Category Archives: public nuisances

At Home with Julia: didn’t fail to disappoint

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The AGE must have thought At Home With Julia was a doco, because they had an item about it in the News section today. “Slight it certainly was, but not fundamentally unkind – to the Prime Minister at least.” Er, no. Mocking Gillard’s partner doesn’t leave her untouched. Not the way they did it. I switched it on in trepidation, wondering what antidiluvian gender-policing tropes they would serve up. I wasn’t undisappointed. Besides Amanda Bishop’s HILARIOUS take on Gillards voice (She’s got such a FUNNY VOICE HURH HURH HURH – That stuff never palls!), the focus is all on her partner, Tim Mathieson (Phil Lloyd). And it’s all hanging on the side-splitting scenario of Man Living with a woman who’s More Successful than Him ZOMG!! WEARZ TEH PANTZORZ!!111!!

It’s relentless, from the first bar of the cliched piano intro. As the first episode opens, Tim is followed by a bunch of subteen boys who taunt him about his lack of manliness as he puts the bins out. That sets the monotonous pattern from then on as Tim fails again and again to live up to masculine standards. He even visits JG’s workplace with a sandwich. Emasculating! His day continues as a mounting litany of humiliations. Gillard calls him “my little T-pot”. And while the Tim Mathieson character bears most of the weight of the superannuated tropes, as he becomes ever more irritated and frustrated (and as oblique jokes about his manhood are made by the minute) we’re given to understand that JG’s relationship is doomed to failure. A woman simply shouldn’t be under work pressure. Everyone knows it’s the woman who makes the damned sandwich, amirite? Even in the first episode we feel the relationship is so strained it must eventually crack, and then she’ll be all alone with only Bill Shorten the terrier and Bob Katter for company, won’t she? And serve her right for being an emasculating prime minister and destroying her man.

Clearly – still – the idea that men taking the role of partner to a successful woman are pathetic, and they’re pathetic because they are then comparable to a woman, which is terrible, still has great traction. I’m just about to watch Rush: a woman running about in a flak suit with a gun might be frowned on by some conservatives, but no-one sees her as pathetic and laughable. Women taking on mens’ roles might meet with resistance, but it’s because they’re a subordinate moving up. A man taking on (what’s still defined as) a woman’s role is looked on as moving down.

I can’t help but wonder what this meanspirited and patriarchy-fellating little show will do to the real-life relationship. No matter how Mathieson presents himself in his everyday life, he now has the “man emasculated by successful woman” lesson rammed down his throat weekly, and it can’t help but affect how he’s treated by the public when he goes out. I imagine it can’t help but affect the dynamic between the two of them. And if anything happens to their relationship, then the world will be all, “See, there you go, ball buster.”

And I can’t help but wonder how many teenage girls are abandoning plans for a bigger role in the wide world, because you know, it just makes you unloveable and makes your partner miserable.

Thanks, ABC.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo

…Now I’m on a horse

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I apologise in advance for adding to the pixels devoted to Tony Abbott. Sometimes the urge to vent overcomes the need not to add to the noise machine. I was complaining in various places, before the election of Kevin in 07, about having to listen to the excruciating, grating sound of JHo’s voice droning out of the radio at every news bulletin and often in between. It reduced my quality of life measurably. I rejoiced at the thought of those times being over. Little did I know we were entering into a new paradigm where the bloody Leader of the Opposition got his voice – “nasal, high-pitched, hectoring, aggressive, negative, bludgeoning” – on the radio 24/7. Death or New Zealand are equally beginning to beckon.

For those who do not reside in Australia and therefore aren’t exposed to this excrescence day in and day out, Tony Abbott is a man who (1) can’t resist a photo opportunity and (2) has a pretty florid Action Man complex. Every day he’s in a hard hat, fluoro vest, or some other macho uniform pretending to take part in some salt-of-the-earth toil – I haven’t seen him in a flight suit yet, but give him time. So it was that when he was out on the range in Rockhampton with some horsey dudes, of course nothing would do but he must get on a horse too and have a Bonanza photo opportunity. Tones’ Action Man shots are always embarrassing, but this plumbed new depths of toe-curling awfulness. I’m not sure if this low-res Youtube vid does justice to just how bad it was.

