This might not be a phase, this might be a bit more permanent, I’ve kind of always really like aussie hip hop, because it connected my loves of performance poetry, music, politics, & comedy. Heres a few of the things that I’ve been listening to recently.
In the midst of my quarter life crisis I bought a juicer, and am currently enjoying juicing ALL THE THINGS & inviting friends over for juice related adventures.
Sweet potato fritters & green juice
Strawberries, blueberries, banana, apple, kiwi in greek yoghurt with chia seeds yo
Salad, feta, yeah.
Maybe if you rode to work, you wouldn’t have to worry, about how many eggs you ate today.
Yeah, so in an endeavor to be healthier & happier in mind body and soul, I’ve been focusing on making positive changes in the things that are actually quite easy to change. So there’s that. We should do nice things for our bodies, not out of self loathing, but to love them & take care of them.
Recently I made the mistake of flicking through The Advertiser, this article was published over the weekend, titled ‘Revealed What Makes Women Happy’.
Looking at this shitty information graph my spidey senses for sexism started tingling & my ‘this looks like bullshit’ alarms started going off.
Starting off I’m just going to address what this graph indicates.
Looking at the ‘source of happiness’ pie chart in terms of what is included is
All of these options don’t seem to be ‘sources of happiness’ that doesn’t require leaving the home, the kitchen or the mall. All of which is reinforcing stereotypes and expectations about what women are interested in & what women are ‘good for’.
Just to clarify, I don’t think that being interested in any of these things is bad, but I think that women are more complicated and have ambitious that aren’t just domestic or based on relationships of nurturing a family, getting married, & being the glue that is holding together the ‘family unit’. How very hetro-normative too.
Please take note that ‘Role as a wife’ + ‘having a husband/partner’ (same thing twice) & ‘role as a a mother’ + ‘kids’ (same thing twice) was included. Which is something that I find confusing in terms or portraying data thats interesting & looks like its included to reinforce that women are think getting married & having babies is very important to them.
The fact that ‘Friendships’ is included as being the most important in terms of being a source of happiness, doesn’t make up for the majority of bullshit options and I’m assuming lack of options for women to choose.
I’m not sure if other options weren’t included, or whether The Advertiser just chose to include the results that made the results look skewed in terms of making them look like women’s only interests and ambitions are to be the perfect little home makers.
But I’m calling bullshit of making it look like that women don’t derive happiness or aren’t interested in such things as:
These kinds of interests aren’t even included in the pie chart of ’What women want more time for‘ which was:
Ugh.
The data apparently came from “Today’s Woman survey of 6253 Australian women by NewsLifeMedia and parenting website kidspot.com.au“. A website that gives me the feeling that only gathered the survey from women who are interested in “trading in their careers for the role of wife, mother and friend”, which is I stress again, is an option which is fine for women to choose. But, I think is totally biased and skewed in terms of data.
It would be the same as me collecting data, by talking to women who are interested in hand sewing their baby’s clothes, with questions that only give women the option of rating ‘how much happiness they get from being a mother’.
Opposed to going out & collecting data from many different locations, to get a test sample that is more representative of society. I really have my doubts that many of these women interviewed weren’t single/students/queer/from a culturally or linguistically diverse background.
Basically I think this data comes from a really shitty source, that in my mind doesn’t have authority of ‘What Women Want’ at all.
I really that within this simple graph that The Advertiser is misrepresenting women, and is another example of the media misrepresenting women, making us seem like our only goals is finding a man, pushing out baby’s & finding the time to shop & stay trim.
What I find really alarming is that this article was written by a woman - Natasha Bita, National Social Editor.
In the article, which you can read online here she writes:
“Australian women worry more about their weight than their children’s safety or money.
But food, shopping and pets still provide more pleasure than sex.
What women want most is the ”three Fs” – family, friends and financial security.”
Which is also sending out strange mixed messages about women, we are apparently really into being mothers, but we’re more concerned in our weight and body image, to the point that we struggle with our love of food, which is more of a pleasurable experience and interest in sex. Which kind of makes us sound like we are shitty parents, for putting our worries and anxieties about our bodies first and pushes again the stereotype that women aren’t interested in sex, and sex is all about men’s pleasure.
The quote from the article above sounds like a sponsored message from Tony Abbott or Alan Jones to push that we aren’t interested in ‘Destroying the Joint’ by getting involved in anything outside the home, or just being a consumer.
