I would just like to say a hearty “thank you!” to the lovely financial advisor from the ANZ who cancelled our meeting 5 weeks ago, the one where I was to sign over all the secret squirrel money I have in the whole world to your “moderately aggressive” investment strategy. Love your work, Geoff!
MUP sent me a copy of The Great Feminist Denial, by Monica Dux and Zora Simic, which was nice of them. Here are some thoughts about it. I would have liked to been able spend more time thinking about it, but life intervened.
As a young woman, I would identify as a feminist if asked, but it wasn’t something that I foregrounded. I grew up in an explicitly feminist, activist and very middle class household, and so did my partner. I expected that I was entitled to be treated as a human being, and that I wouldn’t be passed over or denied opportunity because I’m female. What made me more strongly identify as feminist was getting older entering the workforce and learning a bit more about the world. Since I started blogging I’ve ramped up my feminist identification again after seeing misogyny and feminist-blaming in the blogosphere.
So I’m not the target market for this book, which attempts to pick apart why young women are so alienated from feminism.
The authors relied on an informal survey, which they say is not meant be scientific or statistically valid. But they don’t give us much information about it and it all ends up coming across a bit like a Cleo article. In fact, most of the first half of the book has that feel, leading me to wonder whether tighter editing could have woven the two author’s contributions together more seamlessly (and got rid of the typoes and a few other infelicities – for example talking about “‘control crying’ and ‘attachment mothering’” rather than “controlled crying” and “attachment parenting”. )
Dux and Simic say that the feminist that lives in the imaginations of young women as channelled through the mass media “is a feminist who hasn’t kept up with the times, an anachronism that overshadows the way women perceive contemporary feminism”, and that those negative stereotypes persist because there are so few positive images of feminists about. It’s a problem, but the answer can’t be this ahistorical rejection of an unpretty, serious and passionate form of feminism:
“While the ideas of the radical lesbian feminists might seem threatening to many, their power is largely illusory. Their influence on the feminist movement in Australia has been about as significant as that of an eccentric opposition backbencher in our federal parliament.”
Particularly when they have correctly identified the media’s tendency to discuss feminism without feminists, why are they doing this?
Grrr. And there’s a lot more grr in a long thread at the Hoydens’ in response to a recent op-ed in the Age by Monica Dux, including comment from Dux. The op-ed serves to highlight the book’s problems with tone and to show up how an ironic authorial voice only really works when your reader already knows what you mean and is inclined to agree with you. Irony is actually easier to use successfully in the context of blogging because bloggers are more enmeshed with their readers. Also we have smilies 
The authors point to lively feminism on the web and include a lengthy interview with tigtog and Lauredhel from Hoydens About Town. The interview is weirdly tacked on the end of a chapter in a grey box and not contextualised or developed. And why don’t they consider whether the online world might be a better vehicle to inform young women about feminism than a mass media that shown it doesn’t care to?
The tone of the second half of the book is more sober and analytical, and I found it much more persuasive. They canvas a number of media debates where strawfeminists have been invoked – in respect of single women, mothers in the paid workforce, raunch and the positioning of feminists as neglectful or uncaring of Muslim women by the “noisy sisterhood” of female MSM columnists such as the late Pamela Bone and Miranda Albrechtson. Angela Shanahan gets a thump too, which earnt my hearty approval.
These descriptive sections are fairly solid, but their attempts to reframe the debates seem underdone in the face of the relentless volume of their earlier material. For example in their discussion of mothers they suggest reframing the conversation as one about “rights” rather than “choices” but don’t acknowledge how rights discourse almost inevitably resolves into a contest of asserted rights. They claim that “choices made by labouring women are a little like confessions extracted under torture”. They ask whether the lower c-section rates and better perinatal mortality (I wonder whether it’s actually morbidity; no reference was cited) enjoyed by Dutch women are a result of robust health attributable to clog wearing. I know, I know, it’s a joke, but it’s not funny and it detracts from the seriousness of the argument.
See also a post by Helen from Cast Iron Balcony, who liked the book more than I did. I wish I had liked it more, but I think the problems with tone and clarity hobbled their attempt to persuasively address misrepresentations and misunderstandings of feminism.
Did you see the 48 kilo women’s weightlifting? Wow. Heh.
And whatever else you think about China, they’re on message, aren’t they?
Also, I miss you Paul.
A belated welcome to the new bloggers of the Rethinking Jane Austen course at La Trobe University. Here’s a little something I whipped up earlier:
An explanation of title is here, and here is the blog of the phenomenon.
Hat tip to Hoyden About Town.
(And yes, I will post proper soon.)
Today’s discovery, via ArtWranglers, is the divine little moment you will have when you go to this page and click on this → thumbnail which is the top left one at the site.
It’s week 1 of 16 in the project, in case you’re looking at this post and that link in, like, the future.
The artist is Charlie Sofo. You can see some of his works here. I would like to link to his online gallery, but as the upgrade I just did of it KILLED IT STONE DEAD, I won’t. I will just calmly beat my head against the table.
And bye-the-bye I finally sent Sage to school today, for the third time in the last two weeks, only to have the school call at 11:30 because he’d been coughing so hard he vomited into a book. I asked him if he did it because he thought it was a crap book and he said “Cuggle*, I would never do that!”
I’m off to play the video again and suffuse myself with some quiet Charlie joy.
* Fucking Cuggle. With a very pronounced rising inflection and a verrrry extended second syllable. Even the grownups are calling me Cuggle now.
My dear friend Steevie is heading North soon, probably for good. He’s got a fancy schmancy new dslr that he used to take this photo on Burrumbeet cave in the Budawang National Park. Wish I’d been there.
Click to embiggen, it’s amazing. Reproduced with his permission, but like he could stop me. Heh.
We got our friend Byrd to jazz up the suburban sedan a little recently with a tasteful car tattoo:
You may notice a bit of problem with that front panel there. That would be because on Friday I managed to drive into a bulldozer.
We were both going very slowly. I would hate to see what a fast bulldozer could do.
I am fairly sure that some of my answers to the insurance company’s questions will be appearing on one of those terrible “Things Idiot Drivers say to their Insurance Company” lists, viz:
“How would you describe the damage to the other vehicle?”
“Minimal. It was a bulldozer.”“And what colour was the bulldozer?”
“Whaddaya reckon?”
“I’ll just put down ‘yellow’, will I love?”
Jethro was in the car with me but everyone’s OK. Not the car though. The car is not OK.
All of a sudden the sign on the ATM at the supermarket is not so funny as it was when I took this photoa few days ago:
