Like Groundhog Day, International Women’s Day yet a fucking gain, finds itself hijacked and imprisoned in the eternally recurring culture war chatter, I won’t dignify it with the term debate, as to whether you call yourself a feminist or not.
I could not give a rat’s chlamydic arse if a woman calls herself a feminist or not. In fact the minute I get a whiff that the argument’s on I want to start flame throwing.
I don’t care about your personal philosophies on this day at this time. I don’t care if you are personally confused about whether or not to put on make-up in the morning. I so, so do not care if you have a luxurious bush or a full Brazilian. I do not care if you are sometimes a good feminist sometimes a bad one, whatever the fucking hell either of those things actually are. Fuck off with all the confessional shit just for today, and engage with a bigger picture, I’m begging you.
I have a dream. In my dream every woman with a public voice just for once refuses these speaking and writing engagements and instead throws her weight behind a National Day of Mourning on March 8, for the women world-wide, and particularly in Australia because this is our homeland where we can best have influence, who are murdered and abused by intimate partners, as well as the children who witness and suffer.
I have a dream that if women with a public voice do accept speaking and writing engagements on this, our one fucking day of the entire fucking year, they will agree to speak out all day long about domestic violence, government responsibilities, and the safety and protection of women and children, and nothing else.
I have a dream that we will march in the streets with banners and posters and candles on this day, protesting the deaths and injuries, emotional and physical, that so many of us across all demographics endure or have endured in the place where we are supposed to be safe, our homes.
I have a dream that we will unite to take on this Abbott government full frontal in its despicable cuts to frontline domestic violence services that will leave women in the most remote and already under-serviced areas with absolutely nowhere to go.
It is far more important, sisters, that we keep women alive and capable of adequately functioning than it is that we get more already privileged women on to fucking boards, or listed in Wikipedia, or winning fucking literary prizes. The only way we will do this at this point, is to get our lady arses out into the sodding streets, and if necessary, just like the women who got us the vote, chaining ourselves to the fucking railings until politicians give our dire, deathly situation priority.
Dear ladies, for 364 days of the fucking year you can write and speak all you want about your bush or your Brazilian, or your personal philosophy, or how women have to learn achieve within the same rotten, stinking, oppressive power structure as men without even questioning that fucking structure, otherwise they will be automatically forbidden entry to it, but for one day, for one fucking, fucking day, can we focus on the biggest, most life-threatening danger to women in this country, and how nothing has improved in family violence statistics since feminism’s second wave, over forty years ago.
And if we can’t, I’m going to poke everybody’s eyes out with fucking burnt sticks.
Listen to this Background Briefing report this morning on the effects of the Abbott government’s funding cuts to frontline domestic violence services. Then tell me your fucking pubic hair choices matter. Tell me after listening to this whether you call yourself a feminist or not matters jack shit in the scheme of things.
Sorry for all the language.
No, I’m fucking not.
No Place For Sheep 
J, You make more sense than MSM. Flame thrower extraordinaire. X
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Love this. Spot on. Mwah.
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When somebody wears a uniform then we expect them to act in accordance with whatever that represents, and I guess there’s something equally to be said for those who commit to publicly represent their feminism. One problem in either case comes about when we lose all respect for either the uniform or a particular strain of political activism.
I for example can only do my best to relate this to what I know, having lost a great deal of my former respect for religion, but in a way that rejects the doctrine not morality itself and not most religious people in particular. I simply think they’re wrong about the way they describe the human condition when they posit the need for a deity whereas I find it self-evidently unnecessary to share their convictions while continuing to share our common human impulse to empathise with one another.
I think there’s a bigger picture of social cohesion that emerges out of those common impulses that simply shouldn’t allow us to remain so cut off from the domestic welfare of those around us. Yet listening to that background briefing piece I was very stuck with how out of sight, out of mind an issue that’s reduced to a funding question becomes.
I am on a totally different page when I wondered earlier about treating the problem at the source almost like a healthcare issue by providing more counselling services in an attempt to give men as well as women better options when it comes to accepting help before relationship problems boil over.
Yet here we are dealing once again with the realpolitik of a government which beggars belief by lauding Rossie Batty Australian of the year while simultaneously abandoning women in the very situations I think should never have gotten to crisis point.
Maybe the answer is as obvious as not needing to change all men, just a couple of real recalcitrants in Canberra.
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Yes, it won’t make sense often unless you’ve been a situation where someone has punched YOU hard in the face, let alone done that serially.
There probably would be a move to a greater urgency in dealing with the way society is set up if something akin to “Send them back where they belong” was instigated, involving men.
Thinking on it, there are of course some men who would understand an average woman’s perspective; these are men who have ended up in jail, been bullied and sodomised and laughed at by the screws if they complained about it.
I do not think most polticians and most men in general would welcome that scenario (just having a small laugh at the thought of Turnbull, Matthias Corman or George Brandis in Long Bay for a stretch).
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While I might join you in a smirk wondering which of that sorry lot would drop the soap first in the showers at Long Bay, there’s got to be a better way to get people to empathise against violence than punching them in the face……
That is after all what you seem to think is required for understanding. I don’t agree…. not just with words I’m somewhat mischievously putting in your mouth but with a more important subtext…..The problem being that if we rely too heavily on lived experience to know anything is wrong then every time things start to get better there’ll be an inevitable relapse as people begin to forget.
That’s why I think we have to address underly problems like domestic breakdowns, gambling and alcoholism at their source rather than simply rely upon the kind of moral code that allows us to chastise others but do nothing to assist.
That is in effect what Abbott et al are doing, plenty of crocodile tears and lip service honouring Rosie Batty, but when it comes to taking action they pulled the funding from even the band aid solution!
