Archive | March, 2011

Debating the religious right

9 Mar

First up, don’t, if you can help it.

by Medusa's Lover via flickr

One might as well get in a fight with a three year old about the existence and purpose of the tooth fairy. Rigidly faith based positions founded on moral absolutes are not debatable This is but one of the things inherently wrong with them.

The female face of the Australian religious right

Reluctant as I am to make any of this about Melinda Tankard Reist, she is undoubtedly the public face of the religious right in their attitudes to female sexuality, and the influences of popular culture on boys and men.

I don’t know of anyone else in this country commenting as loudly and as frequently on this topic, and topics related to it from that perspective. Having positioned herself thus, I have little choice but to acknowledge her primary role.

The religious right believe that to succeed, a society must operate within a framework of common assumptions. Dissent is divisive and must be smothered. It therefore makes sense that censorship through protest is a cornerstone of what some describe as a dominionist sexually and socially ultra conservative theocracy.

Tankard’s Reist’s practice is to resort first to censorship. In this she has adopted the tactics of the American religious right, and Tea Party luminaries such as Sarah Palin herself described as a dominionist, though this is contested.

Research confirming close ties between the Tea Party and the religious right is here

The narratives of propaganda

Religious campaigners are not required to provide any evidence that the object of their disapproval is what they say it is. They simply have to use florid rhetorical propaganda to inflame and frighten enough petitioners so that corporations will be equally frightened, and for the sake of peace and unwanted attention, pull the offending material.

If at all possible, they make at times extremely tenuous links to the welfare of children. The threat of being promoted as acting against the interests of children will cause just about anybody to fall to their knees, begging the Christian conservatives for mercy.

Again, they are not required to provide any evidence for their claims, though they do sometimes offer the opinions of a like-minded individual, preferably one with some experience in a relevant field. For example, this quote from sexual assault counsellor Alison Grundy quoted on MTR’s website:

“Now we have thirty years of research to show that the sexualized and violent messages of popular music, media and video games do shape and provoke male aggressive and sexualized violence. I wonder how long it will be before songs like this are seen as inciting crimes under the criminal code?

Any research that directly links any part of popular culture to the increased abuse of women’s and children’s human rights is important. MTR and her fellow travelers argue that popular culture causes an increase in violence and sexual offenses against women. Research supporting this claim, is, one would imagine, foundational to the religious right argument.

However, the reader isn’t told what the research is, who conducted it, when, and where, and how, and we are not provided with any links. This is not unusual, as those forum commenters who’ve attempted to find links to another survey quoted by Reist in her article New song from Delta’s man (Delta’s man? He has no name?) feeds rape myth, have discovered. Despite many requests, the sources have not been supplied.

On her website, Tankard Reist provides share buttons under the French Vogue photo shoot of sexualized five-year-old girls so that visitors can boost their circulation on the Internet. This on-going exploitation of the little girls is justified as raising awareness.

However, sourced research that supports serious claims against popular culture and female sexuality is entirely absent.

The Australian religious right don’t feel the need to interview males about their reactions to popular music and video clips before agitating for censorship on the grounds that they provoke violence of all kinds. Collecting and collating data, reaching informed conclusions as to the effects these things actually have on the demographic, well, why go to all that trouble when God is in the house telling you everything you need to know?

Fox News by Justin via flickr

The US neo cons, Tea Party supporters and the religious right long since perfected the art of moral panic by rhetorical floridity. They are enabled in their endeavours by such luminaries as Rupert Murdoch, and his Fox News media slaves Bill O’Reilly, the recent Mormon convert Glenn Beck, and Megyn Kelly. Fox News is apparently the trusted news source for a majority of Tea Party followers, more than twice as high as in the general population

It’s all relative, isn’t it?

John Malkovich, in the character of hapless CIA operative Osbourne Cox in the Coen Brothers’ movie Burn after Reading (2008) is confronted about his drinking by an aggrieved co-worker.

“You’re a Mormon,” he snarls back, “everbody’s a f*cking alcoholic to you.”

In the same spirit, (acknowledging the blatant use of stereotypes) when your bottom line for the expression of female sexuality is that it should be confined to the marriage bed, everybody’s sexually licentious. If Victoria’s Secret underwear is pornographic to you, everybody’s a pornographer.

