The Year of the Frock

So according to some, 2017 is/was the Year of the Cock, though, as I noted in my earlier blog under that title, this is a western twisting of the Chinese Year of the Chicken, a designation that makes rather more sense, given all that we get from the chicken compared with the cock.

When I wrote this earlier blog on Jan 6, fifty-one weeks ago, it was before the Women's March and the Weinstein revelations and the  #MeToo movement and the box-office smash hit feminist films Hidden Figures and Wonder Woman and TIME magazine's pronouncement of the sexual harassment "whistle-blowers" as Persons of the Year,  all of which, and much more besides (including the election here in September of a woman PM that made international headline news), contributed to such a surge of feminist activism and interest in exposing and fighting sexism around the globe that the word 'feminism' became the most searched for word in 2017 and voted Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster for 2017. 

Who would have thought it would take the election of the world's biggest cock to finally, after the tireless efforts of dedicated and much derided feminist campaigners for more than two centuries, liberate and listen to the chicken?

Well I didn't think. But I did sense the beginning of this long-awaited and hard fought for uprising at the Women's March in Auckland two weeks later, when so many women, here as around the world, showed up with their voices and their placards to protest that king cock and loudly and openly identify with the feminist cause.

I'd been on a fair few feminist marches before this one and never seen anything like this level of collective anger and support for the sisterhood, with there being so much to lose for those, especially women, who identified with the much despised 'F-word' and movement. But now, in one short year, that once reviled word is the word (and cause) of the moment and women (and men) who identify with it are hailed as brave instead of hated as bitter, man-hating harridans, at least by many, if not most.

So in honour of this seismic shift I designate 2017 The Year of the Frock, with "frock" loosely woven to mean whatever item of attire you chose to wear -- or not to wear -- that celebrates the life-giving and hate-trumping power of the world's egg layers, with and without feathers.

     

 
  

Catnip Christmas

Mother TT guarding the nip.

So... we bought a new plant for the garden and it turned out to be CATNIP. Our two resident cats are obviously pretty happy about the situation, one of them, TT, is pictured guarding said nip here.

The other, Trixie, her daughter no less, has shown an interest.

Otherwise we, the owners of the garden and chief purchasers and planters of all and sundry pants, are happy enough about the arrangement of the plant designed to grow wild and spill down the low hill onto the brick path, which it more or less does.

The fact that we didn't know it was Catnip raises the Christmas surprise element significantly. Surprise is king at Christmas and here we have mastered surprise, TT and her daughter Trixie had no idea we were bringing home catnip for Christmas. Much harder to surprise the children.

Daughter Trixie,
watching the nip from a close distance.

Anyway, we are happy with the result, two happy cats and a garden that looks suitably rambling and wild, which is what I wanted in adding the plant that would turn out to be catnip.

Everyone is more or less happy, the best you can ask for in this day and age.

Meow.

Love to know what it is about the catnip that they like so much...

Time to end

A family of two young girls (8-9yrs) and their mother built this
on Takapuna Beach yesterday. 

It's time to end the year and maybe the blog. I am feeling overworked and it is probably time to move on to a more integrated image, site and message for Sacha Jones Comedian. This blog gets a little too "political" for that image and message, at least for some people's tastes, not mine, but some. So fair enough. Time to ditch "the political" and rock the comical! Are you ready??? I hope so.

So the very best of the season and end of year and New Year to all of you! And a Happy Christmas Day for those who are into Santa. I hope to see you again via my integrated web presence in the future if this is indeed my last blog post. It is certainly my last of the year.

I am, I confess, into Santa and the whole nine yards of red tinsel and spiky holly and too-tasty chestnut stuffing mainly, I think, because of childhood associations. Everyone wants to be transported back to their childhood from adulthood when you have lost the childhood freedom to not know who you are yet and so to be all sorts of different people while more looking out than looking in.

That is the freedom of the child and that is why I love working with preschool children. There is so much creativity in them. So much fun, so much freedom, so much curiosity, so much energy, so much life! I just adore them all. It is a total thing for me and even older children right through to teens and early 20s.

New Christmas umbrellas in Sydney 1970.
I (older sister) was VERY happy. 

I am into older people too, quite a fan of the human being in general, though I am not quite as much into older humans because of their (our) mainstreamed and streaming traits. But still very much I love them (us) for their (our) endurance, our experiences and our readiness to laugh at ourselves, something most of us couldn't do when we were younger. I know I couldn't.

So a very Happy Christmas!!!!!!!!!! May you get at least one thing that you want and or need under the tree and have some fun food time with the people you care about.

Little Lies Tell One BIG Truth

Spoiler alert: In this year's award-winning HBO miniseries, Big Little Lies based on the 2014 book of the same name by Australian author Liane Moriarty (who happens to be my exact age, emanates from my home town and is basically living my ideal life - but I am not jealous) we finally have the truth told about domestic violence on our screens. And about bloody time!

As someone who has also written at length (though in an academic context) about domestic violence, and who knows the frustrating battle it is for women victims of domestic violence to be believed if and when they finally find the courage to risk their lives and tell their truth, an injustice that underpins and reflects all the other unjust abuses that women are made to suffer in our world, I feel that this cinematic truth-telling could be a game-changer for the world of women (and men).

