Clementine Ford attended Bettina Arndt’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on Why Sex Matters So Much to Men at the Wheeler Centre last Thursday. She tells us why she vehemently disagrees with Arndt’s views on men, sex and whether women should say yes to their partners even when they’re not in the mood.
‘Life as a hot-blooded heterosexual man isn’t much fun these days!’
So began sex therapist Bettina Arndt, when she brought her particular brand of gender politics to the lunchtime soapbox at the Wheeler Centre last week. If you’re not familiar with Arndt’s work, the Cliff Notes are simple: heterosexual men in married or de-facto partnerships aren’t getting enough sex, because women are too mean and selfish to dole it out to them on a regular basis. Women have this idea that they have the right to say no to sex whenever they want. But ladies, when you won the right not to be maritally raped, it didn’t mean you could withhold sex for the next 20 years. Frankly, men are trapped in a sea of endless negotiation. They’re up against it and they don’t know what to do.
I assure you, I’m not exaggerating. All of these ideas and more form the general basis of Arndt’s politics. In fact, apart from the bit about women being mean and selfish, Arndt said all of those things last week – even the brazenly offensive part about women thinking they have the ‘right’ to say no to sex.
It’s not necessarily surprising that these views exist. When you live in a society that finds it acceptable to seek advice from the Catholic priesthood on the choices women make regarding marriage, you can pretty much guarantee that anything else is par for the course. In her extremely superficial representation of sexual interplay, Arndt is less guilty of reinforcing the status quo than she is of legitimising it.
And it’s not as if she has no experience. Regardless of how vehemently I might disagree with Arndt, I must at least acknowledge that she has a minimum of 30 years’ research under her belt and presumably a mass of subjects who’ve been all too willing to share the details of their sex lives with her. Put simply, I do not disbelieve her when she says her male subjects are dissatisfied with the level of physical intimacy in their marriages, and that they wish they could get more slap ‘n’ tickle.
But the problem is in how limited that pool of subjects might be, and how willing they are to address their own complicity in the matter. Arndt reports that single women do not exhibit the same eradication of sex drive as the married or partnered women in her studies, yet she fails to draw the obvious conclusion. If, removed from a domestic partnership, women remain sexually vital and vibrant (or are, as she shudderingly refers to them, ‘juicy tomatoes’) then surely the problem isn’t the women? Surely, it’s the bounds and interplay of that domestic partnership?
In fact, Arndt doesn’t really seem to acknowledge the reality of most domestic partnerships at all. Rather than ponder what a job plus motherhood plus unpaid domestic labour might do to a woman’s libido – particularly when statistics continue to show that they carry the burden of that labour – Arndt instead wonders why women wouldn’t choose the ‘easier’ option of satisfying their husbands in the sack. Women spend an awful lot of time and energy doing things to make their husbands happy, says Arndt. Things like spending hours shopping for him, trying to find nice underwear, or scrubbing the kitchen floor to make it perfect! Surely ten minutes of letting him do it to them would be easier?!
It’s usually not difficult to find flaws in Arndt’s logic, but this has to be one of the most glaring ones. Not only does it absent women’s sexual desire from the equation, but it’s erected (heh!) on the idea that women primarily make men happy not by being an independent, equal partner, but by performing domestic chores for them. Indeed, it establishes sex itself as a domestic duty that wives are expected to perform in order to placate their menfolk. Now, men are all adrift, grovelling on their knees for a scrap of attention. Frankly, it’s unseemly.
Of course, I can think of nothing less likely to get women going to bed knickerless than the idea that they probably should. But when I asked Arndt if she thought obligation was the enemy of desire, she replied that it wasn’t – because desire could be switched on. ‘If you put the canoe in the water, people will happily start paddling,’ as she wrote in one of her articles. Ladies, lie back and let him frolic in the ebbs and flows of your Lake Titicaca!
While it’s true that desire can be stimulated after initial contact – many people could claim to have begun sex not really feeling like it, and had quite a pleasant time after all – is that really what we should be arguing is the payoff for women fulfilling their duty? And is that really the level of intimacy men are after?
When further questioned as to why she seems to only demand change of women, Arndt argued that she was often pigeonholed by journalists. Apparently, whole reams of discussion about the complexities of men and women, not to mention male obligation, were failing to make it into the final copy of all those people determined to paint her as a woman-hating harridan.
But the last I checked, those journalists weren’t writing Ardnt’s articles. They weren’t delivering her soapbox at the Wheeler Centre. And they certainly weren’t standing before a fair-sized crowd arguing that if men are only having an affair here or there in a 29-year marriage, they’re mostly succeeding at monogamy yet getting no credit for it.
Perhaps the reason Arndt’s men seem to have so much trouble getting their wives ‘in the mood’ is because, in Arndt’s world, those wives have already spent all afternoon on their knees in another position – namely, scrubbing that kitchen floor. Solve that problem, and I think you’ll find that women are a bit more open to some casual frottage.
Until then, I’d rather not take sex advice from a woman whose alternative for me not actually having sex with my husband is to just lube up and give him a quick wristy.
Clementine Ford is a writer and broadcaster who has appeared in the Age’s Daily Life, ABC’s The Drum, as a guest on ABC TV’s Q&A and as a host on Triple R’s Breakfasters. She blogs at www.clementineford.com.au.
You can view Bettina Arndt’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on Why Sex Matters to Men on our website.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered on the web over the past week.
It’s a bit weird to think that one of the hottest topics of conversation in the literary world, from London to New York, is a book that began as a self-published fan fiction e-book, and is now an international erotic bestseller backed by a multi-million dollar deal.
Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek article, ‘Spanking Goes Mainstream’ on what she diagnoses as a ‘current vogue for domination’ (or, ‘the stylised theatre of female powerlessness’), epitomised by Fifty Shades and explored on HBO’s new zeitgeisty series, Girls. Roiphe says it’s a reaction to feminism, by women who find ‘free will a burden’. The internet has exploded in angry response.
For those wondering what all the fuss is about, The Vulture has produced ‘The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Fifty Shades of Grey’, including reasons why it’s just not sexy:
‘There are ways to write sex well. This is not that. This is like Tom Wolfe–bad sex scenes but punctuated by non-sex scenes that are gut-wrenchingly awful. A passage where we find out what Anastasia Steele looks like via girl-frowning-at-her-appearance-in-a-mirror exposition should be punishment for vehicular manslaughter in some states.’
Novelist, critic and Big Issue books editor Chris Flynn has been blogging a lot for Meanjin recently. This week, he writes about the influence of the Hatchet Job of the Year Award on the kinds of reviews that are being published; wondering if the rewarding of snark promoted by the award might be encouraging reviewers to be gratuitously mean, making it more about them than the work under consideration. ‘As a casual reviewer myself I’m beginning to wonder if I’m just not mean enough to be cut out for the task,’ he writes.
Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones. ‘If decapitations and regular helpings of bare breasts and buttocks are all you require of your television, step right up,’ wrote one unimpressed reviewer.
He singles out the infamous New York Times take-down of Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper (‘a textbook on how not to write fiction’) and Neil Genzlinger’s evisceration of television’s Game of Thrones – and its viewers (‘Dungeons and Dragons types [with a] fairly low reward threshold’).
Adam Mansbach (of Go the F**k to Sleep fame) has a very nice little satire in the New Yorker on the art of asking authors to ‘blurb’ (ie. endorse) your book. Here’s an excerpt from his pricing chart:
This is your first book. (+$100)
This is your first book in a decade. (+$150)
You’re still using the author photo from your ‘promising début’. (+$75)
I know you. (–$50)
I met you once. (–$20)
We made out at a party. (+$25)
We got drunk together at a literary festival once, but I could tell you were thinking the whole time about how now you could ask me for a blurb. (+$75)
Adam Mansbach with the book that made him famous.
One of the most popular articles we’ve published this year was our look at the pink-and-pastel hued ‘Lego for girls’, officially branded Lego Friends. This week, Salon reports that Lego executives have agreed to sit down to talk with SPARK, a group who hopes to get the company to include more characters in its standard Lego lines, and improve the Lego Friends line, which Time magazine compared to Disney Princess, ‘with its emphasis on physical appearance and limited career choices’.
Of course, Disney Princess – and Lego Friends – are fantastically successful with consumers, if not commentators. Salon is sceptical, thought its reporter says ‘it would be wise for a company founded nearly 50 years ago with the imperative to create toys for “girls and for boys” to remember that goal doesn’t mean “girl toys and boy toys.”’
The New York Times has launched a new regular series, ‘By the Book’, in which they interview writers about what they’re reading and recommending. They kick off with David Sedaris, who is characteristically entertaining and enlightening.
David Sedaris: ‘Whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like’.
Among his confessions? ‘I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives. The worse off the subjects, the more inclined I am to read about them. When it comes to fictional characters, I’m much less picky. Happy, confused, bitter: if I like the writing I’ll take all comers.’
The book that made him want to write? Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. ‘His short, simple sentences and familiar-seeming characters made writing look, if not exactly easy, then at least possible.’
Christine Gordon, bookseller and Stella Prize committee member, delivered our Lunchbox/Soapbox on International Women’s Day, to a rousing crowd response.
She talked about why sharing women’s stories is central to the success of feminism, reflected on some of the storytellers who’ve resonated most in her life – and explained why we need to give stories by Australian women their proper due. Here is the edited text of her talk.
There are so many options when talking on International Women’s Day.
