More thoughts on writing, gender and statistics

Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the Sydney Morning Herald (what I'm writing, this week, I mean -- won't be published till early Feb).

It's something I think to check from time to time and I'm glad to say that even when I'm not doing it consciously I usually manage, over the course of four book reviews, to mix up genre, gender and nationality pretty evenly. The literary editor does the first cull of the books that come in for review and sends me more than I need, and then I choose from them.

(I'm always startled to realise how many people think reviewers choose their own books, at least for hard-copy publications. Books for review, and reviewers for them, are chosen by the literary editor, though reviewers will often make a pitch to review this or that book.)

Mostly when people are counting statistics about whether men or women are getting more coverage, they don't look any further than the numbers. This week's copy features three women writers and one man. With four books to review per week, the most frequent gender ratio in my own columns (as I say, not often deliberately: frankly I'm proud of having internalised this to the point where I usually don't even think about it) is 2:2. Sometimes, as this week, it's 3:1, one way or the other. Very rarely is it 4:0 but when it is, again, the all-male and all-female weeks are pretty equal in terms of numbers.

Recently I compared stats with a fellow writer of multiple short reviews per week, over a period of months, and was astounded to see that of 88 books I'd reviewed in that time, 45 were by women and 43 by men. Not chosen deliberately; the cards just fell that way.

However.

Part of my job is to select a Pick of the Week, which gets twice as long a review as the others. It's usually pretty easy to do, especially in a weak week. Sometimes a book just leaps out at you; other times it's a tossup between two, or even more. Usually I pick the one that has the largest number of positive things to be said about it, which would seem to guarantee that the largest number of people won't feel as though they have been misled if they ever get round to reading the book.

This week, I happened to notice that the Pick of the Week is the only book out of the four that was written by a man. It's a clear winner, though the others are fine and none of them is downright bad -- although this isn't always the case. I have no problems with this choice at all.

But if I looked at my column for, say, four weeks in a row, or over a period of six months, and noticed that I had reviewed more women writers than men but that the men's books were consistently being featured as Pick of the Week, I would. I would have a problem with it, and with myself. There'd be some ferocious self-interrogation going on. But it's not a thing that the raw stats would pick up.

Normal service will be resumed shortly ...

... now that the standard November pile of work has been whittled down almost to a reasonable level. (And don't think I'm not grateful to have work. Au contraire, for how else would I ever hope to pay the dentist?)

I heard the most wonderful interview with Paul Kelly on the car radio yesterday and wrote a long post about music in my head but of course it's all gone now. Well, nearly all; hands up anyone else who remembers Peter, Paul and Mary singing 'I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog'. Sigh.

Of course they bloody do

Michelle Grattan's piece in the Age today is not only disingenuous but even perhaps a tad hypocritical, reporting today from well up in the high moral ground that the Federal Labor MPs all have cheat sheets, media questions, for the answering of.

Because as if the very best efforts of Craig Thomson were not enough to bring the party crashing down around his ears and usher in the era of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who if he falls over will be replaced by Prime Minister Julie Bishop, some unidentified (a) total doofus or (b) rat in the ranks (tick one) has left his or her notes lying around on a chair where, of course, the meeja just happened by and picked them up.

Whether it was done by accident or design, you can only imagine what Julia Gillard is thinking this morning. When you've been forced by circumstance to make a fateful lose-lose decision about leading your party, fought an election, exercised your stunning negotiating skills to form government, kept it all together for over a year despite some truly frightful attempts to oust you, and made a few appalling mistakes all by yourself, who needs a rabid, grubby Opposition, a hostile media, a big smear of misogyny right across the national board (Opposition, media, electorate, one's own party, you name it) when you've got one f*ckwit who can't keep either his credit card or the other thing in his pants, and now another who is too absent-minded, or treacherous*, to avoid leaving this kind of thing lying around?

But here's the thing. Of course they've got a bloody cheat sheet. No sensible person who has anything at all to do with media questions would be without one. Because most, not all but most, journalists in our country in its current incarnation seem to think that journalism is about nagging, needling, asking hostile, mindless gotcha questions (50 extra points if you make someone cry or lose his/her temper) and then putting as sensational a spin as possible on whatever the answer was in order to sell more papers. Even Michelle Grattan, who used to be the gold standard.