One of the biggest lies that has been told by men who have gone out of their way to cover up the truth about domestic violence - and many have, including one of the leading criminologists in this country - that women in relationships are just as violent as men and the finger-pointing at men is just another way to deflect blame for this violence from women onto men, is particularly beautifully exposed in this series.

At one point one of the minor male characters says: 'I think women are chemically incapable of forgiveness', a line that echoes Shakespeare's 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned'. This oft told lie about women that is also part of the denial of the viciousness of men's fury and vengeance - especially when it comes to women - is also put to rights in this series, with the women shown to be essentially too forgiving of violent, weak men, and in the end, ultimately forgiving of each other, whereas the men, most of them, remain caught in their anger and unwillingness to forgive.


As the truth (and the lies) about women and men is coming out all over the place this year, it seems more than ever before, and with a real momentum towards truth-telling building as symbolised in TIME's naming the women (mainly) who have spoken out about male sexual abuse as this year's Person of the Year , I think we are on the brink of real and revolutionary change towards a gender justice the likes of which the world has never seen.

Revolution is a big word, but then again so is truth, and if we want the latter we had better be prepared for the former. Some of us have been prepared for years, decades, centuries and millennia...     

Cat Person

So last night I had what I would call a negative gender experience when a mature-age male stand-up comedian in the line-up I was part of later on in the night called his teenage daughter "bitch" and the mostly male audience laughed.

What does this have to do with cats?

Well nothing much directly. Except that the short story "Cat Person" published this week in New Yorker magazine (a story that doesn't have much to do with cats either) is about a different but similarly negative gender experience between a woman and a man, written from the woman's point of view. And going by the massive 'viral' reaction to it by women who relate (mostly) and men who object (mostly) and find the story misandrist, I got to thinking once more about the pervasiveness of this gender divide and how it cannot possibly be what we are stuck with, and that if it is, we are definitely doomed to mutual unhappiness and, ultimately, destruction.

"Cat person" is an extremely real and unsensationalised story of an unhappy sexual encounter that is the culmination of a six-month courting experience mostly conducted in a series of texts between a young woman (20) and an older man (34). The theme is simple enough but it is told by the woman narrator in a way that somehow cuts brutally to the heart of the male-female disconnect we have not seen done quite as clearly and cleverly before.

The man in the story makes so many mistakes against his own self-interest in what he says/doesn't say and does/doesn't do once they meet up before, during and after sex - if his purpose is to have a long-term relationship with the woman, which it is - and the woman, seeing all these mistakes and being disappointed and put off, nonetheless acts against her better judgement and self interest by initiating sex with a man she has pretty much decided is not the witty charming 'cat person' she had thought and hoped he was.

In the end, not only does a relationship not develop but both parties are quite seriously wounded by the experience, yet they both actively orchestrated and self-sabotaged it. WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

Why? Because women read (and write) romance and erotica and men watch (and make) aggressive, misogynistic porn, and never the twain shall happily meet as long as these gender-dividing practices continue.

Why? Because the clitoris is deceptively hard to please and too many men resent and fear having to work out how to please it - to the point of cutting it off to take it out of the equation entirely.

Why? Because women generally take too much of the responsibility for this deceptive difficulty (it really is not that hard to please) and are typically too forgiving of men who struggle with the challenge and the wider one it symbolises of having to get to know women.

After reading this story I want to say to men: Just trust us to like you and be forgiving (indeed too forgiving of your weaknesses), and in exchange be prepared to do all that you can to try and figure out what makes us happy, before, during and after sex. Mostly this requires paying way more attention than you typically do to the signals we give off, including the words we speak, and asking what we mean if you are confused. Please ask rather than assume, and pretty please don't take your cues from porn!

This seems a fair exchange and the exchange that nature intended (except for female over-forgiveness, which is a survival mechanism developed from living in a man's world that makes too many excuses for male ignorance of womankind) and is the exchange that nature depends upon to take us forward into a post-misogynistic world in which men and women actually get on and everyone is a whole lot happier, cat and dog people alike.

And don't call us bitch; we're not dogs. Meow.

The POWER (book review)

When I look at this image I see a clitoris with finger poised...

...and so I thought it an apt image to accompany my post on The Power by Naomi Alderman, the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction winner that I've just finished reading.

The actual book cover doesn't do much for me personally, and if I had the power I would suggest this image replace it for the next reprint. Alas, I do not have the power.

Alderman's dystopian feminist(ish) novel asks: "What might a world look like in which women are the ones to be feared?" as one reviewer puts it, fairly accurately.

As a freelance political theorist who has given a good amount of thought to the question of what the world might look like if women had power equal to or more than men, I am always interested in this question and, as it happens, am currently engaged in writing my very own fictional answer to it.

But feared? I'm not sure this is the answer, or rather the question we need to take our feminist mission forward. Surely fear is what we want to move beyond.

Alderman's book essentially flips the balance of power in favour of women by giving women greater physical strength than men, and suggests that with that strength women would end up, eventually, after righting a few wrongs, just as violent and frightening as men have become in our world.

