Pink hair does not a woman make

Human females have a constitutional (disease-resistance) advantage over human males, an advantage that the Covid pandemic is appearing to prove , especially in older people but the advantage exists at all stages of life; while men have a structural strength advantage over women, an advantage that transwomen in female sports are consistently and increasingly showing up to everyone's ultimate cost. 

These differences are not political, they're poetical, if anything. We should each be playing to such strengths not denying and trying to battle them, as trans activism is increasingly doing. Mother Nature knew what she was doing in creating these strength differences that should ultimately be complimentary not combative. 

Sex 'transition' by all means, as far as you can, if you want to live the outward life of a person of the sex other than that of your birth sex (for 99.99% of humans at least), but accept that you will never be able to reproduce like a person of the other sex or to run or even walk or indeed to battle diseases, and many more things besides, like a person of the other sex. 

So don't expect to be a person of the other sex. It's never going to happen. And in reality, if it were possible, none of us would want it to be the case, as much of the charm and challenge of human interaction lies in these differences - and in the similarities - when interacting with people of the other/same birth-sex as our own. Vive la difference. 

Women and men are not meant to compete with each other in physical strength and endurance tests, only in intellectual and creative ones, the much more meaningful tests of our individual strengths and abilities anyway, tests for which we can appear however we choose to appear in body size, shape, dress and gender identity, without it affecting our chances, in fair intellectual and creative tests at least. 

Mother Nature knew what she was doing in creating our different strengths. We should listen to the Mother.  

https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/10/21/biological-male-wins-womens-cycling-world-championship/

Pink hair does not a woman make, rather a spoil sport. Man up, 'Rachel'. 

Me no pause

I was turning fifty. For the party at Mum’s I’d stocked up, filled half a drawer with paper pulp, thrown a t-shirt over the whole unsightly stash as a decoy in case Mum investigated, as she sometimes does, making sure I'm using the drawers she clears out specially for me, the same drawers I used as a child and still consider mine. Funny what you don’t want to share with your mother.

She didn't know I had been bleeding for sixty days straight and only stopped the week prior to flying over, the progesterone pills finally kicking in, hopefully not sowing the seeds of dementia in the process, presuming they were not already sown. 

There’d been so much blood at peak times through those sixty days, if that returned the day of the garden party, with white marquee and matching furniture, it would be Carrie all over, only I couldn't blame my mother, at least not directly.

I’d have to leave the party running, get M to give some excuse, jet-lag, age-grief, something slightly less bloody. They could sing Happy Birthday to me through the window, a Rapunzel-type situation, only blood flowing instead of hair. If it came back in full force, enough to shoot the tampons straight back out into my hands, there’d be no happy about it.  

But the blood never came. I turned fifty. They sang Happy Birthday to my face, smiling in spite of itself. We ate truffle cake, with me put in charge of the knife, so many slices I feared I’d never get one and might have to put the knife to a use less sweet; to draw my own blood, indeed.

Then we went home, the unused contents of that childhood drawer repacked together with regret and the accumulated gifts, none of it useful. 

Months went by and I realised the blood was never coming back. I’d menopaused for my fiftieth birthday. Happy birthday!

But then it did come back. Regret and relief in equal measure. Me no pause not yet. 

Sex snobs

Last night we went to hear Elisabeth Gilbert talk at our local theatre. It was a full house, about 1,100 capacity. That's a lot of women gathered in one place! The pre-show buzz was in a higher octave than usual.

You could count the number of men. One was beside me. A woman about our age suddenly sat down next to M (hub) and started up a conversation:

'Well I must say it's nice to see this is not a woman's-only event'.

Hmmm... she was definitely hitting on him. 'My wife's a writer', M said, as quickly as civility allowed, before the conversation got too personal, 'so she's here in a professional capacity' (only partly), he added, with a dash of pride, I thought. The woman drew in her chin and suddenly remembered her daughter on the other side. There's definitely a shortage of men willing to listen to Elisabeth Gilbert.

And the truth of the matter is that I suggested we go see Gilbert in part because we go to so many live events by men, other than the writers' festival, which is slightly more female than male. But we've been to see Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, separately, as well as Lenny Henry, Eddie Izzard and Danny Boy, Billy Connelly, Eric Clapton and the Flight of the Concords. We've also seen Clive James live and a play about two gay Kiwi cooks, Hudson and Halls. We've heard Thomas Keneally talk and U2 sing. For all these performances the audiences were like real life: 50/50 male/female.

On the female performance front it's rather bleaker. Apart from Liz Gilbert we've seen French and Saunders - their last performance ever as French and Saunders, in fact - Melissa Etheridge and, briefly, Sandi Toksvig, the new QI host, at a writers' festival gig. We've also been to hear Julia Gillard (former Australian PM) talk, but we've attended various political talks by men, many actually, so we cant really count Julia.

So that's it for the women! Three to four live gigs.

In all of these performances by women, the audience was so female-dominated you felt there were no men there at all. It was even more so than at the ballet, which we have also seen, though mostly I have taken our daughter, and there are men in those performances anyway. But at Gilbert's talk, you could pick the men out in the audience like you pick out red heads - well, I don't, but some do. There were a maximum of 20 in the auditorium, I reckoned, based on the three in my wide vision, four including the one sat next to me. 20 out of 1,100 is less than 2%.

And she was great, Liz Gilbert. 'Funny!' M said, slightly surprised. She's a born story-teller so she told us a great story about her German book tour, with all the suspense, drama and humour of a classic good story. She's a natural and an original entertainer, both valuable and rare qualities, but somehow men generally don't care to know more about her or women like that. They don't read their books and they don't go to hear their talks.

Men are sex snobs, in short, and that rhymes (with talks), so it must be true.

No nudes, no crotches

I've been thinking about nudity lately - as one does - and wondering why it seems a subject that is soooooooo different for men than it is for women.

Investigating Playboy's decision to cut its famous nude centrefolds, images that in one year (1972) sold more than 7 million copies for old Hugh, I found, to my annoyance, that this decision was purely economic not ethical. Hugh had not, in his dotage, decided that the sexual exploitation of the female form for money was not cool. Rather, static female nudity has become so passé that it is no longer selling enough magazines (only 800,000 pa). Only. Poor Hugh.

Free internet porn will do that, be careful what you wish for, Hugh. More boys and men than ever are viewing naked women in lewd, 'fuck-me-hard-baby' poses, and indeed are watching women act out these crude male fantasies, all for free. The sexual exploitation and abuse of women is alive and well, rest assured, Hugh.

At the same time there is the parallel online phenomenon of women being inundated by crotch shots (erect) sent to them, unsolicited, by the men who would be, or are, their online dates. Women, most of them, are not happy about this. We, most of us, don't want to see your baggy balls and stiff bits on our phones while we're eating lunch, call us old-fashioned. For women, the visual removed from the context of lovin', from the touch, thrust and taste, is - how can I put this delicately? - fucking grose.

When I, and I think most women, see a hot guy we don't think, hmmm, I wonder what his penis looks like. One hopes he has a penis, sure, but assuming as much, we are much more interested in wondering what sort of man he is, which will in turn tell us, while he still has his pants on, what kind of lover he is or could be (with training). What sort of man he is is sooooooo much more important than what sort of penis he has (or is).

Why is this soooooooo different for men? Why do you care what our breasts and nipples look like naked? Can't you assume from our clothed appearance that we have them and they look, every last one of them, pretty darned good, and ditto for the other bits?

I don't get it.

In the meantime, to perhaps stop regular men sending their unsolicited crotch shots, Playgirl might be a solution, a magazine with professional shots of hot (flaccid, because erect says 'look what I got for you, baby', which is wanky) naked men in 'I'm a nice guy too' poses, presuming such all-round men exist, which is doubtful.            




   

What's wrong with this picture?

Answer:

A) Only one is wearing a hat cap
B) Only one is waving
C) Only nine are wearing a tie
D) Only one of those ties is pink
E) Only eleven of twelve have a penis (at least presumably; not entirely sure about Putin)

What the world and lil' ol' New Zealand can do about it? adDRESS the situation. Climate change is not the problem, it's the answer.

Mission Ambition

Reading this heading in the latest Time magazine, my first thought was: 'Phew! I'm not the only loser.'

My subsequent thoughts were:

'Fuck that! Don't be generalising about me!'

'What's ambition got to do with
anything anyway?'

'What is ambition?'

'I need some chocolate.'

'Some fresh bread would be good too.'

'Why is the cat meowing at my door!? Oh; it's probably because I heated up some spaghetti with that chocolate bread and she wants to lick the bowl.'

Fine. She can have it; I only wanted the chocolate anyway.

Now. Where was I?

Oh, yeah: ambition isn't working for women.

Okay. So I took the bait and read the article, the upshot of which is that, according to Time, the author-businesswoman who wrote it and those high-flying American women and men they surveyed for the article, 'ambition' is defined as success in the world of business, that is, as running your own business and/or making it up the corporate ladder, past many men, to CEO.

