Misogyny kills women. In Australia, it’s currently killing women at a rate of roughly 1.5 women per week. Misandry just hurts men’s feelings.
Why, then, do so many people seem more outraged by the latter than the former? Why are Facebook memes depicting women tied up and beaten passed off as clever comedy by the men who post them, while the women who criticise those men or simply express their displeasure are accused of being hysterical man-haters determined to paint all men as violent closet rapists? Why, when women are the ones perpetually ridiculed, abused, harmed, humiliated and degraded, are we also the ones expected to apologise for being ‘too angry’ about it?
I refuse to offer reassurances and caveats about men anymore. It’s a waste of time, and it’s an insult in a world that privileges these same men in almost every single aspect. I talk about liberating women from the kind of inequality which sees us raped, killed, forced into giving birth, paid less, beaten, humiliated and subjugated, and tries to pass these things off as a seemingly unavoidable part of human nature, perpetrated by no one in particular. If people need to call me a man-hater to justify maintaining that fiction, so be it. I’ll just be over here actually doing something about the wretched state of the world, and fighting for the rights of all women to walk freely within it.
I can tell you for days on end to laugh at this dross and you would agree with me, but that doesn’t stop it from being intrusive, enraging and occasionally upsetting. I know we’re joking around here, but don’t feel bad if there are still days where you feel so intimidated by the thought of Captain Neckbeard screaming at you that you vow to hide your feminist light under a bushel and never speak of equal rights again.
THIS IS NORMAL.
Take a look around at the feminist guard. Sure, we’re battle-scarred now, full of piss and vinegar and an arsenal of wisecracks. But we’ve all been there. We’ve all ingested the bullshit dredged up by the patriarchal backlash and decided that the only way around it is to pre-empt revelations of our feminism with disclaimers. Like, ‘Oh, but I’m not really like a feminist-feminist,’ or, ‘But don’t worry, I totally love men still.’
Something I’ve learned along the way is that exposure to abuse in an already hostile world really is a feminist’s best friend. Trust me on this – the more you hear harsh words used against you, the more immune you become to them and the more ridiculous they seem. It’s just impossible to be personally wounded by the phrase ‘slutbag cum dumpster’ when you’re hearing it for the fiftieth time. Don’t get me wrong – it’s absolutely offensive on a macro level. I find it terribly upsetting that men still use this kind of sexually punitive language to try to put women in their place. But on a personal level, it no longer has the power to weaken me.
It’s a bit like how words begin to sound meaningless when you repeat them over and over. Try it now – chant ‘fork’ for a minute.
Fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork fork.
I guarantee that it’ll take less than twenty seconds before you suddenly have no idea what a fork is or why it’s supposed to sound like that. Look at the word on the page – doesn’t it look weird to you? What the fuck is a fork anyway?
If you want to be open about your feminism, you’re going to get a backlash. It’s just the way things are. But you are fucking stronger than crumbling under its weight. Women have been subjugated since the dawn of time and we have survived. We have survived despite the odds never being in our favour. We can handle a few snotty words thrown at us by the pathetic, scared little men who truly believe that it’s possible to destroy us by calling us fat angry slutwhore ugly hairy immature misandrist bitches who are just crying out for a dick to shut us up.
I mean, we’ve been hearing this shit for centuries. If they’re really all as creative and visionary as they seem to believe, they could come up with something original instead of remaining such an intellectually bereft bag of soggy dickblisters.
Now THAT’S an insult.
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12 –
THE GOOD GUYS
In 2015, I celebrated International Women’s Day by taking part in an all-day feminist event at the Sydney Opera House. All About Women is steadily becoming a staple on the Opera House’s events calendar. Over the last few years, it’s gathered incredible women together from both inside and outside Australia to discuss issues of gender equality, leadership, feminism and even, in the case of Leymah Gbowee, to relate how the women of Liberia (tired as they were of male leaders’ impotence and foot-dragging) organised themselves to end the Second Liberian Civil War. If there’s ever a place to experience Imposter Syndrome, it’s in the Opera House’s green room during All About Women. This is why I normally just hide in the corner drinking wine, sweating into clothes that are distinctly less glamorous than what everyone else is wearing and hoping I don’t make a mess of myself.
On this particular day in 2015, I had both listened to and spoken on a number of panels discussing a broad range of issues. My head was full of vibrant conversations about men’s violence against women, how feminism needs to move beyond seeking equality for white corporate women with white corporate men, the necessity to fight for radical liberation for all women – women of colour, Aboriginal women, disabled women, trans women, Muslim women and every other woman who has been historically sidelined by the feminist movement – and how new technology was creating previously unthought-of spaces that mobilised both collective organising and resistance to the ever-present backlash. In a session called ‘Mother Courage’, the 2015 Australian of the Year, Rosie Batty, sat in conversation with feminist writer Tara Moss and discussed openly the institutional and social dismissiveness of men’s violence against women that had led to her ex-husband murdering her young son right in front of her.
