Past Editions

• First Edition: , 6th June 2008
  at Hoyden About Town
• Second Edition: 4th July, 2008
  at In A Strange Land
• Third Edition: 7th August, 2008
  at Audrey and the Bad Apples
• Fourth Edition: 1st September, 2008
  at Blue Milk
• Fifth Edition: 1st October, 2008:
  Hell On Hairy Legs
• Sixth Edition: 3rd November, 2008:
  Penguin Unearthed
• Seventh Edition: 3rd December 2008:
  Ideologically Impure
• Eighth Edition: 2nd January, 2009:
  Stephiepenguin
• Ninth Edition: 5th February, 2009:
  The Hand Mirror.
• Tenth Edition: 2nd March, 2009:
  Ideologically Impure.
  Theme: Fighting the power/
  subverting the dominant paradigm.
• Eleventh Edition: 6th April, 2009:
  WhyI’mbitter’s Weblog.
• Twelfth and Bumper Birthday Edition: 3rd May, 2009:
  Chally at Zero At The Bone.
• Thirteenth Edition: 5th June, 2009:
  Demelza at SAHM Feminist.
• Fourteenth Edition: 5th July, 2009:
  anjum rahman at Kiwi Stargazer.

Welcome to the Fifteenth Edition of down under feminists carnival! This carnival features posts made by Aussie and Kiwi feminists during July, 2009.

And Oi! You lot! If you want the carnival to continue as a success, you need to submit some posts each month! I had to find most of these myself – and it would be nice if our hosts didn’t have that added workload burden on top of collating and formatting the carnival.

Before we start, A reminder that Hollaback Australia is up and running. Tired of being shouted at, leered at, wanked at, rubbed against, or groped while out and about in Oz? Now it’s your turn to shout back. Submit your photos and stories now! Hollaback also has a sidebar button you can put on your blog.

Starting the carnival on a pinker note:

Pink plague

Mim headdesks “Bloody hell, even the lollies are gendered” at Mim’s muddle:

Music

Nixwilliams sets the words of a feminist concern troll to music, in “I Respect Women“.

The 98%-male Hottest 100 on Triple J has spawned a multitude of responses. I’ve been very much enjoying <a href="http://girliejones.livejournal.com/1403124.html“>Female Appreciation Month, started by Girlie Jones. GJ also provides links to a whole lot of other bloggers who have joined in. Put aside plenty of time to appreciate this!

The #hottest100women is going strong on Twitter. Read more about the #hottest100women project on Facebook.

Amanda lists a few songs and artists that didn’t make the list and makes some direct comparisons here in “Women are, like, different”, as does shinynewcoin, who writes more in “you’re soaking in it. Fuckpoliteness sums up, in @Hottest100Women – the somewhat ludicrously extended version. And Godard’s Letterboxes has a terrific series: Hottest (white male) 100, More thoughts on Hottest (White Male) 100 – Kingsmill’s list, Hottest White, Male and possibly middle aged, 100, Female voices and the Hottest 100, and Final (I promise) thoughts on the Triple J Hottest 100
.

Class, Poverty, and Welfare

Queen of Thorns talks about grievance politics in “Is truth beauty? Is beauty truth? Does knowing a person’s income tell you a damned thing about them?” at Ideologically Impure:

What fucking planet are they, and numerous commenters at The Standard and, one imagines because one ain’t going there, Kiwiblog on that they can see “[x] dollars per week” and go A-HA! I KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU AND AM TOTALLY QUALIFIED TO JUDGE YOUR LIFESTYLE?

blue milk fights for the right of a teacher’s baby not to be treated as a second-class citizen in The second class baby.

I may have found myself at a recent P&C meeting knee-deep in a fierce debate on whether a teacher at my daughter’s kindergarten, who is not long off having her first baby and who will be returning to work more or less full-time a couple of months after the baby’s birth, should be allowed to ever have her baby on the premises, even for breastfeeding. She has the full support of the other staff and owners of the kindergarten, but not the parents it seems. Babies and breastfeeding, however segregated, are troubling distractions for fee-paying kindergarteners.