On these terms, their survey shows that 'ambition' isn't working for women, as much as it is for men, because women eventually realise they want more than the trappings of conventional career success, namely money, respect, power and the independence these things can buy, at least in theory.

For women, they want more than cold hard career ambition can buy - namely they want family, fun and freedom - and at the same time, they typically don't get the same respect as men do for their business successes, while being mocked for their ambitions, which compounds this lack of work satisfaction.

So, in short, women are damned if we do and damned if we don't have traditional career ambition and success. So what's new?

Well, Time doesn't really have any answers, except to note that more men are finding the same frustrations at work (at least in business) and are increasingly rating their desire to have a better work-family balance as a core life ambition.

This is new, and for my money - if I had any - it would be the only way forward for women as well as men in terms of us all getting the most we can out of life and being fairly rewarded for our efforts along the way, which is the only ambition worth talking about.

Marilyn was right then: for women to aim for what men have (and men not expand their aims to value more of what women have and are) is to lack ambition.

Marilyn also said...

No wonder ambition isn't working for women.

Making Monsters

It's a gloomy day,
summer's on its way;
we should be making magic, instead we're making monsters.

Meat on the hook, money in the book, men in the crook,
flowers underfoot.

Cold hearts, warm guns,
never mind the lovers' sun.

Summer's on it's way
it's a gloomy day.

It's lonely at the top

I've been thinking a lot about heroism lately, reflecting on my long-held cynicism about the male heroes we are constantly sold in film, religion, sports and politics that don't match the reality of men I have known and studied for many years, and how it is we don't big up womankind in the same way but instead dumb her down, blame her and diminish her to make him - and Him - look better. 

I've blogged on this theme before, including in my last post, and you know my feminist cynicism well. But cynicism should be open to revision lest it become dogged and complacent. And I try to keep an open mind to having my eyes opened, as it were, to being proven not wrong exactly, no indeed, but less right, perhaps. 

Two films I watched recently, Everest and Foxcatcher, have given me some pause for thought on the subject of male heroism. We haven't time to go into the subject at any length here, but in sum I would say that if you want to get a truer idea of male heroism, watch films based on real events, such as these. 

Heroism (male or female) is defined as courage or self-sacrifice in the face of adversity or danger. I don't think climbing Everest qualifies as heroism in itself, especially if you leave loved ones behind who are counting on you to come home to help raise your children, as Everest climbers, mostly men, so often are, leaving wives at home to weep and worry. There is nothing self-sacrificing in this and as the adversity is contrived, of your own making, it is hardly courageous to overcome it. 

In Everest (spoiler alert) the Kiwi guide Rob Hall risked and lost everything; there was no happy ending for Hall and his pregnant wife left to weep into the phone and raise their unborn daughter alone. But... it was his work that took him up Everest, work which provided for the family - though his wife was/is a doctor so he did not carry the sole burden of feeding the family (just as well, as it turned out) - but that means he was not simply a self-motivated thrill seeker, but a responsible operator of a successful business doing dangerous work for himself and his family. There is a degree of self-sacrifice in that. 

But rather more heroically still, Hall died trying to save his weakest climber/client who had made two previously unsuccessful attempts at the top and this was his last chance. That climber died too, as did another client, the only woman climber, possibly in part because Hall was occupied with saving another, or at least trying to. He did get him to the top. So Hall was not entirely heroic here, though he did show self-sacrifice and courage in risking his life for another, even if he jeopardised other lives in the process and was likely in part motivated by commercial interests, as climbers pay to get to the top, not nearly there, and his reputation was on the line.

This half courageous, half reckless-risk-all-for-money-and-glory 'heroism' strikes me as a much truer representation of male heroism than the pure Hollywood heroism we're much more often subjected to with happy endings and women saved, not left to pick up the pieces of lives destroyed.

The same is true of the Mark Ruffalo character in Foxcatcher, a one-time Olympic gold medalist, who sacrifices all for his younger brother (whom he raised) but for the wrong reasons, or partly the wrong reasons we are left to assume, him being paid a small fortune to coach his brother to Olympic gold by the obscenely rich, but deeply flawed man who would end up killing him when he did not deliver the victory and glory he desired. 

This rich man struck me as another true male character we never see on our screens or even read about in our books, one who is more or less the opposite of a hero, all selfishness, insecurity and vanity, without any redeeming charms, who has to win gold and ultimately kill to feel like a big man. The world has met and suffered many men like this, not a drop of heroism in them.

Although this character is gay and tortured by a mother who doesn't understand his appetite for wrestling, a 'low sport', she describes it as, it is the vacuousness of his life of obscene inherited wealth that is his real undoing, and this again rings true for the money men running the world who effectively go mad on the power of being able to buy everything, including people and their devotion, though not their love, which is the kicker. 

