I’m not going to blog about Alan Jones. I wrote about his “destroying the joint” comments and Feminist Dadded him just the other day and I don’t have any words left for him at the moment. But other people have written about him, and more.
Denise Allen: Jill Meagher and Alan Jones: My point is that some men feel that they have the right to rob us not only of our innocence and our right to feel safe in our own community, but of our sense of decency. That they feel they have the right to behave in either a violent, sadistic, misogynist, cruel way and believe they can get away with it.
Peter Wicks: Strip Alan Jones of his AO: Instead, I thought I’d make a plea to have something taken from him that may actually make him regret his actions and words ― his Order Of Australia.
Tara Moss: Mean boys the worst culprits: As I wrote this, a headline caught my eye. Violence broke out in a Sydney suburb at the weekend, including a brawl, stabbings and two drive-by shootings. The trigger for all this violence? A compliment paid to another man’s wife. Now imagine the headline: Woman Pays Compliment To Other Woman’s Husband – Violence Ensues. Such a scenario seems absurd, yet the notion of women competing ruthlessly with one another for the favour of men is a common narrative in pop culture. And somehow we’ve bought into it.
The Mind and Other Confusions has a long list, starting in 1988, of why he shouldn’t be broadcasting, in Alan Jones: A Review: This may be the worst of his crimes so far but lets reflect on the history of this so called political powerhouse and current king of the Sydney Shock Jocks.
And finally, Tom + Lorenzo point out the enormous plotholes that turned what should have been a sad and scary episode into “meh”: Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan: Look, Doctor Who is not meant to be examined too closely, we get that. But this falls apart with just a few questions… What we don’t understand is — You know what? Let’s just make a list. (via Hoyden About Town)
There’s a guy who leaves comments every now and then, always late at night, that always give me a chuckle. Like this one:
JK is still awaiting for dopey to try to and she can’t of course wipe some of these posts before she is sued for ? Imagine Gillard types trying to even talke the tight lid off a jam jar with puny white sheilas hands let alone toss a grenade where it has to go suckers -Guess we will have to investigate Maams PHD title thesis ? bet its crapp media bolloocky femmo garbage post modern junkette cripper critter collosal creepy anti male garbaological neon marxistfatarsedfemmo shit?
Gotta give him credit, that’s actually a pretty good thesis title. I think I’m gonna use it. And neon as an insult is so on-trend right now. I love wearing bright colours, so who am I to argue with being called neon?
Even his spelling is a work of art:
I believe I will have to speeke personally to Jules the carbonica deeoxxeede PM about this blogg site It is addictive certainly and I can’t leave it go–Holy Cow and thanks to the originators even though they hate my gutts– My buisness is failing -my teeth are falling out I have stopped my martial arts and I have not even moved my bowels for a while –shot to bits its dreadful there must be a law agin it babe PM come on baby Now where is my harp My God I will never get to Heaven what about you Kevin..?? oh turned down the catholic faith and went over to the other side –oh dear oh dear.. jk- nighty bye kidds.
There’s just something so refreshing about the way he uses English. He’s actually put some effort into his insults – unlike some douche called “Frank” who left this comment a while ago:
Eat shit you old fucking bags. Life sucks once you realize you can’t get shit for free any more, and act crazy and get away with it. Be nice, be sweet, be sane, and realize that for all your romantic talk, you’re just as selfish as any man out there. Get to the back of the line where you belong old bitches, go watch your Twilight movies and fantasize about how you were younger. You’re not Bella, I’m banging her tonight.
That’s right, “Frank” is going to be “banging” a teenager who doesn’t even exist because that’s the closest he’ll ever get to a vagina. I think we can all feel a little sorry for “Frank”.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure JK feels that I’m denying him his right to be published on News with Nipples. I’m mean like that. So, come on down JK. For one post only, the floor is all yours. Better make the comments worth it.
I’m uncomfortable about this thing we’re doing at the moment, where we dig up something from decades ago and hold it up in front of everyone, crying, ‘See? See? This is what they are really like!’. Because while it does give me joy to see Tony Abbott in the shit, this, and the Slater and Gordon stuff the MSM hounded Julia Gillard with, makes me nervous about what it means to be a public figure, and about what kind of politicians we’re going to have in the future. I don’t know about you, but when I was in my teens and early 20s, I did and said some pretty dumb shit and I’d hate for someone to use it to illustrate what I am like now, as an adult.