You can get on a bike and kind of pootle off and give the impression you know what you’re doing. Sitting on a fast trotting horse – I’ll say it again (yes, I’m repeating myself, I said this about Ian Campbell’s equestrian heroics) is an action which thousands of ten year old girls perform faultlessly every Saturday at pony club, but you need to have put in the requisite hours to learn how to do it without looking like a panicking rag doll. Action Man, having failed to do this, looks a right doofus. You’ll know next time, Tones: horse: bicycle: Not the same thing!

A day or two later, you could hear exasperated noises coming from our kitchen as I was doing pre-work sandwich making and listening to Abbott deploy his unique, circular logic on AM. “Well, it’s very important that this matter be resolved and that this boil for the Government be lanced, [Erk! Do you mind? I'm buttering bread here!] because while the Government is completely distracted by the Craig Thomson matter it’s not able to properly attend to the pressing problems that our country faces…[False - The minority Gillard government is actually getting on with the job of passing legislation and, well, governing, despite the constant Dog and Pony show distractions thrown up by the Coalition.] …Now the reason why the Prime Minister has to deal with this matter and resolve it is because that there are more important things that the Government should be focused on. [Absolutely! So why aren't you talking about these very important things? ...Oh.] But the Prime Minister’s incapacity to deal with the matter of the Member for Dobell means that these other problems just get worse…Blah blah Integrity… Let the sun shine in blah.” He thinks we’re so stupid we won’t even notice that if people are distracted – not completely distracted as he puts it – he’s the one doing his best to do the distracting with his energiser-bunny childish ping-ponging all over the place, both physically and verbally. So disingenuous, and so lacking in the dignity and intelligence we’d want in a leading politician, but of course it’s Gillard who’s always copping the scrutiny and being found wanting.

It was nice to see, the next day, that someone else noticed. “Yesterday, opposition leader Tony Abbott veered close to over-reach…He told the ABC in the morning that ”while the government is completely distracted by the Craig Thomson matter it’s not properly able to attend to the pressing problems the country faces”. He made the same claim later in the day while arguing that normal parliamentary business cease in order for Gillard to make a statement about the matter. The ”distraction” has been generated all along by Abbott.”

Yeah.

Poor Journalism nearly causes Road incident

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Yesterday, as I learned while driving along Burke Road listening to PM, Lara Giddings had just replaced David Bartlett as Tasmanian premier, and DID A JOURNALIST IN THE PRESS CONFERENCE JUST ASK THIS QUESTION? OH YES SHE BLOODY WELL DID. *Head threatens to explode*.

(Transcript)
…As a single woman taking on the role, do you, are you concerned perhaps you’re giving up the potential to have a family? Is it compatible?

I like to think there’s a split second where Giddings gives the journo a death-ray glance before she breaks into her, apparently signature, charming smile. But that’s probably wishful thinking. Like most of our politicians, she knows she has to roll over and play nice for the press gallery, however shit her immediate questioner may be. They have the power to make her look bad. And she knew she was wedged. So instead of saying “what an appalling question, and beside being not relevant to the topic and none of your bloody business, you wouldn’t be asking a single man that if he was in my shoes today”, (Headline that day: Tasmanian PM proves Feminists Have No Sense Of Yumour!1!”) she said

If I had the choices, then, uh, it might be an issue for me, but I’m yet to find that man.

Which broke my heart. No, not because she hasn’t found a man! Because a woman who’s being interviewed on a rather important achievement and should be in a position of authority still has to submit to insults like this and laugh along.

I don’t know who the “female reporter” was, although I have my suspicions, based on level of reporting fail, proximity to Hobart and obsession with femininity performance.