Mark Ruffalo's character, by contrast, is (was) a loving husband and father, and indeed brother, and the quiet heroism of his life, outside of his Olympic wrestling glory, is the truth this film shows so well - he is not perfect - and again, a truth that is so often denied us in our fabricated heroes.  

It's lonely at the top, but it doesn't have to be, when 'the top' is not a mountain or a mountain of money, but the more modest achievement of giving and receiving love. If you have to choose between love, money and glory, and you probably will at some point in your life, especially if you are a man, a real hero chooses love.  

And on that note, I hope this blue cocoon is single - for her (or his) sake.        

Wednesday Woman

Men and boys first

This short take, printed in September's issue of Time magazine, as the lead-in item to the refugee crisis in Europe - the cover story (of the European issue) - is deliberately misleading and misogynist.

The husband and father of the drowned woman and boys whose story sparked western sympathy and support for the Syrian refugee crisis, did not exclude his wife when he said all he wanted was to be with his family. He said 'children and wife' (my emphasis).

Time deliberately left the 'wife' out of the headline, as most all media coverage of the story has done, either not mentioning her drowning - probably as she tried to save her young sons while struggling with excess clothing-drag, because even when you're fleeing by sea woman must be covered up - or mentioning it in passing - 'along with their mother' - to make quite clear that her death is incidental or, at best, secondary to the death of her sons. Females - women and girls - are the second, incidental sex. So what's new.

What bothers me most is that all news agencies seem to know and accept this; to know that the death of young boys and their grieving father is a story, a tragic story, where the death of their mother is not; indeed her drowning detracts from the otherwise tragic story and is better not mentioned at all. That they know this, and would seem to be right, is evidence of the most shameless and widespread misogyny imaginable, worse - when you stand back and try to look ahead to a better world - than the refugee crisis itself, which is caused, after all, by the age-old battle for power, at any cost, between men that renders life nasty, brutish and short.

The Syrian civil war started as resistance to yet another autocratic man who forced his way to power against the will of the people. These power-mad, compassionless men, who also head up repressive religious orders around the world, will continue to find their way to power and wreak misery when they get there, as long as we continue to let them, by not speaking out about the perpetuation of male arrogance and pride by the excusing and reinforcement of misogyny when and wherever we find it, all over the world. We are all refugees looking for a brighter world until that happens.



  

It all began with bloomers...

It all began with bloomers. And by 'all' I mean changes in women's fashion from more to less and less is more, and the resulting never-ending furore, at least in the west, over what women wear - or don't wear - as the case may be, and how that affects the bigger battle for gender equality of which women's fashion 'freedom' and self expression is but a part...(Prepare for an essay).

The bigger battle, surely, is for women to be fully respected and valued as equal human beings alongside men and not seen as the second sex, creatures of lower intelligence, morality and strength, who are born - second - to serve as men's titillating and obedient assistants, as almost all men of power with the self-proclaimed capacity to write and rewrite gender norms throughout history and across all cultures, have defined us - until now. Maybe. Some things never change.

Believe it or not these dashing 1850's "bloomers" that were named after American Amelia Bloomer who introduced the fashion, were radical and daring in their day, being a substantial modification on the full length, many layered starched skirts they replaced, giving women not only more freedom of movement but more choice - as opposed to no choice - about what they wore. The bloomers also did away with the mandatory long-waisted corsets worn so tight they rearranged women's internal organs such that medical professionals lamented what useless cadavers (corpses) women made for study. Hmm...

However, although the suffragettes of the day were some of the first women to wear these liberating bloomers, corset free, they eventually gave them up and went back to the the dresses and corsets when they saw how the bloomers had become more of a talking point at their rallies than their campaign for the vote. And so the bloomers went out of fashion for another forty years in order that those women campaigning for the vote could be taken more seriously. Was it worth it? Yes and no.

Eventually bloomers came back in vogue and with the help of two world wars and a second, and perhaps a third wave of feminism, campaigning for much broader freedoms for women, women's fashion went through a series of increasingly radical changes, largely from more to less, and from skirts to pants and, eventually, underpants, such that women in the west today are now more or less free to wear what they want in public. And what they want to wear, at least some of them, is very little indeed. Exhibit A: Miley Cyrus.

The question is: Is this apparent fashion freedom real and empowering for women? Well, yes and no, in my opinion. Miley looks happy enough in this picture and seems to be saying 'I like my body and I'm free to show it in all its feminine - if super-skinny-feminine - glory if I want,' which is her right to do. She seems free, even empowered.