On my last panel of the day, we spoke about the layered invisibility of women in pop culture, and how this artificial reflection of the world’s diversity succeeds in diminishing not just our voices and engagement, but reducing even the minimal space we feel we’re entitled to occupy. My co-panellists and I talked about the importance of women’s anger, and how it has been pathologised as ‘hysterical’ and ‘irrational’. It was the best kind of dialogue – robust and vigorous, and held between people who almost certainly did not agree with each other all of the time but who could at least find common ground in the isolation felt by women within the wider world.
And yet, after all this refreshing focus on liberation and structural oppression, and with three intelligent, competent and experienced women on stage, the very first question to come from the audience queried why feminism doesn’t spend more time and energy on engaging male ‘champions’ and providing space for them to speak about feminism. Why, this woman asked, had that morning’s session titled ‘How to Be a Feminist’, not included a single man on it?
Wait a minute, what?
Make more space for men to be leaders in the feminist movement? Lady, feminism has far too many women it needs to make space for and include in public discourse before it starts worrying about whether or not men are being denied room at the top.
Besides, men are already everywhere in modern feminist discourse. If we have to fold in on ourselves any more than we already have just to create additional space for them, we’ll be forced to amputate all our limbs. Men are the looming shadow in the room, the invisible spectre that dictates women’s discussions and dominates mainstream feminist concern. Women have been inst
ructed so often to worry about what the men will think about every single thing we do or say, every move we make and every thought we think, if we have to start practising feminism like this then we might as well just rebrand it ‘society’ and be done with it. Instead of being brazen, unapologetic activists fighting for liberation, all too many women have now learned to pepper their politics with caveats, sentiments designed to reassure people that feminism is really a rather gentle kind of philosophy – a group of nice women doing nice things who would like equality if that’s okay with everyone else but who most definitely don’t pose a threat to the general order of things.
In its quest to be palatable and welcoming, mainstream feminism has become too conciliatory in its aims. You’ll no doubt have been at a public talk or discussion about women’s rights and heard reassurances that, of course, we are not talking about ALL MEN! That of course the men in THIS ROOM are good, decent ones who care fiercely about women’s rights. That most men are wonderful human beings who wouldn’t lift a finger against a woman and who certainly never, ever participate in or benefit from the structures which oppress us.
Because Not All Men, right? I mean, we’d hate to make them feel bad.
On the other hand, if men are genuine allies to women – if they are genuinely invested in our liberation and equality – why should they feel entitled to any kind of acknowledgment or reward? More to the point, why do we feel constantly pressured to give it to them?
This is a challenging prospect for some people. The roots of patriarchy run very, very deep. Some feminists fear that if we don’t mollycoddle sympathetic men, they’ll throw a tantrum and go home. But doesn’t this urge to placate and flatter simply replicate the same power dynamics that underpin our oppression in the first place? Consider the language we use for men who pay even the vaguest lip service to women’s liberation. We call them Ambassadors. Champions of Change. Everyday Heroes. We congratulate them for wearing white ribbons and for talking about employing more women. For talking about it.
But who’s doing the actual work? Women, that’s who. And we are never praised for it. We aren’t celebrated as Good and Decent people. We aren’t heralded widely by our communities. There are no ambassadorships handed to us or titles bestowed like Champion and Hero. When Charlie Pickering writes the occasional article about how bad violence against women is and publishes it on Mamamia (a website read almost exclusively by women who are likely to agree that domestic violence is A Bad Thing), he gets 50,000 Facebook shares and a thousand women squealing about what an incredible person he is. When a woman does the same thing, she can expect to field dozens or hundreds or sometimes even thousands of comments labelling her anything from a man-hater to a fucking fat whore of a bitch who needs to be shut up by having one cock shoved in her cunt and another one whacked in her mouth.
(A note on Charlie Pickering: it is worth mentioning that a 2015 viral video from his show The Weekly which featured a monologue on rape culture and an accompanying song performed by three very talented women, neither mentioned any of the feminists who had been raising awareness about that issue for years nor acknowledged that the segment had been devised and pushed for by one of the show’s female writers, comedian Cal Wilson. Instead, Pickering was festooned with accolades and praise and called an ‘amazing ally’, because this is precisely what happens when men lazily co-opt women’s work on gender equality and casually, without thought or even recognition that there might be anything wrong with this, pass it off as their own.)
Speaking of men who put in minimal effort where women’s rights are concerned, let’s talk about programs like White Ribbon and Champions of Change. Once upon a time, I was full of praise for these movements. I couldn’t say enough good things about Andrew O’Keefe (who I still love from afar) and his role as a White Ribbon ambassador. ‘Look at these wonderful men talking about violence!’ I thought to myself. ‘Aren’t they fantastic?’ I saw it not only as my duty to let everyone know how fantastic they were, but my privilege to be able to discuss them in such glowing terms.