Although Giddings tried to have a red-hot go at talking about her actual policies and qualifications for the job, this was what the Australian put on its front page today – “Leftist Lara still looking for Mr Right”. FFS.

To those of you who are going to say this is trivial and not political and build a bridge, this stuff matters. Sure, little girls are watching and learning that they can become Premier. They’re also learning that if they do, people will quiz them in public about their marital status and sex life and that for a woman, not being partnered or having children is a terrible loss of face. And they will get the message, still, that if you’re a woman and you want to aspire to the top jobs, you risk having to give up the family thing, but men don’t. (And, no, reporting family matters about Tony Abbott or Kevin Rudd isn’t the same thing.)

Journos, I know you’re having a difficult time of it, but is wilfully choosing braindead stupid questions really necessary? And does advancing the male-as-default-woman-as-curiosity narrative really have to be part of your job description?
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

Hurrah for Commonsense!

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It’s not often that you see an office worker pin up a newspaper article in her office in close proximity to the door, so that no-one walking in could fail to see it.

Hurrah for Ted!

DON’T let political correctness ruin Christmas, Ted Baillieu has warned schools and other community groups.
The Premier said Victorians should embrace the festive season.
He said schools should not back down from running Christmas pageants, concerts and nativity scenes for fear of offending minority groups.
“A Baillieu government expects school principals to take a reasonable and commonsense approach so all Victorian children have the opportunity to enjoy the simple pleasures of Christmas,” he said.
The warning comes after some schools and community groups imposed Christmas bans in recent years.

Ah, “some schools and community groups”. Could some journo – I suppose it’s too much to hope for a Hun journo, but could someone with journalistic credentials please do an in-depth investigation to find out just how many schools and community groups are actively forbidding expressions of Christmas cheer? I suspect the answer might be “very few”, or “hardly any” or “really could not find any examples of Christmas festivities being forbidden as such, just an overwhelming meh-ness about the whole rampant sentimentality and consumerism thing”, but that might crimp the annual Festival of “Let’s Whine about Political Correctness”, or Boltmastide. In short, we have no way of knowing how much of this urban myth is true and how much is invented out of whole cloth, but Baillieu is getting unlimited traction by fixing this non-problem. So important, we’re told, is the Attack on Christmas that the editorial was written about it. “Premier’s Xmas gift to children!” “…Nativity scenes and children singing carols and exchanging cards could once again be part of Christmas celebrations at Victorian schools.” Funny, that, because carols and cards and all that malarkey have never ceased at this end of town.

Anyway, I am guessing our cube jockey, like the Hun commenters, swallowed this annual Boltmas legend whole and had the article displayed so that the exceedingly diverse collection of people who had to visit her office would have their unchristian noses jolly well rubbed in this happy news.

Can we please examine this earth-shattering rescue of Australian culture for a moment, because like most sweeping statements made by Liberals, it contains a pretty illiberal undercurrent. If the new Premier now says that organisations will no longer be allowed to ban tinsel and Santas and Bethlehem dioramas, does it follow – as it surely must – that such displays are now compulsory? Will legislation brought in, and how does that reconcile with the separation of Church and State (if the Federal government’s obsession with funding chaplains and Religious Ed and faith-based private schools hasn’t destroyed it already?) Or will dissenters simply be subtly monstered, like the one example they did find – some Public service wretch who has now been “counselled”?

I have, really, as a person whose mother was a staunch Anglican for many decades, tried my best to think how I might feel if I was a practicing Christian faced with the cancellation of my kid’s school’s nativity play in favour of some other kind of end of year celebration. As church and community groups regularly put on Carols by Candlelight and other celebrations, I hardly think I could claim that had destroyed my ability to celebrate my religious holiday in the way I see fit; just not in that particular place. I might even feel that religious belief and religious festivals are part of the private sphere. Sure, I could imagine I might be a bit pissed off if I was really keen on the whole thing, but I don’t think they would be nearly as pissed off as I am at having my taxes spent on chaplains, RE, and faith-based private schools. You gunna do something about that, Ted? Thought not.

