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Harassment of women by men at Summernats cannot be excused or ignored

Clementine Ford

As a former resident of Adelaide, I'm familiar with the vibe that settles over a place when a revhead event is in town. For years, I endured the transformation of what was a mostly pleasant city into an unsociable mess heralded by extreme noise, drunken louts and the toxic scent of burning rubber. When the Clipsal 500 arrived, my university girlfriends and I either left town or resigned ourselves to a week fending off boorish comments on the street from obnoxious boozed-up blokes high on petrol fumes and grid girls.

So I have sympathy to spare for the residents of Canberra who might not be quite so thrilled after Summernats returned for another year. Having just staged its 30th, "Australia's biggest horsepower party" might have officially ditched the wet T-shirt competitions and nude shows, but a predatory vibe still infects certain parts of the event.

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Summernats sexism: 'The street where you don't go'

It looks like something out of the 1970s. A world that many Australians thought had disappeared. Think again.

Rohan Thomson's photo essay for Fairfax captured a slice of this over the weekend, most notably in the image of a lone woman surrounded by more than 20 men (who were reportedly chanting, "Black top! Black top!" at her, Summernats code for "hey you in the [insert colour of shirt here], show us yah tits!"). But this is just boys being boys. Right?

Leaving aside the fact that there are definitely positive elements to festivals such as Summernats (it's a spectacle, there is an artistry to the vehicle building and/or maintenance and, I am told, a true element of beauty to watching these cars be pushed to their limits), there are still questions to be asked about why and how this kind of sexually predatory behaviour becomes normalised, particularly at events traditionally considered to be the domain of men.

I'm not interested in car culture and have never been to a festival like Summernats, but I have been in similar environments where the enthusiastic application of liquor, testosterone and mass excitement have resulted in a threatening or intimidating vibe. Like most women, I've had groups of men holler at me on the street to show them naked parts of my body. Given that this kind of obnoxious posturing is expressed most often by multiple men at once rather than individual men working alone, it seems reasonable to assume that part of the attraction lies in the pursuit of fraternal bonding. (It has certainly been offered up as an explanation for why high profile sports players engage in pack sex together.)

Indeed, the whole "boys being boys" excuse is regularly trotted out to defend this kind of activity, with women routinely instructed to stop being so sensitive because it's apparently all just a bit of fun and it doesn't really mean anything. (Sidenote: It is not an inherently masculine trait to find fun in sexual harassment. Also sidenote: if you are not the target of the "fun" harassment, you don't get to decide how those people should feel about it.)

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Although this kind of pack bleating only forms a part of Summernats (and certainly isn't characteristic of all its attendees), it's significant enough to have some people take steps to safeguard themselves from harm or avoid certain places entirely. Even those people who downplay the impact confirm the behaviour exists in statements like "you just have to know what to expect" or, ominously, "make sure you go with your boyfriend or a male friend and don't go to Tuff Street after dark".

When I asked members of my Facebook page to share their experiences (both positive and negative) of Summernats, one woman illustrated just how far-reaching some of these measures are: she works at the McDonald's closest to the Summernats site, and female staff members aren't assigned to the drive-through window throughout the festival's duration because of the high incidence of sexual harassment.

Another told me about working a stall at Summernats and having a male friend needing to pin her to the ground and cover her body with his own after a group of men surrounded her and started trying to pull her clothes off. And while there were women who talked about loving the cars and certain parts of the culture, even they spoke pragmatically about what they saw as the need for women to be aware of which areas to stay away from.

As a feminist writer, I'm used to being told that I hate men and want to demonise everything they do. It's inevitable that some of the responses to this piece will focus on how I don't need to worry, no man will ever ask to see my breasts and that perhaps that's what I'm really angry about. I will also be told that if I want to focus on "real abuse", I should look to the Middle East and Islam, and stop laying into the good men of Australia. But I'm interested in the cognitive dissonance that instructs people to, on the one hand, fiercely defend men against charges of misogynist objectification while insisting on the other that people (and women especially) should know what to expect when they enter these environments.

Why are women told in general to modify our behaviour because "there are (amorphous) bad people out there", yet when evidence of mass sexual harassment is reported at a specific event populated by people with actual faces and community standing, it's discounted as men blowing off steam and ... having fun?

Why are the events like the mass groping at Cologne used as an example of how immigrant men pose a threat to "our women", yet white Australian men acting in a similar fashion at a car show is dismissed as "boys being boys"?

Why are people okay with perpetuating the cultural belief that harassing women is not only something men like to do to express the bonds of friendship with each other, but that it's also not a big deal because those same men have declared it so?

These questions simultaneously propel me, frustrate me and confound me. We should all be ashamed to offer these excuses for toxic male behaviour. It's not funny and it's not healthy, and women continue to suffer because some people are altogether too committed to making sure men never have to change.

When I posted Thomson's photo essay on my Facebook page with the invitation for people to share their experiences of Summernats, one man commented: "Some one [sic] does not like to see men enjoy themselves."

The sentiment sat in stark contrast with an email I received from a woman detailing a pack assault that occurred the same year she'd had her top ripped off by a group of men. She wrote, "I wish it were banned. Every year I wonder how many young women have their fates changed."

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