… that it’s possible to care about more than one thing at the same time, without having to explain it to other feminists, too.

The title of this post was swiped with permission from Orlando, commenting on this post by Mindy about Helen Razer’s popular article, Destroy the Joint misses the point.

I am weary, so very very weary, of reading “Where are the Feminists” type articles where the topic is anything “feminists” are failing to write about this week. In some cases, this is taken to be proof that feminists do not care about the Thing that should be written about, or they excuse the Thing due to their excessive PC-ness. The fact that we might be unpaid feminists blogging in the cracks between work and family and real-life activities (which might include activism, personal or family illness, or a million other things) isn’t an excuse for our failure. Because the world is absolutely chock full of Terrible Things, and feminism is fighting many systemic problems on lots of fronts, it’s inevitable that we will often write about things other than the Thing which should be written about. Proof positive that we are horrible.

Helen Razer, a celebrity opinion writer with something of a media megaphone, has decreed that

Feminism is the struggle against masculinsed violence and feminised poverty. Or, the acknowledgement that physical violence is enacted disproportionately by men and poverty is experienced disproportionately by women. That’s it, really.

Just to mention the article by Jenna Price of DtJ she’s describing as “twaddle”: Razer wastes quite a few pixels claiming Price is claiming women in power will be nicer, which is indeed a horrible old relic of the Victorian “Angel in the house” image still held by some well meaning people. Reading Price’s article, she says no such thing. She does, however, point out that women are still underrepresented in power networks generally and are hived off into “life and style” media ghettos which are deemed suitable for our overheated ladybrains. Not earth shatteringly new information, but I don’t see how Razer can dismiss this as “twaddle” or trivial.

I had thought that feminist writers and bloggers do write quite a lot about masculinised violence and feminised poverty. I also get the impression that Razer, who has made this complaint more than once, doesn’t write much about these topics at all, preferring to write articles about how much other feminists suck.

In her article about Lingerie Football (Again, aren’t modern feminists pathetic, etc) she missed the opportunity to write about how that “sporting code” demonstrated exactly how feminised poverty works by writing about their very different treatment, in terms of pay and conditions, health and safety etcetera, compared to male footballers. She left it to other bloggers to pick that up.

Google searches on “”Helen Razer” violence” and “Helen Razer” poverty” have so far failed to locate any articles or blog posts specifically on these topics. Come on, Helen; you can’t criticise other people in at least three articles for not focusing on the big issues without writing about them yourself. Go on. Hit us with your best shot.

To be fair to Razer, and to get back to the general topic of this rant, this attitude is not unique to her. I wish I had a dollar for every Tumblr social justice blogger who has blasted “feminists” for not writing about the Terrible Thing which she has decided is the Thing which must be written about du jour. Next thing you know she’s posting about nail art or some favourite food. (This is perfectly OK by me, by the way – I’m not the one wanting to make a huge deal out of blogging/not blogging any given topic. But consistency, y’know.)

This has percolated into academe, with Swati Parashar’s Drum article on the failure of local feminists to blog about the gang rape in Delhi. Clearly, this meant we did not care, or even excused it because of our excessive pee-cee.

Razer’s broadside included a Twitter hashtag, #DestroyThePoint, which portrayed the DtJ group as a bunch of airheads making hilarious non-sequiturs. Now any large facebook group will naturally have a few airheads in it, but I don’t think DtJ was a particularly terrible offender.

Moreover, I think feminist writing over the last few years has effectively put to bed the notion that the treatment of women in the media and everyday life is somehow separate to the Big Questions of Power and Money. Sexism is the notion that men are the default humans and women are the other, the sex class, less serious. It’s all linked. As Tigtog says in a comment on Mindy’s post, “it strikes me as a crucial omission to overlook the role of microaggressions and double standards in perpetuating masculinised violence and feminised poverty.”

These things are connected with veins and nerves and connective tissue. Try to cut them apart and you’ll be left with a bleeding mess. And that’s what I see when I look at things like the Razer article.

