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.