According to the article the report also goes on to say
‘‘It’s hard for her to balance her work, friendships and self with all the demands at home,” the report says.
”She feels a lack of time and is often overwhelmed.”
(Perhaps this is because women are still expected to be the sole carer of children? I’m also really confused as to why there is no mention of their husband’s/partner’s input to their family, or the domestic duties I’m assuming that they are only dealing with women with partners).
The article then ropes in an ‘expert opinion’ with Professor Barbara Pocock, director of the Centre for Work + Life from University of South Australia, who said
“women who ”step back” into part-time work while their children are young often enjoy a better work-life balance.”
(I think that we should be encouraging women to be getting out into the workforce, working full time, or working on their education to sharpen up their skills & qualifications. Which needs a combination of a mixture of swapping the gender roles in terms of who is doing the majority of the work in the home & making child care more affordable for working families).
”We’re encouraging young women to become doctors and engineers and managers, and we need the workplace to respond,” she said.
”Many women working full-time are finding it really hard to hold it together.
”It stresses children and families, it can contribute to relationship strains and it’s not good for community fabric.
(Indicating that women are not capable of coping with work/life balance. I’m not sure if the point is to say that women have too many expectations to be all things to all people, in work and home, being the perfect wife/mother/worker. But ultimately seems to be putting the blame on women for making relationships strain & ‘being bad for community fabric’. Ugh.)
”Women’s biggest source of stress, however, is maintaining or achieving the ideal body weight, affecting 72 per cent of women.
”The pragmatism she displays in other areas of her life turns to irrationality and stress when it comes to her weight,” the report says.
”Not until the age of 65 does she stop worrying about it.”
(I think its interesting that the pressure to have a ‘ideal body’ is mentioned, but doesn’t really explain what the source of these stressors are coming from. Whether thats from herself, her husband, the media, society, whoever. Nor does it really mention if there is a healthy solution, or ways that women can get around this. But this also makes women sound like they are self absorbed with the (somewhat shallow but complicated) issue of their body image, over the issues of raising kids/career/money/etc, which i think is also not very helpful in terms of a positive portrayal of women).
The article then goes on to an interview with 18 year old University students about their friendships with other young women, which in my mind doesn’t really make sense, as much of the previous text is focusing on married women with babies. It seems like more of a trick to make it seem like the research gone into this article is more balanced than it actually is.
Although, I do really agree with the sentiment that women having friendships with other women is very important and influential in terms of giving us happiness. We need support systems, we need connection, we need people who can understand and empathize with our experiences. Women mentoring other women, and being allies to each other is something that is throughly underrated and underutilized in terms of female empowerment.
But I’m confused to why the friendship connection wasn’t asked of the women who are battling time commitments of their work, babies & husbands. Is it because its likely that the family unit alienates women from other women? That they no longer have time to have meaningful friendships with other women? I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do think that interviewing the carefree uni students about their friends, is a sneaky way of trying to give this bullshit article some kind of positive spin.
Because I’m a young person, thats very engaged with social media, of course I posted a picture of the graph onto facebook/intagram/twitter & these were some of the reactions & comments it received:
“Who wants more hours in the day to do fucking chores?”
“I don’t even want to get married, where do these figures even come from?”
“They had an article about a month ago that basically said it was women’s fault that their husbands leave them/lose interest in them/have affairs because they don’t ‘take care of themselves’ after marriage and ‘let themselves go’.. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with that newspaper but yet I still read it every day because it’s Adelaide-based. We really need a non-conservative local paper.”
“Heres news for them. Women like to go to the pub, we drink beer. We also work in men dominated areas and easily out do them. We work faster, more efficiently, with less accidents and wear on machinery. And we are able to THINK more efficiently because we are not afraid to confront our weaknesses and turn them into strengths. There are advantages to being the underdog, ladies…”
“It is a useless and unrevealing chart. All it says is “women want more” and a list of categories in which they want it. The same for be true of men. And cats. And trees. “Respondants were allowed to give more than one response”: SO WHERE IS THE FUCKING “CONTROL” IN THIS EXPERIMENT THAT ACTUALLY MAKES IT M-E-A-N SOMETHING???”
“But it must be true. That is what Tony Abbott has been telling us all along! I have not read the Advertiser in decades”.