Incidentally, it’s likely that only in a wealthy Western liberal democracy could women’s underwear be co-opted as a symbol of the abuse of women’s human rights. Women in many other countries can’t afford it, are earning five cents a day making it, or are distracted by mass rapes, genital mutilation, hunger, and sexual slavery.

Even in this country we have our distractions. A report on the economics of Domestic violence released by researchers at UNSW on March 7 revealed it costs Australia 13 billion dollars a year. Abuse of children, and sexual assault continue at alarming rates but strangely, the most vocal advocate for women and girls in this country has selected underwear and bad songwriters as her symbols of injustice in her tilt against the abuse of women’s human rights.

To be fair, I notice there is a piece on the website about the bustling streets of Mumbai in honour of International Women’s Day.

Disclosure rocks

Here I need to take a personal moment. Another of the shared religious right/Tea Party/ neo con tactics (taken to new heights by Sarah Palin’s Got you in the cross hairs campaign against Democrats who voted for healthcare reform) is to discredit anyone who disagrees with them by launching a personal attack either on their private life and/or their knowledge base. This tactic is also used by feminists of all persuasions, including Christian.

I’ll disclose my credentials in the area of women’s human rights, in the vain hope of forestalling more “feminist” tirades against my ignorant “anti feminist” bent.

By the way, is anti feminist the same as un Australian, only specially for women?

I’ve just completed a chapter for a forthcoming book on human rights titled Intimate Violence as Human Rights Abuse: Re-Framing Intra-Familial Violence against Women and Children.

I’ve published nationally and internationally on this topic, as well as presenting at conferences around the world. I’ve also written extensively on the failure of prominent male human rights commentators to include intimate violence as human rights abuse in their publications and their thinking.

That’s enough trumpet blowing for one day. May it keep me safe from harm.

Truth claims, damned truth claims and statistics

In psychological terms, the interpretations put on the expressions and representations of female sexuality by many on the religious right are nothing more than their own projections, fed by, among other things, their faith-based beliefs about sexuality. These are then extrapolated into truth claims, and concerted efforts are made to impose them on the rest of humanity.

Truth claims such as these need to be taken out of the sphere of personal projections and religious imaginings, and backed up with hard evidence.

OMG by Skye Nicolas via Wikimedia

If Christian conservatives don’t provide evidence they should be ignored. We should learn from the US experience while we still can, that it’s not good enough for our cultural and social landscape to be determined by people who are offering nothing more than their own projections, based on their relations with imaginary friends.

If they are too lazy to get out and find hard evidence for their claims, there’s no reason why anybody should listen to them. Hard evidence is the first step on the road to addressing the problems.

Let’s trash the songwriter’s partner while we’re at it

Through laborious trawling I discovered innumerable Christian websites that instruct the Christian wife on her manifold responsibilities to her husband. Among them I found this one and a warning, turn off your sound unless you want your senses assailed by the most spectacularly awful piano rendition of Rock of Ages known to humankind, rivaled only by the pianist accompanying Elvis’s cover of Unchained Melody circa 1977. The quote is:

The wife is to reprove her husband privately and lovingly when he is in sin and point him back to the Lord.

As well as following that lead from US religious right, Tankard Reist also seems to be taking a lesson from political dictatorships in the matter of holding responsible the relatives of those who’ve offended you, as well as the original offender.

On her website you’ll find an attack on singer Delta Goodrem, songwriter Brian McFadden’s girlfriend. The Christian right apparently holds Goodrem partially responsible for the offending lyrics in his latest song, because she should have vetoed McFadden’s work. Reist suggests that Goodrem is perhaps inured to violence against women, and therefore didn’t notice it was present in the song.

She then reveals that Goodrem is a spokeswoman for Avon Voices, an organisation that works to raise awareness of violence against women. There’s also a video of Goodrem speaking on behalf of this group.

I cannot find any explanation for this flaming that is not born out of deep and incomprehensible malice. Goodrem bears no responsibility for her partner’s actions. She merely lives with the man against whom the Christian right has taken censorious action.

In what feminist universe is a woman subjected to this kind of malevolent public harassment, solely because another woman doesn’t approve of something her male partner has done?

Answer: in the co-opted feminist universe inhabited by Christian conservatives.