When I was a journalist I turned down some stories that seemed to be about getting back at someone – which goes some way towards explaining why I wasn’t a very good journalist. I’d like to think that other journalists would see negative comments from a long-past boyfriend/colleague for what they are, rather than saying ‘wa-hey News with Nipples was a dickhead when she was 21, we got us some NEWS’, but it seems increasingly unlikely. With the Slater and Gordon story, if the journos had put in a call to the law firm before publishing, they would have realised that they were being used maliciously, with a story that turned out to be a load of rubbish. The first story was published without comment from Slater and Gordon – making it gossip masquerading as political journalism – and the second story was ‘we’re not falling for Pickering’s grubbiness but here, read all of this grubbiness’. Again, without comment from Slater and Gordon. How embarrassing for them.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s revolting that Tony Abbott punched the wall on either side of a woman’s head to intimidate her. Violence – which includes making someone think you’d hit them – is very serious, and around one in three women will be physically or sexually assaulted by a man at some point in their lives. Some estimates put it at one in two. Hell, if you still don’t think it’s a problem we can talk about money: violence against women costs the economy $13.6 billion a year (2008-2009 figure). That’s the same amount of money the resources industry contributed to the WA economy in 1999-2000, and it’s the same amount the Federal Government will give to universities this year. In other words, it’s a fuckload of money.
It’s also evidence that Tony Abbott thinks women should be controlled – mainly by him – but there’s already an awful lot of evidence for that. Just because his wife and daughters are women, and he works with women, doesn’t mean that he’s Mr Equality.
And that Abbott referred to SRC president Barbara Ramjan as “chairthing” because she asked to be called “chairperson” and not “chairman” is evidence that, at 19 or 20 years old, he had a petty little mind. But I think his response is fair enough:
“It was silly, childish, embarrassing. It shouldn’t have happened but this is 35 years ago, a lot of silly things happen in student politics.”
I think almost all of us said some pretty dumb shit when we were that age. Of course, that doesn’t excuse being physically aggressive. (Lindsay Foyle has more about Abbott being a tough guy when he’s got a gang to back him up.)
But I can’t help feeling a bit icky about all of this. Every time the MSM publishes old dirt on someone – particularly dirt that’s unrelated to their ability to do their job, like going to a strip club in their own time – it makes me wonder, who the hell would get into politics? The answer: people who haven’t done anything silly/dodgy/illegal/fun/kinky/wrong in their entire lives. People whose youth can withstand the MSM. And how representative is that going to be?
I’m not saying that the MSM shouldn’t have published the story about Tony Abbott punching the wall beside Barbara Ramjan’s head in order to make her scared of him. At uni, he was a beefed-up boxer and rugby player with a reputation for aggression and it’s hard to imagine someone not being scared by the wall-punching. I’m just looking at the story in the wider context of what passes for political reporting these days. And no, I’m not saying it’s the MSM’s job to report on politics in a way that makes people want to be politicians. But it is their job to report accurately and fairly, and I don’t see a lot of that going on. Besides, I’d much prefer journalists to be asking Tony Abbott questions about what he says and does now, rather than about what he said and did in the 70s.
I wasn’t going to write about trolls. I don’t need to add my voice to the noise.
But then I saw that the Daily Telegraph is running a campaign against abuse on twitter, and that Ray Hadley is involved and well, once I stopped laughing…
… and laughing…
… I thought, what this IMHO of opinionated voices needs is one more opinionated voice. (Thanks to @enoughsnark for this excellent collective noun. Other great suggestions were a shockjock of opinionated voices (@bluntshovels), a Zemanek (@benpobjie), a talkback (@wombat1974) and a NewsLtd (@purserj). I like the last one a lot, but felt the collective noun needed to incorporate left and right voices.)
Now, leaving aside the fact that the Tele has confused trolling and cyber-bullying, it is this Ray Hadley who is campaigning against people saying abusive things:
Ray Hadley quotes from The Hamster Wheel video above:
“Thank you Julia you imbecile”
“The bloody stupid dangerous woman in the top job” (this was listener feedback that Hadley chose to read out, thereby giving it his approval. Most of us would see a nasty comment like that and bin it.)
“Our vitriolic bitter lying condescending arrogant facade of a prime minister” (listener feedback that Hadley chose to read out.)
“Take the gloves off Tony Abbott stop being Mr Nice Guy and rip and tear we need you” (listener feedback that Hadley chose to read out.)
As far as I know, Hadley hasn’t apologised for his abusive comments – unlike NRL player Robbie Farah. Farah is also involved in the Daily Telegraph‘s campaign and it was pretty quickly revealed that there was some pot kettle black going on: he’d tweeted that the PM should get “a noose” for her birthday.
In the course of this I have been alerted to a ‘tweet’ I made last year in relation to the Prime Minister which was in hindsight clearly offensive.
At the time I did think about what I had done and removed the ‘tweet’ soon after posting it but that of course doesn’t repair the damage.
I make no excuse and offer my sincere apologies. I can only say that I have learnt a lot in recent days and I hope that everyone in the community can learn about the pain that we can cause through such comments.
Hopefully the whole situation will only serve to encourage everyone to think about what we are really saying before we hit the ‘send’ key.