Or about taking some perfectly ordinary fact, like, say, that MPs have had media training and have paid attention to the advice they were given, and blowing it up with the rhetorical equivalent of a few acronyms and punctuation marks, as here, where the invisible OMGs and exclamation marks are thick on the ground. Get real, Michelle. If the media were doing a good job of reporting neutrally and truthfully on the facts, just the facts, about the way the country's actually being run, people wouldn't nead cheat sheets to help with the Augean-stables task of resisting being tormented and misrepresented by the ladies and gentlemen of the press. As it is, WTF do you expect?

*I'm going with 'treacherous'. You don't 'inadvertently' leave your notes 'on an Opposition seat in Parliament'.

They've done what?

The national broadcaster has apparently produced an allegedly comic mini-series, to be aired later this year, about the Prime Minister's private life.

Can you imagine anyone ever writing or saying that sentence about any one of the other (ie male) Prime Ministers in Australian history, while they were in office?

No, neither can I.

And if you were still in any doubt about the decline of newspapers as we know them ...

... then you obviously haven't seen the subject line of today's online update of The Age that just arrived in my mailbox:

Nixon, teen had sex: report

Showing my age, I responded initially to this as though it were some sort of long-repressed "news" about the behaviour of Richard Nixon. (Remember Richard Nixon?) Then I thought Gee this looks like the headlines I used to give my first-year Rhetoric students to re-punctuate in order to teach them how vital punctuation is to meaning.

(Nixon: teen had sex report
Nixon teen had sex: report
Nixon? Teen had sex! Report
Etc)

For those of you not up with these vital matters, the headline refers to one of the AFL's more high-profile serial sleazes and that girl who publicised those photos of Nick Riewoldt's willy, and who cannot, apparently, help herself to stay out of the news.

Osama bin Laden is dead. President Obama's chances of winning the next election are up through the roof. The Tories have just had a similar boost in Britain. (Now that really would be news: 'Millions of Brits look happy!') Victoria has just had its state Budget announced and the federal ditto is just around the corner. Global warming is on the rise, as is resistance to it, and countries in the Middle East are falling over one by one like dominoes. Africa continues to horrify. Greece and Portugal have gone broke. (Just typed 'borke': that too.) Which reminds me: the sacking of subeditors by Fairfax is major news in the sense that it marks a major stage in the decline of, erm, yes, oh right. And so what's The Age leading with? 'Nixon, teen had sex.' Given that subeditors are responsible for, among other things, writing headlines, perhaps in some cases their decline might be ever so slightly less of a bad thing, but not much.

You know what really drives me crispy about this one? (Apart from the decline of, etc etc.) That word 'teen'. Anyone who has ever seen any p*rn with actual words in it knows that 'teen' is right up there with 'panties' (EEWWWW) as far as the lubricious p*rn vocabulary goes, which Goddess knows is not very far but that only makes it worse.

I Do. Not. Care who had sex with whom, in any context, and I never ever want to hear about it ever again ever. Shag your socks off, people, with whomever or whatever you choose: just make sure it involves a nice hot cup of STFU at some point, and I mean for everybody.

And I don't want to hear it about anybody at all, much less Ricky Nixon. Being faced with the image this headline conjures up is not what I require from my broadsheet newspaper. But the whole notion of a 'broadsheet newspaper' is now a thing of the past anyway.

That's not a kiss

Can someone out there more clued-up than I in the ways of psychoanalysis give me some sort of explanation of the hysterical hype about The Kiss on the balcony after The Wedding? This, at least, was not only the meeja's fault. The crowd appeared to be howling for it as well.

The newlyweds have been shagging for the best part of ten years already, so it can't have been the novelty value. Did this (to my mind) utterly weird and not a little icky lustlust (as opposed to bloodlust) come from some deep unsatisfaction in the hive mind, a desire for vicarious untainted lerve – as opposed to the crowd's and, presumably, the journalists' own unsatisfactorily imperfect love lives? Are we all now so shaped by screen conventions and tropes that we think of a kiss as some sort of compulsory narrative climax? Was it just porn in acceptable form?