Why I’m not sorry for Stephen Fry

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Looky this apologia by Stephen Fry for his much blogged and retweeted remarks on women and sex. If you have the time. It goes on… and on… and on. As blogger QoT says, nothing says “I don’t care” like 2,872 words.

So Stephen.

Your original remark was criticised in the media, and you want to get out of it by claiming you’re just a naive retiring type set up by the wicked interviewer? No. Without minimising the tendency of the media to beat things up, you’re a highly paid media megastar, if you hadn’t noticed. Here’s part of the quotation so everyone knows what we’re talking about:

“I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want,”

a lot of your female and/or feminist fans, who love you loved you and see you saw you in many ways as an ally, won’t just point out the wrongness of it – they’ll be hurt and sad. But of course, only your hurt matters. (Oh, and comparing people’s responses to rape? Bonus arsehat points.)

The gist of your latest post – all four pages of it – seems to be that of course you didn’t really think that. In which case, the appropriate response would seem to be “I’m really sorry I made that arseholish remark, I was being flippant and a bit sarcastic and I don’t really hold that view. I can quite understand why being described as cold, calculating manipulators is insulting to women, as well as inaccurate.” What you have said – “there are people out there who actually swallow the notion that I am so stupid as to believe that women don’t enjoy sex. That I not only believe it but that I am dense, dotty and suicidally deluded enough to make a public declaration of such a crazed belief…” doesn’t really cut it as an apology. Because you did kinda, sorta say it, didn’t you? And not only on that occasion.

You’ve simply been asked to own your words. Because just saying you were “taking a thought for a walk”, while presenting yourself as an innocent shut-in who could never have imagined his words would have an impact, is just disingenuous. I’ll spell it out for you. You are a media p-r-o-f-e-s-s-i-o-n-a-l. Your protestations are as convincing as Michael Schuacher whining “Who would have thought that a tyre blowout could make a car spin off course!” You know damn well that when you’re in a media interview and you want to take a thought for a walk, you get your brain to walk with it on a leash.

Now, you want to know why some people are still angry? When you did your silly Twitter flounce, you were responsible for this piece of deliberate bastardry:

[BoganetteNZ: Now after reading this I sent Mr Fry a tweet asking him if he’d been misquoted. Surely he had been – surely someone as intelligent as he is wouldn’t say something so incredibly stupid.
He tweeted to his nearly two million followers the link I’d sent and my name. He said nothing more.
My Twitter almost crashed with the @ comments I got following this.

Just to demonstrate exactly how Boganette “attacked” you, here’s a copy of the offending tweet:

BoganetteNZ: @stephenfry PLEASE tell me you were misquoted and you don’t actually believe this http://bit.ly/aNjbuT

Oh, that’s right, not an attack at all. Just a request for clarification from someone obviously presenting themselves as a fan who’s confused because you’ve unexpectedly retailed a cliche from Misogyny Central.

And for that, Stephen Fry, Boganette got hateful tweets and personal emails for about two straight days from your followers, “FUCK YOU WHORE STEPHEN FRY IS RIGHT”…”"Hysterical Bitch”, ..You get the idea. (I’d imagined your followers as fairly erudite types, but I was wrong.) Forgive me if I take your moaning about how persecuted you feel with a pinch of salt.

You flounced, retweeted one person’s comment to everyone to offer her up as some kind of scapegoat although her tweet was perfectly civil, and you didn’t expect such a pile-on? I’m going to take a thought for a walk here, and I agree to own it fully (feed, de-worm and throw bones to it) if I’m wrong. Perhaps you flounce to elicit a storm of praise from your blog commenters and pile-ons on your opponents. This makes you feel loved. It’s a pattern of behaviour not unknown in the blogosphere, and not one I admire.