I could talk about the history of this fine day. I could talk about gaining the vote, gaining the right to work, to education, to divorce, to have an abortion, to choose a certain lifestyle. I could talk about my anger – or indeed, the collective anger of women. I could talk about my pride in being a feminist, or the collective pride of feminists, for all that has been achieved and all that will be achieved.
But what I remember after listening to someone talk is not statistics, nor facts: I remember stories. That’s why I work in the book trade, as opposed to nuclear science.
Stories – my stories and other women’s stories – are what bring me here today.
Stories are what The Stella Prize is all about. The Stella Prize, an Australian version of the UK’s Orange Prize, will be an annual prize for the best book by an Australian woman writer published that year. The concept emerged following a panel held at Readings, on the 100th International Women’s Day, on the under-representation of women writers in our reviewing and prize culture. Conversations after the event led us – a group of passionate readers, writers and publishers – to begin the arduous task of setting up a prize to raise awareness of Australian women writers. We have some way to go, but we are determined; excited about both the process and the end result.
It seems right and just to me that such a prize should exist. Feminism – and International Women’s Day – is about sharing stories. Today, I want to reveal the journey of shared stories that led me here.
Growing up, I was one of those kids who read. I lived on the outskirts of Melbourne, on a hobby farm surrounded by paddocks. Some weeks, I would read a book a day. It was my transport. I favoured stories written by women; stories written by Australian women. Some of those books, some of that writing, stays with me now.
Puberty Blues: After reading it, Chris Gordon knew ‘that I certainly would not be jumping into the back of a van at the whim of some bloke who doesn’t even know the meaning of angst’.
Let me paint you a picture.
It’s 1981. I’m a relatively sheltered 13-year-old, catching the bus to my all-girls’ private school. I’m wearing a kilt and a blazer. There is a kerfuffle on the back seat. Sailing over heads, a tattered copy of Puberty Blues lands in my lap. Written by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette, it’s a proto-feminist teen novel about two 13-year-old girls from Sydney who attempt to become popular by integrating themselves with the ‘Greenhill gang’ of surfers. On that bus trip up the Calder Hwy, the back-seat tough girl (you know the one) grabs it from my lap with a snarl. ‘Give it ’ere,’ she says. ‘That’s mine.’
It took me another year to read the book, when a copy (that very same one, I believe) did the rounds of Year Eight. We schoolgirls talked about it endlessly. I had no idea people lived like this. More importantly, I had no idea why they wanted to live like this. I guess that was the whole point of the book.
I knew then that I certainly would not be jumping into the back of a van at the whim of some bloke who doesn’t even know the meaning of angst. Oh no: I was meant for better things. From that moment on, I knew I was a feminist.
It took me another few years to really work out exactly where I positioned myself. I found out mostly by talking too much – but in the end, it was by listening to other women’s stories.
Publisher Louise Swinn says she is ‘in this fortunate position of having people’s stories in my head all the time’. I appreciate what she means. Knowing other people’s stories (fictional or not) is a passport. One of the gifts Lette’s novel gave me back then in the early 80s was a love of the Australian woman’s voice; a voice that doesn’t bullshit. The Australian woman’s voice is the voice of honesty.
Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne takes in the Melbourne literary scene, with frequent mentions of writers like novelist Helen Garner and historian Robyn Annear. Again, it is a gathering of women’s take on the world, to make sense of your own landscape and your own truth. Looking at a bookshelf is like looking at a person’s diary. There it is: all laid out; harbouring secrets and desires among the words of others.
‘What was impressive about Damned Whores and God’s Police was its call to arms – to join this vast, optimistic political movement.’
Towards the end of my high school years, I was given a copy of Anne Summers’ book, Damned Whores and God’s Police. It is the story of Australia and the women that helped shape it as the nation we know today. A missing chronicle of Australia. It drove me to preach out loud (and often) on my soapbox about the need for women’s rights. It gave me the anecdotes I needed when justifying my position.
What was impressive about Damned Whores and God’s Police was its call to arms – to join this vast, optimistic political movement. Summers taught me that being a feminist wasn’t just about saying no. It means engagement. I wanted that engagement. I wanted choices. And I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be part of a collective that stood up and transformed the environment we lived in. I learned you do that best by sharing stories and experiences. You can change the world by forming friendships – or indeed, by forming committees. Dare I say, The Stella Prize is a beautiful example of that.
The original cover of Monkey Grip: ‘I read this book because I was working out who I wanted to be.’
My memory of reading Helen Garner’s coming-of-age book Monkey Grip at university was actually all about the mutual analysis of it, the mystery and possibilities of the characters. I read this book because a friend gave it to me. It was the topic of conversation over many long nights. We couldn’t work out if we wanted to be playing starring roles in the novel or to be better, more smug, than those inner-Melbourne urbanites. (I was living in Brunswick at the time.)
I read this book because I was working out who I wanted to be.
The group of women friends I made in that first alcohol-fuelled year at university are the very friends I tried all of my beliefs on before I went public. They were the first to hear me read passages from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, to dish politics, to wear purple for International Women’s Day. And they were always the first to hear me cry. Now, of course, we continue to swap books, TV shows, quips about our lives – and we do so with the knowledge that all of what we are now, all of our politics and meanings and quirks, can in some way be attributed to one another.
Monica Dux, in an essay for Kill Your Darlings, wrote that the difficulties people have had in judging the legacy of such a book like The Female Eunuch is that the personality of its author tended to get in the way. Does this happen to male authors? Are their personalities ripped apart and displayed with public glee?
‘It’s not easy to talk about so celebrated a publication without lapsing into clichés and banalities, and repeating the things that have already been said, not once but dozens of times.’
Monica knows though, that these accounts need to be told over and over, to all and sundry, because there is always a teenager, just over there, waiting to hear.
Kirsten Tranter is committed to supporting younger writers. In an article for the Wheeler Centre last International Women’s Day, she wrote: ‘I think the future belongs to the young women starting to shape the literary landscape, such as Angela Meyer’s super-sharp Crikey blog Literary Minded and the editors of the new magazine Kill Your Darlings.’ This is true. Different influences, experiences and histories must be recorded, must be reviewed, applauded and built on, for feminism to stay vital and current.
Every ten years or so, a feminist must reinvent, repurpose, or reinvigorate a belief. Being a feminist allows us to continue to be active and to give continual support to those striving for equality and respect.
There is an inspiring passage in Anne Summers’ introduction of the newly released version of Damned Whores and God’s Police:
‘I don’t want to wait until I am 98 to try and explain to a 25-year-old what moved me and so many of my generation to activism and revolt. I want, while there is still some chance of communicating, to tell you the story of the modern women’s movement. I want you to know how it started, what we did, and what it did to us. In hearing our story, I hope you will also learn something about yourselves, about where you stand in this great movement of change, and that it might just move some of you to reach out for the torch. It is time for it to be passed.’
To finish, I want to tell you another couple of tales about women who write about how it is.
Thea Astley’s Coda: ‘There are four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, babysitter, burden.’
I’m going to start with a quote from one of my all-time favourite books, Thea Astley’s Coda: ‘There are four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, babysitter, burden.’
Coda did not win prizes like Astley’s other work; perhaps because it is about an older woman. But did have an impact on me. Kathleen, the strong and funny heroine of the novel asks herself as she reaches the ‘burden’ stage of life, what am I going to do with myself? She wants to remain independent, but she also needs people to recognise that she now needs support. In her candid prose, Astley is showing us a woman who refuses to be invisible.
Thea Astley published her writing for over 40 years, from 1958. At the time of her death in 2004, Astley had won more Miles Franklin Awards than any other writer. She won the prize four times.
Miles Franklin: Her gender influenced the critical reception of My Brilliant Career.
Let me tell you another story…
It is about a woman called Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin: also known as Miles Franklin. Her best known novel, My Brilliant Career, tells the story of an irrepressible teenage feminist growing to womanhood in rural New South Wales. This heroine, Sybylla, is one of the most endearing characters in Australian literature; she obviously had much in common with Franklin herself, who wrote the novel as a teenager.
It was published in 1901, with the support of Henry Lawson. Remember, International Women’s Day was not even official until 1910. As Franklin had feared, her gender influenced the critical reception of My Brilliant Career. When her identity as a woman was made public, judgements about its literary merit were common.
After its publication, Franklin (who could not survive as a writer) tried a career in nursing, then as a housemaid in Sydney and Melbourne. It’s interesting to note how many Australian women writers have had jobs as teachers, nurses, cleaners to support their art. (Ah, women’s work: never quite done.)
While working in these roles, Franklin contributed pieces to the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald under the pseudonymns ‘An Old Bachelor’ and ‘Vernacular’. During this period, she wrote My Career Goes Bung, in which Sybylla encounters the Sydney literary set. The book, sadly, proved too hot to publish; it did not become available to the public until 1946.
Franklin was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature. She actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin is set to have still more of an impact on Australian literary life – Australian women’s literary life – through her actual namesake, The Stella Prize.
Let me finish with the words, the honest, no-bullshit words, of a great Australian author, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, from My Brilliant Career:
As a tiny child I was filled with dreams of the great things I was to do when grown up. My ambition was as boundless as the mighty bush in which I had always lived. As I grew up it dawned upon me that I was a girl, the makings of a woman, only a girl, merely this and nothing more. It came home to me as a great blow that it was only men who could take the world by its ears and conquer their fate, while women, were forced to sit with tied hands and patiently suffer as the waves of fate tossed them hither and thither, battering and bruising without mercy.
Here, on 8 March, 2012, on the 101st International Women’s Day, let us ensure, together, that this does not happen.