“Makes good kitty litter liners, dog poo wrap, fire starters…I thought that’s what it was sold for?! You mean people actually read it?!”
I do acknowledge that many of my friends and peers are activist-feminist types, so its not exactly a snapshot of of the wider communities’ view on the article, but i think these are voices that are important to listen to.
To try to wrap this up.
While, again, reinforcing, its fine to be interested in these things, family: having a partner & children, I’m not into shaming women for things that they choose for themselves, but I’m not so much into pressuring women to take a ‘traditional’ path. Women shouldn’t be portrayed as only having domestic ambitions. I think this is damaging to us. We are more then this outdated 50′s identity. We are more than housewives. We aspire to be more than mothers and homemakers.
This really is shitty journalism, its probably quite mild in terms of the other stories that are out there. Regardless, I am really disappointed that it was written by a woman, although I’m not sure if the content or the angle was really her fault, or moreso just doing what is expected to tow the lines of the Advertiser. Maybe I’m an idiot that doesn’t really have an idea about how the world of journalism works, or what its like to be a women trying to make it as a writer in a male dominated industry. But I can’t help but feel deeply disappointed.
I’m tired of these stories, and I’m tired of being pointed at and ridiculed because ‘I’m the one with the problem’. Getting dubbed a feminist killjoy (a title I’ll wear like a badge of honor) that apparently is taking everything a little too seriously.
FYI the problem isn’t that ‘I see sexism everywhere’ the problem is that you don’t see it. Sexism is engrained into our society to the point of normalcy, and you are fooling yourself if you think that we have achieved gender equality already because things are ‘better now than what they were in the 50′s’. There is still alot of work to be done.
We can’t achieve gender equality by promoting that women are more interested in retreating back into the home, because its apparently all too much for us out there in the big bad world. The fact that we can find power in our friendships and connections isn’t even offered to us as a potential tool or solution for dealing with the struggles that we might encounter. But moreso as ‘friendships’ being good for our lonely experience, who can laugh at our little anecdotes about the funny things our kids did today, while we chat to them on the phone while washing the dishes.
So I’m calling bullshit on this one, & I’m demanding better representation of women portrayed in the media. This isn’t good enough.
From the right: myself, Melinda from Collective Shout, Simone 2012 National Young Labor Women’s Officer & Sarah a member of Young Labor
Hey EVERYONE! Check me out! I’m a Men’s Rights Activist! Watch out for my Radical Fedora Views! I just got my copy of the game signed, and am hopeful to make it out of the friend zone soon
Recently I went and saw the film ‘Miss Representation’ at the Mercury Cinema which was showing as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2013 #MissRepADLFringe . This wasn’t the first time that I had seen the film, but i felt it was worth the refresher and the potential conversations that would be had in the foyer afterwards.
Watch the extended trailer below.
Its a documentary film that explores how women are portrayed and misrepresented in the media, but also how women reporting & being in the media is also skewed as it is a male dominated industry. I really recommend everyone should see it, especially if you are interested in pursuing a career in the media.
It also has one of my favourite quotes in the opening of the film
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
- Alice Walker”
The moments of watching this film that ‘hit me so true’ were:
1. I can see the problem of males dominating the media & decision making panels already.
I work in community radio, I’m an activist thats interested & involved in politics & unionism. In the sphere that I am operating in amongst volunteer work, student politics, non-profit organisations, circles that aren’t as powerful or established where the male dominance is pointed at as an examples in the film, is also here too.
On the radio show I co-host ‘Pride & Prejudice’ the team behind my show the majority are male, myself being the only female in the group. The boys I work with are pretty informed in terms of feminist issues, but I still wish I wasn’t the token girl of the group. Often I’ll find myself at meetings where we are planning campaigns, I’ll be sitting around a table where everyone else is a white man in a suit, & I’ll be the token girl in a sundress, that is fighting to be heard, to have my contributions & expertise taken seriously.
I think that being involved in politics can often give you that sinking feeling, where you feel like you are surrounded by idiots, yet somehow feel too stupid & too unconfident to raise your voice. I’m not sure if that experience is unique to being a women or minority involved in politics, but men tend to talk with confidence & not have their ‘authority’ on issues questioned as much.