You should put your big man-pants on and own your own words – and apologise to Boganette.

HULK SMASH! ! !

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That’s a reference to Feminist Hulk, of course. And I was channelling Feminist Hulk on Friday reading he AGE on the train to work. It’s a worry when you’re in a crowded carriage and your tiny purple shorts start to split…

Picture of Kevin Rudd pulling his shirt apart to reveal a superhero costume with "Rudd to Gillard: I'll Save You"

No, no Disney damsel in distress narrative here at all.



I’d heard an excerpt from the Phillip Adams interview the night before so I was well aware that Kevin Rudd was going to stop sitting around in a sulk with the ALP logo erased from his placards and join the campaign properly, once he was physically up to it. As in, join the campaign. Like one of the merry band on the road to Mordor. But our news media chose to describe Rudd’s return through the lens of … Male White Hero returns to Rescue Damsel in Distress.

With a side serve of We Knew a Sheila wouldn’t be Up to the Job. Move outa the way, Gillard, and let the men do this properly.

HULK SMASH!!

Still from the spoof video Kevin Rudd "I will survive", juxtaposed with an ad for an article from the Business section

Tools getting you down? I know the feeling.



I didn’t put those images together – that was on the same page as the article headed “Ex-PM Rudd to PM Gillard: I will save you” by Michelle Grattan and Michael Gordon. Was a disgruntled subeditor making a veiled comment there? If they still have any, that is. And was there any evidence that Rudd actually said anything about “saving” anyone? There isn’t any in the article. But the actual journalists were all on song about the White Knight Rescue narrative.

This from Michelle Grattan, who I once respected so much:

“Knifed one day, needed the next…
…Move over Julia. Kevin’s here to help.
…Rudd looked positively prime ministerial when he spoke yesterday.

And the next day:

It’s the ultimate girl-meets boy encounter…His place or hers?

HURL!

…the woman who grabbed his job from him.
(John Faulkner was) a prime matchmaker for this bizarre marriage of convenience …

There’s more, but I’d really like to keep this nice Sunday dinner down.

So, Gillard can’t win. If Labor wins the election it’ll be “she couldn’t do it without Kevin10!1!”. If she loses, well, a chick just wasn’t up to it.

Headzup to the Oz media. You’ve already been called repeatedly on your crap (non) reporting. And I’m not Robinson Crusoe with my disillusionment and anger.

Shape up, please, before we end up with this.

Earworm of the week: Sorrow!

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I could hardly see for the tears as I stumbled into work today. Sure, last week’s news was gut-wrenching enough, especially the Kevin Rudd presser, but this was nothing in comparison with the suffering I was witnessing today. You shouldn’t even listen to the breakfast news when you’re as sensitive as I am.

First up there was the revelation that a rich old white guy, who’d held onto the highest office in the land for over a decade, had been denied the fun new position of international cricket honcho. It’s not the first time “cricket” and “tragic” have been used in the same sentence for JWH but now the words have been sadly reversed. Tragedy is too mild a description for this terrible blow.

Then, after I’d recovered sufficiently to get out of the house and drive to the station, there was the voice of Ian MacFarlane, like velcro dragged over gravel – possibly more than usual as he struggled to contain his emotion – telling of the persecution of “the miners” at the hands of the cruel, perfidious government. “The Miners”, you understand, not “mining corporations”, because (as Pavlov’s cat and Tigtog pointed out) that would make Twiggy and Gina Rinehart sound like members of the Rich list rather than plucky little blokes and blokesses who go down pit every day and come out blackened and dishevelled.*

“The guvmint holding a gun to the miners’ head! …An aggressive attack!…Xenophobic comments made about foreign ownership! A fullon attack by the guvmint on the mining industry!1!”

I’m ready to go to the barricades to try and just get the concept of a fair go back to this country. Now if you’ll excuse me I think I’m going to cry again. I just can’t bear this treatment of helpless people.