Still Worth Less

AnneE at Elsewoman is “still asking after all these years” at a pay equity demonstration:

I enjoyed meeting up with two die-hard feminists of my vintage, with their equally staunch daughters alongside them. But we did wonder whether, in another twenty years’ time, they’d be standing there again with THEIR daughters, still demanding equal pay for work of equal value.

AnneE presents “Need cash for your hobby? Hire out women for sex!” at Elsewoman:

The news flabbergasts me on a daily basis, but I plumbed new depths of flabbergastry on Sunday when I read about the former Olympic featherweight boxer who has set up a brothel to earn money for his sporting career.[…] “Some people on the team will not think highly of me for doing this,” Campbell said. “If they saw this place and how it’s operated, they’d change their mind…We don’t treat them like pieces of meat.”

Ariane’s Little World looks at the HMAS Success sexual league tables issue in “Us & Them“:

So I’m wondering, why is the objectification of women standard schoolboy mentality?

In The Media

Sack Kyle and Jackie O. More at “a shiny new coin: is this what it is to be human?”, and at Crimitism in “Anonymous blogger “stunned” after something he was told would go away if he ignored it did not, in fact, go away when he ignored it“.

Rachel Hills at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman mounts a partial defence of Australian women’s magazines from Jezebel’s takedown in “The real reason (some) women’s magazine articles suck”

The real reason so many of these stories are pre-written, I suspect, isn’t just because the editors in question want them to look a certain way. It’s because, through their eyes at least, the shape they set for the story is simply the way that it is.

Hell On Hairy Legs tackles the “what men want in a man” mindset:

Finally, I’d like a man who doesn’t go *hur hur* at the thought of lesbian sex, because that shit gets annoying pretty quickly.

Fuckpoliteness has a good eye for sensationalism in “SMH and rape reporting – did you just photoshop her scars??“:

Race & Racism

A Shiny New Coin presents “if at first you don’t succeed“:

I would have thought the fact that all past attempts to improve Aboriginal disadvantage have failed would not indicate that those attempts need to be replicated. The last time a PM came out saying the line was being drawn on Aboriginal disadvantage, his idea was to send out the army and control the income of Aboriginal people.

Ariane’s Little World has a look at Alice Springs council efforts that don’t have so much as a fake benevolent veneer, in Keep your poverty out of my face:

The ABC have reported that the council has put out a set of by-laws for public comment. They include such things as being able to remove and destroy the blankets of homeless people that are stashed away during the day by their owners. Currently, rangers are allowed to remove them from their hidey holes, but are obliged to return them to an Indigenous organisation.

Reproductive Justice

AnneE skewers New Zealand Business Roundtable’s suggestion that the domestic purposes benefit should not be paid to teenagers to stop encouraging them to get pregnant, in “Business Roundtable discovers new contraceptive” at Elsewoman. The statistics aren’t on Business Roundtable’s side.

Georgie writes a Letter to a Senator:

I consider myself both an advertisement for the safety of homebirth (because we transferred when we thought the baby might need it) and the necessity of having homebirth as an option. My hospital experience was extremely traumatic, and nearly a year later I still have flashbacks and nightmares relating to it. Going anywhere near that hospital brings on a panic attack. If I have any more children I probably will not be eligible for the Community Midwifery Program, so if this legislation passes I will be faced with the choice of a ‘freebirth’ (having had two post-partum haemorrhages I would far prefer to have a midwife there), or going to hospital – a place that literally terrifies me.

Nic Heath rounds up “The contentious debate about pain relief during childbirth” at The Dawn Chorus. (Fill yourself in on the background to this at non-DownUnder blogs Stand And Deliver and Feminist Philosophers.)

Science

PodBlack muses about science and sex, in “Ask Podblack – Could Sex Sell Science?” at PodBlack Cat, complete with obligatory “feminists are misandrist lesbians!” commenter:

It also leads to us putting aside the label ’sexy’ as being a part of the ’selling’ – and begins to produce questions like: ‘is this really the best way to get a different message out about seeing the world – that science is a worthy and educational benefit?’ and ‘will it appeal in cases where explicit content is not the best vehicle for a message’?