As L. Cohen puts it about another kind of prison:

I don’t believe you’d like it
No, you wouldn’t like it here
There’s not much entertainment
And the judgments are severe…
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Becoming woman

8 Mar

by Alex Dram via flickr

 

On International Women’s Day it seems appropriate to reflect on feminism.

I never imagined I would find myself in agreement with anything with that terrifying Janet Albrechtson said, but last night on ABC’s qanda she declared that feminism must be a broad church, the rhetoric of the sixties and seventies means nothing to young women now, and we must move on. Or words to that effect.

She also took Western feminism to task for ignoring all others, and mother of god, I agree with everything she said.

I’ve lately fought off allegations of being anti feminist, a victim blaming apologist for rapists, an exploiter of sexually assaulted women (because I once worked in clinical practice as a psychotherapist) not to mention being a “man fondler,”  a term of abuse I’m not familiar with, but don’t hold back, girls.

All this as a consequence of having had the temerity to suggest women have to take responsibility for our safety and well being, because nobody else is going to do it for us.

Anybody who bases their identity on an ideology is asking for trouble, in my opinion. Having held that opinion for some time now, I wasn’t unduly upset when some women started telling me I was anti feminist, pro male, and had a prick in my head. But what this torrent of female abuse did cause me to do was reflect on what it is women can do to other women in the name of feminism, and what a scary thing that can be.

There is no such animal as  universal feminism. Like it or not, it it’s already a broad church and always has been, even if there’s been a dominating voice from time to time.

Like any ideology, cliques and factions within feminism stake out claims and marginalize those who don’t comply. Feminism is as cruel, prejudiced and contemptuous of difference as any ideology. It always has been.

As ferocious as it can be to men, it is capable of equal ferocity to women who do not comply with the factional rules. That’s the nature of ideology. If you add an imaginary transcendental exteriority, you’ve got religion.

I know young women who are vibrant feminists, contemptuously dismissed by some older women as “fashionistas”  who shouldn’t be referring to themselves as “chicks” and “babes.” “Is the word woman too fat for them?” somebody’s asked. But young feminists have to do it their way. From this fresh perspective and energy, something new will emerge for women, even if as yet it is unformed.

Those of us who are their female mentors need first of all to respect their ascendency. Enough already with the moralistic prescriptives!

Get out of the new way if you can’t lend a hand, for the times they are….

There are young women who want to take responsibility for themselves, they see it as a badge of honour. Not for them the jaded diatribes of victimology.

This morning I heard a story of three generations of women together in a house with a man who was husband, father and grandfather to them. For years it had been his practice to drink, come home, and beat up his wife. On this occasion his forty year old daughter hid away as she always had, When the beating was over, the fourteen year old granddaughter took her grandmother aside and told her she didn’t have to live like this any longer. She took her grandmother to a refuge. They got help for her and eventually a place to live.

The young woman had learned about domestic violence and knew what to do. She’d been educated. She took charge, and her grandmother’s life was changed.

Who cares if she also likes to wear lacy panties and short skirts?

So  I’m giving the finger this International Women’s Day to any woman who tells me or anybody else how to be a proper feminist, after telling us that we’re not.

Rotate, honey. I like me just the way I am.

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Peddling fiction as fact: whose nightmare is it really?

5 Mar

Don't tell me I'm gonna be a monster, lady.

 

“Expect to hear boys singing along to it soon. This is the message they are imbibing: Women are slaves and bitches who can service a man’s sexual needs, even in death. Men are brutal and dominant, and have no empathy for women. Men enjoy dead women as sex and entertainment. The female body is to be devoured, reduced to the same status as meat. Female bodies should be displayed before men as a great feast for their consumption.”

This is an extract from Melinda Tankard Reist’s Drum article on the controversial KanYe West 30 second video clip.

I’m not going to discuss the clip, that’s been done to death, except to say I don’t agree that is the message of the clip. And this is part of the point – we don’t all see through the same lens, so it becomes very important to know just what lens public opinion makers are looking through, and that ought to be disclosed.

Reist expresses great fear that all boys will like the song, and all boys will sing along to it. She then claims that as a consequence of this, all boys will “imbibe” the perception of all women as “slaves and bitches,” all boys will think that all men “are brutal and dominant, have no empathy for women, and enjoy dead women as sex and entertainment.” All boys will think that all female bodies are to be devoured like meat. And so on.

