The Barely Disguised Discrimination of Pack Panels

The moment a man spits his beer isn’t usually the time he has a life-changing epiphany. But that is what Adam Hunt, director of the advertising agency the Foundry, has claimed. His mate made a ‘fat chick’ joke about a passing large woman and as Hunt laughed he realized he was being discriminatory and his beer ‘went everywhere’.

Sound implausible? You see, Hunt had been thinking hard about fat pride. This was the brief the Gruen transfer gave him to make an ad to sell the impossible – fat. He decided ‘shape discrimination’ was no different to any other, went to the ‘darkest web sites’ and used 4 jokes, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and fat chick in turn, to make his point.

His ad was so successfully offensive the ABC pulled it from the Gruen transfer, but allowed it, and a lengthy panel discussion, to be aired on the web. And since we can count on prohibition to incite desire, people have since flocked to the site like bees to a forbidden honey pot.

The comments have proven fascinating. They ask whether shape discrimination can be equated with incinerating Jews, gay murder, or terminating black babies to purportedly solve the crime rate. Fatness, some of them argue, is a lifestyle choice, and it has the ignoble distinction of leaving a deeper carbon footprint. Unlike race, or even gay identity, it has been chosen and can be altered.

Who would chose fatness in a world where young men sport bumper stickers that read, ‘Harpoon Fat Chicks’?

Overweight results from a skewed relationship to food, perhaps starting in childhood overinterest, that, due to bullying and damaged self-image, quickly develops through adolescence into an eating disorder. The compulsion to eat more than your body needs come from losing touch with your appetite. Food becomes friend. As social isolation and despair expands with girth people become locked into abusive relationships with food, as their source of comfort seems to turn on them to create guilt and self-hatred. Eating becomes addictive, compulsive and a means to cope with depression and/or anxiety.

Gruen was right that it will never be possible to cultivate fat pride. Even if we successfully ended all shape discrimination, and celebrated large sexy women stars such as the gorgeous Dawn French, people who eat too much are being told by their doctors, and countless new studies reported daily in the mainstream media, that their eating habits are unsustainable for their health. Overeating in that knowledge is self-destructive.

But something else went out of Hunt’s head when he spat his beer and it was gender. His friend was a male who made a joke about a passing large woman. Somewhere in his deftly but overdrawn equivalence between shape discrimination, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism he lost sight of the simple fact that these jokes are mostly fat chick jokes – they are mainly directed at women.

How did this crucial understanding of the nature of the discrimination he wants to end get lost? Let’s turn to the panel and ask them. Hey guys …. Oh, you are all guys.

This was a panel of intelligent and sympathetic men. They thoughtfully argued the perennially tricky question of whether it is justified to recirculate vilification and offence even if the intention is to criticise and undermine it. Since not even the most astute and cashed-up advertising agency can control the reception of the meanings they create, that question remains unresolved.

But, smart and critical as they were, they were still men. Sure, that is no reason for them to miss the connection under their noses between gender and shape discrimination, but my point is they did, and they were less likely to if there were women among them.

What is it with these pack panels with token women? It is an entrenched cultural habit that commentary panels from The Panel, to Insiders are comprised of men with one woman present to offset their overt discrimination. I take my hat off to the women who participate. What audiences miss is that, no matter how fairly these panels are chaired, a lifetime of gendered conversational dynamics first mapped out by Dale Spender, in her Man Made Language, means that women talk most freely among themselves.

But in this particular panel, the Gruen did away with women altogether, with searing irony, to discuss discrimination. And unsurprisingly they missed gender altogether as one of the main conduits through which discrimination of all sorts, from shape to homophobia, gets expressed.

This is not to make the absurd claim that when it comes to discrimination women are always worse off. Here I am safely installed at my desk while traumatized Sri Lankan and Palestinian men are grieving on piles of rubble. But it is to say that if we want to end discrimination we have to understand how it is expressed and circulated. If we remain gender blind, we’ll overlook a principle field of power asymmetry that overlaps with all others.

There is another strained equivalence that can be drawn here. In the same way that the rate of sexual violence has been shown to decrease in countries where women take up high-level positions, such as parliamentarians, maybe another way to end shape discrimination that is mostly directed at women, is to end the phenomena of pack panels.

