fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

When one is a believer in any cause, it is sometimes instructive to see your particular belief from the outside, from an observer who weighs your belief as equal with many others, not positioning it as primary. It is an uncomfortable feeling because sometimes it makes your beliefs seem more trivial than you feel they are, and for a moment you think "am I too blinded by my beliefs to be rational and logical about the importance of these ideas?" Sometimes, however, seeing your beliefs listed with other universally accepted conditions makes for a similarly uncomfortable experience, despite its ratification of what you believe. Because when your particular passion project starts being acknowledged as a legitimate position or condition, one fight is over, and another begins. Today I attended a talk hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies given by Professor Burdett Loomis, Fulbright Flinders University Distinguished Chair in American Political Science entitled Stalemate in ...

Cooking is a great love of mine, but I usually only cook dishes that fall into one of two categories: 1. The recipe was cooked for me or given to me by someone I know, or 2. The recipe is from a book that was bought for me Many of my favorite recipes are known by the people who taught them to me - I cook three recipes known as Jen's Recipe , three from Ariel , one each from Kristen and Kathryn, my Bolognese sauce is from my Mother, and I have two dishes that are my own invention, one inspired directly by a technique I learnt from Kevin. I have a growing collection of beloved dishes that come from cookbooks given to me for birthdays and Christmas by the fabulous Vivian and Natalie and with any book vouchers I buy enormous multicolored tomes from Australian Cooking Legends from which I gather delicious dishes. When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus My star recipes are family recipes howeve...

Due to discussions , I wanted to grab some 'Top 100' lists from various arbiters of taste for books, stage, TV and film and do a quick survey of lady writers and lead roles for ladies. Then I thought fuck it, my readers are clever and knowledgeable, they'll be able to come up with a positive, let's look forward, not backwards list of the popular culture I am looking for. So, knowledgeable people that read my nattering, lend me your ears and your ideas. In the following categories of popular culture: Fiction Prose or Graphic Novels (original) TV Drama scripts (original) Film scripts (original) Stage plays (original) I am looking for submissions of one, five, ten or fifty characters and authors that in your opinion are: 1. Best lead female character written by a male. 2. Best lead male character written by a female. For the lists as they expanded after this post, please go to alternative Top 100 and feminist Top 100 . STAGE PLAYS The eponymous her...

I am really fond of asking newly met people in pubs or at parties questions like ‘how old are you inside?’ ‘does your mother understand what you do for a job?’ and ‘what do you do when you are not earning money? ’ These questions receive a variety of answers, some unique, some boring, but hopefully even with the boring answers, I work with the person to think more deeply and a little sidewise about the question, and we will get to a new and interesting answer for both of us. I came up with a new one last year, which I was very proud of ‘who are your role models or people you find inspirational who are not of your gender?’ This is now my favourite question because so many people just don’t bother crossing gender lines when it comes to the people that inspire them. I actually came up with the question because a group of women and I had been discussing our favourite films with female leads and realised that most of them were films based on books written by women. Very few ...

Why isn’t every man I meet a feminist? I believe that it is because of a perceived difference between objective ideology and subjective experience. I know a lot of different types of feminists because basic ideas of inequality and feminism are encapsulated in political, social and religious laws, rules and beliefs that are applied objectively to women. But everyone’s awareness and experience of inequality, everyone’s reaction to and interaction with inequality is personal, specific and subjective. I will, as always, start with a personal story. I wrote what I now think of as my first two proto-feminist essays in Year Twelve Religious Education as one of the Liturgy Prefects of a Catholic all girls school. I call these essays proto-feminist now, but at the time I remember that I was just following a line of logic to its conclusion. The first essay was on abortion, and I still remember the comfort I felt with the argument I made because I was in love with God at that time, and he...

I have met a lot of feminists in my life, because I have been lucky enough to have a lot of women in my life. And just to be clear, the number of feminists I have met in my life is the same number as the number of women I have met. I have never met a woman who did not know, who did not fully understand, that being a woman is awesome, but for some illogical reason, also really difficult. It is each woman’s experience of the illogical difficulty of their gender that makes them the feminist they are. I know radically conservative feminists who rule otherwise patriarchal families with iron fists. I know comfortably conservative feminists who effortlessly support Marxist and Utilitarian ideas. I know Republican feminists, I know rabid feminists. I know feminists who grew up with equality in their bones and who have never uttered the word feminist because there was no other right ideology. I know feminists who fought to exhaustion every day for decades against family and workmates to be ...

I started a crazy project last year that I called Proust's Pepys . I tweeted the best bits of my diaries and emails from the last 15 years each day. And I had a companion blog with some of the writing that I found that was publishable, but hadn’t been posted on here. It was loosely inspired by Real Time WWII , but unlike Real Time WWII , which is exponentially more worthy and going strong for three years, I barely made two and a half months. I didn't let anyone know about the twitter feed or the blog, because I had not created it for an audience so much as to enforce a deadline each day. I had to collate the information, curate it and post it before midnight each day. Sometimes I made the deadline, sometimes I posted a week in one day. But the set deadline was very, very useful for keeping me on track. Mostly because historically, deadlines and I do NOT see eye to eye. I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Douglas Adams Stressed as I...

