fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

Sometimes my cultural gag reflex is an angry one, one that leaves me heaving and a little teary . Sometimes my cultural gag reflex is a frustrated one, leaving me saying either too many words , not enough words , or incompletely thought out words. But mostly my cultural gag reflex is a bored one ; because as a woman the items offered for my cultural intake can be very boring indeed. I would like to present a short survey of my thoughts as I watch a standard film or theatre offering that does not meet or barely meets the minimum of the Bechdel Test . The Bechdel Test asks if there is two named female characters in the script that talk to each other for a minute about something other than men. Examples of scripts that fail the Bechdel Test fill our cinemas, our stages and other areas of our popular culture * , and that means I am bored an awful lot, alas. The first thing that happens with the standard non-Bechdel compliant script is that when I meet the first female character I want...

When I didn’t know the lyrics and hadn’t seen the video clip, I really loved listening to Blurred Lines . I only heard it on the radio in the office and, due to actually working and sitting some distance from the radio, all I could hear was the bubblegum pop and Pharrell’s hoot. And then came the day that I watched the video clip, read the lyrics and my now robust cultural gag reflex kicked in; who is this Thickehead for whom respect and consent is a blurred line? And why is every sentiment in his song and video achingly retrograde and yet somehow so mainstream? I love to listen and dance to Rap and Hip Hop. I bought my first CD because of Pony , my second for Ooh La La and for close on fifteen years I have suppressed my cultural gag reflex at the lyrics of the Rap and Hip Hop songs I like, especially when I was singing along. It takes a special kind of socialized Stockholm Syndrome to actually sing along to the kind of dehumanising words that these genres encourage for describing...

In the flood of Facebook Outrage (ie, not really worth anything unless you write to all the elected representatives of Australia and then vote to get every last one of the Xenophobic Asshats out of their seat) about the policy announcement on refugees, a buried comment of mine is proving popular. STATUS UPDATE Dear Australian Politicians who think refugees should be sent to PNG. You are Actual Asshats. I think you should read your own advice. http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/Papua_New_Guinea COMMENT There are so many things I could say, but I will stick with the topic in which I am trained - history. Not a single one of those politicians can claim to come from a genetic line that did not come to Australia as a refugee/asylum seeker/immigrant/migrant. Oh, unless they are ALL indigenous Australians? Fuck them and their 'Because I am here now I belong, and I am going to ignore how I got here and ignore what that arrival and continued presence has done t...

This essay was written for a UWA History Unit in September 2001, so soon after September 11 that I referred to those events in their long format. I actually haven't had to change a word to publish it twelve years later, which is a sad state of affairs for Australian narrative on refugees . In the current affairs of Australia in the last month a fascinating example of metaphor and narrative has surfaced. The Tampa Affair alone could have been a watershed in the development of the Australian multicultural psyche if not for the tragic World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks and the resulting USA focus on Afghanistan. In its nearly two weeks alone on the Australian stage, however, the Tampa Affair brought to light some very interesting ‘truths’ in Australian public opinion and illuminated some of the intrinsically Australian metaphors and narratives regarding our presence on these shores and how racially tolerant we really are. As my references for this essay I am using the letters...

In general I have very much enjoyed articulating, writing and reading whatever I wished regarding my ideas on feminism. The interactions I have had with people because of this openness have been unexpected and are all the more precious because each has taught me something important about people I thought I knew, and people I only know now because I said what I thought. I decided recently not to keep my ideas about equality for all women only to sympathetic and comfortably political audiences because it felt as if I was old enough now to own up to my opinions. I also decided to go all out with the F Word because I didn’t want to have to fight through layers of political correctness or degrees of political engagement in my audience – I was either in or I was out – and I had to declare it. I have found that declaring for a clear line of politics and communication has focussed my frustration with inequality to a productive degree. The most interesting manifestation of this focus is th...

I have been trying to work out where my Female Misogynist Asshattery comes from, and I think some of it results from progressive influences on my reading material and education while I was growing up. I often reconsider my reading material in order to speculate on where I get my ideas, because books have always been a very strong influence on how I think and how I view the world. I read a lot of books from specific genres when I was young, and they presented me with ideas about life that were contradictory and have meant that I, thankfully, stand at an ideological fault line between several projections of women and their place in the world . I am a reader first and foremost in life, and my Dad guided a lot of the decisions I made in my formative reading years. My Dad never restricted my reading, I could read whatever I want, and I took full advantage of this fact. At home I read the books from his childhood and they were a unique set of books to grow up on, because my father grew up...

Mary Wollstonecraft Portrait in the NPG At the end of the Eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to discuss the rights of women in the public political sphere, via natural and reasonable justice in the private domestic sphere. She supplemented her arguments for women's rights with appeals for social utility; that freed women make for better men. The dichotomies of reason and feeling, of nature and culture, and of private and public were the chains of female servitude to the pleasing of men in her time. Wollstonecraft questioned why equality is equated naturally with women displaying masculine qualities and not men displaying feminine qualities or equating masculine and feminine as the two equal parts of the same indivisible whole. If the reasoning mind is sexless, and humans only divided into differing parts for reproductive purposes and not to divide the power of reason and feeling between the sexes, why must the victim become the abus...

Email forwards are gendered, I propose, in some areas of content. I find that women do not spend the majority of their time forwarding pornographic images to their female friends (unless you count nude sportsman calendars as pornographic), and I would presume that men do not spend the lion’s share of their time on their emails giggling at cute photos of kittens sporting sassy lines about liking their chocolate, coffee and men strong, rich and dark. Lately there have been a spat of ‘Girlfriends and Sisters Week’ emails arriving in my inbox with wry salutes to the sisterhood of women, the tongue-in-cheek comments about discrimination and stereotypes treated with that special kind of humour that women use to blur the sharp edges of the inequalities we encounter in our society. Whether is it is a joke about body image, gynaecological matters, marriage, age, clothes or men, these emails use comedy to do what every minority political group uses comedy for, to get to the punch line first. ...

I don’t cry often at all, maybe once a year? I am getting better at crying, but it still isn’t something that I do much unless I am arguing with my mother. The surest way to make me cry used to be to let me read Bridge to Terabithia ; I read it each year in school simply to have my yearly cry. There is one time I remember crying and not even realising it; I was cleaning my bathroom and listening to From Our Own Correspondent from the BBC. The story covered UN Peacekeepers in Africa and it was utterly heart wrenching listening. At one point the reporter’s voice broke with emotion and I found myself having to mop up my own tears from the tiles, tears that fell without me feeling them at all through my sympathy and sadness. I can still feel how cold those tiles were under my knees as I really let myself feel the personal impact of knowing of the great suffering in the world. That was the year that I listened to the BBC World Service in the morning as I had breakfast and, as it was mi...