This is the message Reist imagines all boys are imbibing.

But this message comes entirely from Reist’s own mind.

In psychological terms, the messages she claims all boys are imbibing are entirely Reist’s projections.

She hasn’t consulted with KanYe West about what his vision and intentions are. She hasn’t done any  research to ascertain other interpretations of the clip, or if she has, she’s not talking about it in this article. She has no evidence at all of how boys respond to the clip, or if she has she’s keeping to herself.

She’s made it all up.

In other words she hasn’t taken a reality check. She’s constructed a fictional narrative founded on personal fears that she then peddles across the media as truth.

The logical conclusion of Reist’s made up truth: all boys and all men are monsters or are in the process of becoming monsters.

Truth claims such as these need to be taken out of the sphere of personal projections and imaginings, and backed up with evidence.

If there is no evidence they should not be made because they are dehumanizing claims, and in this case, they are dehumanizing all boys and all men.

This is absolutely unacceptable.

Reist does not allow that boys have agency. She portrays them as passive and indiscriminate receptors that can only be acted upon. (Just as she portrays “sexified” women.)

She does not allow that boys experience any other influences, such as parent, schools, extended family, ethical and moral systems.

Reist’s perception of boys and men as revealed in her imaginings is more terrifying than KanYe West’s video clip could ever be, because in her imagination, they are robotic, without human feeling, and murderous.

If she expressed these same perceptions and imaginings about others, say Muslims, a group currently subjected to discrimination and irrational public fear, she wouldn’t be published.

If she claimed that Muslims were “imbibing” information that would inevitably lead to them engaging in necrophilia and all the rest of her floridly imagined consequences there’d be an uproar. If she implied that Muslims have no agency and are empty vessels waiting to be filled by the most vile knowledge she can imagine, that they might then act upon, would the ABC publish that?

But she can do this with impunity to all men and boys?

Hell, imagine if some man made all that conjecture about women?

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Thank you to the Drum

4 Mar

After complaining the other day that the Drum was being one-sided in its representations of female sexuality, I have to take that all back seeing as Jonathan Green put up my oppositional piece “Pornify this” today.

Thank you, you really are Our ABC now.

The conservative sexual crusader wants kilos of McFadden’s flesh

3 Mar

At Melinda Tankard Reist’s website today there’s a list of tweets from the hapless Brian McFadden, promising to donate money to rape crisis centres, and saying he’s sorry that his lyrics have been misunderstood.

He reiterates that he intended them as an intimate song for fiancee Delta Goodrem, and not as triggers for women who’ve been sexually assaulted while drunk.

I’m inclined to believe the bloke. I don’t think for  minute he wrote that song with the intention of glorifying or encouraging the rape of senselessly drunk women.

But his apologies and donations are not enough for Melinda Tankard Reist. Not a truckload of money, she writes, will make up for the damage he has done to women.

Even in a court of law, intention counts when you’re passing sentence. But not in the courts of Christian sexual conservatism.

MTR also holds Delta Goodrem partially responsible. Why didn’t Delta check the lyrics before allowing Brian to record them, she asks. Is Delta so inured to sexual violence that she didn’t even notice what Brian was on about?

This would be unfortunate, MTR implies, as Delta is a spokeswoman for Avon Voices, a group that raises awareness of violence against women.

I guess the sexual conservatives also hold women responsible for what the men they live with do.

Personally, I think that’s a pretty low and unnecessarily malicious swipe.

Then there’s a letter from a victim of sexual assault whilst she was drunk, telling how McFadden’s song has brought it all back and is severely distressing her.

Nina Funnell then writes a long reassuring response to the victim, and I hope the woman follows this up with counselling.

There are triggers that cause memories of sexual assault, and many other traumatic experiences to flood back into consciousness, often without any warning.  This is very hard for the survivor to deal with.

Triggers can be almost anything. I once worked with someone whose flashbacks were caused by pieces of green soap with a particular smell. Triggers are impossible to predict, extremely individual, and powerfully connected to the original trauma.

As much as the survivor would like never to have encounter these triggers, it is literally impossible to clear the world of them.

In some instances they may be so particular as to rarely emerge. Sometimes they aren’t known until the moment they strike. In many instances the triggers are all too common, and people have to deal with them on a daily basis.