On the other hand, some women, most recently, singer Chrissie Hynde, feel, and I agree to a point, that this near-naked exhibitionism that is increasingly favoured by female pop singers distracts from the music they produce and perform, such that women singers are not taken seriously as artists and even perpetuate a 'pornographic culture' beyond the world of music, if not 'asking to be raped', just as the first suffragettes worried that wearing daring bloomers distracted from their political campaigns.

For these reasons, Hynde also objects to these singers calling themselves feminists, which most of them do, though that is very much a recent development, with Taylor Swift doing a late U-turn on her previous denouncing of feminism, partly in response to our own Kiwi singer, Lorde, who hit the charts as an unashamed, and not so scantily clad, young feminist singer as recently as 2013.

Personally I think it's a good thing that young women are embracing the term 'feminist' more than they have done for many years, perhaps more than ever. But I do think Cyrus and others go too far to look sexy by drawing explicit attention to their genitals, bum and bust, which probably contributes to a dumbing down of their image and art, which in turn feeds the age old sexual objectification of womanhood such that women are seen as sex objects and nothing more. For this reason I, and I think a lot of young women too, prefer Lorde's version of free expression and feminism than the slightly knee-jerk, convenient and lightweight version of other young self-proclaimed, scantily clad, singing feminists.

At the same time, the 'asking to be raped' assertion of Hynde's is deeply problematic, not least because accused rapists are routinely let off if their victim was wearing anything less than a burka. The responsibility and blame for rape should be entirely on the rapist and this responsibility is something that feminists have been fighting hard to establish for SO many years, and are still a long way from winning. It's the ultimate uphill battle that women, much less young women, should not have to fight alone by deciding what to wear when they go out. Rape is not about what women wear or don't wear. Men must know this. Women should not have to cover up in public to stay safe from men; men should have to learn to respect women's right to look sexual - most young women don't need to do much to look sexual, after all - without this being seen as in any way inviting men's hands on their bodies, let alone an invitation to rape.

Meanwhile, in the music industry, there is a lot of pressure on young women artists to 'sex up' their image, and this industry is largely run by men. Some women artists have resented this pressure, not many have successfully resisted it, however. Lorde, so far, is a notable exception. So there is the possibility, even the likelihood, that Cyrus and her ilk are not really dressing, and undressing, for themselves so much, as a matter of choice and an expression of their freedom, but rather to please the male music execs who know that the less their young women artists wear the more records they sell. As Hynde says, they have become 'sex workers' of sorts. This is exploitation, pure and simple, and I think there is definitely reason for feminists - those who care about women's lasting freedom - including Hynde, to worry that this apparent freedom will come at the cost of the more lasting sort of freedom on which substantive gender equality is built.

Add to this the concern many feminists have about the prevalence of eating disorders in young women and its genesis in the increasing cultural pressure to be thin, a pressure that seems to have increased the less women in public have worn - and weighed - from models to actors to singers, and you have even more reason to worry, as a feminist, about the influence of the semi-naked, over-sexualised female pop singers of the day distracting a generation of girls from finding and fighting for their substantive freedom while they focus instead on what they look like and weigh.

In short, it's damn complicated for women, as it has ever been and possibly always will be. Certainly a totally happy marriage between female fashion and women's substantive freedom seems beyond our grasp still. But that doesn't mean we can't keep fighting for ways forward, especially those that don't divide women quite as much as Chrissie Hynde's recent outburst has done.

Personally, being slightly biased as a New Zealander perhaps, I think Lorde's example has the potential to lead feminism in a promising direction by suggesting to young women that they can be substantial and successful and sexy (and feminist) without having to be skimpily clad or, indeed, super skinny. And as she recently fired her management team, I am inclined to think - and hope - that she did this at least in part in resistance to their efforts to get her to conform her music and image to that narrower, skinny-sexy-girl-singer stereotype. She is a genius and a major musical talent, so fingers crossed this will be enough to secure her artistic freedom and success. I am holding my breath.      

*This* is not ok

Shame on the New Zealand Herald for reporting the brutal killing of this woman, Tara Brown, by her partner - for now allegedly; but he had a restraining order out against him for past domestic violence - using this image and captioning it: 'Ms Brown was described as "a beautiful girl with a beautiful heart"'.  The woman was beaten to death at the age of 24, leaving a young daughter motherless, and she is portrayed by the country's leading newspaper, on the very day of her death, with her tongue stuck out. Fuck that.  