Are you a sex addict, or merely a dirty slut?

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Sex Addiction is the popular indisposition du jour for the privileged and famous. First it was all over the Tiger Woods coverage, now we’re told Russell Brand’s been suffering from this terrible addiction.

It’s interesting that behaviour similar to that which constitutes “sex addiction” in men is described as “hookup culture” and sluttiness in women. (And by “similar behaviour” I’m really being generous to the Brands and Woods of this world. I haven’t heard of any young female undergraduates maintaining a team of minions to bring multiple sexual partners to them.) As a “sex addict”, you can obviously get away with a lot more than some girl who is merely a slutty slut, and enhance your fame and reputation as a wild playboy at the same time. And if you’re a popular male comedian checking into rehab for your Sex Addiction, then you are suffering from a Condition and deserve sympathy, unlike the disgusting hoydens who are destroying Western civilisation with their wanton behaviour.

Just as an aside, the description of Brand’s father and their sex-tourist trip to Hong Kong, where Dad taught his son to treat women as a commodity without any corresponding Dadly education about condoms and sexual health: what would the commentary be like if his mum had been the one on the trip? I can just imagine.

Conservatives have rushed into print with numerous articles of the “Hookup Culture Hurts Women” type. This is how it’s framed. If Hookup Culture hurts men, or boys, it’s left dangling if you’ll excuse the double-entendre, because the boys/men in these effusions are either (1) Only out for one thing, because they’re totally rooled by their biological urges and can’t help it, or (2) invisible – the writer is interested in focusing on female participants as slutty sluts, but not so interested in their partners, who are entitled to the behaviour (see (1).)

No double standard here at all.

Who would Jesus Bone?

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By sheer coincidence, just before Catherine Deveny was sacked from her AGE gig for tasteless twitters about iconic Orstralians, I clicked onto a masterpiece by Lawrence Money in a spirit of WTF-is-he-saying now. Deveny’s twitters were, to put it mildly, a bit ordinary, but look at what Fairfax publishes on its “blog” section: Could Pauline Hanson be right?. (Previously: “Three Cheers for Pauline Hanson!“)

Money has been around forever on the “social” pages, drip, drip, dripping a kind of slow poison against anyone he sees as being leftyscum, but evidently in Modern Times his previously thinly concealed xenophobia, sexism and homophobia has kicked up a notch. Here’s another one: Enoch Speaks from the Grave!. That is, Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell. But obviously Money’s on first name terms.

A graphic representation of a Charlie Chaplinesque face with bowler hat and a rather Hitlerish moustache.

 
I’m starting to see that little guy’s moustache in quite a different way.

I don’t know that if I were in Fairfax management’s shoes – a strange place to be, I agree – I would necessarily find Deveny the worst trollumnist on the payroll. A writer who, in her own time, although in a public forum (her “passing notes in class” defence was unbelievably silly), made a couple of rather horrible bad taste jokes about a two very successful people; versus someone who, in the Fairfax online space, contributes to the ongoing drip, drip, drip of polemic against asylum seekers and people of other races and religions?

If I were Rove or Bindi, I’d be hurt by the Deveny tweets. They would be like a little savage kick to the gut, those jokes. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. (And of course they are not me, and possibly they weren’t offended at all…)

But more importantly, Rove and Tasma and Bindi aren’t threatened. “Offended” doesn’t cover how an immigrant or asylum seeker might feel, perhaps traumatised already by war and suffering and then subjected to “opinion” articles like this. Many of them, of course, won’t see the article, but they’ll certainly be aware of the zeitgeist which it feeds. “Offended” doesn’t cover physical personal injury at the hands of people who are given courage and targets identified by this stuff. People have died and they are still dying, some just around the corner from me, so perhaps this is a little close to home… literally.

And Money keeps drip-drip-dripping out his poison in the pages, social and online, of the AGE. I don’t know that I’d bone either of them. But I know which one “offends” me more.