Just as men have appropriated their superior physical strength to use against women in the real world - the last thing nature surely intended it for - so, Alderman speculates, womankind would do the same with their power, even to the point of losing the nurturing instinct and inflicting pain on children and the vulnerable for the fun of it, because they can. Because it makes them feel powerful. Power corrupts absolutely.

The mindflip Alderman achieves by putting the reader in a world where men fear women and women don't have any need to fear men, is kind of satisfying to read and very effective for highlighting the injustice of men's ongoing abuses of power at women's expense. But unfortunately the price to pay is that women's power has to turn, eventually, into a comparable corruption where fear and violence rule and the gentler virtues of compassion and empathy are lost, or rather that men become known for these gentler virtues and women for their aggression and ambition.

Perhaps there is something in the idea that it takes an oppressed person to feel compassion for those who are suffering, which might help to explain why women are responsible for three times the amount of charitable donations as men are, despite the gender wage gap working in men's favour. And perhaps men denied their sense of power and entitlement might too develop more sympathies for the oppressed and vulnerable.

Still, this gender flip is too absolute and too convenient to send an effective feminist message, in my view. Women in power have shown an ability to retain their compassion and fight for justice, not all of them of course, but a far greater percentage of them than men in positions of power. Albeit these women have never had as much power as the men in the same positions, as male power has always been backed by the pervasive institutions of cultural patriarchy that make even the least powerful of men feel more powerful than women.

So there is no way to look at our world, past and present, and say what female power would look like. So speculation is required.

But it seems to me it is too easy, and not at all fair to speculate, as Alderman essentially does in this book, that power would go to women's heads and make us just as violent and power-mad as it has made men.

Let's bloody hope this is not the case, at least.

Still, I reckon men who are in any doubt about the abuses of power that they have perpetrated against women, could benefit from reading this book. Unfortunately I suspect it will have a mainly female readership, if for no other reason that men don't often read books written by women, least of all a book billed as feminist.

Ignorance is power.  But perhaps not ultimately. I'll get back to my book now to try and prove that; power to the pen.



 

Melodrama: No White Men

and only one New Zealander...

Jay Z's album '4.44' nominated for Album of the Year 2018

So, in this breaking, 4-day old news that I have just become aware of due to events in my little life intervening - including an allergic reaction to soap - it would seem that for the first time in history no white men have been nominated for Album of the Year.

Is it the first time in history that no white men have been nominated for any major international award in any category of endeavour whatsoever? I don't know, but this seems quite likely, too.

So this is news.

According to a Washington Post music critic last year:

“For the past five years, black artists have been making era-defining pop music, some of which has been nominated for the heaviest Grammy in the land, album of the year... [but] then, when ‘music’s biggest night’ eventually rolls around, each and every one of these artists loses to a white act doing less-challenging, less-timely, less-imaginative work.”

Lorde's album 'Melodrama' nominated for Album of the Year 2018

So I guess the voters have made sure that won't be happening next year, unless... the only woman nominated wins, for she is white.

The fact that there is only one woman nominated out of five nominees for best album is less noteworthy for those in the international media. Much less do they care that she hails from a little known land in the south pacific, and much less still do they care that she went to the same school as my daughter and danced in the same dance group! 

And perhaps this is all fair enough - even if these things are a big deal to me, almost as big as my recently discovered soap allergy, which could be a pretty big stink going forward.

Still, for that one woman (Lorde) to be the only white nominee puts her in a pretty unenviable, no-win position, knowing that if she does wins for her unique brand of 'era-defining' pop music the decision will be seen as racist.

The stats on the number of black artists awarded Best Album are pretty bad and last year when Adele won over Beyonce, she herself said it was an outrage, echoing the general sentiment, and the same the year before when another white woman (Taylor Swift) won over a black artist, this time a man (Kendrick Lamar).

The stats for the number of women who have been nominated or won the award in its 59 years are not collated, but I would be surprised if women weren't very much in the minority. Only three black women (not including Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone) and nine black men have won the Best Album award, which is just over a fifth in total, and given the pioneering role of black artists in the US pop music industry which judges these awards that seems pretty shameful.

Still, that black men have won this award four times as often as black women - and I doubt the stats for white men and women are any different - given that women make up 50% of all populations, if not perhaps that number of recorded pop artists as it is likely that more men continue to be signed to record deals than women, and certainly that would have been true in the early years of the Grammys - suggests that sexism, like racism, is alive and well in the pop awards industry, despite the last two year's winners.

I suspect Lorde's 'Melodrama' is in the line-up for top album next year as the token woman and white person least likely to cause a scandal when she doesn't win - or even if she does. I think even she, like Adele last year, will be hoping that she doesn't.

It's tough being a woman of any colour or creed, with or without a soap allergy. And that could be catchy song lyric, watch out Grammy!



    

   



 

The Goddess Myth

So last week's TIME cover story 'The Goddess Myth' on the increasing pressure to be the perfect mother was told with motherhood represented with several images of a fairly discretely naked woman and child/children, images taken by the woman's husband and the father of the child/ren, Erick Madigan Heck. 