I was first disabused of this notion when I was invited to speak at a training day being held for workers in the women’s health sector. I was delivering the opening address, which included a few paragraphs about the importance of programs like White Ribbon and praise for the ‘exceptional’ work I thought they performed. I still cringe when I remember the response from this roomful of frontline service providers; they were exceptionally polite and gentle as they shared with me their concerns that organisations like White Ribbon were very good at receiving large amounts of funding and public attention and not especially good at actually doing anything. These were people working directly with survivors and current victims of domestic violence and trying to do the best they could in drastically underfunded organisations. They were mostly women (because women, as we know, perform the vast majority of underpaid carer roles and domestic violence work absolutely falls under this banner), and their work was and is almost completely unrecognised in comparison to the empty gestures of ‘ambassadorships’ and ‘champion’ labels.
To be clear, no one enters the women’s health sector for the glory. But it is infuriating to watch people continue to do this hard and brutal work only to have the public support they desperately need be diverted to flashier places like the White Ribbon Foundation. This is an organisation that appears more invested in raising awareness for its own brand than tangibly opposing men’s violence against women. It has no problem enlisting public representatives with demonstrable records of sexism against women (e.g. Tony Abbott, who is on record as stating it would ‘be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons’, a view that seemed evident in his establishment of a government cabinet that contained only one woman) or aligning with other organisations that employ men who definitely have track records of violence against women (e.g. radio station Triple M, with whom White Ribbon partnered in late 2015 despite the fact it employs in on-air positions both Matty Johns, a former NRL footballer involved in a team-related pack sex incident which left a nineteen-year-old woman suicidal and suffering from ongoing PTSD, and Wayne Carey, a former AFL football player whose conduct towards women is well known – in 1996, he pleaded guilty to grabbing a woman’s breasts outside a nightclub and declaring, ‘Why don’t you go and get a bigger set of tits?’ He was later charged with assaulting police officers in Miami after his then-girlfriend Kate Nielson alleged he had smashed a wine glass in her face (she later dropped the charges).
A friend of mine, a man who formerly supported White Ribbon, recently told me that only about 40 percent of surveyed ambassadors identify as feminists. Oh sure, they’re happy to boast the title of ‘Ambassador’, a title that allows them to claim the status of Good Guy Who Cares About Women, but they don’t consider it important to align themselves with the movement that advocates for equality between the sexes.
But that doesn’t matter, because being associated with White Ribbon has become a shorthand way for people to tell themselves (and everyone else) that they’re making a difference. This isn’t always a duplicitous gesture. For some individuals, it’s just a matter of being a little ignorant about the fact that there are other organisations they can team with to achieve more. This doesn’t make them terrible people. They have at least expressed an interest in figuring out how to change the world for the better. Unfortunately, they’ve been convinced that their engagement with the issue stops when they put that white ribbon on and take their pledge, and further empowered by a wider society that reassures them this is enough.
Because why should they do more? They don’t have to. Literally no force or movement in society with any discernible power is trying to make men do any more than this. The equality illusion is exactly that – equality is conceived as something metaphorical rather than tangible. Equality is currently interpreted by most of societ
y as a commitment rather than an action. Frustratingly, the only commitment required from men is in them just saying they support equality for women, even while they continue to enjoy the specific benefits granted to them under a patriarchal system.
What happens when a woman suggests that equality means more than this? That equality might actually mean men sacrificing a good chunk of their power so that women might achieve parity with them? Anarchy! Men can’t give anything up! That’s unfair! That’s the OPPOSITE of equality, people losing something! How does that even work? It’s not really equality, is it, if someone comes out worse? That’s the problem with feminism – you don’t want equality, you want superiority! Misaaaaaaaandry!
This tedious, shrieking response to any discussion that attempts to frame equality as something more than just a word men and women say means feminists end up feeling pressured to scrap this ‘cruel, mean-spirited, unequal, misandrist’ approach and go back to the one which achieves nothing and gets us nowhere – the one which involves men being able to just say they support equality and enjoy all of the resulting accolades and praise, but which doesn’t result in them losing their edge in the workplace, their financial supremacy, opportunities for promotion, speaking rights, leadership roles, position as unspoken head of the family unit, right to talk to or touch women whenever they feel like it and greater domination of the overall physical, emotional and mental space that we occupy as human beings.
Here’s a ribbon. Pin it on. Don’t worry, we won’t ask you to think about anything beyond that because we know you’re a Good Bloke.
And that’s just the individuals. When we look at the corporate engagement with programs like White Ribbon, it’s even more depressing. In fact, lending support to White Ribbon has become an easy way for the organisations that are still overwhelmingly dominated by men and male thinking to mitigate the role they play in perpetuating damage done to women. Get your all-male board of directors to stand up there on 25 November with a white ribbon pinned to their lapel and it doesn’t matter what happens during the rest of the year – you are White Ribbon-affiliated, and that means you are Agents of Change.
Fight Like A Girl Page 20