Most days I feel like i am fighting to be here. Whether it be fighting with ‘left wing’ men who want to tell me that they are better feminists than me, being patronizing, or undermining because I’ve chosen to take the path where I am in situations that is more dominated by men, where I can slug out the harder road & be more directly around people that may still need convincing on certain issues. As far as I’m concerned you’re not my comrades ‘mate’, especially when you’re trying to speak for me or over me at meetings. Or when I’m trying to tell people that I want to aim higher than the tokenistic place that has been set up to benefit me/other women i.e. ‘women’s officer’ over head honcho leadership positions. Or trying to convince men that they shouldn’t be more bothered/upset with trying to find a space for themselves within feminism, but to make the space that they occupy feminist.
Even when you think about ‘The Internet’ as ‘the media’, which I think is underrated in terms of young people being able to write their own narratives, stories & consume their peer’s media (think twitter, tumblr, blogs, reddit & Facebook). Its not a very friendly place to be a women, nay a Feminist, whether it be Facebook groups that constantly post rape jokes or the neck beards on reddit making sexist comments on your posts as soon as they find out you’re a woman/Feminist.
Between the MRA’s, bros, girl hate, and trolls especially, it becomes ridiculously frustrating, when a decent amount of the ‘flaming’, trolling & fight starting that goes down, when it seems to be done just for ‘entertainments sake’. As in, people/men posting provocative offensive things directly & indirectly to people, with the intention of upsetting people (U MAD BRO?) for entertainment. In my eyes this is another form of bullying. And bullying is the lowest form of entertainment.
2. Women mentoring women is awesome.
Because people who are similar to you, i.e. the same gender as you, with similar interests and aspirations, can provide the insight over the hardships they have faced in the midst of working their way towards their goals.
In my time in politics, student politics especially there has been very much a push to have skill sharing sessions, and women only workshops where we talk about how we deal with confrontations with men. There is also exciting movement to have mentorship opportunities between established female politicians and young women who are interested in pursuing a career in politics.
The film showed alot of hope, in terms of what we can achieve when we all band together.
“Women have to work twice as hard, to be considered half as good as a man, luckily, that isn’t too difficult.”
However.
Despite the great deal of work that this documentary does cover, I do think it does still have its limitations.
While I do think it is important to push that we should appreciate female intellectuals, opposed to only worshiping women as being life support to breasts, and the way that she looks shouldn’t come into the equation when rating her for her worth.
I was disappointed that there wasn’t more conversation based around why women chose to present the way they do & how they feel about themselves. Many of the speakers in the film wore make up, wore skirts, had a feminine appearance etc.
I don’t like the assumption and the view that the film pushes that the only reason that when I choose to wear make up or shave my legs, is because I’m a victim of the media and patriarchy. Opposed to my own choice, to look the way that I want to look, and as a form of self expression.
When I use beauty products, or primp or whatever, its not with the idea of trying to look like an ideal image that I’ve seen in a magazine. That concept to me just seems so basic and shallow, the kind of ‘tween issue’ that isn’t covered in any depth in a Dolly magazine, along with the dangers of ‘Sterotypes’ at high school of people assuming you’re a ‘nerd’ & the ‘emo subculture’.
For me using beauty products, or exercising for the purpose of weight loss and fitness about doing something as a form of self care, that makes me feel good about myself. It also just seems kind of boring not to, not everyone is interested in presenting in a ‘natural’ way, speaking as someone who has facial piercings & a tattoo. Femininity is basically seen as doing something, preening yourself, expressing yourself, and masculinity is equated into the lack of doing ‘stuff’, grooming, being natural. I think it would be brilliant if we all could move away from these ties to genders, and let people be who they want to be, and look the way they want to.
I really think that the small things can give you confidence, i once had a really hideous week & had fake nails put on for the very first time, kind of as an experiment and also because i wanted them to look amazing in the case that I had to give the world the finger & tell them all to fuck off.
I hate the idea of perpetrating that women are constantly victims in one form of another.
I don’t feel weak when I wear red lipstick, I feel strong.
I don’t think that women are necessarily aiming to be the ‘object of desire’ when we dress sexily, but perhaps maybe to be the subject. The person who is making a conscious decision to do something that makes us feel good about ourselves, or even just to experiment to find out what does make us feel good. We shouldn’t shame women for that. Image and beauty is subjective, and in the eye of the beholder, the beholder isn’t just men, but ourselves.