This week some objections were aired in TIME's letters to the editor. One genderless person called 'R. Mortenson' from Phoenix was outraged by the cover appearing in the wake of the Weinstein scandal and wrote:

'We are kidding ourselves if we think we can indulge in viewing provocatively dressed or nude women and not have it carry over into our attitudes and behaviour... of sexual predation.' 

Really?  This person is connecting an image of maternity with Weinstein's sexual perversions, abuses of power and violence? Has it really come to that? Have women really lost all freedom to show our bodies in their natural state, discretely - it's not Playboy - without men being tempted to assault and harass us and if not, that is our problem? I call bullshit to that.

These images are so natural and so non-provocative, having absolutely nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the simple joy and beauty of motherhood, and womanhood, that to even mention that man's name in the same context seems like a kind of assault all of its own, and a further victimisation of women and womanhood and implied victory for men like him.

Haven't they got enough power already? They do, and so they must be allowed to degrade motherhood and womanhood further still.

Indeed I think it is quite likely part of the reason why TIME chose to celebrate motherhood in this way, as a reclaiming of the beauty and power of womanhood as something that women (and children, and men who aren't perverted sexual predators) can enjoy - albeit not helped by the modern pressures to be perfect. In these images, there is no pressure at all, which also works as a welcome counter to the story's theme of society expecting too much of women and mothers.

Another detractor, an Australian woman or man called Kerry, protested:

'Why is the woman on your cover naked? I never saw my mother naked, yet...she was the personification of motherhood...' 

These images are not about showing off women's flesh for the sake of it, Kerry. They are about, I like to think, showing womanhood and motherhood in their most natural and powerful state, neither adorned with religious iconography nor twisted and objectified for men's pornographic gratification.

This woman chose to be photographed naked with her young sons and that should be her choice. That TIME chose to represent motherhood that way, indeed in a story about the stresses of motherhood, is their choice and I appreciate them both for making those choices, along with the husband-father photographer for taking such striking images of human beings, female and male, living in their natural, happy and loving state.

Thank you TIME for your most timely story.

 





 

Women's Lives Matter

Reeva Steenkamp (30) shot to death by her boyfriend (SA)

Sophie Elliot (22) stabbed to death by her boyfriend (NZ)

Emily Longely (17) strangled to death by her boyfriend (UK)

The men who killed these young women, their girlfriends at the time, all claimed that it wasn't their fault; two said it was the woman's fault and one said he mistook his victim for an intruder.

The law courts in each country let the killers - dressed smartly in suit and tie - have their say, at length, providing a legal framework in which their excuses and victim-blaming could be heard, and in two of the cases the courts considered the women's actions mitigated the seriousness of the killings. 

In one case the killer was given the benefit of the doubt and believed, with the female judge handing down a substantially reduced sentence than the minimum for murder.  After serving just ten months in prison that woman-killer was released on home detention.

But this week the Supreme Court doubled his sentence duration to the minimum 15 years for murder, of which he will have to serve at least half, so seven and a half years.

This still seems too short for pre-meditated murder and an elaborately fabricated non-guilty plea, but it is something more than nothing that the previous, much shorter sentence was overturned four years on. Indeed it sends the message that this year, in one country at least, and I think in many other countries too, women's lives are being seen to matter more than they used to just a few years ago.

Having studied male partner violence for many years and paid attention to the public trials of men who kill their female partners - most of which cases are never made public - I am quietly optimistic that the world is at long last waking up to believing the radical, apparently uncomfortable and difficult for many truth that women's lives matter as much as men's do.   

     

Listen, Louie

So the last blog post I did on Louis C.K back in August 2016, I used the image of him appearing as a guest on a chat show over the caption (of his making, not mine) 'Comedian/Masturbator'...

In the post I expressed some feminist objections to the content of his 2015 Netflix special (now pulled), including his elaborate mime of making a female rat orgasm that was little more than an extended mocking of the clitoris - I can (and do) do that for comic effect, but he, a man, cannot - as well as his expressed opinion in that special that racism is wrong but sexism isn't, it's just 'men and women giving each other a hard time'; hard indeed.

But about that caption I wrote:

"'Comedian/Masturbator' is funny, especially as 'masturbator' is not even a word, at least not according to my spellchecker. It should be. Next to it you could write: Louis (or Louie) C.K."

Alas, the last part of this comment has now been shown to be all too true; you could write Louis C.K. in the dictionary next to the word masturbator - if it were a word - only it wouldn't be funny.

When you force young women to watch you masturbate, as Louis has finally admitted doing on numerous occasions over a number of years, you go from being a slightly sad funnyman who, in his middle age, is still obsessed with his penis, to a sick unfunnyman who gets off making young women squirm in disgust, humiliation and intimidation being made to watch a man who has power over them jerk off. 

And so it seems I was right to call him out on reducing sexism to a fair fight and spat between men and women, and for making a joke of the female orgasm and clitoris, but wrong to think his sad obsession with his own penis was in any way funny. It is not.

Indeed, the two things are, as we now know, directly connected and part of his sexist dismissal and objectification of women as tools for men's pleasure and power.