Christine Gordon is events coordinator of Readings and a committee member of The Stella Prize. This is the edited text of the Lunchbox/Soapbox she gave on International Women’s Day 2012.
Our article on the politics of pink and pastel Lego for girls provoked furious debate on our Twitter and Facebook accounts last week.
Writer, philosopher and dad Damon Young, one of those who spoke to the Wheeler Centre for last week’s article, shares his thoughts on why pink bricks and ponies may be dodgy, but can be subverted by savvy parents for imaginative free play.
I’ve been playing with Lego for over thirty years. First, as a kid, now as a dad. Over the decades, Lego’s become more ‘boyish’: less smiling minifigures in space-suits, and more snarling villains, stubbled heroes and licensed film tie-ins. More guns, tanks, missiles, fast cars and so on.
Girls can play with all of this, of course – my daughter does. But they often don’t, because they’re taught that girls like pink, flowers, horses, fairies, nail salons, cafe chats and so on. Play is gendered very quickly.
From what I can tell, Lego was once gender-neutral, then ‘boyed’ itself to get market share. If boys like cops and robbers and Star Wars starfighters, then Lego would have them. Bam. Sales skyrocket.
Many girls responded to this typically: it’s not for us.
Having gained a foothold with the boy-branded toys, Lego can now brand with girl toys: hyper-feminised minifigures who like to chat with girlfriends at the cafe before hitting the beauty salon, for example. Not an alien or grave-robbing archaeologist in sight.
Now, is this a problem? Yes, because more knee-jerk sex divisions are dodgy. They uphold traditional ideas about gender roles: girls talk and worry about beauty, while boys fight, die and save princesses. The problem is not necessarily the gender traits: as if one has more value than the other. The problem is that we grow up thinking that they’re ‘natural’; that our education, professional and domestic lives can be no other way. This is what so many toys do: they’re typically conservative, because they recognise and reinforce the easy market categories that already exist, such as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’.
But this is not the end of the story. Together with the media, family life, schooling and employment, toys clearly help to shape our gender identities. But there is no evidence for a straightforward causal relationship between ‘X toy’ and ‘X personality’. Plenty of independent, smart, well-educated, strong women played with Barbie, My Little Pony or Cabbage Patch dolls – I’m married to one of them. She did not simply play out the Barbie fantasy: the dolls were taken from their Valley Girl fantasy-land and given new identities and plots. And regularly taken apart.
Lego is perfect for this. Much of the magic with Lego happens, not with the off-the-shelf play – although it’s clearly good for concentration and motor skills – but with the later free play. All the bits go back into the bags and boxes, and are transformed into new characters, vehicles, buildings. My son’s space police starships and fire stations became a library, a museum, a house, a cafe, and a hundred other things with wheels, walls and sometimes guns.
My hope is that the girl-branded Lego can be used in this way. With good encouragement from parents, girls need not be stuck with traditional feminine characters and scenes. If pink bricks or ponies are first step, they are not necessarily the end of the road.
Parents can provide primary colour bricks alongside the pinks and purples. They can prompt children to remake their cafe or salon, rather than keeping them pristine on the shelf.
If a family genuinely cares about gender equity, and provides a home life of robust respect and reflection, Lego play – regardless of its colour – will reflect this.
If you’re a fan of imaginative free play for kids, you’ll love our Children’s Book Festival, held in conjunction with the State Library of Victoria.
The festival includes workshops, activities, book signings, face painting, petting zoo and more. guests Guests will include Graeme Base, Leigh Hobbs, Hazel Edwards, Andy Griffiths and Sally Rippin.
The Children’s Book Festival is held on the State Library lawns (with plenty of indoor activities, too) from 10am to 4pm on Sunday 25 March, this weekend.
On International Women’s Day last year, Australian novelist Kirsten Tranter wrote for us about the under-representation of women writers in the literary pages. A month later, the all-male Miles Franklin shortlist was announced – and shortly afterwards, a group of Australian women, including Kirsten, got together to propose a major national prize for women writers: The Stella Prize.
One year on, Kirsten looks back on what’s been happening since her initial report.
March 8 is International Women’s Day, this year celebrating its 101st birthday. So what do we have to celebrate, as women in the world of letters?
This time last year, women in the literary world were busily putting the question of gender inequality on the agenda. A US-based organisation dedicated to women in the literary arts, VIDA, had just published statistics that showed hard proof of gender disparity in literary publications. Displayed with stark graphic precision in the form of colour-coded pie charts, the results were surprising even to those of us who had always suspected that the situation wasn’t exactly equal. I wrote about these statistics last year on IWD, here on the Wheeler Centre’s Dailies.
Weeks later, as public discussion about similar patterns of gender bias in Australian literary pages was just gaining momentum, the Miles Franklin Literary Award published its controversial shortlist. This was not only the shortest shortlist in the award’s history, with just three authors; it was also comprised entirely of men – as it had been two years previously, in a list that inspired the term ‘sausagefest', coined by blogger Angela Meyer.
(My first novel, The Legacy, was one of three books by women included on the longlist and excluded from the shortlist of three.)
If you count the number of women who have won that award, and other literary prizes, you will discover that anyone who believes we are slowly making progress on this issue is sorely mistaken. After the shortlist announcement, author Sophie Cunningham pointed out in an essay in Kill Your Darlings that ‘since the Miles Franklin Award began in 1957, a woman has won 13 times. Four times this woman was Thea Astley, but twice she shared the award. Since 2001 two women have won, from the pool of 10 awards.’
The Miles Franklin Award t-shirt with the slogan ‘Australian authors do it better!’ Only one of the eight winners listed is a woman.
Is the Miles Franklin Award a prize that aspiring women writers can realistically expect to have shot at? Are we raising a generation of girls and young women who could be excused for not knowing that Miles was a woman, since the prize is so consistently won by men? If you’re proud of Australian writing, you might like to purchase a Miles Franklin t-shirt with the slogan ‘Australian authors do it better!’, against a list of eight winners of the award. Only one of them, Ruth Park, is a woman. Miles Franklin’s iconic, jaunty image in the centre of the design seems in this context like an unfunny joke. Five male winners on the list are alive. The only two women celebrated there are dead.
The shirt includes Miles Franklin’s ‘clever quote’: ’Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.’ This is true. This shirt inspires a need in me to tell the shirt’s designers that it is insulting.
We will not stop complaining as long as the Miles Franklin judges and other major awards continue to treat women’s writing as less worthy, of less value, and less literary merit than men’s. But we are tired of waiting. We all know how much excellent writing there is out there by Australian women, and we want to celebrate it, to reward those writers, and to bring more readers to their work.
We need a prize of our own. Along with Sophie Cunningham, I am one of a group of women in the world of publishing and books who are now trying to get The Stella Prize off the ground: an award for an Australian woman writer, open to all genres (including fiction and non-fiction), which takes its name from Stella Miles Franklin. The Stella Prize is not a solution to the problems of gender disparity in the literary world, but it is one place to start.
The new VIDA statistics for the year just passed are out, and the results are enough to make you cry into your small blue slice of pie. Or throw your pie against the wall, if you’re inclined to anger rather than despair. One publication seems to have shown signs of real improvement: Granta, the UK-based fiction quarterly. But the spike in the number of women authors in their pages appears to be based on just one issue, on feminism, that they published partly in response to the original VIDA numbers. Making this the most depressing form of tokenism, subsequent issues were a return to form: in their issue (on horror), three out of fourteen written contributors were women. The horror, the horror, indeed.
Some women writers, notably Emily Gould, have responded to the VIDA stats by arguing that women are not in these pages because perhaps they don’t want to be there; and that if we care so much about being published, we should start our own publications. It’s also possible that women are writing – and reviewing, and reviewing books by women – in places other than the top-tier publications surveyed by VIDA, such as the blogosphere, and that we should take this alternative world of letters more seriously. Blogger Elizabeth Lhuede started the Australian Women Writers blog in 2011 in response to the gender disparity in our books pages: there, you can join the Australian Women Writers Reading Challenge, and pledge to read and review a certain number of books by Australian women.
The numbers for Australian literary pages do not seem to be showing much sign of improvement in these terms either, even those edited by men and women who support the idea of gender equality and have been trying to actively recruit women reviewers. Journalist Stephen Murray has conducted his own comprehensive count of gender representation in Australian books pages, which he’ll publish soon. Particularly notable is the disparity in non-fiction, both in terms of the gender of reviewers and the authors reviewed.
My own experience of talking with editors has shown me how vital it is for women writers to pitch their ideas. Editors are inundated with calls and messages from writers with their eye on the lists of what’s coming out next month, pushing to review the things that interest them. This is the only way to get the number of women contributors up, I believe. Even editors who want to achieve a better balance will not change their ways unless we hassle them. If you’re looking for a way to celebrate International Women’s Day, pitching your idea for a review is one way that might really make a difference to the count for next year.
And join us at one of the many discussions sponsored by The Stella Prize around the country today, considering the question of whether women write differently than men.
In case you’re still sceptical about the level of full-on sexism out there in the literary world, read this 2011 interview with author V.S. Naipaul, who believes that they are ‘quite different’. He says, ‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.’ We’ll be figuring out our own answers to that question.
And discussing ways of getting our pie-throwing skills up to scratch as well.
Today, the Wheeler Centre will be marking International Women’s Day with two free events.
At 12.45pm, The Stella Prize’s Christine Gordon will deliver this week’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the topic Feminism is Personal.
And at 7.15pm, conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her journeys through some of the world’s most fascinating and divided societies in The Tenth Parallel.
