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The true story of WWII resistance, courage and compassion as first documented in the unpublished diaries of Antonina Zabinski, the wife of the Warsaw zookeeper during that brutalising war, then much later retold in the 2007 book The Zookeeper's Wife by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.