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I think the most urgent need is for sanctuaries for women when things reach crisis point, and the utter bastardry of Abbott in cutting funding to already stretched services is incomprehensible.
It’s a triage situation. The most urgent matter is providing safe places for women & children in danger to stay.
It take a lot of counselling to change the behaviours of anybody who deals with their problems with physical violence and potential victims have to be protected in the meantime.
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Like I said, listening to background briefing I acquiesced to that view if somewhat reluctantly. It’s just so disappointing that we’re still so far from treating the problem with triage when we should have negotiated a ceasefire long since. Surely if we changed social attitudes to drink driving and smoking we could’ve made a few more inroads against something so obviously wrong as battery!
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I have been taking in battered women since I was 18 and rescued by 17 year old best friend from a bastard who was 24 and bashing her repeatedly.
In one family I had battered mum and daughter at different times, I was battered and my brother and brothers in law helped me leave.
I have turned in arseholes who abuse and neglect their kids and will continue to do it.
The good news is my advocacy for the women I helped to rescue meant that none of them ever went back.
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Feminists are their own worst enemies. When Germaine Greer wrote “The Female Eunuch” in 1970, she completely ignored her own title and instead merely included a brief reference to the failure of satisfying the demands of romance as the supposed cause of female sexual dysfunction.
Later feminists even supported the traditional mental castration of girls in childhood by spreading hysteria over child sex abuse. Thanks to current indoctrination about “bad touch” there are probably more sexually dysfunctional women today than before 1970. (Two-thirds of American women today suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction, according to two separate surveys.)
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This sounds to do with the phenomena of “Über”, or “Helicopter” parenting, sexhysteria.
In a de-industrialised society people have smaller families and tend to “hover” about the one or two (max) offspring they’ve bought forth into the world. Do the kids (sometimes doped to the eyeballs to prevent them disturbing others) end up neurotic?
Certainly traditional ways of doing things have gone by the board; we don’t know if long term change has altered how kids develop and socialise, although, in the West at least, physical gains have come with high infant mortality rates seemingly a thing of the past.
As for prudism and women spooked or guilt-tripped off sex, is it THAT different as to the problem than during the Victorian era, say?
I think the edgier stuff about sex came a decade later in the tragic form of Andrea Dworkin, but Dworkins story itself is an example of what puts many women off men and sex.
Personally, I think the system has got to shed itself of neoliberalist “self first and only ” thinking and get back to the idea of a common wealth/cause and properly funded infrastructure seen as an investment rather than an imposition.
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Like your last paragraph PW. In a nutshell.
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I should have added to that comment, suggesting that in interpersonal relations, men need to understand what is required to satisfy their partners.
I notice sexhysteria has advocated a closer look at their blog, but it looks fairly “dense” at first glance, so won’t comment further ’til Ive found a moment to get my flagging concentration together and get the gist of what sex hysteria feels on matters sexual.
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Helicoter parenting is a recent perversion, while female sexual dysfunction goes back to the Victorian era (when the vibrator was invented to treat female sexual dysfunction) and possibly even earlier. What I mean is not feminine guilt and psychological “frigidity,” but the physical atrophy of brain areas that control clitoral function. Click on my username to see the details on my blog.
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Go Guinevere, go!
Sometimes it is time to call a spade a fucking spade.
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The most ridiculous fucking thing I have heard today comes from Anne Summers, that pampered middle class twat who tweeted – let’s end all domestic violence in 2015 – which of course requires sedating or lobotomising the whole fucking human race.
I agree with Jennifer, I don’t give a flying fuck if anyone claims they are feminists, I had a birthday dinner with my daughter, 2 grand daughters, my daughters boy friends mother and we allowed boyfriends and husbands to join us.
My daughters boyfriends mother and I talked about the disgusting way we treat refugees, the depravity of domestic violence, sewing nice clothes and other political stuff – we hated Gillard and hate her twin brother just as much.
I have never in my life aspired to be equal to any man because to paraphrase Helena Rubenstein on 29 October 1929 THE DAY I AM EQUAL TO A MAN IS THE DAY I WILL BE JUST AS STUPID.
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I agree that was a stupid tweet.
Glad you had a good day, Marilyn.
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How do you know you are not there already, or even worse?
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Germaine was pretty good last night on Annabel’s Q&A, so was the American academic (?). Ms Julie was irritating, in her usual self-promoting mode: ME,ME, ME…
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I read it pretty much that way Helvi, from what I saw of it..was put off by Crabb, missed the first half and find Bishop a kindred spirit to her anyway. (also refer to 2cnd link, in third para of intro).
Greer tries to include, she can be fun, is past all illusion and am inclined to have a second look later, she deserves respect for having to spend an hour parked next to borderline Julie Bishop.
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Baah humbug
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That silly bitch sat there and said we adhere to human rights obligations, turned it back to Gallipoli.
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I find it harder to dislike Bishop than Abbott on the basis that if only selectively she does at least honour human right in principle. Abbott is now actually scolding the UN for lecturing us too much!
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This is where it has gotten us!
http://www.theage.com.au/world/bali-nine-executions-indonesian-minister-threatens-to-release-human-tsunami-of-asylum-seekers-20150310-140dhn.html
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Yes, Abbott is too much. Even Bishop wouldn’t have been as big a fruitcake, but a woman PM with the Coaltion’s hidebound mentality?
Forget it.
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I dislike both, and find that it’s extremely easy to dislike Bishop, nothing about her is real, she does not come across as an authentic person, she’s kind of ‘sweet-talking’, insincere…
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Its not possible for a sane person tolike just about any of them.
With Abbott it is doubly bad, because he comes with noisy soind fx- he is an assault on the sensibilities as well as the intellect.
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Yes but she’s insincere with a view to appearing sincere. Abbott can’t even summon the nous to do that much!
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