I have done doctoral level research on the cultural representation of domestic violence victims and can tell you that this kind of passive-aggressive woman-blaming and disrespecting is not only standard fare for all media reports on domestic violence and homicide in NZ as elsewhere, but it directly contributes to the cultural - and so legal and political - minimising of domestic violence as a serious and fundamentally misogynistic crime.

NZ ran a 'domestic violence is not ok' media campaign some years back (2007) to raise awareness of the extent of the problem, but it portrayed women as perpetrators as well as victims, missing the point entirely. This was a fundamental (and typical) obfuscation of the issue and wasted opportunity to speak directly to the problem that affects almost one in three families in the Western world and is the number one killer of women across the world.

Ashamed to be a New Zealander today.



 

Dick flicks

I have posted on Dicklit (March 22) before,
but once more I feel compelled to stick my neck out on the subject of gender in film.

Yesterday, against the passionate opposition of our film-connoisseur 16 year-old, we went to see San Andreas.

There weren't too many surprises. Our hero, the bulky, part Polynesian who looks pure Maori, Dwayne someone, you probably know more than I do, is fairly stock macho, if a little browner. I hate the name Dwayne. He should be Hene, or something like that.

And why isn't his daughter in the film part brown? To me he looks all Maori and his children should be at least part Maori or Polynesian-looking too.

Altogether, having reviewed Mad Max Fury Road on a gender front here:

http://onewomanswo.blogspot.co.nz/2015/06/maxed-out.html

I can now report that COMPARED WITH OTHER ACTION FILMS Fury Road is far far far into the progressive future of gender-blended film than they are. Unlike San Andreas, Fury Road doesn't exaggerate the natural heroism of men, that's the first big difference.

San Andreas can't help but exaggerate male heroism. It almost makes a point of it. Our Dwayne does little wrong and practically saves the world; the scientist guy, with the face for radio, is a hero for forecasting the earthquake, which saves loads of lives; the English guy, who goes back for the daughter and prizes her out of the car just before it collapses on top of her, is a hero, if in a slightly more modest, smaller and Englisher, guise.

There are strong-ish female characters: the wife and daughter. But both have to be rescued in the course of the film, at least once each and both by our all-round hero, Dwayne. They also both have to have big boobs, boobs that are obviously Made in Hollywood.

There are no fake boobs in Fury Road. If anything, our hero, Furiosa, has her boobs strapped down to de-sexualise her.

We need to get Hollywood boobs out of disaster-action films. They couldn't be tackier. Even Dwayne's tattoo is less tacky than the fake boobs. If he were Maori, he could claim it as a tribal marking. But it would still look silly poking out of his shirt.

Maxed out

I don't know about you but I'm a little maxed out by all the RAVE reviews of the latest Mad Max as a feminist frontier film, just between you and me and this spookily sandy skull.

This weekend I was finally dragged out (just kicking, not screaming) to watch the much vaunted Part IV of the Mad Max series and was struck by three things: the number of men in the theatre, the number of men on the screen, and the number of sculls everywhere, sculls that were probably male too, but it's hard to tell - one can only hope.

What is it with men and sculls? I don't get it.

Anyway. Being a little more serious, I will say that apart from the sculls, which always seem to me more spoofy than spooky, I quite enjoyed Fury Road. The scenery/cinematography was striking and the guitar guy kind of cool and kinky in a not-taking-itself-too-seriously sort of way. Perhaps the film is a spoof on the genre of wanky macho action films. I like the idea of that!

But that's not quite what the film is, I don't think. Fury Road is still in that macho genre of male speed, violence and a sculls! Mad Max himself, a typical bulky, grunty sort of hero, bites the head off a live double-headed lizard in the opening scene, for starters. These are heroes men want to see, not women. I prefer my men to stick to eating cooked and headless creatures. Call me old-fashioned.

Still, there is Theron's gutsy (if gorgeous) shaved-headed character, Furiosa, as well as the basic feministy plot centred around abused women making their escape from the male-run world of desperate cruelty and debauchery. The world as it will become if men are left in charge to run things according to their base instincts until there's nothing left but sculls in the sand, so suggests the film.

Obviously this plot borrows heavily from THE REAL WORLD. If you go to many parts of our planet still, and all parts of it once, this is pretty much how it is and was: women systematically used by men as sex/domestic slaves in countries constantly - and unsurprisingly - at war, with their armies and even parliaments of angry, unenlightened, superstitious and sexist men under the sway of psychotic ass-hole tyrants. Why do men follow ass-holes so readily? What are men so afraid of ? God's wrath? But they invented God. Why are men so easily fooled? Why are so many men so incredibly sexist? Why can't they respect and honour women as fellow human beings?