Razer has a schtick, and it’s being the Cool Girl of Australian feminism, scolding other feminists for sweating all that small stuff which is small, and neglecting to focus 100% on the Terrible Things (about which she doesn’t write much herself). #DestroyThePoint and other snarky tweets were greeted with You Go Girls! and Woohoos! (a description, not a verbatim quote) from numerous male media figures with recognisable names. Cool girls, of course, don’t call people on their day-to-day shit, they keep their powder dry for the Terrible Things, so they make men feel so much more relaxed and comfortable. People who think #EverydaySexism might feed directly into the big issues are so irritating and boring and serious. No, wait – they’re not serious enough, because they’re not off writing articles about masculinised violence and feminised poverty? Are you completely confused now?

When the “How much Other Feminists Suck” topic has become a subset of feminist writing in itself, it’s time to ask how valuable adding another dead cat to that pile has become. If your criticism is that feminists aren’t writing about the important topics you have chosen, guess what?

It’s time to go off, sit down and write some articles on those topics.

More from Monica Seeber, Kim at the recently-revived LP and Jennifer Wilson.

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Related posts:

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2. Who are these feminists? A call for discussion
3. New site independentgirls.org (seeking writers)

This article came out following the brutal gang rape of the student [name redacted] on a bus in Delhi, and repeats a popular truism which I’ve been meaning to write about for some time; namely, that Western feminists privilege antiracism (or anti imperialism, or intersectionality) so highly that we are willing to condone atrocities committed on women in other countries if they’re performed in the name of religion or culture. “It’s Their Culture” is supposedly our cry.

This argument, beloved of the late Pamela Bone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and even the awe-inspiring Mona Eltahawy, as well as (and this is where my spidey-senses are alerted) conservatives, antifeminists and members of the Old Left – the Venn diagram of these may overlap somewhat) is now taken up by Swati Parashar of the University of Wollongong. Because she didn’t see any articles, blog posts or petitions by “Western” femininsts following the gang rape, she saw it as yet another example of our failure to condemn because of our tacit approval of oppression of women “over there”.

Those who are quick to condemn governments which kill women and children in drone attacks in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or who are quick to point out that Western policies have endangered lives of civilians in many parts of the world, find no words to speak out against the violence women in the Global South face repeatedly and every day.
Violence against women that is routinely normalised in certain cultures, in certain societies, in certain countries, and violence that cannot be traced to Western militarism or Western foreign policy does not find easy critics. That would not be politically correct nor would it reflect commitment to anti-racism, perhaps.

To describe my own experience, I was on hiatus from serious blogging because of work and family demands in December, but I noticed that following the atrocity there was an upsurge of awareness and calls for action in India. As a “Western feminist”, rather than jumping in to offer my very important opinion, I felt much more inclined to shut up and listen to the excellent discourse taking place in India, and read about what they were saying. I didn’t imagine there would be any value in me repeating the fact that raping someone with an iron bar was bad, or that there would be anyone attempting to argue that it was condoned by anybody. To paraphrase Chris Clarke, the idea that “…one is obliged to point out that it is a bad thing, and that bad things are bad, and that failure to point this out every single time is an offense punishable by witch hunt, firing, ostracism and the like? Fuck that noise.”

I also thought that us Westies had had quite a productive year in 2012 advancing the discussion of rape culture, with special reference to centring men who rape in popular discussion instead of centring it on women and girls and how it is their responsibility to stop rape. I noticed that that idea was also central in the responses to the Delhi rape from Indian writers and demonstrators. We were, it seemed, on the same page. And that was a good thing.

When it came to Australian utterances, I would have paid the most attention to Indian-Australian women – women with experience in the milieu and some knowledge of the politics on the ground. I would have thought Ms Parashar would have been the perfect candidate to write that fiery article and start that petition. Instead, she chose to write a Culture-warsy meta-article on the inferiority of Australian feminism. Good-oh. But I don’t think she did Jyoti Singh Pandey any favours by doing so, any more than the rest of us who did comment on Facebook, Twitter and other outlets.

So that was where I was coming from, but that isn’t what this post is about. I have definite differences with feminists like Parashar and Hirsi Ali, but that’s not what it’s about either. As we’ve pointed out so often, feminism isn’t a hivemind. I am coming out to repudiate the description of Western feminists en masse as condoning FGM, honour killing and other atrocities because of some idea of “cultural significance” or whatever.