The Age reported today that Lego’s controversial new line for girls, Lego Friends, has won Toy of the Year for its City Park Cafe.
Lego Friends was launched last December, with curvy doll-like figures, given names and distinct personalities, pastel-coloured bricks (including lots of pink) and playsets that include the Butterfly Beauty Shop, Andrea’s Stage and Mia’s Puppy House.
The Lego Friends Butterfly Beauty Shop
The product – which borrows elements from Disney Princess – is a response to the fact that Lego has appealed mostly to boys in recent years, especially over the past decade, with the company adding superhero and Harry Potter themed sets to its line. Lego CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstrop said they’re aiming ‘to reach the other 50 percent of the world’s children’.
Lego Friends has attracted outspoken enemies, with an active petition to ban it.
‘So, now we have boys’ Lego and girls’ Lego, instead of just Lego, a creative toy that all children could play with,’ says Monica Dux, Wheeler Centre regular and author of The Great Feminist Denial. ‘This development is symptomatic of the deepening gender divide in early childhood, a divide which is becoming ever more ubiquitous, and is being forced onto children at younger and younger ages. But where does this process end?’
‘Though there is educational value to playing with Lego, it’s just a toy company that needs to make money,’ said feminist website Jezebel. ‘Girls have already been conditioned to want pink and sparkly toys about ponies and princesses (though mercifully there’s no royal family in Heartlake City) and it isn’t the company’s job to change that … we’ve reached the point where girls see blocks in primary colours and think they’re not for them.’
Neuroscientist Lise Eliot, author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, also believes girls are put off Lego by social conditioning rather than any implicit need for pink and princesses. But she reluctantly endorses the Lego Friends range nonetheless. ‘If it takes colour-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains.’
Penni Russon, author of books for children and teenagers and mother of two girls, recalls playing with Lego as a child ‘in a way that could probably be perceived as gendered’; she made houses and cars, and especially liked the doors and windows that opened and the flowers. But she says that although she probably would have played with pink Lego if it was around, she won’t be buying the ‘silly insipid girl version’ for her children.
‘I think we have all been conditioned by nostalgia to see Lego as something beyond a product and a corporation. Talk about lifelong brand affiliation! Nostalgia (and totally brilliant marketing) drives us to see Lego as some kind of vital childhood experience that enhances intelligence and creativity. But do kids really get more from Lego than wooden blocks, art materials, electronics sets etc? Is it so vital that every child find a Lego set that suits them?’
Writer and philosopher Damon Young is, like so many of us, a product of that lifelong affiliation. He’s been playing with Lego for 30 years – first as a kid, now as a dad. ‘Over the decades, Lego’s become more ‘boyish’: less smiling mini-figures in space-suits, and more snarling villains, stubbled heroes and licensed film tie-ins. More guns, tanks, missiles, fast cars and so on,’ he says. ‘Girls can play with all of this, of course – my daughter does. But they often don’t, because they’re taught that girls like pink, flowers, horses, fairies, nail salons, café chats and so on. Play is gendered very quickly.’
The curvy, pastel-clothed Lego Friends minifigures
He says the hyperfeminised Lego Friends is a problem; toys that reinforce traditional ideas about gender roles and make concepts like ‘girls talk and worry about beauty, while boys fight, die and save princesses’ make these stereotypes seem natural, rather than choices, among many available. ‘Toys clearly help to shape our gender identities.’
But he believes that girl-branded Lego, while ‘dodgy’, can still encourage free play that transcends the boundaries of its pastel boxes.
‘With good encouragement from parents, girls need not be stuck with traditional feminine characters and scenes. If pink bricks or ponies are first step, they are not necessarily the end of the road. Parents can provide primary colour bricks alongside the pinks and purples. They can prompt children to remake their café or salon, rather than keeping them pristine on the shelf. If a family genuinely cares about gender equity, and provides a home life of robust respect and reflection, Lego play – regardless of its colour – will reflect this.’
But Monica Dux remains sceptical. ‘If you think this initiative from Lego is benign, just look at the focus of their new gendered product. Girls get to play ‘cafe’ and hang out in Lego hair salons (!!!), while boys can do almost anything, from travelling through space to constructing cities, having adventures in a wide variety of worlds both historical and imaginary.’
‘If children do learn through play, which of these two lessons would you rather give your daughters?’
Tomorrow, March 8, is International Women’s Day. The Wheeler Centre will be marking the occasion with two free events.
At 12.45pm, The Stella Prize’s Christine Gordon will deliver this week’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the topic Feminism is Personal.
And at 7.15pm, conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her journeys through some of the world’s most fascinating and divided societies in The Tenth Parallel.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
The whimsical Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year was first awarded in 1978, to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. The shortlist for this year’s prize has just been announced, with contenders including Cooking with Poo, Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World and The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria. The full list, and explanations of just what these books are about, is at the website of The Bookseller, the book trade magazine that awards the prize.
The Thai cookbook Cooking with Poo is up for Oddest Title of the Year: ‘Poo’ is Thai for crab and the chef’s nickname.
Recently, we shared a Ron Charles video, ‘Sh*t Book Reviewers Say’, poking fun at typical reviewers' clichés, like ‘Kafkaesque’.
This week, the Guardian ran a blog by Jonny Geller, an agent and managing editor at Curtis Brown, who confessed ‘I think I might have done something really stupid on Twitter’. Using the hashtag #publishingeuphemisms, he translated the real meanings of the phrases publishers use when they’re rejecting authors. Among them: ‘this is too literary for our list’ (it’s boring); ‘the novel never quite reached the huge potential of its promise’ (your pitch letter was better than the book); and ‘sadly we are publishing a book similar to this next spring’ (it too has a beginning, middle and end).
Want more? Last year, a US website published the euphemisms used by some of the business’s most influential, like Bloomsbury’s Peter Ginna (‘acclaimed’ = ‘poorly selling’).
Jonny Geller: Sharing his secrets on Twitter meant ‘I had robbed myself of my tools.’
Next Thursday (8 March) is International Women’s Day. One of the hot topics of last year was the underrepresentation of women in the literary pages – sparked by statistics gathered by US organisation VIDA. One year on, VIDA has posted an update, looking at the past year in books pages and lit mags. Sadly, we’ve still got a long way to go, baby.
Website Flavourwire did its own math and estimated that ‘the vast majority’ of the publications’ statistics hover ‘at around 25% female, 75% male’. For example, in the London Review of Books, 29 of the book reviewers were female and 155 were male. Of the books reviewed, 58 authors were female while 163 were male. And in the New York Times book review section (one of the lesser offenders), 368 book reviewers were female and 448 were male; while of the authors reviewed, 273 were female and 520 were male.
Novelist Kirsten Tranter wrote for us last International Women’s Day on how the issue has played out in Australia. On 8 March this year, we’ll be publishing an update from her on what’s happened in our literary pages and on our prize circuit in 2011 – and what happens next. Stella Prize committee member Christine Gordon will deliver our Lunchbox/Soapbox at 12.45pm on the same day, on the topic Feminism is Personal. And in the evening, war conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her book The Tenth Parallel in another free Wheeler Centre event, at 7.15pm. Bookings recommended.
Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin said of the 2011 VIDA count, ‘London Review of Books, you break my goddamn heart’.
Lionel Shriver is always happy to wade into controversy. In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, she’s published an article on why, though ‘on a strictly definitive level, I am a “feminist”’, she’s uncomfortable with the label.
‘On the connotative level … the word gives me the willies … Self-confessed feminists are, it is broadly accepted, humourless, earnest, touchy, on the lookout for slights, sexless, and probably ugly. They are party-pooping pills who don’t know how to have a good time or take a joke. They are a big drag. Little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word.’
Shriver believes that feminists should be focusing on the big issues, like ‘genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour killings, and marital rape’ rather than being ‘tight-arsed and prim’ about things like raunch culture.
Lionel Shriver: A feminist ‘on a strictly definitive level’, but says ‘little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word’.
Tim Parks has a terrific piece on the New York Review of Books blog about the professionalisation of writing as a career, from the advent of studying (rather than simply reading) books in the 20th century, through agents, writers’ festivals and finally the 21st-century expectation that authors will promote themselves on Facebook and Twitter.
Parks traces the explosion of creative writing courses (and would-be authors) from the 1980s onwards back to studying books: readers ‘supposed that if you could analyse it, you could very probably do it yourself’.
Tim Parks asks: ‘Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders?’
If you’ve been reading the Fairfax press (or surfing social media) recently, you’re probably familiar with the debate about writer and activist Melinda Tankard Reist – and whether she has the right to call herself a feminist.
Tankard Reist is the author of two books by Melbourne feminist publisher Spinifex Press, Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls and Big Porn Inc. (edited with Abigail Bray). She runs an activist group, Collective Shout, that works against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls for commercial profit.
She’s also a conservative Christian who is anti-abortion (or ‘pro-life’) and spent twelve years working for Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine. [missing asset]
Tankard Reist has long been a controversial figure – particularly in feminist circles – but the current furore began with a front-cover profile in Sunday Life magazine on 8 January, nearly two weeks ago. The profile writer, left-wing feminist Rachel Hills, says she interviewed Melinda because she ‘thought it would be interesting’. She wrote on her website, ‘Like many journalists, I spend too much time thinking about what goes on in other people’s heads, and Melinda was a public figure I found particularly perplexing … I still didn’t “get” her. And I wanted to.’
