So, apparently all the men of Australia deserve cookies, becuase they all inevitably become feminists (every last one of them!) when they have daughters (of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest that a man support women’s rights just because it’s the right thing to do). But women of Australia: no biscuit! After all, you can’t expect anyone to take women’s rights seriously when we do stuff like reading non-political magazines, discussing celebrities, and having fun! Because men NEVER do these things, obviously — that is why men are taken so seriously, and have all that political power and get paid more money. Your typical Aussie bloke, you see, never spends any time reading Sports Magazines or talking about women they fancy, or watching the cricket. For the Aussie bloke, it’s 100% SRS BZNS.
Fortunately, Sam, in all his manly wisdom, knows how to fix things — more women need to identify as feminists. Yay! Well, except lesbians and women with hairy armpits. Those are Bad Feminists who ruin it for all the pretty heterosexual women (who really should spend much less time fixating on their hair and makeup). As for why women reject feminism — well, it’s got nothing to do with men who tell feminists that we’re missing the point when we suggest that women should have control over our own sex lives. All of these men, you see, would happily hop on board with feminism if we women weren’t such frivolous ninnies. (And of course, they’d never tell women who did stand up for their rights that they were Humourless, or Making-a-Big-Deal-out-of-Nothing, or that It’s-Just-Biology-Get-Over-It, or anything like that.)
Aren’t we just so lucky to have sensitive, intelligent guys like Sam around to help us out with this stuff?
[ETA: Fuck Politeness has more.]
Categories: arts & entertainment, Culture, gender & feminism, social justice, Sociology
Are cultural politics worse than no politics at all? 
The 62nd Down Under Feminists Carnival 
Sunday Singalong: M.I.A. 
Sunday Poet: Sarah Jones 
Hoyden About Town 
Aren’t we just so lucky to have sensitive, intelligent guys like Sam around to help us out with this stuff?
Why yes, Beppie. Yes, we are. I know I could never figure out that I’m a human being on my own. I need to be told what activities to engage in and how to present myself by a man in order to realise my true, beautiful womanhood.
Did I mention I hate hairy armpits? And those lesbians are so eww.
(I actually do not remember the last time I shaved my armpits.)
Chally’s last blog post..Various announcements on various carnivals, including a reminder to submit to DUFC!
I loved the “It’s all the women’s fault” meme. Why is that women are responsible for just about everything: including sexual gatekeeping, emotional maintainence and now liberating ourselves, but we’re not allowed power over anything much? This is a raw deal.
Humph. I added a link through to this, but as often happens when I link to something at Hoyden, it’s not showing up as a pingback…I think I fail at technology?
But that’s a side issue. Sam. Even when he’s being *feminist* he’s being misogynist. >_<
I detest Sam de Brito with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Although, it must be said he is more progressive than many of his commentors.
There are so many idiotic statements in his blog today it’s hard to know where to start – that childcare is only a feminist issue, that absolutely all women read gossip magazines, that you can’t care about shoes and hard-core issues at the same time because obviously women don’t have the brainpower men do.
There is a reason I pretty much never go to his blog. Because it makes me homicidal.
Grrah. And the papers are 50% football because….??
Oh thank you for taking on this shite. I nearly puked onto my birkinstocks, past my hairy armpits, when I read it. What unmitigated wankspeak.
I’m with you, Jane. Staying away out of respect for my molars.
WHAT a self-absorbed, clueless ass.
Jet’s last blog post..Rape Culture: Still Not Funny
I certainly want to hear what hoydens have to say about Sam de Brito, but I think they are giving him far too much credit when they reiterate his arguments in detail and try to rebut them. That’s like trying to rebut vomit.
There are a fair few people who argue the way he does, and if you debate with them in good faith, with an open mind, you quickly find yourself reduced to breathless indignation at the specious arguments, the glib inconsistency and the dishonesty and bad faith that motivates the whole discussion. You cannot argue with a hate-spewing machine, no matter how glib it is.
If we are to discuss haters such as Sam de Brito sensibly, we have to see them for what they are and take a distant, academic attitude, as science and sociology students do with bee dances or bovine hierarchies. And if we end up sounding patronising and supercilious, so be it.