The feminists I know and read don’t seem to think this way. And in my (self-taught) feminist reading, I haven’t found any. Who are they? Are we at fault for not calling them out?

My Google-fu hasn’t proved very useful on this occasion. (There are the signatories to the reply to Adele Wilde-Blavatsky, which I could google with various keywords, but holy FSM that’s going to take an eternity). So I am calling on you, fellow Hoydens, visiting professors and casual readers, to lend me the benefit of your knowledge and join with me in identifying and discussing these feminists. I’m an autodidact feminist, but many of you who are reading this have studied gender and feminism at tertiary level. Who are these Western feminists who believe FGM and forced marriage and honour killing (and gang rape like the example Parashar is writing about) are OK when perpetrated in other countries? Can you provide a link to relevant articles, interviews or blogs which these people have written? Have at it in the commments.

I’m also asking that discussion is respectful – no calling out or piling on. Just links and brief descriptions of content would be great.

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A couple of young Melbourne women are setting up a feminist tumblr, She Blinded Me With Science.

Here’s the mission statement:

“Welcome to She Blinded Me With Science! We are young women in science who want to see better conversations about science, and have those conversations include women.”

Blogger Hilaroar, via FB:

Would anyone be interested in creating a quick logo for our blog? The theme is women in science. Will provide cake.

It doesn’t sound like a paid gig, so this is not for the professional artists who are sick of doing things for free. But if you’re a graphics enthusiast who would like to have a go, and likes cake, this might be for you.

The tumblr is brand new and hasn’t been updated at the time of writing, but think science, feminism, geekitude and possibly daleks (or not). Contact would be through the Ask page of the tumblr.

Also, what about the tumblr name? It’s based on a common phrase, but is there an ableist problem here? Should we suggest alternative names as well as logos?

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3. Feminist science news!

Here she is bonding with her Dad over the Christmas break by doing a little gadget construction. Bonding with your daughters doing electronics, woodwork, mechanics or baking: A very feminist thing to do over the holidays and there should be a lot more of it.

“The beginnings of the [redacted]!”

“First go with the soldering!”

“On to the capacitors!”

“Soldering for nearly four hours straight. My neck hurts but SOON I will have a [redacted]!

So, what are they making? Have at it in comments!

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You know that old chestnut. COMEDY SHOULD BE SACROSANCT. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO JOKE ABOUT ANYTHING. TO ANYONE.

Station 59 is a smalltime comedy venue in Melbourne where beginner comics can come to an Open Mic night to try out their skills. A week ago they advertised a “debate” on the topic There’s Nothing Funny About Rape: A Comedy Debate.

Aleksia’s post will fill you in about what happened then. As she points out, a debate like that isn’t impossible, but in this context, and with as she says “an all-dude lineup”, it was shaping up to be un-promising to say the least. The “debate” was canned after a bunch of, you guessed it, ber-loody feminists got wind of it and suggested that the event was a bit suboptimal.

The event organiser invited one of the women, who is a rape survivor, to speak on Wednesday night (the open mic night) about rape, comedy and her own experience. (One or two others were invited but declined, expecting the kind of evening you’ll see described in a moment.) “Male-only rape comedy debate replaced with… rape comedy panel. Hm….What even.”

Sensing an impending pile-on, some young twentysomething feminists went along to support her. Disclaimer: A couple of them are known to me, in fact, a couple of them are related to me. And I’m so proud of them.

This is the story from one of the people who were there:

So, the MC [Kieran Butler] basically introduced the issue and as soon as he got on stage he accused the feminists there of censorship, assault and breach of privacy. He said someone had threatened him over the phone (which we had no knowledge of and wouldn’t condone). He turned that into a general diatribe against our group which was there to support Gen and Hilary. He made it clear he had not cancelled the event because he recognised it was distressing to victims of sexual assault but because, as he saw it, he had been “censored”. That pretty much set the tone.