So listen up Louis (Louie), having finally confessed to this sick obsession, so sick and offensive that some of the women involved left the comedy business as a result of your behaviour, you said: "I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen." 

Indeed you have spent a long time talking, saying AND DOING anything you want, Louis, and it is time you listened - TO WOMEN. Let's be clear about that. Men like you spend such a lot of time, on stage, in books, in the home, on the street and in the workplace, making fun of how hard women are to understand, often to the point of suggesting that there is something (almost everything) wrong with us, including that we don't have a sense of humour. But in fact the problem is with men not bothering, and not being made to bother, to listen to women and actually learn more than the basic outline of who we are, in our wide variety, so that you might figure out who we are and how to treat us like human beings.

Comedian Jen Kirkman, who is hilarious, and who has worked with Louis and be made to endure his sick obsession personally, knowing that if she resisted and spoke out about it her career would be over, wrote this on Twitter in response to CK's outing as a pervert by other women:

'When women speak, don't sensationalize it and make it about naming the man. Our stories run deeper. It's our culture that damns us if we do or don't or shames us if we have made peace. It's time to listen to how women want this to be talked about. The end.'

9:43 AM - Nov 10, 2017

What she said.

The right to love

The best thing that happened yesterday.

The right to kill

So ONE of the too many to count reasons why I did what I could last year (and really for many a year prior to that) to fight to stop the election of this lunatic to lead the most powerful country in the world, was because of his shrill rantings on the campaign trail about how 'they' would take away people's guns and he, if elected, would make sure they didn't.

Unfortunately I was up against some slightly more powerful people, not least those that make money from selling guns in the US. The US gun lobby (the NRA) that boasts 5 million (mostly male) members, including this lunatic leader who it describes as a 'true friend and champion', spent over $30 million last year on getting him elected, more than they spent on any previous candidate.

One of the first things the NRA's political puppet did once in office was to undo the regulation introduced under the Obama Administration to make it harder for mentally ill people to buy guns.

One of the first sentences out of the mouth of the lunatic leader after the latest mass shooting in a Baptist church in Texas that killed 26, mostly women and children, was 'we're dealing with a mental health situation here.'

Then he went on to say that if it wasn't for the man who shot the killer while he was leaving the church after having killed or wounded everyone in it - that one man with a rifle against the guy with the machine gun - 'we would not only (my emphasis) be looking at 26 dead we'd be looking at hundreds.'

What a load of man shit.

There's a connection here that shouldn’t be ignored: The most common thread between America’s mass shootings is a history of domestic violence. (Rolling Stone Magazine, Nov 7)

The main reason this idiot was elected to lead the most violent nation on earth, rather than the anti-violence, pro-gun-control female candidate he was up against, is also the main reason why so many mass shootings occur in the US every year, other than the increasing availability of high-powered guns to anyone no matter their mental health or history of violence against anyone, least of all women, and that is men's hatred and resentment of women, the principal cause of domestic violence, the most common form of violence in the world.

I, who have studied the causes and consequences of domestic violence, have long known this, as have other feminists, it is something new and reassuring that a popular magazine like Rolling Stone with a significant male readership, which probably won't be accused of 'man-hating' and thereby dismissed, is acknowledging it and making it public.

Hopefully the deaths of the only 26 and the only 58 in Vegas just a few weeks earlier, both by men with a history of violence against women, and both whose victims were predominantly female, will not be totally in vain, unlike the deaths and injuries of their millions of sisters worldwide who are the victims of violent attacks by the men they know every year, whether by guns or fists or acid or anything any man with a 'mental health' problem can get his hateful hands on.

Thanks too to Chelsea Handler for listing at the end of her most recent Netflix show all the Republican members of congress and senate who have accepted donations from the NRA.

Jazz chickens?

Eddie (front) and older brother Mark in the late 60s

I've just finished comedian Eddie Izzard's book Believe Me: A memoir of love, death and jazz chickens and can recommend it, though you won't find too many jazz chickens in it, unless Eddie's the jazz chicken, which seems entirely possible; as he is indeed both funky and tasty (apologies to the vegetarians).


Moose and I have been big fans of this jazzy trans chicken with the big goofy grin and surreal comic talent for many a year, finally getting to see him perform live here in 2015 to a massive crowd and many a time before that on screen in various incarnations, both as a comedian and actor.

Acting was always his dream and, as he tells us in his memoir with great delight, he is now getting decent acting roles, including playing Judi Dench's son in a film to be released next year. But for my money he's a natural born comedian with a character that is too large and multi-faceted to fit other people's lives, though I still enjoy his acting performances, as I did Billy Connolly's, who is a similar, if less jazzy, chicken.

His memoir is no great writing feat and is rather short on intimate moments as well as punchlines, but you definitely get to know this funky jazz chicken better than you could through his stage performances and that is a very good thing. He is a sincere chap who has wrestled with some identity demons as well as the tragic loss of his mother when he was only six, to come out the other end with a clear vision of who s/he is and a mission to make the world a better place in his own unique, unpretentious, way.

We believe you, Eddie, and wish you all the best of luck. Jazz, as you prove, is underrated.     