I’m sure no one had noticed, but I have been at home for five days straight now. I have a virus that turned my eyes a wet, shining blood red. I looked like a Vampire extra from Twilight , but, like, my blood red eyes were five times worse than theirs. A cross between a Vampire from Twilight and a Vampire from the movies of Anne Rice’s novels actually, because I would periodically shed tears of pain from those glowing red eyes. I scared the good people of the Western Suburbs with my eyes of pain when I was out buying supplies two days into my vampire existence, so I ended up confined to my humble garret, to write more words in less days than I have ever done in my entire life. If I keep the 8,000 words in 4 days habit up I’d have a book on my personal views on gender equality in no time. Maybe I should consider writing a Novel in a Month ? Anyhow, when I wasn’t writing about stuff that makes steam come out of my ears, I was watching, oh, TV shows and movies. And sometimes I’d cry...

I first articulated the concept of women being ideologically bilingual in this world during an eventful conversation with one of my pet misogynists at The Moon last year. The sentence sprung into my head as I decided to steer the conversation towards an area of interest to me that was a debatably female-centric topic. My interlocutor, a young man who until then had been able to maintain eight-hour conversations with me on every topic we approached together, became suddenly angry and uncooperative. The uncharacteristic anger he showed a few minutes into the exchange at first did not alarm me, I merely decided to expand on the new ideas needed to approach the subject, but that appeared to incense him out of proportion to the completely mundane topic of conversation. As I continued to stick to my topic I began to be verbally battered by a very angry man with some surprising points of argument. He said that I had started a conversation for which he had no 'language' to enter t...

The personal discrimination that women experience in their private lives is a matter of great worry, but there is no escape for them in the wider community. Once out of their home, misogyny is so entrenched in the culture they interact with, the fight for equality and respect becomes exponentially more difficult. While the behavior of male role models is an important influence on young women and young men as they grow up, young people are soon exposed to popular culture, public knowledge and sex in the adult world. Examples of how the men outside the home manifest equality and respect for all genders is equally important to young people and how they are begin to think about the world. Celluloid Dreams I remember sitting in the movie cinema watching Brave and trying to work out why my brain was struggling with the narrative. It wasn’t unamusing, I was entertained, as were all the ten year old children in the cinema with me, but I wasn’t really comfortable with it for some reason....

Most of the men I meet are only really part time philogynists, and sometimes only really part time philanthropists. They have a finite number of women that they think should be treated equally under the law, and the rest can fend for themselves. Of course they choose the women that deserve equality, and that inclusion in the protected few can be changed at any time. This selective equality in everyday life means that selective equality for anyone not identifying or identified as male in law, religion and society is not widely acknowledged, or worse, it is openly tolerated when it is made visible. Expecting equality and respect for the people you love, and not granting it to everyone else, is a key reason inequality is still rampant in our world. And this applies to everyone, regardless of gender identity. I am going to start with a discussion of young women and their male role models, because I think this is an important area of collision between philogyny, misogyny and the ef...

It is a terrible sin to waste good fortune. And today I woke up to exercise, for another day, my supreme good fortune. I woke up in a house that I pay for with money from a bank account in my name. I woke up alone, both in my bed and in my house. I woke up to a job that is mine no matter what the condition of my health is at any given point. I woke up to incredible freedom to wear what I wish, travel where I wish, see whom I wish and say what I wish. I also woke up to find a piece of opinion that I posted on the internet with no censorship or moderation had gathered comments and those comments were as reasoned, well explained and as carefully written as any opinionated writer could wish. Today I woke up to an embarrassment of riches that the majority of women alive on this planet do not have and do not have the freedom to ask for, hope for and in some benighted corners of the world even have the right or information to imagine. I would like to start with the gift of waking up alo...

I have a problem. In the last eighteen months I have added quite a few male friends and workmates to my life. In those twelve months three of those males have brought tremendous misogyny into my life. Unfortunately for me, I tried to tolerate this misogyny for the sake of good working relations and the potential I saw in each male. Unfortunately for me, also, this willingness to tolerate their ancient ideas for the sake of their excellent ideas meant that they thought they could escalate their misogyny towards me. Today was the third unprovoked misogynist action from one of these males, and I am tired of forgiving someone who takes forgiveness as a sign of consent. It all started last year when my sister was sent this story by a ... male. Once upon a time, a pilot asked a beautiful princess "Will you marry me?" The princess said, "No!" And the pilot lived happily ever after and flew jets all over the world and drove hot cars and chased skinny long-legged big...