Or was it a remnant of the days when newlyweds hung the bloody sheet out of the window the morning after the wedding? (Look! A woman has been caused to suffer pain, shed blood, and prove that she is no-one's chattel but her new husband's, and therefore all is right with the world! Don't laugh, Diana was medically examined for virginity before her wedding to Charles could go ahead, a test Camilla could not have passed at the same age, much less by the time she married him herself.)

I really was a bit shocked, and more than a bit squicked, by the way the commentators in particular, and the print journalists afterwards, ceaselessly harped on The Kiss. They might as well have been shouting 'Give us the money shot!' But it seemed to me to go much deeper than that. Especially with the crowd. People are incredibly strange, she said profoundly.

At one point Camilla picked up her bridesmaid-granddaughter awkwardly under the arms and appeared to be about to dangle her over the balcony like Michael Jackson, which would have been far more interesting for journalists, you would have thought. And what are they going to do when Harry gets married? Encourage him to barf over the balcony onto the furry heads of the Grenadier Guards? (He looked as if he was going to, I thought, as he and William made their way towards the Abbey; he looked far more nervous than the groom, though it was probably just a hangover. And what's with the walk? Hasn't even the Army been able to teach Harry how to carry himself, or is it some sort of undiagnosed childhood hip wockiness?)

Speaking of Harry, I found this wonderful comment when, struck yet again by the total lack of physical similarity between the groom and his brother, I went image-googling and stumbled on this wonderful remark, by which I was completely convinced:

His glare/look is exactly the same of that of Prince Philip ... he does have that ‘I will tear you apart from limb to limb Mr Fox and drink your blood through a straw‘ look.

Would I trust Prince Harry to look after my Children’s pet rabbits and hamsters if we went away?

No I would not.

Anyway. All theories about the Kiss weirdness gratefully considered. And in the meantime, if I have to look at other people's kisses then I might go with this one, thanks.

In which Lindsay Tanner's argument is amply demonstrated

Last night on 7.30, Lindsay Tanner broke the hearts all over again of people who couldn't for the life of them understand, back in 2003, why the ALP anointed Mark Latham as leader instead of him, no doubt for stupid faction mateship blah blah blah reasons. Imagine how different this country might have been, and might be.

Tanner was calm in the face of Leigh Sales' attempts to demonstrate the very point of his argument by putting on an attack-dog persona and trying to trap him into trashing the party 'because our viewers expect it', which translated probably means 'The suits in management are on my back to be more like a bloke.' She's not very good at it, because you can see her heart's not really in either aggression or stupid gotcha questions, and she repeatedly, quite shockingly and unacceptably, let Tanner make his case, develop his argument, stick to his point and finish what he was saying. Which means that apart from her opening question, the most suitable answer to which would have been 'Well, der', this interview is actually worth watching and listening to from start to finish.

The facts, ma'am, just the facts

"People have not got over her knifing of Kevin Rudd"

No, and they won't, either, for as long as formerly respectable and responsible journalists like Michelle Grattan continue to use flamboyantly loaded language like this in what is supposed to be a reporting of facts.

Grattan is not a fool and she is a very experienced journalist, so the only conclusion it's possible to come to is that she is being disingenuous, pretending to report the facts in a neutral fashion while at the same time reinforcing prejudices and preconceptions with grossly prejudicial language like that.

I'm very ticked off with Gillard myself at the moment, but I am also actually a bit shocked by this shoddy bit of journalism. I used to expect better from The Age, and I still do expect better from Michelle Grattan.

A great big new thing: The Conversation

Via Margaret Simon at The Content Makers, here's a new thing. Looks good. Margaret describes it as 'a not-for-profit collaboration between journalists and academic researchers'. Which can't be anything but good.

The Conversation

In which Tony Abbott falls on his ass but doesn't get a special cookie from his mommy

In the Senate, Labor's Doug Cameron said he was concerned about "the disintegration of the Liberal Party". "The barbarians are at the gate of the Liberal Party," he said. "Who are these barbarians? They are extremists. They are Tea Party imitators. They are the remnants of Pauline Hanson's One Nation. They are the radio and newspaper bullies whose ignorance is in direct proportion to their pay packet. If you get close enough, you can smell the fear of the Liberal Party moderates as Mr Abbott leads them down the dry well of fear and ignorance."