Unless, of course, you use him as a sort of drug, to get your outrage and adrenalin flowing when you’re feeling a bit too mellow to get things done.
katarina — there are a variety of responses that are possible to people like de Brito, and different people are inevitably going to react differently depending on what resonates with them. For that reason, I think it’s a good thing to have as many different types of response out there as possible, and frankly, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to have people attempting to dictate which attitudes we should or should not adopt.
Kthxbye.
I don’t know Beppie. Sam de Brito as a drug would be… interesting. He’d probably be the biggest anaphrodisiac EVER. Does anyone else find him really creepy?
katerina, it is hard to rebut vomit and it is a shame that’s it’s usually a woman’s job to clean it up. Unfortunately feminists end up arguing with hate machines all the time, I don’t think we’re going stop now.
Well its consistent with things. Its just one big feminine and feminist failure. No matter what women do – they are wrong. His argument suggests that women are too passive, that they are too aggressive (align this with the hair and lesbianism), that they are not enough of a collective to get free day care and too individualist and competitive to care. (As if women editors move in some rarified world where they are not answerable to the male media owners who have appointed them as fashion editors and not as collective campaigners for free childcare.) Being too individual and not collective enough, then it stands to reason women are not then individual enough to resist the inculcations of a patriarchal culture and fall for the silliness of these magazines.Indeed, if women simply chose, they could magically morph these mags into a women’s collective effort to change Australia’s social system. Just like that.
And finally he attributes men’s failure to take on the cause – to quite simply – women’s failure to get the message across . Just like that. Again. In Sam’s Feminist Imaginary, the power of patriarchy consists of nothing more than “a few insecure men” and therefore, there is no obstruction to feminism apart from maternally deficient women who infect their girl babies with shoe fetishes and hijack themselves with fat phobias and Lindsay Lohan. For Sam, this has nothing to do with patriarchal mores which begin to be inculcated in girls before they can even talk.
This inculcation, which is conducted with big sticks and visions of the feminine monstrous is, in fact, what Sam excels in. “Choose your Battles?” is it? “Choose your Feminine Fuckup” would be a better title.
Though I was a supporter of women’s right before becoming a dad, and a husband for that matter, but having a daughter (and this is anecdotal) can create a positive awareness of feminism.
But that is the only thing Sam came close to being correct on. Instead of a stupid post haranguing women (and pandering to the misogynistic element of his readership), he should be talking to the blokes.
Tell them why they should support womens’ rights. Explain what feminism is, why it is important and counter the stereotypes. Tell blokes what to say to their mate that gleefully embraces misogynistic attitudes after a few beers at the pub. There is a lot of behaviour that is ingrained by society that needs to be overcome. It isn’t easy as blokes will feel threatened by such conversations.
The conversations that we blokes have with each other, making an effort to understand the importance of womens’ rights, are far more valuable than anything Sam de Brito will ever write.
Perhaps, Shaun, but my dad has a daughter and he’s pretty unFeminist. Bush has two daughters, and I’m not too keen on his “feminism”, either. Etc, etc, etc.
@Anna
Fer sure. I freely admit my experience is anecdotal and understand there are some blokes who will never get it.
Really. For a lot of blokes, daughters seem to just send their ownership-of-female-bodies gland into overdrive. How many “huh huh, you’ll need to get a shotgun, huh huh” jokes have you heard in your life?
I eagerly anticipate Sam’s article on how men should turn every sporting publication, footy show, porn magazine, and action movie trailer into a political pressure soapbox for universal daycare.
Yes, and they’re supposed to be funny somehow or another. “Ha ha, when she’s a teenager, you’ll need a baseball bat!”
I get they’re trying to be funny, but it’s not happening in a vacuum.
Fucking hell. Much too angry honey. >.<
Why don’t you discuss this post he wrote in 2007? You hate it that he doesn’t spew your line of thought. No wonder feminism is so screwed – anyone who doesn’t get it “right” – according to your views is torn apart. [abuse deleted ~ moderator]
http://blogs.smh.com.au/lifestyle/allmenareliars/archives/2007/06/the_biggest_problem_facing_the.html
A little more context might help others parse your comment, #17.