All of the patrons felt [Butler] was using the night as a platform to justify the cancelled night as a “debate about controversial humour”. He argued that comedy has been taken over by a “meritocracy” [!] which imposed Political Correctness™ on the comedy community. Therefore, the Station 59 stage needs to be made into a protected space for “free speech”. He went on in this way for some time.
Then a female comedian and RAW judge who has worked in the industry for 2 decades took the stage and asserted that what he was saying was crap, that rape jokes aren’t necessarily edgy or controversial and all have pretty much been done already. She was repeatedly interrupted by [Butler].
They finally allowd Gen [Genevieve Stewart] to speak. Gen took the stage and announced that she was trying to explain why rape jokes normalise rape and harm rape survivors. She set out to talk about the topic of rape jokes generally then describe her own experience, but she was interrupted and heckled so many times during her general discussion she decided to go straight to the story of her own rape at age 15. Again, she was repeatedly interrupted. When she expressed her anger and hurt that comedians could listen to such stories and still heckle, she was heckled further.

When Gen left the stage, we all left with her. [According to another account, being grabbed and called "faggots".] The MC accused us of being “a mob” (there were about 15 of us). We didn’t see the other acts but we did talk to other comedians outside of the bar. I can’t speak for the others, but one of the female comedians in the club came out and tried to defend the organisers – “nice guys, not pro rape”.
When it was pointed out how many times the MC had inerrupteed Gen they implied that her story of her own rape was “inappropriate” on stage.
Then we left.

So, it looks as though the Station 59 comedy organisers got their wish, that is, they got a debate. With opposing views. Most of us would say that was the definition of a debate, but according to Station 59, it’s CENSORSHIP!

I found it especially interesting that the female supporter of the “debate night” found Gen’s actual rape story too confronting and suggested she shouldn’t have shared it on stage. Isn’t this being a little selective with the “freedom of speech” which is supposed to be the cornerstone of their culture?

Andrew P Street, on Facebook:

“…not only is there no need for Melbourne comedians to have that conversation right this minute, I would argue that – with Jill Meagher’s body barely cold – there’s a really fucking good reason why Melbourne (and, y’know, Australia generally) might not think that right now was an awesome time to start bleating that everyone’s a bit too sensitive about violence against women. I thought timing was everything in comedy?”

Aleksia Barron (author of the blog linked above) also on Facebook:

“The comedy booker from the venue started posting in the comments of my blog post on this topic. He wanted me to come down to the venue, get up on stage and “defend my point of view”. I declined, partly because I think this guy’s a total hack, but also because I knew I’d be playing with the deck stacked against me. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t go now, though, because what happened to the poor girl who did stand up to speak is disgusting.
The booker’s name is Kieran Butler, and it’s him, not the venue management, who chooses the comedians who speak on the open mic comedy nights. I guess it was obvious whose side he was on when he added one of the most aggressive commentators from the FB thread to the bill for this event.

Kieran Butler has made no secret of the fact that Station 59 is a venue for comedians on their training wheels. “”Comedians need to fall [I think he means "fail"] and test out their material and this is a venue for that. It is a comedy night for comedians to try out their material and see whether it will work.” That is pretty much the kind of venue in which rape jokes won’t work. Let me recommend this article by the US comedian Curtis Luciani.

…It is accepted, for example, that you probably should not go in front of an audience that contains several black people and start tossing around the n-word unless you have an EXCEPTIONALLY sophisticated and road-tested routine built around it, one that you are confident will overcome the very significant risk you are incurring. If a comedian did this and did NOT overcome the risk, no one would be shocked if the audience shouted her down and stormed her out of the club, nor would anyone be particularly eager to defend her.

… Here’s what YOU need to understand:

1) Rape is way, WAY more prevalent than you seem to think it is. Are there more than five women in your audience? You do the math, and then you run the little fantasy scenario that I just put together in your head, and you tell me how it feels.

2) I ain’t buying any of that “If I can make jokes about genocide, why can’t I make jokes about rape?” Horseshit, unless you made those genocide jokes during a gig at the Srebrenica Funny Bone. You got away with making a joke about genocide because your odds of having a holocaust survivor’s kid in the audience were pretty fucking low.

And if you did happen to have one in the audience, and he heckled you, walked out, and wrote something nasty on the internet… would you be more likely to be a human being and say “Wow. I can understand why that person’s authentic response to what I was doing was so emotional and negative. Maybe my genocide material just isn’t good enough to justify the pain that it inflicts. Maybe I need more skill in order to pull this off.” Or are you gonna be a lousy piece of shit and say, “Yeah, I apologize, I guess, IF YOU WERE OFFENDED.”

