Funny Cows

This is not about cows -- heads up for the uninitiated.

I miss this shit 

This is my final blog for the year, a year that has been very fucking funny and very fucking far from funny too.

It has been an interesting year you could say, on and off the comedy stage. I put on my first hour-long 'one-woman' comedy show at the Auckland Fringe Festival and it sold out. We even had to turn some people away. Some of my friends may never speak to me again. Serves them right for underestimating my pulling power. Hmm...

There were a lot of laughs at those three 50-seater shows and at one of them an English guy in the audience told my husband he should pack me off to the Edinburgh Fringe pronto: 'She's just as funny as that lot', said he. So you never know, after what happened later in the year, my husband may well do that.

Because after I made it to the semi-finals of the Raw Comedy Quest (to find the country's funniest new comedian), my second and final year of Raw, and performed to a very good reception on the night, applause break and all, I got royally shafted by the man who runs and judges the comp and had to watch yet another batch of less funny (on audience reaction) teenage and twenty-somethings, 70% of them male, be put through to the finals ahead of me for the second year in a row, some of them only in their first year of Raw, and I snapped. I became a very unfunny cow indeed.

And Friday last week, after months of wrangling with the Comedy Guild and then the Human Rights Commission over my claim of gender and age discrimination against that shafter in chief, I spent three hours in mediation with him and a woman called Holly who did her best to keep things civil between us but did not entirely succeed. Nothing was resolved (I'm sworn not to disclose any details of what was said there), so I might still take my complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal that is a public process open to the media, to get this thing out in the open and on record. It shouldn't happen, what he did to me. Change is needed.

Meanwhile the shafter in chief has banned me from his club, which happens to be the only comedy club in the city and the main club in the country, which has shut down my stand-up 'career' for the time being. Last month I also bailed on my Fringe show before cancellation fees for the venue kicked in, losing my nerve after all that has happened since the last one.

"Maxine Peake is magnificent in Adrian Shergold’s
unflinching drama about a stand-up on the 70's northern club circuit".
The Guardian.

All is not lost, though. I am still laughing indeed, not least at the Brit film Funny Cow, reviewed by The Guardian as a film full of 'grit and wit' that we watched a couple of weeks back and it reminded me of all that female stand-up, especially mature female stand-up, can be and and is, which was reassuring, even if I can't be doing it for the time being. It's one of the best films I've seen in years. You've got to hand it to the Brits, they do grit and wit better than anyone.

Hopefully I'll find a way back to stand-up some day soon and even make it to the Ed Fringe one day, preferably before I lose my grip on the wit.

Merry Xmas.    

Grace and gracelessness ('Not all men')

Grace Millane 22 murdered in Auckland last week.
National vigils held this week for her and all the women victims of male violence
in this country (and every other).

When I was researching and writing about male violence against women and the public-political response to it in the first decade of this century, there was no 'not all men' protest when there was a public outcry against this violence.

Apart from the global uptake of internet commentary since then, this was because a) there was scarcely any public outcry against this violence then, though it was no less rampant, and b) the male lament of blaming the feminist man-haters for making up stories to bring men, all men down was implicit in this lack of public outcry and in the much louder narratives written into law and public policies of female provocation, denial of the extent of the problem, especially with domestic violence, which was my focus, and the outrageous claim that women are just as violent as men when the facts tell of women experiencing injury and death at the hands of men at a rate for which there is simply no female-to-male comparison.

My own mother bought into all this women-blaming and denial of the problem, as did the vast majority of people, men and women, commenting and making decisions around male violence against women. Feminists have been fighting such an uphill battle for so long to get the public and parliaments of their countries to care about murdered, raped and maimed women, especially those in a domestic setting but really all of them. They are all connected.

This is changing as we speak as the vigils attended by thousands for murdered women like Grace and for all the women slain at the hands of men are a powerful sign of significant change. And it seems to me, as someone watching the public response to gendered violence for a long time that this change has been fuelled by the global female indignation over Trump's election and the Women's March in early 2017 and the Me Too movement that was also in part a response to this that has shown women who had not previously identified with feminist causes, and perhaps some men - but far from all men - that what we have here is a serious problem of male power and violence out of control and women being the main victims of this rampant power abuse and toxic masculinity but everyone being the victims in the long run.

And although thousands of men, many more men in fact than are joining the outcry against the violence, are contributing publicly to what one journalist here has well described as 'the astonishing selfishness of "not all men"'  protests, the fact that men are having to yell so loudly about how unfair we are being to them in protesting about male violence against raped and murdered women and are being rightly and widely shamed for this, is a sign that the balance of the public narrative and concern has shifted significantly and hopefully lastingly in favour of taking male violence against women seriously and in realising that the male sense of superiority and entitlement and unchecked power to disrespect and dominate women at every level of society is all part of the problem.

RIP Grace, your violent, tragic death has already sewn the seeds of a movement towards a world in which women like you and their daughters and granddaughters may indeed be able to rest (ramble and riot) in peace.