It would be a foolish therapist indeed who recommended total avoidance of anything likely to act as a trigger. That would be condemning the survivor to a miserable life.

What we can do is teach cognitive behavioural techniques that can be used to manage the distressing flashbacks. This has the added advantage of empowering the survivor, both with the skills to handle bad times, and with the sense that she or he has some control over circumstances that can feel uncontrollable.

Given the proliferation of sexual topics in popular culture, it’s unrealistic to blame any artist for triggering a survivor’s flashbacks. As the triggers are so individual, its impossible to know what they might be.

As stupid as you might think McFadden’s song is, blaming him for activating post traumatic stress disorder is wrong. You might as well blame the manufacturer of green soap, and I believe McFadden, in his intentions, is as  undeserving of blame.

The world is not an easy place to live in when you’re suffering post traumatic stress disorder. Many people don’t understand it, and have a low tolerance of sufferers who can seem difficult, withdrawn, moody, angry, weepy, and generally not interested in much. It’s tough, having first to withstand the trauma, and then to spend your time dealing with the aftermath.

The most difficult part is working with people towards an acceptance of their experiences, in the sense that they cannot be changed and must be lived with, as must the aftermath. The survivor has to take responsibility for learning to do this. This is the cornerstone of recovery. It can take many years, and nobody can do it for them.

I don’t think it helps survivors to be encouraged to look for someone to blame in the world around them. Nobody deliberately triggers someone’s flashbacks, unless they are entirely sadistic and know the survivor well enough to be able to do it.

If a creator of any kind must first consider if something in their work will cause distress to someone somewhere, and then abandon it in case it does, then nothing will be created.

I think Tankard Reist’s crusade against McFadden, and now Goodrem as well, is bordering on the vicious. She wants what she wants, which is an abject confession that they’ve caused immeasurable distress to women everywhere by recording the song. If she doesn’t get that, she will hound them, of that I’m certain.

She is displaying all the signs of the outraged self-righteous good Christian woman bent on vengeance, not only on him but on the woman he loves, and that is not a pretty sight.

And let’s remember, he isn’t a rapist. He wrote a song.

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Fundamentalist sexual propaganda dominates at the ABC’s Drum

1 Mar
Masturbation by Klimt, drawing 1913

Gustav Klimt 1913. Masturbation. via Wikimedia

Lately The Drum seems to have been co-opted as an advocate for right wing fundamentalist Christian propaganda about the “pornification” and “sexification” of women.

Commentator Melinda Tankard Reist, sometimes supported by observations from journalist and researcher Nina Funnell, has published three pieces in the last three weeks, peddling her views on the “proper” expression and representation of female sexuality in the media and popular culture.

Given that some of her opinions can only be read as extremist (her war on Victoria’s Secret underwear, for example; her unrelenting insistence that women are doomed to be the hapless victims of men) it is astonishing that the Drum hasn’t come up with anything that directly contests these views, and gives voice to the opinions and feelings of the millions of women who find Victoria’s Secret fun to wear, and consider ourselves anything but victims.

If this right wing agenda manifested in any other subject area on the Drum, we would all be astonished, and a challenge would immediately be published. But not when it’s about controlling how women express our sexuality, apparently.

Tankard Reist’s grim visions of the inevitable baseness of men, the fear of and contempt for female sexuality revealed in her propaganda, continue to dominate the Drum’s pages.

It’s left to a handful of determined commenters to take her on.

Perhaps the Drum doesn’t consider the representation and expression of female sexuality a topic worthy of defense, even on the eve of International Women’s Day.

This is not on, our  ABC. There’s no balance here. You should be putting up articles that celebrate female sexuality, and support a woman’s right to decide how she’ll express it. Centuries of patriarchy have tried to control our sexuality, and now we’ve got the Christians at it again. Enough, already.

Why are you assisting the fundamentalists in this project, Jonathan Green, and why aren’t you giving a voice to women who love their sexuality, don’t see any reason to hide it and have no quarrel with underwear companies and stupid songs?

Women who revel in taking responsibility for ourselves, and don’t need MTR and Nina Funnell to do it for us, thanks all the same.

For those of you dissatisfied with the Drum’s promotion (by omission) of a right wing sexual agenda, On Line Opinion will fight back on Friday.

At least there’s still someplace where a woman can say she doesn’t mind a lacy thong and cleavage.

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