Pro-Choice

If Tony Abbott felt that he needed prove his great relationships with women, his superior understanding of women and how we work, he should have stayed in bed this morning, or sent Margie in his place. Instead, he fronted the post-MYEFO media and declared that the Government doesn't really understand families; if they did, they would never have monkeyed around with the Baby Bonus.

Echoes of 2007, when Bill Heffernan called Julia Gillard "deliberately barren" bounced around Twitter. Was the Leader of the Oppostion really drawing attention back to the Prime Minister's choice to remain childless, and using it as evidence that the Government doesn't understand the pressures on Australian families...during a time when he's trying to appeal to women voters?

Journalist and academic Julie Posetti tweeted:

"You've got to be kidding me - Abbott played the 'Gillard isn't a mother' card. Again?! Interesting misogyny accusation deflection strategy."

Gold Coast Columnist Sue Lapperman tweeted:

"I can't believe @TonyAbbottMHR has not learnt anything from the past couple of weeks. Badly done Mr Rabbit, badly done."

There are probably more than a few people who are surprised that the conversation about equality, misogyny, sexism and respect has lasted longer than just a few days. It's more than a wistful post-mortem to a surprisingly successful social media campaign. The latest opinion polls are reflecting the gender divide, with Prime Minister Gillard pulling away as preferred PM.

The initial blast was triggered by Alan Jones claim that the 'women are destroying the joint', the murder of Jill Meagher, and the emergence of Tony Abbott's family on the national stage. The rage subsided just a little, only to have Alan Jones throw an entire warehouse full of ammo with his "died of shame" comment in front of a room full of future conservative leaders.

After worldwide attention, countless editorials, panel discussions and blogs, plus fifteen minutes of unforgettable honesty from the Prime Minister, the women of Australia show no signs of sitting down or shutting up. Even women who acknowledge that they avoid the news are talking about Jones, Abbott, Gillard and why its so much harder for women. Plenty of men are standing beside the women this time. A new generation is learning the lyrics to I Am Woman.

That early conversation about destroying the joint has made way for a whole range of new discussions, from the acceptability of the word "vagina" in polite conversation, to questions about the continued existence of a corporate glass ceiling, the cost of tampons and the right to choose to be a stay-at-home Mum.

More importantly, it's not just hipster-talk. As late as yesterday, big companies were still choosing to withdraw their advertising from the Alan Jones Show on 2GB. Assuming that they'd allowed enough time for the heat to dissipate - or figuring that they'd lost enough money - 2GB reintroduced advertising during the Alan Jones show. It didn't go well for them, with several ads from companies who had withdrawn from the Alan Jones Show "accidentally" going to air. 2GB has underestimated the attention span of their foes.

We'd have to include MRN's Mr Jones and Mr Tate in the list of men who are surprised that the women are still destroying the joint. This is no storm in the Royal Doulton, dear. This is serious.

It's no longer a protest or a campaign; it's becoming an oestrogen-propelled perpetual motion machine with the power to reignite the processes of change our mothers and grandmothers started back in the sixties. This time there's a difference: women have nothing left to prove. We can choose whether to burn our bras, run them up a flagpole or strap ourselves into lacy underwired torture devices. They're our bras, and it's our decision.

Equally, we can choose to focus on career and crash through the glass ceiling like Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop have done, we can reproduce like bunnies and care for the family full-time, or we can plan to balance career and family.

If you stay on the right side of the law, and well away from those who need to apply their version of propriety to everyone, you're fine, but right now, the focus remains on the levels of balance and respect between men and women.

The latest Essential Poll asked about perceptions of sexism. The results aren't good for anyone, with the possible exception of Prime Minister Gillard. Sexism is very much alive and well, and this goes some way to explaining why her infamous speech about Tony Abbott's misogyny is still reverberating.

Margie's Abbott's appearances to help her husband look softer and more (politically) appealing to women are backfiring too. With the greatest respect for Mrs Abbott, putting her in front of a cynical media simply strengthens her and weakens him further. She becomes the story.