Tea Party imitators? Members, more like. Did you see the spelling on some of those signs? I don't mean the basic illiteracy, I mean 'mom' for 'mum' and 'ass' for 'arse'.

Who wrote those signs and at whose behest? Who were the people carrying them? Were they actual Americans, or did they copy them boilerplate-style from some lunatic-fringe website?

Also, is that the Doug Cameron with the charming Scottish accent who quite some years back used to be a scone-hot rabble-rousing unionist extremist annoying the bejesus out of parliamentarians by running rings around them in arguments? I kind of liked him back then, too, but I like him even more now.

Quotation from here; more on the subject at Loon Pond; and Margaret Simon on the way The Australian, in contrast with The Age, is pretending this morning that none of it ever happened. Which in itself is telling; even The Australian has disowned this mob this morning.

It just gets worse and worse

This is the third disgracefully dishonest headline I've seen today.

Bob Brown has written today to Julia Gillard saying how appalled he was by the placards being waved by Tony Abbott's posse of bussed-in flat-earth clowns, and saying that he knows she has 'broad shoulders' but he also knows that this kind of stuff can be hurtful.

How has The Australian reported this online? Under the headline Anti-tax banners 'hurtful' to Gillard.

The clear implication is that Gillard found them hurtful, and said so, and is therefore a wimp, all of which is complete crapola.

Furthemore, they are not in any way 'anti-tax banners'; they are banners saying, and I quote, 'Ditch the witch' and 'Juliar .... Bob Browns [sic] bitch'. This one is written over a crude background sketch of what I presume are supposed to be the flames of hell, in which they presumably want to burn her. I mean, it wouldn't be a picture of the planet going up in flames, would it.

I've got a headline for them: how about Genetic link suspected between the inability to place an apostrophe correctly and the belief that the sun revolves around the earth.

Print media watch (online edition)

What, offhand, would you say was the subliminal message behind this conjunction of text, image and caption?

I want to know who chose that photo to illustrate that story. I want to know why he (or she) (hah) chose it, and from how many available images. And I want to know how many people it got past to make it online, and I want to know who they were, too.

And then I want to know how many of these people have wives, mothers, sisters, girlfriends or daughters, and I want to know how they'd feel if one of these women were sexually assaulted by a mob, and if there were a press story about it, and if that press story were accompanied by the most revealing photo of the victim that could possibly be found.

And if anyone says 'Oh they're just doing their job to sell their product,' I will remind that person of the phrase 'Nuremberg defence'.

UPDATE: The photograph originally used to illustrate the article to which I've linked has now been removed. It was a large photograph of the journalist from the waist up, looking particularly glamorous in a white evening dress that showed a great deal of tanned cleavage. I assume the Age got a lot of flak about it. If so, good.

Shame all round, boys

Now I know that with the Great Big Non-Story of Nick Riewoldt's Willy (and of course that's what this is really all about: is it that he thinks it isn't big enough, or is he embarrassed about being caught in a pose that might shout 'wanker'?) we are back in the land of what my Facebook Friend Lord Sedgwick calls the Single Digit IQ Nuff Nuff, original ref to Brendan Fevola and Lara Bingle.

But does that time-honoured 'quality' newspaper The Age, which I'm old enough to remember as a once mighty power in the land, really need to get in on the act as well? Note to Paul Millar and Jared Lynch: It's 'stream of consciousness', boys. Not 'stream-of-conscience'.

(NB: also, Elizabeth Jolley has already made this joke. But she was doing it on purpose.)

Actually, I don't see any sign of any conscience anywhere in this whole story. Not even a trickle. Just infantile narcissism and total abnegation of responsibility for one's own behaviour as far as the eye can see. That and the tip of the iceberg that is the pig-dog ugly subculture of the AFL-and-women.

But I hope that young woman is enjoying her ten minutes of fame, because the AFL is going to swing all of its power and money into action and crush her like a bug. And more vain and misguided young women will swan in to fill the tiny gap she leaves in the AFL's neverending supply of stupid girls, and nothing will change. A plague on both your houses.