These are questions I want a truly feminist film to ask and try to answer. I'm not sure the 'action' genre can. For me, the problem with the so-called feminism of Fury Road is that we're still mostly watching men fighting and the fighting is mostly productive. Guns and fists - mostly men's fists - still save the day. When the escaping women run out of ammo, Max heads off into the night and returns with a necklace of bullets enough to wipe out the world, as well as the other guy's blood on his face. Classic tough-guy hero.

Meanwhile, Furiosa is mostly a Joan of Arc character working within this basic storyline as a token female warrior in a male dystopian fantasy world. Max is still a macho hero who saves Furiosa's life when all the other women around her can't. Perhaps she saves him too, as the reviews of the film claim, and perhaps this is the feminist message of the film: that men need women to save them, just as women need men. But DO women need men? I'm not sure. How can women ever trust men to save them when they have consistently shown their preference for saving themselves? Are there any male heroes in real life? You can be sure there are none that use their fists.

And female heroes? well that's an entirely different matter. The hundreds of millions of women worldwide who endure lives of constant domestic abuse and domination for the sake of their children, or risk their lives to try and escape their violent partners, again for the sake of their children, as extensive academic studies attest, suggest that the world is full of women heroes. Malala is a powerful present-day example, as was Benazir before her.

Fury Road gives us a sexy female hero who helps save the world, but leaves the ultimate macho fantasy of men as tough-guy heroes who save women and the world mostly unchallenged. The 'feminism' in the film is too thin to provoke any serious rethinking of the basic myth of heroic masculinity that I believe is responsible for the enduring idolisation of males as primary and females as secondary support/servants; the world's governing mythology that underpins its enduring cruel and violent patriarchy.

Feminism - female liberation, equal power and respect between the genders worldwide - is hard; Fury Road makes it look easy, or at least uncomplicated, provided you have plenty of bullets and a big enough truck - and a big strong man on your side.

Still, if the uber macho action films previewed before the main event this weekend are any indication of the alternative in that genre, Fury Road is a step, even a giant leap, in the right direction. If we can get powerful women and anti-macho themes into all action films, then we might just see this deeply conservative genre work to open the eyes of the millions of men who watch these films every year.

For alternative points of view see:
http://time.com/3850323/mad-max-fury-road-eve-ensler-feminist/
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2015/05/26/how-mad-max-fury-road-turns-your-writing-advice-into-roadkill/        

Fuck dust

Seriously? Dusting shoes?

For the second time this week this same ad, inside the same catalogue of crap, has been smuggled into our house within the two quality magazines - from different countries - we subscribe to for their political and cultural insights. Fuck off already I say to that! And fuck dust! And while we're at it, fuck sexism and fuck global capitalism!

Put some serious hair on those feet the thickness of that green worm hair you got there and I might consider making an investment - god knows it's not getting any easier to buy birthday presents for my teenagers. But don't be suggesting I've got nothing better to do than pick up your dust with my feet! My feet have got better things to pick up.

A week in the world

* Gay marriage in the US Supreme Court no longer a shoo-in to win the approval of the court.

* Nepal on its knees with more than 5,000 dead from earthquake.

* Asylum seekers drowning on Europe's doorstep in great numbers, as anti-immigration voices rise and Australia's PM tells Europe to send 'em back, like he did.

* The UK general election, forecast to produce a slight conservative victory, which would give the balance of power to the left-wing Scottish nationalists.

* US riots over the repeated killing of black men by white police.

* Olympic gold medalist who competed as a man declares 'for all intents and purposes' s/he is a woman.

* 'Spinster' reclaimed by woman writer as a progressive term for those who embrace an independent life beyond marriage.

* The aspiring first woman leader of 'the free world', Hillary Clinton, accused -
by a woman -  of delivering 'the most inept, phony... and meaningless'
presidential campaign launch ever.

* And finally, from the world of waste and whales: Advertisers for not so cheap junk infiltrate serious magazines with drop out catalogues selling 'mop slippers' that clean your floors while you (female feet) walk all over them making sure not to miss a single spot, and cushioned toilet seats with 'lovely whale design' lids for your female finger to poke appreciatively that will be approximately 7.5 thousand times harder to clean shit and urine-soaked pubic hair off than porcelain. But never mind; you'll have the lovely whale design to gaze at while you work.

It's a girl!

Shrew shmoo to you

I'm sorry, 'shrew shmoo' is hard to say, but bear with me; it's all in a good cause...