I don’t think the way to fight these pressures and expectations that women face is to completely reject the popular notions of beauty that is portrayed in the media to the extent that you attack other women over it & shame women (including yourself) who; enjoy dressing up, paying attention to fashion trends, wearing make up, being conscious of their image, have a fitness regime for the purpose of staying slim or losing weight.
It doesn’t feel empowering to look at the magazines and be told ‘cheer up about feeling like/being an ugly fuck, you should probably just not bother, because these magazine are totally Photoshoped yanno, no one actually looks like that’. Only to go outside onto the streets or onto the internet and see many stunning women that aren’t photoshoped on magazine covers.
This is just another dichotomy that alienates people, the film makes it seem like we need to pick a side, that the issue is black and white, be the victim & primp or reject the notions, & be ‘empowered’. I think the issue is more complicated and grey.
This is a dichotomy that I have seen, where we have people on either side pointing at each other saying:
‘You only wear revealing clothes because you don’t respect yourself’
‘You should shave your legs, have some self respect’
‘I’m not like the other girls, who only care about looking good for guys, they are all stupid skanks’
That last one is very a la Taylor Swift’s song that perpetrates girl hate ‘You Belong with me’. What if that song was more like:
“She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts
She’s cheer captain and I respect her right to wear whatever she wants and participate in traditionally ‘feminine’ activities, because I understand that life is not about condemning another woman’s personal choices just because she doesn’t ‘deserve’ the boy i have a crush on”
This spilt just creates a battlefield between women, where we are fighting each other, and judging each other on our actions. Theres no solidarity, or comiradairy. Women fighting women is not the answer, its a distraction.
I’m pretty much over having to fight over dichotomy complexes, whether it be issues like this or virgin/whore dichotomies about women. We are more complicated then just one thing or the other, not everything is either strictly bad or good.
‘I don’t hang out with girls, they’re so bitchy, I’m only friends with boys’
I have friends that pride themselves on that fact that ‘they aren’t like the other girls’ who like ‘going to town, wearing make up and heels’ as they feel that means that they are better and more intelligent than them. They feel good about themselves for ‘hating’ these girls, rejecting femininity to get approval points from their guy friends or men they like.
This just creates more alienation, more girl hate, & perpetrates the idea that women are always competing with each other whether that be ‘trying to be the most beautiful of them all’, or trying to simplify women to just the way they present, by trying to push that they are lesser, because ‘they are trying harder to be beautiful & be attention seekers, because they have low self esteem’. There is nothing wrong with wanting attention or wanting to feel beautiful.
One choice is not better than the other. Being aware of these expectations and how they are created is important but; giving the message to girls that the only reason they present a certain way, is because they are a victim, or too stupid to realise they that are a victim is not beneficial to women.
It just brings up that bullshit where people say:
‘REAL women have curves’
‘REAL women don’t want attention, they want respect’
‘REAL women don’t need to wear make up to feel good’.
All of this just results in more girl hate, and shaming women for things that aren’t actually harmful or bad.
You know what a ‘real’ woman does? WHATEVER SHE DAMM WELL WANTS.
It just feels like no matter what we do, we can’t win. We’re dammed if we do, and dammed if we don’t.
We’re dammed if we wear lipstick (really basic example) because: its apparently only we’re doing something to please others not ourselves/that we don’t think that we’re good enough/adjusting ourselves for the male gaze/don’t have any self respect/because we are a victim of the media’s portrayal of the popular notion of beauty.
& we’re dammed if we don’t: because we’re not pretty enough/not taking care of ourselves/don’t have any self respect/gross/masculine/not making an effort.
Giving tribute to the poster and Rosie the Riveter
And at the end of the day people will judge you no matter what you do, so you might as well do what makes you feel good about yourself. So long as it doesn’t take a swipe at other people for their choices in the process. We should be encouraging people to respect women in no matter what forms, or shapes they come in, whether they choose to wear lots of make up or none at all. What might make one person feel uncomfortable and degraded, might make another person feel powerful, strong and beautiful.
With all the conversations we have been having on the Radio Show ‘Pride & Prejudice’ around the topic of Polyamory, alternative relationships, long distance, open relationships etc, i decided to do some reading up on the topic. I’m still yet to get into the real meat of the text as yet, but this is the most memorable quote of the book so far.
