The anti-intervention movement and violence in remote Aboriginal communities

There is no subject more inflammatory than violence against children and sexual violence, the abuse of innocence, universally sickens and abhors. The vulnerability of Aboriginal children has been central to settler imaginings of Aboriginal people. They were early and routinely said to be victims of infanticide, cannibalism, the ‘terrible rite’ (sub and circumcision), ceremonial disfigurement and child bride capture and later the more banal crimes of poor hygiene and inadequate discipline. These confections, all based on hearsay and speculation, became commonplace, and they drove the Protection and Assimilation administrative regimes, which did untold damage to Aborigines, ‘for their own good’. Given this record, the Northern Territory Intervention and its newer incarnation Stronger Futures should be viewed with deep suspicion. These latest administrations are imposing another assimilationist regime, this one informed by the very neo-liberal economics that are presently tipping over European economies like dominos. With wearying repetition, the government wants the extensive Indigenous land holdings of the Northern territory, because a new frontier is well underway, of mineral extraction. Yet non-Indigenous Australians are faltering with this campaign. They know there is acrimonious disagreement among Aboriginal leaders on the question of the Intervention. They are reluctant to take sides, wary of the colonial strategy of divide and rule and preferring to stay with another colonial staple – that Aborigines are an undifferentiated entity rather than a diverse and contemporary people. Most discordantly they know this time the violence in remote communities is both real and fetishised. This has made it a political no-go zone. Because of the opportunising of the Howard, Rudd and Gillard Governments on the exposure of that violence and the racist identification of it as particular to Aboriginal peoples, along with people’s reluctance to shame Aboriginal women and demonize Aboriginal men, it has entered the category of the unspeakable. Those who oppose the Intervention and Stronger Futures omit it and even excuse it. Recently an activist referred to the young men who broke into a campervan outside Alice Springs and gang-raped the tourists inside. She said they were trying to get home. She said ‘You can see why these boys get into these things’. Actually, I can’t see how stealing a vehicle to overcome a lack of transportation bears any relation to rape. The anti-intervention movement has encountered stalling and evasion from the same people who readily galvanized against Howard’s anti-Wik 10 point plan and marched in droves for Reconciliation. Yet facing up to, rather than minimalising, violence against women and children in remote communities, is key to resisting the racial discrimination these latest forays into Indigenous administration have imposed. For this violence is manifestly not Aboriginal. It is everywhere endemic to our society. It is male and the perpetrators are a minority of men. Family violence is first and foremost about gender, not race, but it is more pervasive and extreme in communities where masculinity is in crisis. That crisis is identifiable, around the globe, with communities afflicted with inter-generational disadvantage, and all of the self-destructive behaviors that consistently impact on people enduring the most entrenched socio-economic alienation. Those men, consistently and manifestly, have prehistories of violent subjection, often racial, sometimes colonial. But returned soldiers and institutionalized men are also susceptible. We humans are inordinately efficient at perpetrating violence and paradoxically incapable of enduring it. But gender plays a role here to, for a minority women coping with trauma are more likely to be self-destructive, whereas a minority of men are destructive to the people around them. Violence in remote NT communities is more visible. The collusion of silence to uphold high-stake reputations, the surrounding infrastructure of services and amenities, all conspire to keep it under wraps in the rest of the country. Some have claimed Aboriginal men are customarily more violent to their women and children. Violence has spiraled in some communities because of the coupling of socio-economic disadvantage with the kind of self-destructive behaviors that ‘customarily’, in all human societies, go together with a crisis in masculine identity: particularly alcohol and substance abuse. It is Orwellian to identify pornography with Aboriginal men. As Rosalie Kunoth-Monks recently, patiently, explained, you won’t see Aboriginal people posing in pornographic material. She drew attention to a descriptive cultural disjunct. If anything, porn, most of which has undersold the ideals of libertarianism and sunk into the myopia of misogyny, is an assimilative apparatus to gender relations that I’m afraid have charactised non-Indigenous society as far back as the First Fleet. I’m talking here about the eroticizing of the power asymmetry between men and women and men and children. There is only one solution to male violence, and it applies wholesale across all communities around the world, whenever expressions of masculine identity become, with a minority of men in that community, inextricably bound up in the abuse of power. The women in that community and the non-violent men who support them, should be supported in their demand for the removal of violent men from their homes, communities and lands, until they can guarantee they will cease to pose a danger. Ironically, the exiling of violent men was able to be enforced by the entry permit system that was disbanded under the Intervention. This removal should not be enforced as a criminal matter. These men need to rebuild their lives so they can return to where they are needed most, their homes, families and communities. Before the Intervention women in some remote communities were working together in an attempt to deal with violence. They are not passive victims waiting for whitefellas to rescue them. We need to go back and look at what was already working. We need to empower the Aunties for if they and their men are disempowered, by top-down imposed administrative regimes that humiliate and discredit them, the violence can only worsen. A version of this article first appeared as ‘Some Hard Truths about the Intervention’, in The Age, 2 July 2012.