Miss Protest

I learnt something surprising about my father-in-law yesterday: he thought beauty pageants treated women like 'cattle' and would not have them in the house, as it were, back in the 70s and 80s when these glitzy sexist fests were all the rage the world over and only extremist feminazi man-hating lesbos protested them publicly.

He is no longer with us and when he was alive he hid his feminism fairly well (as did almost everyone, until very recently), but I am glad to know, better late than never, that he was a closet feminist of sorts, because if he was then other straight white privileged men might be too, with just a little more prodding.

When discussing with my daughter the recent protests by Miss Peru contestants who recited on stage their country's gender violence statistics instead of their bust, waist and hip measurements (cattle indeed!) her response was 'just don't do the fucking contest in the first place!' which is fair enough, I think. She is the age of these contestants who sign up to parade around in matching gold bikinis and tight dresses to be ranked like cattle - by men like Trumptard -  according to their measurements, high-heeled strut and insipid sugar and spice smiles, and she would never degrade herself (and womankind) in this way. And that is a very good thing.

However she could also see, as all thinking women (and some men) can, that this battle for women to not be treated like cattle - and much worse than cattle - must be fought on all fronts and is far from a simple matter of avoiding watching or partaking in beauty pageants.

And so she and I, and her father, if not quite her brothers - who remain in the feminist closet and declined to comment (though taking an interest in learning something rather surprising about their grandfather) - could agree that the protest was a positive and gutsy step in the right direction, not least in the direction of women standing up for women instead of competing with each other, in the shallowest of ways, for the amusement of men.

The juxtaposition of bikinis and brutality I think strikes a particularly powerful chord of protest that resonates well in the present climate of women speaking out, and together, against powerful sexist and abusive men the world over.

To fighting on all fronts and in all fashions, from bikinis to burkas.   

   

Zookeeping: women and war

The true story of WWII resistance, courage and compassion as first documented in the unpublished diaries of Antonina Zabinski, the wife of the Warsaw zookeeper during that brutalising war, then much later retold in the 2007 book The Zookeeper's Wife by poet Diane Ackerman, and finally brought to a wider audience this year in the film of that title by New Zealand director Niki Caro is a new kind of war story, one told from a female perspective.

It is a beautiful story focused on life, instead of death, and without Antonina, then Diane, then Niki, the wider world would not know of it, not know of the courage and compassion of this Polish woman and her husband who risked their lives to save as many as 300 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto amidst the most brutalising, terrifying and compassionless horror imaginable.

As most stories of women's compassion and courage and cleverness have been all but lost to history, with men's stories predominating in what is told and retold, especially of war, this change of perspective that uncovers and tells of this long obscured history is vital. That women are coming together to tell our stories, old and new, more than ever before, is one of the most progressive aspects of modern life, and one that I believe is, or could be if we don't resist it, as some are, a game-changer that moves us towards a world without the brutality of war.

Never mind lest we forget. This is a case of lest we fail to realise that women risk their lives, women resist and women care, often in ways and at times where and when men fail to. The will to war and brutality is not an essential part of the human condition and women's voice shows us this in a way that we have not been shown before.

Lest we fail - to see and to hear from women.

JUSTICE EQUALITY FREEHELD

Justice is the juice that makes the sometimes bitter fruit of life sweet, but it doesn't grow on trees...

I have just caught up with the 2015 movie Freeheld, and want to recommend it with all my heart to anyone interested in seeing how true justice (equality and freedom) works. Justice is a fight,
a never-ending war, against the prejudice and privilege that is built into our laws and practices, our values, beliefs and social norms that were set up to protect and defend those in power against those without it. It is rarely the mere working of those laws and it is rarely ever realised in full.

The movie Freeheld produced by and starring Ellen Page and based on the award-winning documentary of the gay women who fought for equality and justice and ended up setting in motion the wheels that would legalise same-sex marriage across the US is an excellent dramatisation of one of these rare moments where justice is realised in full.

It is a real life Philadelphia adapted by the writer of that powerful and pioneering gay-rights film, though not receiving anything like the same accolades, I hope not because it's about gay women not men. I thought it was just as powerful and being based in a real-life life-changing story for me makes it even more moving, if it does lack the show-business shine of a Hollywood drama.

I read yesterday that Ellen DeGeneres is heading down under to Australia with her wife Paige to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary and support the passing of same-sex marriage legislation in that country, my country of birth, that has resisted this progression. As Ellen's so public coming out helped (and helps) so many other gay people, including Ellen Page, to come out - and then to produce and star in this important film, among other things - her courage in the fight for justice must also be acknowledged and commended. I hope she succeeds in helping to sway public opinion in Australia towards justice, because justice breeds justice and helps the fight against prejudice and privilege for everyone everywhere.

So thank you to the Ellens and to all the other women and men whose fight for justice for gay people - and for all people - help to make the world a freer and fairer place for all of us. We are all equal indeed. 
   