This weekend, iconic Australian feminist Anne Summers argued that you need to sign onto certain principles in order to be a feminist – and abortion rights is one of them. ‘As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women’s ability to be independent. There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility … To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.’
She concluded of Tankard Reist, ‘Just because she says she is a feminist does not mean she is.’
In a past Wheeler Centre debate, Summers' contemporary Wendy McCarthy recalled abortion in the 1960s – before social pressure from feminists and others made it legal – as potentially fatal. ‘In my own experience, to get an abortion required furtive phone calls, 63 guineas (a large amount of money), cops patrolling up and down the road, hoping someone would give you advice when you left…’
Yesterday, Kate Gleeson said the most significant argument against Tankard Reist’s identification as a feminist is her involvement – through her work as Harradine’s adviser – in restricting the approval of the abortion drug RU486 and ushering in Australia’s adoption of the ‘global gag rule’ that dictates AusAID’s overseas family planning guidelines.
Gleeson said this had ‘profound implications for women’s access to contraception in our donor destination countries’, contributing to ‘the two-tier system in which Western women have mostly unfettered control over their reproduction, while those in the developing world are at the mercy of dangerous abortions’.
Today, Cathy Sherry takes issue with all those who’ve questioned Tankard Reist’s right to call herself a feminist. She says ‘I have long considered myself a feminist and been disturbed by the parts of the sisterhood who operate like the nasty in-group in primary school … I do not know Melinda Tankard Reist and I am not pro-life, but I defend her right to express her opinions, call herself a feminist and prosecute her own beliefs … The real test of tolerance is tolerating those with whom we strongly disagree. We will never have a right to express our own contested ideas if we do not defend others' rights to do the same.’
A somewhat baffled Rachel Hills (who says that the huge response to her profile – including five separate opinion pieces last weekend – has been both ‘a bit of a dream’ and ‘challenging’) reflected this week on what she’s learned from the experience. She concluded, ‘if you want people to listen to what you’re saying – whether you have a big platform or small one – you also have an obligation to engage in good faith’.
Hills’ approach to the profile was to avoid a hatchet job, but ‘to write something critical (in the sense of making analytic judgments) but still human’.
While perhaps not all the arguments being traded are useful (or indeed respectful), the broad debate is teasing out some big questions.
Today we’re cross-posting a blog post written by Stephanie Honor Convery and published on the Melbourne Writers Festival blog. Stephanie takes a look at two Festival events looking at gender and feminism, and in this excerpt focuses on last night’s address by Sophie Cunningham on why feminism still has a long way to go.
Sophie Cunningham’s ‘A Long, Long Way To Go: Why We Still Need Feminism’ would have left you with the conviction that sexual inequality is indeed very real, and evident in statistic after sobering statistic.
In Australia, Cunningham explained, only 58% of women are in the workforce, compared to 78% of men. Only 54% of ASX200 companies have women in management roles, and only 10.7% of executive managers are women. 56% of law graduates are women, but only 25% of practicing lawyers over 40 are women, and those women in law suffer a 62% pay gap. The arts are nowhere near exempt from these kind of telling numbers. When the May issue of Esquire listed 75 books every man should read, only one woman made the cut. The 2009 and 2011 Miles Franklin shortlists were all male. Since the award began in 1957, it has been awarded 51 times. Out of those 51 awards, only 13 recipients have been women. In theatre, visual and fine arts, these trends are mirrored, if not worse. And one set of numbers Cunningham didn’t give: in the 16 years since the MWF instituted an opening night keynote address, that headlining festival role has been occupied only twice by a woman – by the same woman: Germaine Greer.
When Jonnie Marbles attacked Rupert Murdoch with a foam pie during Murdoch father and son’s appearance before a parliamentary committee last week, he chose a fine time to do it. It was just after Conservative MP Louise Mensch had asked James Murdoch a pointed question: “Can you just tell me whether or not the Taylor settlement included a confidentiality clause?” It turns out that the answer was yes, it did. Moreover, it has since turned out Murdoch’s testimony before the committee may have been “mistaken”.
The settlement in question referred to an out-of-court payout to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, whose phone was hacked into by News of the World reporters. But the answer was to be postponed as it was at precisely this moment that Jonnie Marbles walked onto history’s stage for his obligatory 15 seconds, thus immortalising Wendi Murdoch’s right fist, particularly in China. Here’s a 2006 New Yorker profile of Wendi Deng-Murdoch.
There is a literary angle to this story, and it is in the figure of Louise Mensch, MP, aka Louise Bagshawe, previously UK Young Poet of the Year (at the age of 18) and student of Anglo-Saxon and Norse at Oxford. According to the New Yorker, Mensch is not only married to the manager of Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, she’s also the pseudonymous writer of 14 chick-lit books under her maiden name, Louise Bagshawe. She makes no great claims for her books, most of which lately have been given catchy, one-word titles like Glitz, Passion, Desire and this year’s Destiny (review): “Obviously they have no redeeming literary merit at all,” she told The Times in a 2007 profile.
The Economist has dubbed Mensch the “surprise star” of the committee hearing, and this her finest moment:
Mrs Mensch, looking and sounding like a clever young prosecution barrister, reminded Mr Murdoch that he had said Les Hinton, a former chief executive of News International (News Corp’s British newspaper subsidiary), had resigned because he was the “captain of the ship” when wrongdoing took place. “Is it not the case, sir, that you are the captain of the ship”, she asked the elder Mr Murdoch? The magnate’s pride seemed piqued, and he rose to the bait. “Of a much bigger ship,” he rumbled.
Mrs Mensch did not blench. “It is a much bigger ship, but you are in charge of it. And as you said in earlier questions, you do not regard yourself as a hands-off chief executive, you work ten to 12 hours a day. This terrible thing happened on your watch. Mr Murdoch, have you considered resigning?”
“No,” said Mr Murdoch.
For all that, The Guardian’s Laura Barnett noted, both the New Yorker and The Economist couldn’t resist writing patronisingly of Mensch’s many accomplishments, as if she were “a mere flibbertygibbet whose every successful move as an MP deserves to be greeted with condescending surprise.”
This is an extract from a report by Bridget Chappell in the 85th edition of Voiceworks, the quarterly magazine of Wheeler Centre resident organisation Express Media, out now.
The guards of Sulaimaniya Prison women’s wing wear high heels.
It’s a small wing, homier in appearance than its adjacent counterpart for male prisoners. Glimpses of men, slumped and crowded, sneak past me on the way in. It’s reminiscent of that public transport feeling. No-one’s sure of what to do with their eyes.
Hana Baradost is the chief of the female inmates’ wing of what is officially known as Sulaimaniya Directory of Arrest, Iraqi Kurdistan. She is spread-eagled contentedly across the armchair flanking the large desk in her private office. The plastic palm fronds in the corner, her blue camouflage suit and the communist-era military cap perched atop her piled black locks form a composition of years gone by.
I am the flat-soled, notebook-wielding visitor today: that alone makes me a Z-grade celebrity, calling in the hopes of penning something on the women in her charge. I feel my privilege press uncomfortably against the walls of the room; I’m trying to get comfortable in my seat.
The women’s wing of the prison was established following the 1991 Kurdish uprisings against the national government of Saddam Hussein. Now, with Iraq torn between violence and upheaval in the south and frenzied, potholed development here in the north, this prison represents not only the tragedies, but also the strange and often conflicting social changes that have gripped Iraq. Baradost pauses as she tries to recall what was done with female prisoners before 1991. ‘Women weren’t criminals back then’, she says simply. ‘Society was different, we were confined to traditional roles. Nobody would have allowed for it.’
We climb the stairs from Baradost’s office to the second floor. ‘They can request books or newspapers if they want,’ Rewan Rozaki, the visiting social worker from Khanzad Women’s Centre, tells me. It is because of her that I am here. ‘However, many of the women who come here are illiterate.’ The unmistakeable pitter-patter of children’s feet resonates on the landing as three small, curious faces appear above me. ‘Mum! It’s visiting time!’ they call out in Kurdish.
Three women are currently held in Cell 407 for prostitution. Twenty-three-year-old Jamila from Baghdad joined Kurdistan’s bottom rung last year, working in Sulaimaniya for six months before her incarceration. ‘I came because there was no work in Baghdad,’ says Jamila. ‘My friend encouraged me to come to Kurdistan to work with her, and when I arrived I discovered what she was involved in here. I couldn’t escape. I’ve been in this cell for four and a half months.’
While the stigma of prostitution is global, in countries such as Iraq actions that are viewed widely as immoral may put women at risk of death for the violation of religious codes and family honour. It is this absence of a support network that leads many of those convicted of such crimes to remain in prison after serving their sentence, lest they be thrown back into the world that landed them there or – possibly worse yet – found by their families. ‘Try to stay in here for as long as you can,’ says Rozaki to Jamila simply. ‘Stay in prison past your sentence – we can arrange for this. We cannot take you at the shelter – but we can arrange for you to stay in here until something has been worked out.’ Rozaki’s tone with the women of Cell 407 is motherly but firm. Jamila and I exchange glances. We are the same age.
‘Many of them go straight back to their pimps,’ says Rozaki. ‘It’s very hard to find alternative work, and many of them cannot face their families, it’s not an option. They get far more mental support here in prison than they do outside.’ She states that while Khanzad has submitted a proposal to the Kurdish government to establish a shelter specifically for those women escaping prostitution, their official stance on the issue holds little promise for the project’s future and for women such as Jamila. Jamila feels that as an Arab Iraqi woman, she has even fewer options available to her than the Kurdish inmates have. ‘I’ve seen many Kurdish girls come and go during my time here – their family does everything they can to push their cases through court, to avoid the family shame of a daughter in prison. I don’t have that. I have to wait.’