Those of us still fighting the battles against misogyny don't mind if women want to stay home with the kids. In fact, that might have been my choice, had my situation been different. The point is, it's a valid choice, every bit as worthy as any other choice a woman makes - what to wear, when and if to have children, how to cook a decent sponge cake. That's the point that Heffernan, Jones, Abbott and the rest of the Misogyny-R-Us Superleague just don't get.

It's our choice. We don't need permission, approval, or guidance...but if we want any of those, that's fine too.

There was one guy on Twitter this morning who had a 140 character pouty. His point was that he was sick of hearing every gender-related comment reframed against the current environment, and measured for sexism. His frustration is understandable...but he might need to get used to it, at least for now. We don't want our daughters and granddaughters fighting the same old battles.

A Horse Walks Into A Bar...

“Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn't mean it does not exist.” 
― Margaret Cho

Samantha Brick doesn't need more attention from me or anyone else. I wasn't going to write about her; I think she's  a sad woman with a distorted view of herself and her world. I feel sorry for her, not because of the outpouring of negativity in response to her article, but because she is so detached from the world where the rest of us live.

She's so wrongity-wrong-wrong about being hated, about being beautiful and in her decision to write such a bizarre piece. Her editor also has responsibility there, yet I suspect the decision to publish was a commercial one.

Despite her intentions, Ms Brick hasn't revealed a common but usually overlooked flaw in the female psyche. All she's done is revealed her own warped perspective, and her insecurities. 

Ms Brick's entire theory is based on two assumptions: relative beauty, which is neither constant nor objective, and women being capable of mass, frivolous hatred.

It's naive to make the assumptions she makes in her article. The Sisterhood of Women isn't a bowl of rice, where each grain is basically the same as the rest, and shares their ultimate goal, which is to join its friends to form the bowl of rice. We don't all think the same, or want the same, or believe the same or react the same as other women. In fact, when thinking about body image, the variables are everywhere. 

The Social Issues Research Centre lists a few: 

What people see and how they react to their reflection in a mirror will vary according to: species, sex, age, ethnic group, sexual orientation, mood, eating disorders, what they've been watching on TV, what magazines they read, whether they're married or single, what kind of childhood they had, whether they take part in sports, what phase of the menstrual cycle they're in, whether they are pregnant, where they've been shopping – and even what they had for lunch.

We have fat days, good days, bad hair days, pale and pimply days. We have confident days, flirty days, days - weeks - of insecurity, periods of self-loathing, new-clothes days, new-hair days, days when we wear the wrong bra, and those glorious over-sized T-Shirts and trackie-daks days. I've even had days - well, one day - when I wore shoes that didn't match each other. In terms of body image, a sense of the ridiculous is helpful.

Ms Brick's theory  is predicated on the assumption her friends and colleagues consider her to be significantly more attractive than they are. Of course, I don't know those friends and colleagues, but as a premise, it's hard to accept. We've all seen plenty of photos of Ms Brick, and she seems to be of average attractiveness. Beautiful? Maybe. Uncommonly beautiful? No. Remarkably beautiful? Only in Ms Brick's mind. 

The likelihood of her being so much more beautiful than other women in her life is remote, unless she choses to associate exclusively with unattractive women for whom every day is a bad hair, pale-and-pimply, trackie-dak day while she is professionally coiffed to kill.

And then there's her accusation -and that's what it is -that women hate beautiful women. We're almost all guilty of being overly aware of appearances, and in comparing ourselves to our perception of others, at least sometimes. When we think it matters, we make extra effort. Some of us are competitive; some are vain, some are envious. 

Hatred is a different kind of emotion. It's one we reserve for only the most deserving of foes: the seven-year-old bully who punched you in the stomach every day at the bus-stop when you were five, the scheming little bitch who was sleeping with your first boyfriend while pretending to be your friend, the boss who presented your best work as her own and took the credit for it.

After that, I have trouble thinking of reasons why women hate other women...or men. 

We don't waste our strongest emotions on people who don't matter, and we forgive easily. The truth is that far too many women turn their hatred back on themselves. We find reasons to blame ourselves when life lets us down. It's probably not healthy, but it's real.

I doubt Ms Brick's world is real. Has she concocted this sob story for attention? Has her editor dreamed up this craziness to boost website traffic? Or has Ms Brick written her own truth, oblivious to how far it is from ours?