@ Bener:
If you mean that people don’t get a free lifetime pass on writing sexist rubbish because they once wrote some feminist-positive stuff, that’s true. Germaine Greer doesn’t get a free lifetime pass, and classic feminist Greer stuff was actually ground-breakingly original. You think we’re going to give a free lifetime pass to someone on the basis of a post that doesn’t even “sound” like his normal writing voice?
ETA: “torn apart” ? Being mocked for writing something egregiously ill-informed and condescending is being “torn apart”? Way to play with hyperbole.
He refers to the second wave feminists as “hijacking” the movement (um… where would western women be without them? The 50’s). Correct me if I’m wrong – and I don’t mean that in an arrogant way – but I could have sworn it was the second wave feminists who fought for the universal daycare he’s complaining women don’t care about… they were probably the very ones who who even came up with the concept.
@ Rose:
Excellent catch, Rose! I think you’ve got that exactly right.
Hey de Brito, if it weren’t for second – wavers it would still be legal for men in this country to rape their wives, you arrogant misinformed assbag.
Shaun, I totally reject the whole “but what if it were YOUR daughter?” trope. It reeks of paternalism. Appealing to men to see women as humans on the grounds that some of those women belong to *them* is WRONG.
@ Tigtog
That’s good. That part struck me as really odd; you know, like reality had gone topsy turvy and I was the last to know. But then, pretty much the whole article left that impression on me.
I mean, apparently fathers are to be considered feminists if they have a daughter – that’s it – but the mothers of those daughters and the daughters themselves, well, THEY must prove they’re WORTHY and have to EARN it, dammit! By working hard to meet criteria which are directly at odds with each other.
Gah, can’t believe this guy gets so much space to publish such tripe.
Opening the Sun Herald and seeing him lauded as “Feminism’s new (deep) voice” made me choke on my toast.
Seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Thu60-YB_Yg?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
[MODERATOR NOTE: morphers who change their posting nyms in an attempt to evade the moderation filter normally get their comments deleted in full. This one will stand because the link is relevant. The rest of your comments’ content has been deleted. Choose one nym/email combo and stick to it. ~ tigtog]
@ SomeYoungGirl:
I certainly hadn’t seen it. It sounds like a most worthwhile mentoring program, and good on Sam de Brito for founding it.
The fact that he’s capable of commendable activism on behalf of indigenous youth doesn’t make him perfect or beyond criticism when he makes an arse of himself with respect to feminism though. His column contains several statements which are simply factually incorrect and which indicate that although he probably does want some feminist goals to be advanced in our society, he still has a long way to go with feminist analysis and self-examination too. He’s only half got it.
[MODERATOR NOTE: morphers who change their posting nyms in an attempt to evade the moderation filter get their comments deleted in full ~ tigtog]
SomeYoungGirl — if you feel that de Brito has helped you out, then that’s great. But as Tigtog has already noted, that does NOT give him a free pass to make offensive, incorrect and condescending statements. Because you know what’s nasty?
Nasty is assuming that men have rights by default, but that women need to work for their rights.
Nasty is suggesting that women who have hairy armpits don’t represent “real” feminists.
Nasty is implying that lesbians are guilty of hijacking the feminist movement.
Nasty is telling women that they should forgo frivolous entertainment while placing no similar demands on men.
Nasty is making an untrue assumption that all men with daughters are feminists, and then telling women that they’re not up to task because they do not meet this imaginary standard.
Nasty is ignoring all the activism that women do every day in order to lecture women about how politically disengaged they are.
And I choose to respond to this Nastiness by mocking it mercilessly to show how stupid it is. I’m not going to ignore it just because de Brito has done good things too.
[MODERATOR NOTE: morphers who change their posting nyms in an attempt to evade the moderation filter get their comments deleted in full ~ tigtog]
Yeah – I was being so offensive. So I changed my name. WHo cares?
SYG, imagine that instead of doing something to help indigenous youth get employment opportunities in his corner of the media*, S de B came over all condescending and said that indigenous people were DOING IT ALL RONG and should listen to HIM, a white fella, tell them how they should conduct their lives and their struggle.
*(and honestly, if someone has a media profile and resources to do so why shouldn’t he be doing that anyway, and I’m sure it did his marketing angle no harm)