Bridget Chappell is a human rights activist who grew up in Canberra and now divides her time between Europe and the Middle East.
(Click to watch video.)
“We are in a crazy, crazy pornographic culture, and for that we need extreme measures, and I can’t think of anything better than radical feminism for that.” During her recent visit to Australia, academic, activist and social critic Dr Gail Dines stirred strong debate with her radical feminist position.
Particularly controversial is her critique of the pervasive influence pornography wields over the mainstream of contemporary media culture, as articulated in her book Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality. Following a passionate discussion on ABC TV’s Q&A program, Dines appeared in Melbourne in conversation with writer and fellow feminist Monica Dux, as a guest of the Wheeler Centre in partnership with the Sydney Writers' Festival.
“Australians have a unique capacity to celebrate failure,” writes crime novelist Angela Savage in a piece on travelling, writing, Australia and the grandeur of failure published today on her blog. “I stumbled across a wonderful example of this during a recent visit to Red Cliffs in Victoria’s Mallee region. Red Cliffs’ main tourist attraction is Big Lizzie, the largest tractor ever built in Australia … The 45 ton wonder was built by engineer Frank Bottrill in Melbourne over a 12-month period, with the idea of replacing the camel trains that carried loads of wool and other goods over sandy terrain … With a top speed of 2 miles an hour, Big Lizzie left Melbourne in early 1916, expecting to be in Broken Hill by early 1917. She never made it that far, breaking down, forcing bridges to collapse under her weight, turning back from flooded rivers.”
The Orange Prize for fiction by a woman has been awarded to Téa Obreht, who at 26 years young is the youngest writer to have taken out the prize in its 16 year history. Serbian-born, New York-based writer Obreht won for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, which a Guardian report describes as being “set amid the horrors and aftermath of Balkan civil war, mixing magic, myth and folklore with intense, tough realism.”
We recently wrote of a push to inaugurate an Australian prize for women’s fiction. That prize has since been dubbed the Stella Prize.
AIDS is 30 – a grim birthday. The New York Review of Books blog has published an account of the ravages of the early years of the epidemic by activist Bill Hayes.
In the 1970s, a young boy called ‘Kraig’ was the posterboy of psychiatry’s ability to ‘treat’ homosexuality. This is his story.
Fancy a three-month writer’s residency in Shanghai or southern India? Applications close July 1.
VS Naipaul has had a tumultuous week. On Monday, he patched up a feud with Paul Theroux. On Tuesday, he said he knew of no woman writer, including Jane Austen, who could match his talent. Of Jane Austen in particular, he spoke dismissively of “her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”. “Women writers,” said the 78 year-old, “are different, they are quite different”, adding their writing is cursed with “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. He claimed to be able to discern the gender of an author within a paragraph or two.
Naipaul, who was knighted in 1989,l has form on the topic: almost a decade ago he lambasted India’s women writers, accusing them of banality. He also put many colleagues off-side when he declared post-colonial countries were “half-made societies”.
The Evening-Standard reports that Naipaul’s authorised biographer Patrick French concluded that his subject was a “bigoted, arrogant, vicious, racist, a woman-beating misogynist and sado-masochist.”
A volume of lavishly-illustrated drawings for children by a pioneering Australian woman will be auctioned next month. Charlotte Waring arrived in Australia in 1826 at the age of 29. She’d been hired to be a governess to the children of John Macarthur’s nephew, but instead she married agriculturalist and author James Atkinson, whom she’d met on her way to the colony.
As well as writing and publishing the first Australian children’s book – A Mother’s Offering to her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales (1841) – an Age report describes Atkinson as “a child prodigy; a fiercely independent, well-educated woman; a single mother of four left to run one of the most important colonial properties in the Southern Highlands; a young widow who was reputedly raped by a notorious bushranger; a battered wife who fled her alcoholic second husband, though it left her penniless.”
In 1843, Charlotte illustrated a 30-page notebook for her daughter Emily’s 13th birthday with coloured drawings of the flora, fauna and indigenous people of the Southern Highlands region. That notebook has come to light after languishing in the drawer of a descendant for some 25 years, and will be auctioned on June 12 by the Aalder’s auction house in Sydney. Another of her daughters, Louisa (1834-1872), became a pioneering writer, naturalist and feminist.
After former IMF chief and ex-presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of rape at the beginning of last week, the most public of France’s public intellectuals sprang to his aid. Writing in the Daily Beast, Bernard-Henri Lévy, or BHL as he’s known in France, condemned the presumption of guilt inferred in media coverage of the alleged rape of a hotel maid in New York. With all the fury of a pamphleteer, BHL vented his frustration: “I resent the New York tabloid press, a disgrace to the profession, that, without the least precaution and before having effected the least verification, has depicted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a sicko, a pervert, borderlining on serial killer, a psychiatrist’s dream.” Lévy has been friends with Strauss-Kahn (himself often referred to as DSK) for two decades and considers himself a member of the French political left as well as one of its strongest critics. Here he is at the New York Public Library on stage with Slavoj Zizek in 2008.
Levy’s plea on behalf of his friend has been roundly condemned by the American media. David Rieff of The New Republic summarised BHL’s argument as “because DSK is a valuable person, he is entitled to special treatment”. And an inferred slur against the alleged victim has raised the eyebrows of feminist bloggers – although BHL couldn’t hold a candle to the French media’s more chauvinistic fringe (in French). Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the French public seems to have concluded that something was foul in the state of Sofitel. It’s been reported that most French people believe Strauss-Kahn was the victim of a set-up.
(Click to watch video.)
The problem with feminists, according to Australian Humanist of the Year Leslie Cannold, “is that there aren’t enough of them”. In this video of her recent Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation at the Wheeler Centre, the author and ethicist tackles what ideals should inform how female representation unfolds in the popular imagination. Ultimately, she sees us aspiring to build a world in which the need for feminists “withers away”.
Speaking as a novelist (author of The Book of Rachael), Leslie asks: what obligations does a feminist novelist have? Can fictional characters be role models, and if so, should writers endeavour to portray exemplary females? “To my mind, women shouldn’t need to prove they’re better than men to deserve their fair share of life’s opportunities. That they’re human, and it’s only fair, should be enough.”
Image via WikiCommons
Philip Roth, titan of male Jewish-American postwar literature, has taken out the biennial Man Booker International Prize, announced yesterday at the Sydney Writers' Festival. The prize (previously covered here), valued at over $90,000, is given in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement to any writer in English or translated into English. Responding to the news, Roth described his win as a “great honour”.
The win was marred however by subsequent reports that one of the prize’s judges, Carmen Callil, resigned in protest at the decision. A publisher, writer, critic and founder of feminist publishing house Virago in 1973, Callil (a Melburnian by birth) commented, “he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe… I don’t rate him as a writer at all, I made it clear that I wouldn’t have put him on the long list, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn’t admire – all the others were fine.”
The other nominees for the prize this year were Wang Anyi (China), Juan Goytisolo (Spain), James Kelman (UK), John le Carré (UK), Amin Maalouf (Lebanon), David Malouf (Australia), Dacia Maraini (Italy), Rohinton Mistry (India/Canada), Philip Pullman (UK), Marilynne Robinson (USA), Philip Roth (USA), Su Tong (China) and Anne Tyler (USA). John le Carré was also nominated and asked – unsuccessfully – for his nomination to be withdrawn.
Robert McCrum has written in Roth’s defense, calling him “a master of American prose, the author of some of the finest sentences and most subtle prose narratives in recent years.”
Some of those sentences include:
“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.” – The Dying Animal
“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.” – American Pastoral
“As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.” – Sabbath’s Theater
“People are unjust to anger — it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.” – The Counterlife
“The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel – on the body of every Jewish child! – not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE.” – Portnoy’s Complaint
(Click to watch video.)
When the women of Australia started their march towards equal rights almost half a century ago, they envisaged broad-ranging changes. Today, women make up slightly less than half the total workforce. But bastions of male privilege remain – none more so than the company boardroom.
Women account for less than one in 10 private company directorships. And while women earn 16% less than men in overall terms, in the financial sector they earn up to 32% less.
In this Talking Point, we look at the glass ceilings that continue to impede women inside the boardroom and out.
Session chair Narelle Hooper is joined by Helen Szoke, Carol Schwarz and Margaret Alston. Together they discuss the perceptions and prejudices which hamper progress for women at work, evaluate the potential impact of shareholder activism and weigh gender quotas against so-called meritocracy.
Throughout, they consider whether gender equality in the workplace is best couched as a rights-based argument or an economic imperative.
Image of c1880s stereo-optic view of Burmese pagodas via WikiCommons
By Unpublished Manuscript Fellow Michelle Aung Thin
Four years ago, I started writing my first novel, set in colonial Rangoon of the 1930s. In my writing I explore what it was like to be a young woman of mixed race – a sexual icon – in a place ruled by European men. In the private space of my imagination I was interested only in the truth of things – those ways of being in the world obscured by familiar and unchallenged worldviews. I wanted to mess with modern perceptions of how men and women belong: to show that things were never as rigid as they seemed. I wanted to subvert things. I wanted to redirect the discussion. In other words, I did my best to write like a woman.