I recommend Mr Butler reads the whole thing.

In answer to Andrew Street’s question – why was the whole thing necessary in the first place – it seems to me this constant pushing of “transgressive” comedy (unless, of course, it’s genuinely transgressive and brilliant, the real thing, but sadly that’s rarely the case) is a bit of ordinary male territorial dominance. You reckon I can’t lift my leg and piss on that post over there? Watch me! Nyah!

Good work, Feminist Killjoys!

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3. Quickhit: freebies to a Sydney comedy show

(Seems I’ve missed the deadline already. Blogging Occupational hazard – sorry!)

When I think of the books I read and re-read as a child, the ones which changed me and which fed my developing feminism, there are two things which they have in common.

One is that as a child growing up in a suburb in a coastal city in the most urbanised country on the planet, I craved books about people who didn’t live in cities – the Billabong books of Mary Grant Bruce, Swallows and Amazons and its sequel We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea; Jean Craighead George’s extraordinary My Side of the Mountain; Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding; Colin Thiele’s February Dragon; Nan Chauncy’s and Ethel Turner’s everything. Some books I loved might have been ostensibly urban, but featured animals and/or a desire for an escape from the city: Barry Hines’ Kes and Paul Gallico’s Thomasina for instance. (Paul Gallico was huge back then but you hardly hear about him now. If any of you cat people haven’t read Thomasina, get you to Book Depository stat.)

Another common thread in my childhood reading is that I gravitated with some powerful inner magnetism towards books which featured horses. The Billabong series again, Kate Seredy’s The Good Master, all the Pullein-Thompson books (if you weren’t a lover of pony books in your childhood, there were three Pullein-Thomson sisters, plus their mother Joanna Cannan, and they all wrote with the same signature style so as to be almost indistinguishable). Mary O’Hara’s Thunderhead series. I’m thinking of this today as I finish Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread, which is a book about horse people, unusual today. It was more than the love of horses themselves, their beauty and power and personalities. It was the underlying theme in all these books that women can do difficult things, they can be brave, competent and independent. They can spend a whole novel being concerned with facing problems, not their appearance – in fact there’s often a sense of glee in descriptions of a girl’s muddy or otherwise mussed-up state, where the author conspires with the reader in rejecting the norms of twentieth-century clean and “dainty” womanhood. (Ugh. Aren’t you glad that that word, at least, has well and truly sunk into disuse?) The Good Master and the Billabong series are a paradigm of the role of horses in writing about female emancipation in a pre-war world and the threats to that fragile sense of liberation. The Mary Grant Bruces and Pullein-Thompsons wrote about cracking hardy and not falling into the paradigm of domesticated womanhood, although these writers – products of their time – assumed that it would get you in the end.

“Pony books”, despite being at the slighter end of the scale, nevertheless had a strong ethical message – people who were cruel to their horses and rude to other people invariably lost while those who were kind and straight with others won the blue ribbons at the gymknana in the end, or had some other kind of personal victory. This was commendable, though perhaps not the best preparation for real life.

Honourable mention for some books which don’t quite fit here: Geoffrey Willans’ Down with Skool!, whose characters survive on Twitter, and Finn Family Moomintroll. I wasn’t much of a fantasy reader but loved ghosts and horror, scaring the wits out of myself with Edgar Allen Poe and M.R. James.

You’ll notice there is a generational element there. I grew up in the twentieth century, just as the baby boom was petering out, to older parents. I read a lot of older writing, some of it from Edwardian times, most of which isn’t in circulation now. Edith Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It, What Katy Did, and many of the titles I’ve mentioned above. I’ve re read a few of them lately, and as you’d expect, some hold up better than others. It’s saddening to read A Little Bush Maid and see how Grant Bruce accepted, uncritically, white attitudes to indigenous people before WW1. It’s not a book I’d buy for a grandchild, although you could use it in schools as a set text, in context.