Monogamy 2

There is a universal truth to all long-term sexual relationships that is never openly discussed. This widespread sexual malaise lurks behind all our frenetic sexual questing, and provides a feast for all the opportunists who snout in the resulting trough, from philanderers to pornographers to Bettina Arndt. It is simply this. At some point every sexual relationship loses ignition. This simple unavoidable and bewildering fact is a hidden infirmity, that in our solution-compelled world we imagine we can resolve without first fully understanding. We can’t. Once sexual ignition dissolves, for some after 3 years, for others after 10 years, for a rare handful years later, it thereafter makes rare appearances between the sheets. Many turn to what are quaintly termed ‘marital aids’, ranging from lingerie to fantasy to toys to DVDs to acts that give that kick purely because they are transgressive. What do I mean by ignition? Ignition is the roar of the engine. The overtake of all senses and thought processes by the overwhelming need to get into your lover. Combustion might flash when the inside of a knee shows as it’s crossed under a bar. It might spark within the first frank gaze of longing, the flick of a tongue, the wrench at a belt buckle. And when it ignites every last one of us is clawing, thrashing, convulsing and doing flamenco hands with our feet. When it mutually ignites sex becomes a head-on-collision. It is, we’ve all said it, The Best Thing Ever. Ignition is what we all want. But most of us have loved someone enough to stay all the way to the point when it is lost. Most of us has grieved it, some quietly, at the risk of making our beloved feel we have lost ‘attraction’ even though objectively we know that doesn’t make sense. Some of us sensibly talk it through knowing in doing so we destroy that entirely unbidden mechanistic jolt that by its nature can never be contrived consciously. Some of us endure rounds of counseling thinking ‘intimacy’ is lost, even though objectively we know that also doesn’t add up. Ignition is something outside of words or cultural contrivances of any sort. I am a social constructivist, yet I think ignition is something we will never explain or manufacture. Ignition is essential, yet like all the biological things we do with our bodies, we have built elaborate social rituals around it, from monogamy to conjugal visits to viagra. We can hypothesise into the next millennium about why ignition is lost – children, overwork, domestic inequity, impotence - but for now we haven’t yet faced up to the fact that we all try to survive in sexually exclusive relationships without it. This is a very tough call. Margaret Mead wasn’t the last to observe that the institution of monogamous marriage depends of wide-scale prostitution. But that doesn’t tell us much about how women cope, who aren’t prostitutes that is. Couples that survive the loss of ignition have invested so much of their lives in their sexual interdependency – children, mortgages, love – they hobble along without it, since there is too much at stake to overthrow on such a seemingly facile premise. Make-do sex rules. Some replace it with other things and though technically sated they live with a certain hollowness. Speaking, as I have all the way through, from experience – extrapolating outrageously in fact - those of us that find a way through the loss of ignition settle for sex without it because losing all the things invested in a life partnership is a far worse prospect. Besides, enduring love may not turn the key, but it can be immensely, ecstatically sating, and the glow goes on for days. This kind of sex oils the machine. It’s great, and we accept it doesn’t roar. But the loss of ignition is part of life so long as we construe our lives around monogamy. Monogamy can’t sustain ignition. Generations ago I suspect ignition was less central to ideas of sexual success, and successful relationships. Its loss may have been experienced as part of the maturing of a relationship from which, once endured, new things could be built. Is it a matter of just growing up and getting over it? I for one think we humans weren’t meant to be sexually exclusive, and building our lives around monogamy has been disastrous for too many, particularly when children are involved. How many more broken bodies do we need to hurl onto the count before we acknowledge it’s not working, it rarely has and it rarely will. Perhaps the problem isn’t the loss, which we should openly accept