 

Queen making

So for a country of less than 5 million people New Zealand doesn't punch above its weight, as the macho boxing metaphor goes, it pioneers above its weight (never mind sport). And the recent election of the world's youngest female political leader (Jacinda Ardern), as mentioned as the first news item on Wiki's front page yesterday, attests to this fact.
What's more, as it is the country that was first to give women the vote, and first to award a university degree to a woman, and first to accept a woman in the role of a church leader (Anglican), and first to elect and twice re-elect a left-wing woman prime minister (Helen Clark), I am of the view that though we have a shamefully high rate of domestic violence and a significant gender pay gap and have just come out of three looooooong terms of a right-wing, male-heavy government with a leader who was one of the first to congratulate Trump, a lot of what we get right is down to this pioneering history of women being in leadership roles in government and society. We also have a number of world-leading women film directors and writers.

That said, it's still a bloody battle. The majority of New Zealanders did not vote for Ardern's Labour Party, but for a fourth term of the male-dominated and led right-wing party that had cut taxes for the rich and done everything to make worse and nothing to improve the quality of life for the majority of New Zealanders or to tackle the serious environmental issues facing the country -- and the world.

But still the majority (45%) voted for them, partly because they had SO much more money to market themselves as the good guys who will make everyone rich and suddenly turn-tack and end poverty and any other bullshit that money could buy. And Ardern and the party with a long history of caring about social justice -- fighting sexism and racism -- and countering the corrupt inequalities of modern capitalism, who had much less money and much more integrity so could not shovel the shit as their shameless opponents did, got just 38% of the vote and had to rely on the Greens and then the centrist party NZ First, which is led by a former right-wing male politician, Winston Peters, to put them into a position to form a centre-left coalition government.

Because Greens would never go right-wing, it was down to Peters to become 'king maker', as he was called by the media, and for 25 days the country was kept in suspense about which way he would go, which was too much power for one man and a party that only got 7% of the vote, even though it was kind of cool that he is an indigenous man, even if he has not necessarily been a friend to his people in the past.

Fortunately he did the right thing and became queen maker instead, but it should not have to be such a bloody battle, for women and for justice. My nails and nerves are not up to it, nor should they have to be. Hopefully Jacinda and her centre-left government will turn the tide for good.

My YouTube Debut

Me standing up fourth in a line-up of ten at a small bar in Ponsonby last Sunday. 

Photo taken from the video -- aren't I (hubby) tech savvy.

Woody's Witches

So this is what a witch looks like one is to presume, as she - film director and former actor Sarah Polley - is one of the women now speaking out about Weinstein and other Hollywood men in power who abused her and other women and got away with it for decades. Indeed she describes Weinstein as merely "one festering pustule in a diseased industry."

To use Woody Allen's phrase, women like Polly who speak out about these abuses threaten us with "a witch hunt atmosphere" that is "not right either". Indeed to quote Woody in full:

“You also don’t want it to lead to a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself. That’s not right either.”

Why is that not right, Woody? My PhD supervisor used to wink at me whenever he felt like it and I did not like it one bit, it felt like and was a demeaning abuse of his power. He was Head of Department at the time.

It should not be up to men - as it always has been - to decide what is and what is "not right" in terms of their actions towards us, not least men in powerful positions, such as Woody and Weinstein and Trump - and my former supervisor. The list is long. Women need to have our say, to speak to power, and so we are, and let's hope that the men who try to silence us this time by calling us witches do not, for once, prevail.

So bring on the witches, stand aside Woody, Weinstein and all the other winking wankers.

Qualification: I do respect the more creative endeavours of these men, especially Woody, but resent the fact that they get to create and make crazy sums of money all too often at the expense of women.

Battle of the Sexes

Writing my thesis on women who kill their abusers, I was all too aware of the tendency of those who are quick to condemn these women, along with the refuge workers who try to help them avert this outcome - as well as the much more common outcome of the murder of the abused woman - as 'man-hating feminazis', I challenged the notion that these women and the feminists like me who support them in trying to prevent and fairly punish the perpetrators of domestic violence are engaged in a 'battle of the sexes' with all men.

This concept 'battle of the sexes' I - and various other feminists before me - argued was unhelpful, as it only fed into men's characterisation and condemnation of feminist efforts to make the world a fairer place for women as a battle waged against anyone, which it is not. It is a battle for justice against injustice, which is not a person or a gender but a complex system of discrimination and dehumanisation that treats male humans, even before they are born - even before they are conceived - as superior to and more important than female humans (a fundamental, all-encompassing injustice) and in doing so directly and indirectly causes the violent abuse of girls and women that reduces the human experience for everyone.

Men wage war and fight us-versus-them battles between different groups of people, including men and women. Women - at least feminists - fight for justice, a many-sided never-ending battle without winners - yet. We are all losers in that battle right now and we will all be winners if it is ever won, a possibility that is a million miles - but hopefully not quite as many years - away, but a possibility nonetheless. 

For this reason I am not a fan of the name given to the film about Billie Jean King's life and the tennis match she played against Bobby Riggs, but I do like and highly recommend the film even so. It's a moving and telling real-life story about a great tennis champion and feminist who fought against gender discrimination in sport that should have been told in film a long time ago. That it is being finally told in 2017, forty-four years after the event, is no doubt testimony to the significant strides feminists have made in the film industry and beyond in the last few years, if not this year in particular, thanks, in large part, to Hillary Clinton.