This article first appeared in The Age, 16 May 2009

This Year’s Budget Falls Right After Mothers Day.

Few people realize how flammable maternity bras are. Under the right conditions they go up like a drought-stricken quokka. Burning bras is of course a rather hackneyed way to draw attention to a protest cause. But this is what we did under the auspices of the Mothers of Intervention, on the steps of the Victorian parliament, on the release of Pru Goward’s Valuing Parenting report in 2002.

Goward had made strange bedfellows with Sharan Burrow of the ACTU to recommend 14 weeks universal, publicly-funded maternity leave. That’s right. It was 2002.

Seven years on and the memory of our charred, melted bras seems as good a symbol of recent gains for mothers as any. We mothers have all of us spent years in training, working and paying taxes. We all of us everyday, carry on the relentless grind of unpaid caring and domestic labour, that guides our littlies toward productive and participatory citizenship. In that sense we had all of them ‘for the country’ and each of the blessed little blighters does their bit to counter the ageing demographic.

Tuesday's budget night follows close on Sunday's Mothers' Day. Only 22 % of Australian enterprise agreements make provision for any paid maternity leave, a recent study at the University of Sydney by Marian Baird has revealed. Under these positively industrial-revolution era conditions Mothers are being forced into early returns to work. Let’s be absolutely clear about what this means. Women who are at times still recovering from birthing, and establishing breastfeeding, sleep-deprived, passing clots and with painfully distended breasts, and at the height of attachment, these women are sitting at their desks when they should be with the babies who need them.

Part of our difficulty is that too few of women who have experienced birth and newborn babies are informing the policy-making around paid maternity leave. It is unimaginable and unconscionable that new mothers and new babies should be torn apart from one another before they are ready because a wealthy government fails to understand and provide for the dictates of their bodies.

The Productivity Commission draft report has recommended 18 weeks pay at the minimum wage as a government-funded parental leave provision. We are facing a national skills shortage which may put women in a better bargaining position in demanding leave from their employers. The more flexible the work arrangements the more women are able to continue participation in the workforce. However, since women still dominate in lower-paid jobs in the service sector they are also most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the economic downturn on unemployment.

A number of recent studies have shown that differences in men and women’s access to paid leave around the birth of their children establishes and entrenches patterns of inequity in the home. Pressures on women working the ‘double-shift’ are simply unsustainable. Without access to paid leave, and just as critically without enough support from their partners in caring and homemaking, women face a stark choice between having children and employment. Rationally and reasonably women are opting for fewer children – I know I did - having profound effects on low levels of fertility, and the aging demographic.

To counter these trends government policy needs to consider and provide for men not just as breadwinners, but as care-givers. It won’t be enough to support mother’s domestic and care commitments. Any paid leave needs to consider the particular needs of mothers as bearers, birthers and breastfeeders in the early stages of childraising. But if we genuinely want to encourage equity in the home as well as the workplace men need to be included in family-friendly provisions including access to paid leave.

A payment that attaches to the child and allows parents to negotiate the best time to take that leave, whether together or separately, or whether to spend that money on childcare at the right time, enables most flexibility. That is, as long as their choices are not forced by their respective workplaces paying men higher wages and insisting on inflexible hours, or demotion on their return to work.

Few people realize that mothers’ day was first celebrated in 1870 by an American civil war mother protesting her sons’ enlisting and advancing the cause of pacifism. Julia Ward knew the value of her work as a mother, but she also toiled in a no-man’s land between the public sentimental mythologies of mothering – the motherhood statements – and its actual valuing and exploitation by governments. This budget we mothers want our due for mothers day. Mr Rudd and Mr Swan need to keep in mind that women also vote with their wombs.

The Contortions of Pussycat Sex Appeal

Picture this. Five cervixes bobbing about on stage. Or was it six? Hard to keep count, what with my round-eyed seven-year-old next to me as I valiantly tried to explain away the music video thrust before her eyes.

The graphic nature of the Pussycat Dolls’ routine leaves very little to the imagination. Nevertheless, a coterie of cervixes came to mind. So very graphic was the fanny-flashing, they’re just a nip and a flap from soft porn.