as part of the pact of monogamy – though preferably not on Bettina Arndt’s website as something mean-spirited women inflict on men. The problem is we repress the loss of ignition and don’t know how to tolerate it and move on to something else. That something might be polyamory, or it might be some cherished understanding that binds a couple closer. I think after decades of sexual questing we can safely say it isn’t anything the sex industry has been able to resolve for us. This article first appeared as ‘The Disaster of Monogamy – we should acknowledge that it rarely works’, Opinion, The Age, 1 November 2011, p. 15, HYPERLINK "http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/the-disaster-of-monogamy--we-should-" http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/the-disaster-of-monogamy--we-should-acknowledge-that-it-rarely-works-20111031-1ms42.html

Monogamy

It was the tip of the nose that did it, and not just for me. The wife of Democratic New York Governor Eliot Spitzer stood by his side on 12 March 2008, as he attempted to salvage his reputation by resigning from office. Looking rent to the core of her frail and neatly suited being, she stood quietly as her sexual allure was effectively trashed by her own husband before millions of viewers. Pale but keeping it together with what must have taken an iron will, it was just the tip of her nose that give away how utterly humiliated, dejected and betrayed she felt. So poignant was the picture, it inspired the television law drama series The Good Wife (2009) which replayed that interview with a cathartic reprise. She smacks him one out of sight of the cameras and didn't it feel good. Men like Spitzer make us collectively angry. He not only abused public funds - some $80,000 - to pay exhorbitant escort fees, he caused distress to the very people he is charged with protecting from the slings and arrows of life, etc.  Yet the Spitzer story was somehow different to the Clintons' and a blur of public figures whose unfaithful marriages have undergone the same flayed-alive, overexposure. Sometimes it takes a critical mass to disperse the fog of unquestioning. I saw the carcass of the Spitzer marriage being flung atop a mass of corpses too high to see over. I needed to step back to get perspective, and once I did I saw a heap that, like most heaps, looked like a monumental waste. It's no surprise Sptizer’s call-girl has done very nicely for herself, with a Playboy shoot, a single release and a sex-advice column in the New York Post. Spitzer's wife, Silda Wall, has also capitalized on the media attention, releasing a book, ‘Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer’. She has said, 'The wife is supposed to take care of the sex. This is my failing; I wasn't adequate.' Bettina Arndt would agree. It is men who suffer a 'sex-starved' subsistence in heterosexual monogamous marriage. Women deprive men, women dismiss men, women shame men about their natural urges. Women are, all over again, Female Eunuchs and God's Police. Whatever sexuality we managed to reclaim during the sexual revolution, we are now content to consign to history and worse, impose our desultory, lack-lustre, bed-death on the men we love.  Eric Anderson also discerns a gender abyss between men and women's sexual needs in his recently released book, ‘The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating’. This study of 120 partnered undergraduate men found that 78% cheated, and unlike Arndt who attributes men's infidelity to sexual neglect, Anderson blithely puts it down to men wanting to have sex with other women. He and Ardnt advocate rethinking monogamy, and I agree.  It may just be the surveillance and exposure of our once private lives that has brought us to this point of realisation, but monogamy clearly isn't working and in the end it's kids who are getting most hurt by the trashing of perfectly functional relationships all because we have lazily failed to pay attention to the self-evident – sexual exclusivity is a cruel and repressive ideal few attain. Long term monogamous sexual relationships at some point lose ignition. Most soldier on without it, but a critical mass can't live without it. Rather than hurt the partners they love, and destabilise their kids, they lie. Increasingly the absurdity of the institution, its inherent sexual repressiveness, is being questioned. What concerns me is this nasty turn toward correlating monogamy with women's sexuality, as though it suits us because we have lesser, read