Another common thread of the books of these older times is that the narratives went on without parents present very often, if at all. I didn’t see that as unusual at the time. I can’t help comparing my own childhood – spending whole days playing in a disused quarry in a patch of scrub pretending to be the equivalent of My Side of the Mountain, exploring creeks with insufficient thought of snakes and footwear, riding horses with friends over huge areas of paddock and back road without telling anyone where we were going, or even knowing in advance where we were going… in the light of today’s helicopter parenting it seems so dangerous, even without the more dramatic adventures of the kids in the books. But it was inspiring.

Even today, the lessons of my childhood reading remain. Don’t be a wimp. Be nice to other people. Even if you’re a bookish nerdy type, you can love the bush and the outdoors. Be resourceful. And be good to your animals.

What were the books which shaped you?

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We see horse racing on TV all the time, but rarely 3DE. It’s a brutal, testing sport needing both physical courage and years of hard work. The second phase, cross country, involves ridiculously large obstacles (I saw a twincab ute used as a jump at Werribee), in often slippery and muddy conditions. Eventing is unique in that older people can compete, and men and women compete with each other in the same events.

Fiona Carruthers writes in the Fin Review:

Ever since the late Bill Roycroft’s Man from Snowy River style ride at Rome in 1960, Australia has excelled in this event. In 1960, Roycroft rode the all-important final Show Jumping phase with a broken collar bone and concussion following a fall from his plucky mount, Our Solo, during the cross country phase.

And from there she makes a brief mention of Andrew Hoy and the rest of the current team. HEY WAIT A MINUTE. If you are going to mention Bill Roycroft, why is there no mention of the legendary ride by Gillian Rolton at Atlanta in 1996? Here’s the story:

Her dreams of winning gold medals at successive Olympics in the same event appeared gone when she fell and suffered broken ribs and a broken collarbone as Peppermint Grove lost balance during her run. As a consequence of Rolton’s injuries, her left arm became immobile.

Remarkably, Rolton climbed back on and continued, only to fall a second time – into the water this time – as the horse failed to clear a jump.

She rose yet again to complete her run and help the Australian eventing team of herself, Wendy Schaeffer, Andrew Hoy and Phillip Dutton win gold.

In a recent interview, Rolton admitted she hadn’t noticed her injuries during her performance.

“I was so totally focused on getting through to the finish. I just was oblivious to everything else, actually,” she said.

How tough is this woman? But there’s more:

In a separate interview, Rolton revealed her coach Wayne Roycroft was livid following her heroic display.

“He came up to me and he was absolutely like thunder. He said, ‘Well, you couldn’t help the first fall but why the (expletive), (expletive) did you come off the second time.’ And I just sort of pulled my shirt back and there was this bone sticking up and he said, ‘Oh … mmm, you better get to the hospital then. But don’t take any drugs, we’ll probably need you to ride tomorrow,’” she recalled.

Rolton has since been inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame. She’s in London at the Olympics now, judging competitions.

Last time I took the boy to the Melbourne Show, I dragged him past the horse events. In the middle of the arena was Gillian Rolton, dressed to the nines in a skirt suit, big cloche hat and court shoes, judging some kids on ponies. I made sure to point her out to my son and tell him this story.

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Image from Regnans Tree Facebook group

A group of grandmothers has locked onto machinery in truly terrible winter weather. Their spirit and determination absolutely blows me away.

Toolangi resident Bernie Mace says the works are destroying the environment and it will take specialised equipment to remove the women.
“Well they’ve used some pretty elaborate apparatus which is going to require police search and rescue to remove them from this equipment,” he said.
“Well the desperation is just palpable, no matter what we do the trees just keep coming down.
“It’s a very serious matter as far as the community is concerned.”
VicForest us urging the protesters to undertake “more constructive dialogue.”

“Constructive dialogue”? Like when My Environment took them to court and won, so now they’re seeking to move the goalposts (i.e. water down the Flora and Fauna Guarantee act) to prevent that happening? Like when they obfuscate and mangle the language to try to convince others that what they’re doing is “sustainable” and “harvesting” and not at all damaging to the environment we’re all supposed to protect for future generations? Right.

Googling the womens’ courageous action today, the reponse from our mainstream media appears to be…crickets chirping. They did report this, which throws their bravery into even sharper relief.

You can make a donation to the campaign here, if you have any dollars to spare.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Crossposted at the Cast Iron Balcony

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Ad transcript:

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Voiceover: Boys and girls are different.