My novel will be published this September by Text and I am currently working towards the final draft with my editor, Mandy Brett. One of the things we’ve been talking through is the title – in the rush to finish the book I was happy to leave it until last. Text has suggested The Monsoon Bride. They love it. My writing and reading friends think it has a certain ring to it, the hint of a satirical edge. Brian Castro, my PhD supervisor at the University of Adelaide, reckons ironically that it is a title that will sell. But I have all kinds of reservations. It’s the word ‘bride’. It seems too girly. You see, while I write like a woman I find that I am worried about being read as one.
This is not some exercise in self-loathing, or a wringing of hands over my political marginalization. My misgivings are all about avoiding pigeonholes. I want to sell lots of books. But I also want my work to be part of the literary conversation – the main conversation, not an alternative sidebar. I think that my novel has something to contribute to debates around race and cultural belonging; that it is worthy of the conversation. So will the word ‘bride’ in the title limit the way it will be read and reviewed? Will being read like a woman also mean being sidelined or dismissed?
None of this was an issue when I was writing the book. I didn’t even think about it. But now that my novel is finished, I find myself treading carefully. Instead of cutting through entrenched and biased worldviews, I have to take them into account as I negotiate my way through the marketplace. Four years of hard work is at stake. And I am wondering, how do you get in the game without playing the game? How do make sure you are part of the conversation and yet keep your self-respect?
I’ve seen the pie charts from VIDA showing how only a fraction of women are reviewed in the major literary magazines compared to men. I’ve read Kirsten Tranter’s take on the corresponding Australian magazines. I am tuned in to Leslie Cannold’s campaign for 51% representation. I saw the fallout when the shortlist for the Miles Franklin was announced (including one respondent to Alison Croggon’s piece in The Drum Opinion who maintained that “men do write better books”). I am sensitive to the suspicion that writers who complain about being overlooked are simply not good enough to be published.
It strikes me that this bias masquerades as ‘commercial reality’. Editors responsible for putting together the literary section of a newspaper or a magazine – major marketing vehicles for books – know that reviews of titles by men will be read by the broadest audience as a matter of default because, as Eileen Myles writes in her essay ‘Being Female’, “female reality always contains male and female”.
Readers also want to be part of the literary conversation. They are more likely to engage with books that are brought to their attention by taste-makers. If the majority of literary fiction reviewed is written by men, then of course it will seem like books by women are not as critically interesting – hence the partiality, unconscious or not.
But what seems equally important is not to get stuck in the narrative of winners and losers. The way this issue is reported, it can seem as if women writers and men writers are two teams playing a football match and ours is the dud side. It’s depressing.
No writer – female or male – can control how she or he is read. I know this. I also know that my name on the front cover and my photo on the back will raise certain expectations of what is on the pages inside. All I can do is: write as well as I can; be aware of my own blind spots not only in my writing but also in my reading; think critically about what is before me; acknowledge the fact that this is a complex issue, that all sorts of things get mixed up together (like, what is quality? what type of writing belongs to women?); and try to have some integrity and expect it in others.
Besides, my first novel is about to be published by a publishing house I admire. I should be happy, right? That is what irks me most; I have to think about this instead of just rejoicing in getting my work out there.
So in the end I went with The Monsoon Bride. It does have a certain ring to it. It does have sales appeal. And I really like it. I’ll just have to leave it up to readers to get the irony.
Michelle Aung Thin’s first novel, The Monsoon Bride, will be published by Text in September. This is the third and last in our series of essays by the 2010 shortlisted Unpublished Manuscript Fellows.
On January 24 this year, Toronto policeman Michael Sanguinetti walked into a lecture room at Osgoode Hall Law School to deliver a talk to 10 people on campus safety. He began his talk with a line that has since passed into infamy: “You know, I think we’re beating around the bush here. I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” Sanguinetti must be wishing he’d heeded the advice. His statement, which he has since retracted, prompted a debate that in turn has become a movement.
The first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, and women are SlutWalking through the streets of cities across North America, Europe and now Australia. Boston’s took place last weekend. Melbourne is set to join the worldwide SlutWalk movement on Saturday May 28. Other SlutWalks are planned in the UK for London, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Katt Schott-Mancini, an organiser of the Boston SlutWalk, summed up the motivation behind the SlutWalk in the following way: “What you are wearing doesn’t cause rape – the rapist causes it.”
The number of sexual assaults in Australia trended upwards by approximately 50% between 1995 and 2007, about twice the rate of Australia’s population growth in the same period. There were 19,781 recorded sexual assaults in Australia in 2007, or slightly more than one every half hour of every day.
Anti-pornography activist Dr Gail Dines – who will be appearing in Melbourne as a guest of the Wheeler Centre on the eve of the Melbourne SlutWalk – has questioned the use of the word ‘slut’. “Women need to take to the streets,” she writes, “– but not for the right to be called ‘slut’. Women should be fighting for liberation from culturally imposed myths about their sexuality that encourage gendered violence.”
Feminist writer and activist Ray Filar has responded to Dines by labelling the SlutWalks a reprise of the riot grrl culture of the 1990s. “There is room for more than one feminist march,” writes Filar, “and more than one kind of feminist activism.”
A (male) organiser of the Los Angeles SlutWalk has responded to Dines more stridently. Hugo Schwyzer has blogged, “SlutWalk stands for the principle that no matter how short the skirt, no matter how high the heel, no matter how promiscuous the past, every woman is entitled to freedom from verbal or physical sexual assault.”
Melbourne academic Lauren Rosewarne sees the debate re-exposing the divide between second- and third-wave feminism: “The movement of slutwalking is the fascinating phenomena [sic] of what happens when the political passions of the second-wave fantastically crash into the third-wave’s warm embrace of sexuality performed in all its spectacular, confronting and revealing glory.”
A group of Australian women writers and publishers are seeking a sponsor for a proposed literary prize for fiction by Australian women writers. Sophie Cunningham, Kirsten Tranter, Louise Swinn, Monica Dux, Jenny Niven, Aviva Tuffield from Scribe Publishing, Rebecca Starford, Jo Case and Chris Gordon from Readings have formed a steering committee to establish the award – equivalent to the UK’s Orange Prize – which has a working title A Prize of One’s Own.
In an interview in the Guardian, novelist and publisher Sophie Cunningham said the committee was talking to sponsors. “What we want to achieve is a prize that brings more readers to novels by women, and respects and rewards the work of women writers,” she said. “Women continue to be marginalised in our culture. Their words are deemed less interesting, less knowledgeable, less well formed, less worldly, and less worthy.” Not only have the Miles Franklin Award shortlists been exclusively male twice in the last three years, several state premier’s literary award shortlists also excluded women. What’s more, although in overall terms publishing is dominated by women, the highest levels of the industry continue to be mostly male. The committee is hoping the inaugural women’s prize will be held in 2012 or 2013.
The Wheeler Centre’s next Talking Point is ‘Banging on the Ceiling’, Thursday May 12 at 6:15pm.
Last week, we reported that Jennifer Egan had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. We also reported on the kerfuffle prompted by the announcement of the shortlist for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award – a very short shortlist, consisting of three rural, historical stories, all written by men.
Jennifer Egan has prompted more debate about women and letters following comments she made in a Wall Street Journal interview shortly after receiving news of her Pulitzer win. Asked whether women writers tend to understate the importance of their own writing, Egan replied, “Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them … I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.”
In her response, Egan referred to Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Though initially well-received, the novel was subsequently accused of plagiarising widely from chick-lit authors like Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella and Megan McCafferty, authors whose work Egan described as “very derivative and banal”.
Egan’s comments drew opprobrium from various bloggers (“Oh, wow am I pissed. I’m so pissed off I don’t even want to use cutesy exclamation marks to illustrate how pissed off I am”) who argue that chick-lit shouldn’t be dismissed as a second-class form of literature. Writes one defender of the genre: “Is there derivative, poorly written chick lit? Sure. But there’s also derivative, poorly written literary fiction. Slamming an entire genre of novels written by women is unsavory, inaccurate, and akin to the kind of girl-on-girl crime that women should be trying to stop, not perpetuate.”
The stoush takes up an exchange in the Guardian last year which began when DJ Connell called the label “chick-lit” offensive: “When you call a woman a chick you diminish her as a human being and dismiss her as something less than intelligent”. Michele Gorman replied with a defense of the genre: “saying that chick-lit can’t be well-written is a little like saying that pretty girls can’t be smart. It’s ludicrous. And it’s wrong.”
Here’s an overview of the debate from the Millions. In a related article, Egan describes her writing process in candid detail.
(Click to watch video.)
What happens when women get behind a camera? How do they use cameras to cast a fresh look on the world around them? Organised by the Melbourne Centre of International PEN to mark 2011’s International Women’s Day, ‘She Must be Seeing Things’ featured an illuminating presentation by film critic and academic Deb Verhoeven. Exploring the relationship between activism and filmmaking, Deb asked, what role can the cinema play in societies that don’t even have them?
(Click to watch video.)
Why is it that we see so few plays by Australian women on stage? Why is it that women are still so under-represented, despite the great strides made in recent decades by feminism? What responsibilities does the theatre have? How can female playwrights avoid the stain of tokenism and kid glove criticism?
In this video, Playwrights Patricia Cornelius and Van Badham, Artistic Directors Marion Potts and Ralph Myers and moderator Chris Mead discuss contemporary Australian theatre’s relationship to gender, diversity and the canon.
An Ampelmädchen street light at a pedestrian crossing in Dresden, Germany, via WikiCommons
Late last year a US-based organisation advocating for women in the literary arts, VIDA, surveyed major UK and US literary publications such as the London Review of Books, The Atlantic and The New Republic. They counted how many women wrote for the publication, how many women reviewed books, and how many books by women were reviewed relative to books by men. The numbers show what many of us have suspected or known for a while: women are underrepresented on every level in these publications.