Sex and Sexuality

Rachel Hills presents “Lars, Loneliness and the Real Pillow” at Musings of an inappropriate woman:

Japan has for a while been the go-to country for oddball stories – especially those relating to isolation. That a staggering 25 percent of Japanese men and women have not had intercourse by their early thirties (or, presumably, in many cases an intimate relationship) speaks of this isolation. But as The American Virgin points out, the Japanese aren’t the only ones having trouble negotiating the modern sex and relationships field.

Keri and Rayedish write submissions on the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009.

The Law

Helen at Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony notes, “We’ve been here before”.

The mother is charged with murder, but the father is charged only with manslaughter.

Where is this feeling of deja vu coming from?

Disability

Ramping It Up looks at the fine line ‘mainstreaming’ teachers need tread to avoid exclusion and invisibility in “A Certain Age: Tragedy, the Insipid, and other people’s mothers”

Part of it, I think, is a mistaken belief that denying the existence of a disability is somehow more affirming or liberating. For whom? Given that she can’t walk or even sit unaided, to allegedly treat M “like the other children” either renders her completely invisible, or allows for no participation at all. (Look everyone, run over here! Oh no, not you.)

Violence

Emma Hart looks at domestic violence from the inside in “Because You Should Know “ at Public Address:Up Front.

The next time, you go to a friend’s house. He finds you there, too. Rather than watch your friend get her indignant certainty smacked off her face, you go back home. You know she’s disappointed with you, but better that than have her understand the only way anyone really can.

Queen of Thorns responds with “Emma Hart is my homegirl” at Ideologically Impure:

It is the Women’s Refuge Annual Appeal week, and I thoroughly encourage y’all to donate, because they do hugely important, heartbreaking work that needs to be done.

Sobering fact of the day in case anyone’s feeling callous or indifferent about abuse: their website has a “Hide My Visit” button. Because there are women out there whose partners will search their browser history and attack them physically if they find evidence – like a visit to a Refuge website – that their victims might be looking for a way out.

Reviews and Fandom

Karen Healey asks “Which Readers?“:

So apparently sci-fi/fantasy book fan convention Readercon is advertising next year’s con with the tagline, “This IS your father’s Readercon.”

The problem is that my dad doesn’t read sci-fi. He reads westerns, sports biographies, historical fiction, and conspiracy thrillers. He used to read The Phantom, and he might have seen Star Wars once.

I, on the other hand, have been consciously seeking out fantasy titles since I was nine years old and read The Lord of The Rings. Because I saw Eowyn, who laughed in the face of death that no living man might hinder and, and said, “But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless!”

I watched Sarah tell the Goblin King that her will was as strong as his and her kingdom as great and that he had no power over her. I was with Laura Chant, rebirthing herself in the beginning place, as the bones of her skull shifted under her lover’s hands. […]

Marjorie Morgan looks at a delightful but old practical ‘boatkeeping’ manual, written in the style of a housekeeping manual from the 60’s, which offers fascinating look at how the way in which women are viewed has changed in our society in the past half century. Check out The Woman’s Guide to Boating and Cooking at GO! Girls Outdoors.

Fifty Two Acts announces that Vertical Horizons, a new femme fanzine, is now open for submisions of femisnist/woman centred fiction, non fiction, reviews, comics, art, and any other good ideas you have that you might think fit the ethos of the zine.

A second look at Slash/Yaoi misogyny bingo at sqbr, highlighting the self-contradictory nature of these sorts of remarks:

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That’s all folks. Thankyou for participating, and please do spread the word through your bloggy networks.

Check out the main Carnival page for more details, and please consider volunteering to host a carnival!

Categories: ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, health, indigenous, law & order, linkfest, media, Science, social justice

Tags: australia, bigotry, blogging, books & writing, carnival, disability, Down Under Feminists Carnival, dufc, exploitation, race & racism, reproductive justice