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Voiceover: That’s why only Huggies nappies have tailored absorbency surge layer where they need it most… Huggies nappies. Because there is a difference.”

You know who to call when besieged by egregious gender policing of tiny helpless children and in danger of wrecking the TV by throwing some heavy object at it? Cordelia Fine! I searched and searched for my copy of Delusions of Gender, which is temporarily (I hope) lost somewhere in the house, unless it’s been “borrowed”. But no matter, because I found this wonderful review which gives a detailed introduction to the book.

Why do people take such pleasure in biological justifica-
tions of gender stereotypes? And why is their automatic reaction
when you point out the rather large leaps in their “reasoning”
to say: “Oh, you feminists just don’t want to accept facts”?
So it has been a great pleasure, this winter vacation, to read
Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society,
and Neurosexism Create Difference, which carefully and with
great precision demolishes the nonsense that pervades the
popular and technical literature pretending to be scientific
fact, exposing it as truthiness which is nowhere close to
truth.
To set some context, consider the industry—that’s the
only word for it—that has grown up pushing purported sex
differences in public policy. One example, would it were
the only one, is the Gurian Institute…

…and about a million other shoddy “scientific studies”, not to mention “news reports” which consist of little more than credulous regurgitation of press releases.

Read the whole thing, then run, don’t walk, to your bookshop or library, depending on your budget, and get this book if you don’t already have it. Today, when “hardwired” is one of the most popular words in the popular writer’s lexicon, toy departments of chain stores observe a gender apartheid which would make P.W. Botha whistle with admiration, and every attempt to criticise this relentless gender policing is met with cries of “Political Correctness!”, this book is so necessary. It’s also – as the reviewer points out – studded with gems of Fine’s wry deadpan humour.

In 2002, Hines and Alexander studied the play of
vervet monkeys. !ey gave them two boy toys, two girl toys,
and two neutral toys. Male vervets divided their time equally,
but female vervets spent more than a third of their time
with the girl toys. Impressive, yes? But, wait, one of the girl
toys was a pan. To quote Fine, “Although it is true that pri-
matologists regularly uncover hitherto unknown skills in our
nonhuman cousins, the art of heated cuisine is not yet one
of them.”

Parents typically underestimate the power of the cultural signals which bombard their kids literally from the moment they’re out of the womb (see the example of the difference in boy and girl birth announcements and differing treatment of boy and girl babies in general). Suddenly, everyone’s going hooray! for gender essentialism, and the whole infernal machine is given another spin for the next generation. Ads like this simply capitalise on the whole phenomenon and ram the message home with all the subtlety of a full disposable nappy in the face.

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Related posts:

1. Quick Hit – Warrior Princesses
2. Quick Hit – 15 Interesting things about vaginas
3. Princess Boy

Other writers and bloggers have already made the point that LFL isn’t so much a “sport” as a titillating curtain raiser for actual football, and that the comparison with Roller Derby is specious (Michelle Smith’s comparison with jelly wrestling is closer to the mark.) I have a depressing vision of a family of football tragics, the kind who, unlike me, actually enjoy field sports and are good at it. The boys are looking at the AFL players and thinking “when I grow up, I could do that. Awesome!” Their sisters girls are watching the LFL players and thinking “Crap, football is obviously not for us, unless we’re built like centrefolds and don’t mind that we’re just eye candy before the real game.”

Razer goes for three lines of defence which I think you’ll find familiar. The first is an old favourite from the 1980s-1990s culture wars:

Critics of LFL are humourless joy-killers!

Critics of this rarely played but much-discussed demonstration sport have included reliable wowser Melinda Tankard Reist and, somewhat little less predictably, ABC radio broadcaster and Chaser alumnus Dom Knight.

More lately, Melbourne academic Dr Michelle Smith wrote in The Age that the Lingerie Football League was ”undoubtedly sexist” and that the act of dismissing its impact on the social lot of women was not only itself sexist but evidence of ”insidious” sexism.

What Smith actually said, and she was no Robinson Crusoe here, was that

The LFL selects women who look like centrefolds in their bra and panties, not muscular or stocky women who might be athletically most suited to football.