I reckon this is a pretty good public apology. There’s no pathetic ‘I’m sorry IF anyone was offended’ – which we all know means ‘I’m not sorry and I haven’t bothered to think about why my comment hurt people’. Mind you, that Farah sent the tweet a year ago and is only apologising now makes me wonder if it’s because he was caught out being a hypocrite. But it could also be that it wasn’t until he was on the receiving end that he realised how much these nasty comments can hurt people. I hope it’s the latter, because I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt.
It’s important that we allow people to learn from their fuck-ups, because learning from fuck-ups is one of our best qualities. It’s clear from Farah’s follow-up tweet at the time, that “no one said anything about suicide” (explained in the noose link above), that he didn’t realise he was saying the Prime Minister should kill herself. That in his mind, giving someone a noose was somehow disconnected from what that noose should be used for. It’s like those idiots who call a woman a slut because she won’t have sex with them. Derrrrrr-brains.
The real power in Farah’s apology is in encouraging people to think about what they’re really saying. If he’d just said sorry, it would leave it open for the “political correctness gone mad/can’t people take a joke” crowd.
Anyway, back to the Daily Telegraph. Knowing that the moderators at dailytelegraph.com.au have published some pretty awful comments in the past, I went searching for examples so I could say, “Ha! Hypocrites!”. I looked for stories involving Lara Bingle, Julia Gillard, Gretel Killeen – women who are regularly abused by readers and are rewarded by having their comments published. And I found nothing. All the comments on these stories have disappeared.
So I looked more generally at political stories – particularly those involving the words “carbon tax” or “asylum seekers” – and found nothing. All the comments are gone. Now, it’s possible that dailytelegraph.com.au stopped paying moderators to publish comments a while ago and, not being a regular reader, I didn’t notice. And by turning off the comment function, it meant that all the comments vanished. It’s possible.
It’s also possible that when they decided on their #StopTheTrolls campaign, they’d figured they’d better make themselves look squeaky clean and get rid of the evidence that they’ve been happily publishing anonymous abusive comments for years. If that’s the case, then they should have the balls to acknowledge it.
The DUFC is a monthly collection of the best feminist writing from Australia and New Zealand. It’s a great way to catch up on some things you might have missed, and to discover new bloggers. (And I’m very excited about hosting it later in the year.)
This month, there are interesting, challenging, fabulous and funny posts on: Motherhood & Other “Women’s Work”, Trans Issues, Sports, Health, Marriage Equality, Pop Culture, Geekdom, The Body, Media, Gender and Sexism, Violence, Politics, Disability, Race/Racism, and General Feminism. I’m not linking to those topics here because I don’t want to shit on lip mag’s sandwich. That would be rude. So click on this 52nd Down Under Feminists Carnival link and have a look around, I’m 100 per cent sure there will be something you like.
And many thanks to the fabulous lip magazine for putting this carnival together.
Alan Jones must have been worried that Grahame Morris was going to get the top Ernie Award this year, because why else would he say – in response to Julia Gillard announcing aid to the Pacific to raise the status of women to help end domestic violence – that women in politics are “DESTROYING THE JOINT”? It’s purely about missing out on the Gold Ernie, and nothing to do with the two-year tanty that he and Tony Abbott have been having because they didn’t win the election. How embarrassing for them.
He’s got a point, though. These uppity women, you let them go to school and then they get involved in politics and then they don’t want to be hit and it’s POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD and what’s a bloke to do? Sheesh.
Jones then repeated his suggestion that women in positions of power should be drowned: “There’s no chaff bag big enough for these people”. (By the way, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his sports and charity work for children and young people. Does he know that Youth off the Streets and the Starlight Foundation help girl children as well as boy children? Has someone told him that girl children grow up to be These People?)
Thanks to Jane Caro, the hashtags #destroythejoint and #destroyingthejoint were all over twitter on the weekend. Instead of insulting the man who seems a little too comfortable with violence against women – in April he said that trying to stab your ex-girlfriend to death is just “Shakespearean“, plus, you know, saying that women should be drowned – everyone just took the piss out of his statement.
Some Tweeps expressed concern that the attention was feeding Alan Jones’ desire for publicity. I understand their concerns, but #destroythejoint was about laughing at Alan’s misogyny, showing solidarity through ridiculing the suggestion that women were out to #destroythejoint. It was an opportunity to respond for every woman who has received a put down comment that irrelevantly cites her gender.
In the last 24 hours, women tweeters and their many male supporters have redeemed Twitter as a place where you can make a powerful political point without getting vicious or violently abusive.
It’s been such a deft but peaceful takedown, it’s enough to make you proud.
Words that were meant to degrade and undermine women instead became a clarion call to action. The women of twitter became keyboard warriors of the best sort, using social media to mock (and dare I say it, destroy) one of the most arrogant and politically powerful voices of MSM.
If “destroying the joint” means laughing at one-trick-ponies like Alan Jones and ending the gender pay gap and ending gender discrimination in the workplace and in sport and ending violence against women, then I say FUCK YEAH GIVE ME LASERS!