You see, I was doing a bit of research on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew -- as you do -- and came across this interesting article from a movie script assessor, a male movie script assessor
http://www.scriptmag.com/features/taming-shrew-writing-female-characters-archetypes lamenting the lack of likeable female protagonists in the 2013 line up of big films, a line-up he also notes is woefully short on female leads of any sort, compared with the line-up of big films with male leads, most of whom are redeemably likeable and heroic. Just a mirror image of the real world, basically: lots of nice, heroic, non-violent guys; lots of violent, shitty, shrewy women.

Indeed this seasoned script assessor reckons that ALL the female leads in the big films of 2013 were shrews of one kind or another (read the article to see just how many kinds of shrew there are, according to Hollywood film writers and producers).

So what's a shrew?

In the English language, the word shrew is used to describe a woman given to violent, scolding, particularly nagging treatment... The animals of the same name were believed historically to behave aggressively and with cruelty, and to have a venomous bite;^[1] the term "shrew" was then applied first to a person of either sex thought to have a similar disposition, then to women alone.^[2] (Wiki).

So the aggressive and cruel 'shrew' mice are male and female, but the human equivalent 'shrew' is only female, that's how history (men) decided it and that's how Hollywood (mostly men) reinforces it. Shrew shmoo to you, men; it's not good enough what you do.    

Dicklit©

Last night I didn't get much sleep on account of my husband waking me in the early hours for wild and passionate sex. As the day broke through, so did he...

At least part of that scenario actually happened. But that's not the most interesting thing about it, as most sex scenarios told in print are fictionalised in some part, if not all parts. Who cares whether it's true or not (it is true, but who cares? Other than him and me, of course -- at least I hope he cares...).

What is interesting, or more interesting about these words, is that being written by a woman, from a woman's perspective, although a man is centrally involved, if published beyond this blog they would almost certainly be classified as 'chicklit' and summarily dismissed to the back page of the book section, as trivial girly writing, while the guy writing is taken seriously as literature proper and given, as is the case here, in The Weekend Herald (NZ) magazine "Canvas", precisely ten times the amount of coverage. Two 'man books' and authors get two full pages and five 'lady books' and authors get barely half a page. And the injustice doesn't end there.

While the 'dicklit' books, as I will now refer to any book written by a man, are classic 'man' books, one with an all-male cast, the other with a surreal, mostly male cast, with one female character who is mute -- ah, if only! -- and plenty of darkness, pain and punishment, the 'chicklit' books cover a wide spectrum of topics, including one where the main character is a man who 'transitions' to becoming a woman. The 'dicklit' books in other words are narrower in what they deal with than the so called 'chicklit' books, yet because they are written by men, written with a dick, you might say, they and their authors are taken so much more seriously than the books written without a dick, or, you might say if provoked enough, with a brain.

I think for every derogatory sexist term invented to keep women in their place we need a counter male term, just as we need 'Ms' to balance "Mr' as terms or titles that promote respect. If we can't manage equal respect, and we really CANT, then equal derogation will have to do. So 'dicklit' it is for me, for all male authors until further notice, except for Dickens, which is a little ironic.

The right to be a dick-head

This was the title of an article I submitted to The New Yorker after the attempted assassination of U.S. Governor Gabrielle Giffords in 2011. The article was praised but not published, and the magazine mistook me for a man. Never mind.



The recent shooting in Paris has reminded me of this shooting, though one hardly needs to go back that far to cases where men with guns have attempted or succeeded in assassinating progressive public figures, to prove some damn point or other. It all amounts to: 'My gun-dick is bigger than yours', in my opinion. You don't prove anything with a gun, merely that you're a dick-head. And our collective refusal to do what we can to politicise and reduce gun violence continues to sanction and support men's sense of right to be gun-wielding dick-heads.

Giffords' took a stance against guns, and her assailant didn't like it, nor did he like the fact that she was a woman, only the third woman ever to be elected to Congress in Arizona's history. Her predecessor and successor were/are both male. He put a gun to her head in broad daylight and pulled the trigger. He was at liberty to do so because of the right to bear arms in the U.S. and the gun-lobby that supports this right unimpeded (though Obama did try). He then shot at the crowd of people gathered to hear Gifford speak, killing six in total, including a nine-year-old girl and a federal judge.

The dick-heads in Paris were at liberty to shoot and kill twelve, again in broad daylight, largely because gun manufacturers in the West, the biggest dick-heads with guns, sell them the weapons and ammunition to do so for the sake of huge violence and killing-dependant profits. The wider politics in each incident are practically a side issue. Dick-heads with guns will always find a reason to kill if money is at stake.

One dick-head, one gun, six people killed; two dick-heads, two guns, twelve people killed, and many more injured in both cases. The maths is simple.

Dick-heads with guns kill and always will, as long as dick-heads and guns unite.