deficient, read inferior needs. By all means let's rethink monogamy, but why that entails blaming women for the failings of an institution that arguably hasn't left us overly sated and all-over-rosy either, isn't clear. Aside from entrenched, habitual misogyny, it is hard to explain why the voices of women are either missing or stereotyped in the debate to date. Arndt has so alienated women over decades of overexposure in male-appointed editorial column space I'm astonished any have contributed to her 'research'. I for one refuse to have another Saturday morning trampled by her myopic ravings and haven't read a word she's written in over ten years, anymore than I would listen to Alan Jones, or watch Andrew Bolt. Certain men, who may not have taken ‘Gender, Sexuality and Feminism’ in their undergraduate years at a guess, will flock to her website seeking solace, making her sample self-selected. I wonder if any have ever asked themselves what they might do better to make their wives want them again – Cut their nails? Brush their teeth? Read the kids a story? Make eye contact? Instead it is all about women’s lack of testosterone. It's easy to blame, and harder to think with rigour on a question that does indeed cause untold numbers of men AND WOMEN real distress, either because a central part of their well-being is daily undermined by living unsated, or because their entire lives, their emotional and financial security, things they have worked most of their adult lives to build, and that of their children, has been thrown asunder on the tissue-thin premise of sexual possession and its betrayal. The keystone of the institution of monogamy is sexual possession. Its origins lie in the securing of agnatic bloodlines for property inheritance. Over centuries it has cast a long shadow disproportionately over women's lives because we are the only ones in the reproductive dyad who can prove with certainty our children’s parentage. The Father could be anyone, and nothing cuts deeper for men, as it would for women. It has made them a little insecure about women’s sexuality and that’s putting it mildly. It is thus women who have endured real suffering Bettina, such as violence, incarceration, lobotomies, impoverishment and social stigma. Indeed the body count for adulterous women over the centuries and the horrific state of many of their corpses is testament enough to the gender asymmetry in heterosexual monogamous marriage. Sexual possession has no place in modern relationships or familial configurations. It is like religion. For some, for a time, it provides an ideal to live up to that gives structure and purpose. To have mutual satisfaction over a lifetime with the person you love is not just ecstatic, it is a triumph given all the impediments to good sex a couple can face. But for monogamist fundamentalists, sexual possession provides the rationale for violence against women and children. The children of monogamy fundamentalists face a clear and present danger when their mothers repartner; in two recent cases, of being left to drown at the bottom of a dam, or of catapulting to their death off the Westgate Bridge. There is much at stake here, and we have reached a critical moment in this nascent debate. Let's not squander the opportunity to create better relationships, and perhaps defuse one highly volatile fuse for violence against women and children, by letting gender bias and misogyny creep into the discussion. This article appeared in The Hoopla, 9 January 2012, http://thehoopla.com.au/monogamy-its-over-lets-talk-it

Samantha Brick and Beauty Determinism

Samantha Brick is what we might call a Beauty Determinist, but she is far from alone. She created a sensation last week by insisting in London’s Daily Mirror that every minor encounter, every passing glance, not to mention catty confrontation, was invariably about the visual impact she has on all and sundry as a beautiful woman. There soon followed a number of spoofs by wily journalists who couldn’t resist letting rip with Brick’s unassailable narcissism, her puffed up self-portraiture, and her self-evident self-delusion. But could it be true that the visual has come to take up so much of the pie-graph of feminine identity? Putting Brick’s personality disorder to one side, the 5000 comments tacked onto her piece and its viral contagion suggest she might have pushed one or two unaccustomed buttons to do with women’s visual status. From her many photos Brick is passably pretty. Combined with height