If you have to lose the battle to win the war, as she did, then so be it, but it is nice to win some of those battles too. Thanks, Billie Jean King; you are a feminist hero indeed.





 

Guns r US

Guns don't kill people, people do.

Never a bigger lie was told to make a dirty dollar than this one.

People (men) with guns kill and maim people by the tens of thousands every year in the divided states of America. The statistics on mass shootings alone as published here in the Guardian (1,516 mass shootings in 1735 days) are so unfuckingbelievable it is surely beyond the comprehension of any sane person with a human head and heart to grasp.

And yet we the sane and sincere of heart have to live - and many of us die - with the reality that this is our fucked up, shot up world, especially if we happen to live in the US, but we all kind of live a little in the US these days. What happens there shapes everyone's values, fates and fears to some extent.

I was in Boston (with husband and daughter) about to train through Connecticut the day of the horrifying (can't find an adequate adjective, this will have to do) school shooting there of 26 six-year-olds and their teachers ten days before Christmas 2012 by a 20-year-old with a semi-automatic weapon (he also shot his mother) and will NEVER FORGET the images and stories of unimaginable grief from the parents followed by the despicably callous and totally fucked up response from the NRA and gun lobby suggesting the answer is to get primary-school teachers to wear and be ready to use guns at all times.

Of course arming primary-school teachers is not going to stop a Las Vegas-type massacre. To stop that cowardly machine-gunning down of hundreds of people from the safety and comfort of a hotel room without restricting the sale of fast-fire guns to civilians - something Democrats have been trying and failing to do for decades - you'd have to frisk everyone who walks through the doors of a hotel in Las Vegas and everywhere else in America (and scan their luggage), every time they walk through the door not just on check-in, for guns. Because the latest mass-shooting cowardly fucktard had a dozen assault weapons in his hotel room, long guns he obviously couriered up to his room unseen. Or perhaps he carried them out in the open dressed as Rocky and no one batted an eye, because it's all so lovely and legal. So even if this level of frenzied frisking were possible, you would still need a law banning the transportation of assault weapons into a hotel, which seems inconceivable.

No, that will never happen, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

These reactions to the Vegas shooting from Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel should be seen by all.

Menism

So New Zealand, the country that first granted women the vote, has just shown in its re-election of a right-wing party that is essentially of and for men, that it, like the US, continues to stand at the altar of menism, the first (and last) cult indeed.

In its desperate bid to curb the rise of women - justice, equality and truth - the corrupt cult of Menism worldwide is reviving and regrouping against these ideals that women have consistently fought and voted for. Indeed they are the ideals and values of feminism alone, not socialism, not liberalism, not environmentalism.

It is a sad day for New Zealand, and for the world, that with such a clear alternative in favour of equality, justice and truth presented to us we have voted for this corrupt cult yet again, if not all of us (46%) and there remains a slight possibility of a centre-left coalition government forming yet, but only with the help of a paid up member of the cult gone rogue, a man now being called, and treated as, 'King-maker' indeed, which says it all.  

And so just like America, so like America, though we pretend otherwise of course -- English (so aptly named) has better hair and is less orange but no less hairy and white -- we baulked at the gates of freedom and showed we could not handle the truth and did not care about justice. An opportunity missed; hopefully the last.



   

VOTE

As they say, stand up (hand up) and be counted or sit down and shut up. Your choice.

The people's politician

In the first country in the world to grant women the vote, on this 124th anniversary of Suffrage Day indeed, if ever there was a clear choice to take a country forward into a future that has any hope of bringing about improvements in the quality of life and prospects for the majority of its people and doing the opposite of that by continuing to increase the obscene income and asset inequality between the richest 1-5% of people living in that country and everyone else by cutting public education, community sector and health care funding that removes vital support life-lines to all sorts of people struggling with life, increases the debt a whole generation of young people head into their futures with while extending the length of time people wait with life-threatening illnesses for treatment in the public health system, for the sake of cutting taxes to the rich and opening up borders and loopholes to allow overseas property speculation and ownership to price the younger generation out of any prospect of home ownership in the country's cities where the job opportunities are, along with those who have underpaid public service jobs in the education and health care sectors who are unable to afford the cost of living to remain in the cities, bringing about chronic shortages of teachers and nurses in those cities that are ultimately handed over to the rich and greedy here and overseas to outbid mid-level investors and buy up large with no intention of living on the land they buy for the profits they squirrel away into trust funds that escape taxes on and or send offshore to build the economies of countries elsewhere, it is the choice between LABOUR and its new no-bullshit, let's-do-this-good-and-right-thing young leader Jacinda Ardern and the other party with its been-around-in-wrong-wing-politics-forever-and-never-done-a-thing-to-improve-the-well-being-of-his-country's-people leader in the upcoming New Zealand general election this Saturday! (Apologies for the long sentence but those buggers have been in power a long time, so it's fitting).

Lead the way for New Zealand and this worried world, New Zealand, show us, and everyone beyond our shores who has a functioning bull-shit detector, that we know what we are doing and will help you to know and do the right thing too! Let's do this!