Joan Baez sings Woody Guthrie for our times

Why We Still Need Feminism, Part #1,908

Have you noticed that whenever The Australian wants to publish another piece of vicious, moronic, sexist crapola about Julia Gillard, they nearly always get a woman to write it? Kate Legge on earlobes, Glenda Korporaal on handbags, Planet Janet on pretty much anything you care to name, and now yesterday we have this pile of really stinking ordure by another such female OO journalist [sic] with Form in this respect, namely former adviser to Peter Costello and John Howard (about what, one wonders. Women's affairs? Nah) Niki Savva.

Greg Jericho at Grog's Gamut reckons that of all such poisonous tripe published by the OO thus far in a naked attempt to sway the stupid, this Savva piece takes the biscuit. Which is saying a lot.

Why do they do it? I think it's because they're so ignorant of feminism that when someone says 'Oi, this is vicious, moronic, sexist crapola,' they can reply 'No it isn't, because it was written by a woman.' And I really do think that they really do think that that constitutes some sort of answer.

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?'

Why We Still Need Feminism, Part #1,763

If ever you were tempted to think that women in Australia or indeed in the West generally had finally gained some sort of equality in public life, ask yourself this simple question.

Can you imagine how it would have gone down with Australia's (these days) almost uniformly conservative MSM journalists -- and, alas, with the bulk of the populace -- if Julia Gillard rather than Tony Abbott had been photographed in Afghanistan firing an automatic rifle?

They'd be blithering and drooling for weeks. They'd start with Hanoi Jane, and they'd go downwards from there. And in the meantime, Abbott's petulant whingeing about being made to look silly is dominating the papers, most of which are ignoring Abbott's puerile narcissism and instead using this massive non-event to attack what he's calling (and calling, and calling, and calling -- if there's one thing Abbott does love, it's a bit of repetition, a bit of repetition) Gillard's 'low bastardry'.

See, it's okay for the Leader of the Opposition to call the Prime Minister a low bastard, publicly and repeatedly, but it's not okay for a woman to shoot a gun.

The rules are baroque and Byzantine, Grasshopper, and nor do they make any sense, but you break them at your peril.

More on Grog's Gamut

 Margaret Simons has a must-read post up at The Content Makers on the ethics of journalist James Massola's outing in The Australian of the blogger formerly known as Grog's Gamut, including a crystalline bit of analysis by Swinburne lecturer in media ethics Denis Muller.

Among other excellent points, he makes this one:

... there is another public-interest consideration to be taken into account here, and that is the public interest in having a plurality of voices in the public space or, as John Milton called it, the marketplace of ideas.  If, as a result of the outing, Mr Jericho withdraws from the public space, the Australian polity will be the poorer; it will have been harmed.  The harm would be negligible, certainly, but the principle is not negligible.  Ethical reporting requires that such possible consequences be identified and an honest rationale be developed to justify causing them.

Shock, horror: atheist witches not hypocrites

In what parallel universe does it qualify as "news" that the Prime Minister and the Governor-General didn't go to church?

Can you imagine how the joyful, nay, orgasmic cries of 'Hypocrite' would have rung round the walls of The Australian's offices if Julia Gillard, who once, when asked by some journalist, readily agreed that yes she was indeed an atheist, had fronted up at church? They must have been really disappointed that she wasn't there.

What next, a trial? As Kate Grenville once said, the test is, if they drown. And if they don't drown, then that proves that they are indeed witches, and you get to burn them at the stake instead.

Yes, we know

As readers of this blog may have noticed, I'm quite a fan of Crikey reporter Bernard Keane and am enjoying his weekday reports in Crikey's special extra early-morning campaign newsletter. And I am an even bigger fan of George Megalogenis, one of the few grown-up journalists this country seems to have left.

However.

Here's Keane is this morning:

The impact of the Latham “intervention” on the weekend is yet to be played out, but I suspect George Megalogenis was right in suggesting yesterday [Keane doesn't say where] that there appears to be a pattern of men trying to undermine our first female prime minister.

Keane says this as though it were a new thought: as though Megalogenis had made some startling new discovery.

Female journalists and bloggers have been saying it ever since the day Gillard became Prime Minister. We have offered all sorts of evidence in support of the observation. And for the most part we have been ignored, if not squashed, mocked and derided, by blokes in online conversations about it (not all blokes, but enough of them to stifle conversation on the topic), whenever we so much as stuck our heads above the parapet and hinted that there might be a bit of it going about.

But I suppose that for some people, nothing's really real until a bloke says it.