, apparently AKA the Traumatiser?), they do in fact know better. They are Loudly Denouncing in a cold, calculating and insincere manner, in order to appease and control the populace by rhetorical stealth. I am sure that most politicians and most journalists know in their more reasonable moments that arson often proceeds from a very particular psychological state. Most of those who do it could be described as what my friend L. would call Not a Well Person.

This is not to excuse them, merely to say that the only way to reduce this kind of sociopathy is to understand and control it at the source. Which is where these people come in. Operation Nomad in South Australia has apparently drastically reduced the number of deliberately lit fires in this state over the last few years, and in the wake of last weekend's Victorian inferno, that state is initiating talks with SA Police to discuss setting up something similar in Victoria.

However.

There are two other categories of people currently crawling out from under their icky rocks whom even I would Loudly Denounce without hesitation. Looters and charity scammers aren't even acting out psychological compulsions. They're just the utter bottom of the human barrel.

Obscenity

We has it.



Found via Hoyden About Town.

This is just wrong in too many ways to count, but here are four to be going on with:

1) False advertising. A woman the size and shape of the one in the photo doesn't 'need' to wear this or any other torture garment. I am of an age to have spent the first year of my adolescence being forced to wear 'foundation garments' (then suddenly they invented pantyhose -- stockings had hitherto been kept up by girdles, and if you were over fourteen and left your legs bare you were a slut -- and the world changed overnight) so I know whereof I speak.

2) Allegedly to minimise 'figure faults' and maximise 'assets', this garment has a (porno)graphic subtext, not particularly sub, that fetishises the arse in a way that makes crotchless 'panties' look innocent, normal and sweet. I have my own ideas about where this growing arse/anal fetish is going. Between it and the various charming customs around the place -- mass abortion of female foetuses in countries where of course everybody wants a boy; large-scale rape of babies and toddlers in the belief that it will cure AIDS -- the global overpopulation problem is already well on the way to being sorted.

3) This 'body shaper' underwear craze is bringing back the quaint locutions of the 1950s, isn't that sweet? Do a quick prac crit / close reading / fisk of these corset manufacturers' advertising some time. 'Body shapers' = 'Your own uncorseted body has no shape, ew, men won't like it [*makes child-frightening bogeyman noises*], so put that self-esteem in the garbage right now and spend money instead.'

4) OK Girls, Break Through the Surface of the Primeval Slime or Die Trying department: this garment is a patriarchal instrument of torture. Do. Not. Wear. It. Or anything like it. Ever.

Those who don't understand (or don't want to understand) that 'patriarchal' can apply in a situation like this where women appear to be willingly doing these things to themselves are being literal-minded essentialists who don't understand what a patriarchal society is or how it works, and no correspondence will be entered into on this subject because I spent 17 years explaining it to fresh crops of newbie students every year and that is enough for a lifetime. In a nutshell: when you say 'Yes but women want to do this to themselves' I will reply 'Yes indeed, many of them do. Why is that, do you think?'

I know there are men out there who deliberately Google 'patriarchy' so they can turn up at strange blogs for the first time and argue the toss, and any such (instantly recognisable) comment will be binned. Go here if you genuinely want to understand this concept better than you do.

Loud Denunciation of Sandra Bernhard, wherein recent vows are broken almost at once

Regular readers around the Ozblogosphere will have noticed a certain amount of concern trolling about how shocking it is that 'the feminists' (because as you know we are a mob, all the same, and immediately identifiable) have not Loudly Denounced Sandra Bernhard's reported remarks about Sarah Palin, as discussed here.

As a matter of fact I have seen Bernhard Loudly Denounced by a number of feminist bloggers and commenters, but a concern troll will never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Nonetheless, I feel the need to make the gesture. So here you go.

If she said what she is alleged to have said, and it seems that she probably did, in no matter what context, Bernhard was totally out of order. Her 'joke' was offensive and the charity was right to drop her.

Nothing about rape is funny.

Besides, if you're a comedian and Palin is your target, Tina Fey is the way to go. Because a dead straight impersonation is funnier than anything else you could possibly do.

So here you go, Sistahs, here's some handy proof to link to next time you see a complaint about what hypocrites feminists are for not Loudly Denouncing Sandra Bernhard, and crowing about how 'silent' we have all been. I, for one, hereby Loudly Denounce her.

Have I said it often enough yet? Will the bold be easy enough to read, do you think, or would big-print capitals in primary colours be better?