The stats are published online in the form of pie charts, and there’s something peculiarly poignant about seeing them broken down in this way: the small blue female slice, often scandalously slim, in a big red pie. The New York Review of Books last year published 79 women and 462 men; The Times Literary Supplement reviewed books by 330 women and 1036 men; The Paris Review interviewed one woman author and seven men. That’s a small slice.
Australian publications don’t fare much better. Books editors from The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed on a recent episode of The Book Show were all surprised to discover that their pages showed a comparable bias. If you picked up the Australian Literary Review last week you would have been faced with an illustration of a cranky John Curtin staring out from the front cover, surrounded by a list of highlights inside the issue: without exception, they take the form “male writer on male writer”. A glance at the contents list inside reveals two women contributors out of fifteen overall, and one review of a book by a woman writer. I wrote an open letter to Luke Slattery, the editor of ALR, last week, asking for his views on the issue.
Editors of the VIDA-canvassed journals have been mostly defensive. Ruth Franklin at The New Republic faulted presses for not publishing enough books by women. TLS editor Peter Stothard articulated an attitude similar to the one critiqued by Jodi Picoult last year, when Picoult complained about the attention lavished on white male literary writers in the pages of The New York Times: “while women are heavy readers,” Stothard admitted to The Guardian, “we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS” which simply publishes, he claims, “the best reviews of the most important books.”
Since the beginning of the novel, women have been closely associated with it as readers and writers of the genre, but attached to the most derogated and supposedly corrupting forms of fiction such as romance (think Emma Bovary). It’s a persistent form of sexist thinking, mixed up with value judgments about what kind of books count as important literature, but it’s still rare to see it so openly and uncritically expressed.
TLS aside, it’s hard to imagine to that editors are sitting around congratulating themselves on successfully excluding women from the literary world. Some of the most sophisticated discussion of the issues raised by the VIDA stats has taken place on the literary site Bookslut, where two of the editors, Jessica Crispin and Michael Schaub, initiated an exchange of ideas on the topic, exploring the complexity of the unconscious biases that shape our gut reactions to books, without recourse to a rhetoric of blame or shame.
Editors like to complain that women writers and reviewers pitch less than men. This may well be true: after all, what woman in her right mind would look at the ALR each month and think “I belong here”? There’s no way around it: if we want a bigger slice of the pie, we need to ask; it will not be handed to us any other way. The ALR is one of the few outlets that actually pays decent money per word; it’s national, with a huge distribution: it should be obvious that women are entitled to be an equal part of the public intellectual conversation to which its editor aspires.
My first novel was published last year (it was widely reviewed) and I started paying a different sort of attention to these questions. In particular, I noticed with dismay how few women are nominated for major literary awards. In the past 20 years the Miles Franklin has been won by only four women. Several state Premier’s literary awards last year included no women writers on their fiction shortlists. The exception is the recent Prime Minister’s awards, where Eva Hornung won the fiction category with her novel Dog Boy. It’s not all gloomy: I like to think the future belongs to the young women starting to shape the literary landscape, such as Angela Meyer’s super-sharp Crikey blog LiteraryMinded and the editors of the new little magazine Kill Your Darlings. And now after all these metaphors I’m seriously hungry for a decent sized piece of pie.
Kirsten Tranter is a Sydney writer. Her first novel, The Legacy, was published internationally in 2010.
It’s the centenary of International Women’s Day today and we thought we’d mark the occasion. We’ve asked novelist Kirsten Tranter to write a piece on the under-representation of women in major literary journals and magazines – read Kirsten’s essay here.
In case you haven’t already caught them, we also thought we’d point you towards some web links we liked. The Bond franchise’s Daniel Craig has dressed up in drag and copped a dressing down for the occasion. We admired this list of 10 great female graffiti writers and this piece on gender outlaws. We thought this Book Beast article on angry men provocative, and we liked the pictures in this essay as much as the writing. Finally, happy 20th birthday to Spinifex Press.
Update: Here’s Charlotte Raven on how the new feminism went wrong, and Carmen Lawrence in an opinion piece on how feminism has come, and how far it has to go. Carmen Lawrence will be speaking in favour of the motion, ‘Both major parties are failing the Australian people’ during our Intelligence Squared debate next Monday night. The Overland blog has lots of great links too.
Related events coming up at the Wheeler Centre include She Must Be Seeing Things (20 March), Drama Queens (27 March), Leslie Cannold for Lunchbox/Soapbox on the problem with feminists (7 April), and Jeez Louise (16 April).
We recently ran a piece that mentioned, among other things, the under-representation of women in literary journals. The imbalance is replicated in other areas of public life. Popular comic and public speaker Catherine Deveny has announced an initiative intended to reverse the trend. Dubbed ‘No chicks, no excuses – expert women for every event’, it’s “the brainchild of Leslie Cannold, Jane Caro and Catherine Deveny, three women in public life who got tired of event organisers saying they couldn’t find good women speakers.” Deveny’s website claims the inspiration for the initiative lies in a column she wrote on corporate exclusion of women at public events.
While we’re on the subject of feminism, we thought the Gender Genie might be of interest. It’s a website that invites users to paste 500 words or more of their prose into a field that then scans it and assesses whether the writing is ‘male’ or ‘female’. We’re not suggesting that there is such a thing as ‘male’ writing or ‘female’ writing, but the website is the result of an article on the subject, as well as a ‘sexed text test’ (try saying that 10 times in a row) originally published in the New York Times.
Leslie Cannold, author, commentator, ethicist, researcher and social activist, will present a Lunchbox/Soapbox on April 7 on the topic, ‘The Problem with Feminists’.
Last week, as paid parental leave finally became a reality in Australia, both the Age and Sydney Morning Herald couldn’t resist turning the development into a winners and losers story. Both papers featured two women with their newborns. One had given birth just after the toll of midnight, cleverly netting herself 18 weeks on the princessly sum of $570 before tax; the other wasn’t able to keep her legs crossed until the deadline had passed, lumping herself with the baby-bonus pumpkin instead.
Both stories were tacky and entirely missed the point of this important development… which meant that they were perfectly in keeping with the way paid parental leave has typically been debated and discussed in this country.
As many a weary feminist has pointed out in the eons it’s taken to realize this modest goal, the debate in Australia was never really about the cost to the economy, to small business, or to the taxpayer. It was about ideology. Just look at all the hyperbole and handwringing, all those Hanrahan-inspired “we’ll all be rooned” pronouncements. It’s middle class welfare! Why should women be paid to have babies? And what about those babies? Who’s looking out for them?!
This sense of looming catastrophe was epitomised in Tony Abbott’s prescient threat that paid maternity leave would only be achieved over the then government’s dead body. Of course the government did die, and the corpse back-flipped, quite spectacularly, but that’s another story.
All the bluster, all the bitter resistance to something that should be seen as a workplace entitlement, not a gift or a privilege or a “bonus”, is symptomatic of how uncomfortable we still are with the idea that a woman with a baby should be seen as anything other than a “mother”. So, paid parental leave is rarely described as being about working women wanting to maintain a relationship with the workforce after they become parents. Instead it’s about mums and babies.
The truth is, a robust parental leave scheme makes a statement: that women have a right to parent and to be an active part of the workforce. That motherhood need not be an all-consuming mono-focus, requiring a woman to discard everything else in her life. So, the law has changed at last, but have our attitudes? It was telling that on the day of its launch both Jenny Macklin and Julia Gillard emphasised that Australia’s paid parental leave scheme was “good for babies”. Why can’t it be good for women, plain and simple? Now that would be progress.
Monica Dux is a feminist writer who co-authored The Great Feminist Denial. She has spoken at the Wheeler Centre on perceptions of pregnancy in her Lunchbox Soapbox, The Happy Gestator.
Novelist Amanda Craig has contended that the best female writers of her generation “worked in the shadow of the Amis-McEwan-Barnes-Rushdie generation” with “many of the worst omissions are, predictably, women”.
Craig goes on to list several female novelists – including Liz Jensen and Pat Ferguson, who “has since been unable to find a mainstream publisher despite her dark, dazzling novels being highly readable and twice long-listed for the Orange Prize”. She says that the domination of certain male authors during the 80s and extending into the 90s has meant that a generation of female writers were locked out of the literary establishment, because “by the time we published, usually in our mid-thirties, a second wave of younger talent had risen up and overtaken us”.
In defence of the lit boy’s club, Robert McCrum writes in the Guardian that “during the years of the supposed Amis-McEwan-Barnes-Rushdie hegemony, is how much brilliant variety has come to the fore” and “there’s a long list of writers who came after McEwan and Barnes but who have secured much greater public recognition”.
McCrum’s argument is that competition is good for writers and that regardless of gender they should toughen up. “Shakespeare competed with Marlowe and Ben Jonson; Byron with Keats; Dickens with Thackeray; Woolf with Joyce, and so on. Strong talents are galvanised by rival artists not crushed by them.” It does, however, serve the counter argument that all but one of McCrum’s examples are men. It seems the competitive lit world is distinctly masculine. The cooperative approach of the Brontes, for example, created great work without competition yet struggled to be acknowledged in their own lifetimes.
McCrum, however doesn’t see it that way, preferring to deliver a final jibe: “Maybe posterity will be kinder to Ms Craig and her contemporaries. For the moment, the jury is still out. Harsh, but true.”
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