and blondosity, and a certain ratio of hip to breast, this is all it took for her to be, at one time, considered a stunner. But that would still leave her as nothing special for the simple fact is the vast majority of women posses a combination of enough beauty attributes to appear lovely in their youth. For all of us it passes. Clearly the attention Brick once commanded took on a significance soon outlived by her years, but she nevertheless continued to see all through the prism of beauty. This sets her apart in only one sense. Most attractive women are perfectly aware of their visual impact. After all even beautiful women have got eyes and can judge against prevailing standards. They also become expert readers of perceptual relations. For their safety depends on them developing a refined radar because of unrelenting sexual harassment. That’s right. Any hostility directed at beautiful women usually comes from men, a surprising number of whom toggle between the impulses of attraction and assassination. Like Samantha good-looking women know they possess an asset with particular exchange value. Unlike Brick however, as they get on with their lives and see it falling away, achievements outweigh the importance once given to their looks. However it pans out, we all negotiate our status as spectacles. And for all this plenitude of pulchritude women still manage to get on extraordinarily well together. They mostly celebrate each others’ attributes, tut-tut insecurities and see beyond surface affect to the character and spirit that animates their friend’s visage to moments of incandescent gorgeousness. It’s part of how we cherish each other. In that sense Brick described herself as a deeply lonely woman. Whilst some women see-saw between a sense of entitlement and failure in terms of their approximation to beauty ideals, Brick is a remarkably blithe spirit. Somewhere in her psychic attic she’s stashed her own Dorian Grey portrait, disintegrating in the half-light, while she marches out into the full glare, insisting that by putting her best face forward it should be met with universal indulgence. Her feigning of Cinderella-like subjugation by ugly-sister-surround, surely had a tipping point, namely her obliviousness to the ways she clearly alienates others. But Brick exposed not only an unhinged vision of gender relations, but the hypocrisy surrounding feminine beauty. Women make spectacular careers from a self-appraisal of the exchange value of their visual appeal – usually as entertainers, but occasionally as public figures. The critical point is they must never, ever, openly acknowledge that they can see with their own eyes that they are beautiful and knowingly capitalize on its social value. To do so would make them calculating. If they let on they know they hold a certain undefined asset as beautiful women that they can work to their advantage, they would be accused of ‘trading on their looks’. That old adage, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is in actuality a warning to women. Beauty is visualized externally. It is bestowed from outside. Beauty cannot be self-made. That is why it is ultimately a powerless designation. The irony of this of course is the truckloads of cash a critical mass of women are willing to spend on lotions that, tellingly, make no difference to the ‘evenness of tone’, ‘firmness’, etc, of their fingertips. Each new technology that aids the contrivance of beauty is abhorred, even though we gave up the ethical ghost on self-modification centuries ago. Brick proudly documents the lengths she goes to in order to, paradoxically, piss off all the women in her life. That’s fine. A whole genre of chick lit is devoted to the surreal absurdity and shrieking expense of women’s largely ineffectual efforts to be more beautiful. What doesn’t wash down with the fat-burning capsules, however, is declaring you’ve actually pulled it off. That’s because we know the very premise of beauty depends on a multitude of half-truths and contradictions. Most confronting was Brick’s claim that she determines the reception of her looks. Beauty is something that inheres in her yet that she works up into a declaration to the world. The button she pushed was her contradictory, yet correct, acknowledgement that she has absolutely no control over how she is perceived. She attributed that to women’s innate jealousy. In fact it inheres in the very definition and operation of feminine beauty. Liz Conor is the author of The Spectacular Modern Woman.