fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

Rosie Batty and Natasha Stott-Despoya were on Q&A tonight discussing Domestic Violence . They were outnumbered, ironically, by the male panelists. Anyone reading the crime reports in newspapers around Australia today would find sordid tales of people throwing themselves at other people’s fists and sober drivers inconveniently getting in the way of drunk or speeding drivers. We all read about people who work hard to buy houses to fill with possessions only to selflessly let other people destroy or steal them. There is the inevitable roundup of people staying in relationships only to be injured or killed by their partners and, of course, those terrible reports of children who seduce adults. Apologies, my mistake! I seem to be getting the relative culpability of perpetrators and victims mixed up. I am especially confused because we seem to have two ways of reporting crime and violence. When we report crime, we have crimes in which the criminal is named, and crimes in which the v...

Whether it’s called chick-lit or mommy porn , narratives written for women are treated with grave disrespect by the publishing industry and the wider public, especially erotica. Erotica written exclusively for women is rare, and when it exists it’s pink-i-fied, covered in vanilla and perceived to be much harder to create than it actually is; a Red Velvet Cake if you will. Erotica written for men is Victoria Sponge of course; totally vanilla, lots of cream, the tiniest smear of delicious red jam. Heterosexual male erotica is so mainstream prizes could be given out at Rural Fetes for the best out of an array made from a completely standard recipe. In a world of written and visual erotica that does not care to cater for our desires nor our gaze, women are adept at sustaining a sexual imagination by living off erotic crumbs that fall from the table of male-centric literature. In fact, everyone whose sexual practice is not that of a heterosexual male is trying to live off erotic crumbs...

Published online: WAToday The Sydney Morning Herald The Age Brisbane Times The Canberra Times I'm on the train and the person across from me is reading That Book ; the religiously repressed treatise on misogyny packaged as a risqué rebellious romance with ropes. In that moment I manage to subjugate the urge to evangelise safe, sane, consensual orgasm techniques to them, a stranger on the train. But if you wanted to play the lead role of Stranger On The Train, maybe we could see where this takes us? Much has been written by practitioners, participants and detractors about the sexual practice called BDSM, as explored in Fifty Shades of Grey . I have been an avid reader of such discussions. After all, train-riding missionaries who urge strangers to "branch out from missionary" need to keep up with the literature. I have found it interesting that most critiques of the portrayal of BDSM in the book have preserved the idea that BDSM is "alternative" or ...