If I could, I'd remind Ms Brick that she is the one most guilty of judging people - including herself - based on her perception of beauty. 

"A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

International Womens Day: Be Inspiring

I’m sitting here at my desk, taking some time out of my work in Project and Change Management, to think about my place in the world.

Last night I was wondering if perhaps IWD didn’t apply to me. I’m not fighting to break through a glass ceiling, or to access health care or to survive on the streets. I’m not equal to a man yet; I suspect that if I was a man doing this job, my salary would probably be higher, but I’m dealing with that. Nothing is stopping me. I know that there are still venues I can’t get into and things I can’t do, but I don’t want to join the Tattersalls Club, and I don’t want to pee standing up.

But in not being equal, I’m also not “less” than a man. Neither am I superior. I am a woman.

I recall of one of my favourite scenes from The West Wing, where Emily Proctor’s character Ainsley Hayes explains her feelings on the ERA – America’s Equal Rights Amendment.

It's humiliating: a new amendment we vote on declaring that I am equal under the law to a man. I am mortified to discover there is reason to believe I wasn't before. I am a citizen of this country, I am not a special subset in need of your protection. I do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old white men. The same article fourteen that protects you protects me and I went to law school just to make sure.

That speech has always resonated with me. My mother and her generation did enough work for women’s rights to allow me to make my way in the world. I don’t feel hampered or held back or limited in any way by my gender, and I don’t need to take advantage of special assistance programmes that favour my gender over the male gender.

Women are no more a big lump of homogenised oestrogen than men are a chunk of testosterone. We’re not all the same and as such, our needs as female-gendered humans are individual. That IWD isn’t a day when I can fight for my equality doesn’t mean we don’t need to fight for other women (and by “we”, I mean all of us – men included.)

The theme of this year’s IWD is about being role models for the next generations of women coming through. My Prime Minister, Governor General, State Premier and State Governor are women. There are some role models, right there.

The proportion of female board members in Australia is still far too low at 13.8%  – and yet people like Gail Kelly make it. If she can do it, I can too…if that’s what I want to do. It's worth looking at the roles those women on boards are in - a few CEO and Operations Executives, yet most of the female directors are in more typical female areas: HR, Communications and Marketing and a few finance experts. Is this a sign that women are still facing barriers in male-dominated executive roles, or is it just that women play to their strengths?

And that’s an important consideration. Men and women are not the same, so why assume that men and women have equal ambition to serve as company directors or as frontline troops or as drivers of enormous mining machines.

But too much of this conversation seems to be around careers and independence, and that’s not where the inequality lies.

It’s 45 years since Aretha sang about RESPECT. We need more than a song.

·         Australian Shock Jock Kyle Sandilands called a female journalist a fat slag

·         Kyle Sandilands’ said  Magda Szubanski would lose more weight in a Concentration Camp. Magda’s family is Polish.

·         Kyle Sandilands referred to a pregnant journalist as a “fat lying toad”

·         American Shock Jock Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut because she campaigned to have contraception included in a health plan

·         Australian Senator David Bushby “meouws” at Senator Penny Wong because she spoke up in Parliament

·         “Ditch the Bitch” placards aimed at Australia’s female Prime Minister

·         Facebook’s ban on pictures of breastfeeding

None of these examples are about physical abuse; this is just name calling and undermining women because they can. I could blog until the end of time about the abuses we don’t see, physical and emotional; the common thread is respect – or the lack of it.

I don’t believe all women should be respected simply because they’re women. I believe all women should be respected because they are people. After that, all people – male or female – get to build on that respect, or in some cases, lose it. It’s nothing to do with gender. We have a responsibility to our mothers and our daughters to be better, more respectful role models.

This International Womens Day, and for each day after this, be inspiring.

Update: I wish I’d written it down somewhere and had it date-stamped and witnessed. I probably tweeted it, but that would have been some months and many thousands of tweets ago. We can assume there’s no record of it, but I said it. I swear I said it. I said it over and over again: Sarah Palin is not done with the 2012 Presidential Race. Let’s just say that the door is open more than a crack. So far, I’m not seeing anyone who can beat Obama, and that includes Ms Palin.