Female athletes are regularly undervalued for their sporting abilities, but rewarded for their appearance…

(…and are contractually obliged to be prepared to be dakked on the field in front of thousands.) Seems fairly straightforward to me: That’s sexism. Or, as Twisty would say, it’s in accordance with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women (a.k.a. the megatheocorporatocracy). But Razer chooses to describe Smith’s argument thus:

To be clear: it is generally agreed by feminist persons that the Lingerie Football League is sexist. The league is not only proof of sexism but a source of sexism. Further, if one elects to think of the league as less than sexist, one is sexist.
I was surprised by this reasoning, and not just because it was so dizzyingly syllogistic.

AKA: If my target’s argument isn’t weak enough for me, I have others. Or as commenter “Steve up North” has it, “It’s just a bit of fun, women perve as do men. Feminists are as boring as cardboard for breakfast and most of them wouldnt know a good time if they fell on it. Lighten up, life is too serious and some fun goes a long way to put a smile on peoples faces.” Really, with such a succinct criticism of the silly feminists right there, Razer’s article wasn’t even necessary.

Second, another old favourite which I thought had died a natural death: “Victim feminism”.

Crucial to the “feminist” critique of the Lingerie Football League is the idea that the participants in this spectator sport have no volition or are, at best, victims deluded into the idea of “raunch” liberty…
Surely there are few things more demeaning to women than the incessant reminder that they are being demeaned.

Talk about syllogistic! If you call out any kind of demeaning behaviour you’re responsible for demeaning the targets of that behaviour…

…Which brings us to that current favourite, the Working People v. the Elites! (Elites from Brunswick, who are the elitiest evil elites of all of the elite!)

Just by coincidence, Mr Denmore has just written about this very phenomenon, whereby if you’re opposing the LFL but your approval to the miniskirted warriors of Roller Derby, “(Y)ou’re just a latte-quaffing elitist out of touch with the Barnesian (as in Jimmy) concerns of real folks.” Razer’s post isn’t in the Murdoch media, but it’s a ripper example of the genre.

Just as the Minister for Sport is ”offended” by the debut of this faux sport, I am offended by the snootiness that sustains her critique. If Lundy is genuinely and knowledgably worried for women playing dangerous sport in brief and sexy outfits, then she must step in and immediately outlaw roller derby.
Of course, this will not happen because roller derby is played chiefly by middle-class women in Brunswick who wear their hotpants ”ironically”.

“Women in Brunswick” presumably means the latte-quaffing elitists Mr Denmore refers to, but it seems a bit rich to me, seeing as Razer spent the first half of her life as an inner-city public radio DJ bringing Nirvana and L7 to the masses. You would think that hipsterism had never passed her lips, perhaps she never inhaled. But it’s a strange stick to beat the rest of us with. Nevertheless, let’s look at the reasons these jackbooted elites want to spoil all the fun. If you follow the links you know the arguments the feminist joy killers have put forth: we think it’s bad for women in general and talented sportswomen in particular. Collective Shout have talked about banning it, but most of us unrepresentative left-liberal academic elitist swill (thanks, Mr D!) are simply pointing out why it is continuing the regrettable social norm of men as default human and women as sex class, in several different ways. This, Razer says, is “snootiness”.

Now let’s turn to the Razer article and look at the words used to describe LFL.

Gaudy, not very nice, (like) pole dancing, not terribly hygienic, sport-and-strip hybrid, pseudo-sport, tatty peep show, (signifying) a lack of taste and clothing, faux sport, tat.

So, in other words, we tut-tutting, cause-adopting latte set (Thanks again, Mr D!) are unacceptably “snooty” when we try to look at LFL with an analytical eye, while Razer can bag it out in terms which look undeniably snooty to me, but that’s all right, because… why? Well, I’ve come to the end of this post, or my patience, and I still don’t really know. but my suspicions have something to do with clicks, outrage and page views.

There’s also a passage which attempts to draw an equivalence between women and monster trucks but a great weariness has come upon me. I’ll leave the logical vacuity of that up to someone else, perhaps.

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Related posts:

1. We waste enough energy already explaining to trolls
2. Quicklink: Tansy Rayner Roberts unpacks Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy
3. Leave it to football to prove that women are the ‘sex class’