For her tenth birthday a friend’s child had been given a DVD of current pop video clips and a bunch of her friends, including my 10 and 7-year-olds, were gathered around watching, in silent and detailed study, as a series of young women indulged in intent sexual posturing.

Behind them a group of mothers were variously open-mouthed, indifferent or guffawing at the desperate contortions these young women were pulling to appear pretty and desirable. And to whom? To an audience of flabby middle-aged corporate men who need to appear virile to their peers despite their impotence? Try girls aged under 10.

The ‘PCD’ – oh they are important enough to warrant an acronym - were mouthing something about popping bottles while opening giant champagne flagons from which sparkly glitter burst. Their every move seemed to be about turning themselves inside out so we could all get a better look.

A speculum might have saved them all that splitting, gyrating, thrusting and bottom vacillating. But less is more, right?

Those of us mothers who consciously work in a swat team of cultural quarantining might imagine these PCDs – Pornitically Correct Debutants - were manufactured by a boardroom of impotent Californian Corporate Profiteers who assume we all suffer the same need to make penile responsiveness the centre of our vision and our culture.

So central in fact that PCD inc is an expansionist media enterprise recast as a music group through a record deal with Interscope Records. Originally a Los Angeles burlesque dance act this toxic troupe of pornographied gender norms has morphed into a reality television program, venue, casino and merchandising and - who would have guessed - a spread in Playboy.

But their creator is not some bloated Caesar of a tyrannous gender regime emanating from the remote, dysfunctional community of Los Angeles and enforced through media saturation. Any libertarian media commentator would delight in telling you those are a set of stereotypes saying more about the devaluing of ‘low’-culture and the snobbery of critics. Did somebody mention gender politics?

The PCD creator is a woman, a model and choreographer named Robin Antin. Pink might have once have dubbed her a Stupid Girl, but instead she works with her. Antin’s immobilized face might feign scorn at repressed embittered feminists who think her work grossly exploits young women. But what would she say to mothers of little girls who, trying not to be too prohibitive, nevertheless draw the line at crotch-clutching and protest – we can’t turn it off.

You see, there’s the rub. The devastating argument always put against us inhibited, resentful feminists is to look the other way. I confess that is my impulse in the face of such a consistently dull, unrelenting cultural visage of same-same undressed pouting pretty-girls taking themselves so seriously it is laughable. Along with most families we adopt of policy of avoidance for our children, but it is slim defense against the barrage of turbo-sexed imagery that is not just before their eyes, but directly marketed at their age group.

Let’s once and for all debunk the ‘adult-entertainment’ façade of a retaining wall around sexualized imagery as delusional and counter-productive as that built around the Gaza strip.

Firstly, what adult missing even a residual trace of cynicism doesn’t appraise the PCDs as a tonga-line of twerps? Granted there may be a populace of men who actively suspend disbelief for the pleasures of penile responsiveness (to which we are all enjoined to bear witness), and to them I wearily say, oh get your hand off it.

Secondly, who else among our demographic has their antennae out, uncritically receiving all media transmissions from the likes of Robin Antin, and passively absorbing her damaging mesh of meanings about girlhood. Through a set of circumstances parents can’t actually control, it is children under 10 watching the PCDs and this is cause for real concern, even outrage.

Unsurprisingly my diatribe to the under tens didn’t work. I ranted the PCDs are like puppets who make a lot of money for other people and have no say about their dance moves or lyrics. They have careers so short-lived it is discriminatory. They make being pretty the central objective of young women, most of whom can never live up to their surgically altered features and air-brushed bodies.

But what did work was laughing at the preposterous lengths the PCD’s went to, to attain the status of sexy. The bewildering acrobatics of desirability have become so absurd, so ‘ridick’, you need botox to keep a straight face.

But little girls are trying, in a relentless routine of minute daily gestures and self-adorning, to figure out how on earth to be girls. And since it doesn’t come naturally they take the ludicrous posturing of the PCDs very seriously indeed. Diatribes and snickering aside, if parents want to give their children a childhood, that is largely distinguished from adulthood through their protection from adult sexuality, we need to stop buying into this guff. Better still Robin, stop making it.