Liz Conor: Comment and Critique

A Riot of Consumption

2011-08-12T17:31:00.000-07:00

A Riot of Consumption

You deserve it. You deserve a tropical holiday, a luxury car, designer sneakers, the latest igadget, a weekly pedicure, Miranda Kerr’s breasts (to have or to hold) and a thousand gorgeous possessions to place around your home and body. Anything money can buy and money can buy anything. All of these things will come to you as if by magic, not because you earned it but just because you’re worth it. And without these things you’re worth nothing.

The memory of Mark Duggan, the man whose shooting by police sparked the initial riots, has been trashed in a literal free-for-all. In a bewildering turn of events, the usual expression of street level mayhem turned into something unprecedented. The rioters turned their rage on the palaces of dreams, and souvenired from the aisles of exquisite temptation.

Not exactly of Will and Kate’s circle, the young people involved, it is by now well rehearsed, are without prospects with time on their hands. Most are cocooned in miserable housing estates with the despair and disenfranchisement of intergenerational welfare pressing in on their hungry, unbridled souls.

The commentariat have got them pegged. They are angry at the austerity measures, they are disillusioned at the MP rorting scandal, and the insidious involvement of the Metropolitan police in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. They are the ‘children of Thatcher’, on the wrong end of the widening gap between wealth and poverty. They are dragging themselves throughthe long days of their lives with no sense of a place in the world. Over and over again they are told that they give nothing and take too much.

But they are something else too. They are consumers and consumption has become fundamental to the expression of their identities. They are besieged by advertising and daily goaded with beauty, luxury, celebrity and finery. The rally cry of the London riots sets it apart from any protest event in human history. What Do We Want? Stuff.

While consumption aims to incite a permanent state of dissatisfaction – only momentarily sated by the splurge - and there have always been shoplifters and pilferers from every socio-economic strata who have flouted its contract, what we are seeing here is in essence an unparalleled and violent response to the deceit of the consumer accord.

The contract, and it underpins our economy, no longer holds for these looters. With renewed purpose the feckless security guards will while away their days imagining the underside of shopper’s clothes. There will be more of them, and more police standing by, because kids know that only a critical mass and a balaclava is needed to get stuff free.

It’s not as though corporate consumption presents such a compelling moral order they feel obliged to kneel under the vaulted ceilings of its temples. They may not believe that it’s immoral to take excessively marked up things from stores manned by underpaid staff, made in third world countries at irreparable cost to the environment.

Is there any political content to their destruction and theft? We witnessed an uprising of the demographic most targeted by advertising – childless young adults with less financial constraints than families juggling mortgages with disposable incomes. Only they don’t have that last thing do they?

They are enmeshed in welfare, sometimes generations of dependency with little prospects for employment. In the economic backwaters of the mega-metropolises access to a reasonable education has not improved their life prospects. They are living an unrelenting stalemate.

The disjoint between the despair of welfare and the plenitude of consumption may well be impossible to sustain daily. The promise of gratification has become a screeching imperative. And they know it is also a lie. The advertising that encircles their every move is not a pledge that life will get better; it taunts their deprivation and it has goaded them into violence.

Worse, consumption, not welfare, instills entitlement. What are the good things in life for them? What makes up their dreams? A qualification, a meaningful job, financial autonomy? Dreams are now things we buy. Our Rapid Eye Movement has become an acquisitive, unrelenting survey over a saturated surface of superfluous stuff. Every facet of our lives is enmeshed in the acquisition of goods, most of which we don’t want anymore within a few short months. It is as senseless as, well, looting.

Where the materials are sourced, and by whom, who profits from it, how the labor is remunerated, how much it damages the environment, all of these ‘means of production’ are invisible. They need to be. They bear a remarkable similarity to looting.

There are no consequences for consumption. Under an ethical milieu that thrives from divesting all sense of responsibility the logical conclusion is surely to resist actually paying up.

There was a time when the disenfranchised organized, say as workers. How do the permanently unemployed organize? They may not have a manifesto, but there is no doubt what is being targeted here. They are not kicking in police stations, prisons, parliaments, embassies or even heads, they are kicking in shopfronts. Could it be that consumption, an organizing principle of our lives, has failed them?

There are clear issues to address here. Police violence and racism. Education and employment. Housing and social inclusion. And though it’s not chic critique to say it of course parenting matters. Of course they feel universally unvalued. But I wonder if their parents have much time to show love, and how, under a cloud of exhaustion and sadness they overcome the alienation they feel towards their own kids when they behave badly. How do you tell your kids you believe in them when they are destined to ‘die in the ditch of welfare’, as Noel Pearson had put it. ‘Family pressures’ means unraveling relationships. There’s no respite from poverty.

But there is something else too that hasn’t been given enough thought. Telling kids hundreds of times a day that they are entitled to an abundance of beautiful, enhancing, pleasurable things that they are unlikely ever to be able to afford, and that to be without amounts to failure, is nothing more than taunting the disadvantaged.

(This piece first appeared on The Drum, ABC online, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2836576.html, 12 August 2011

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-24T23:12:00.000-07:00

This wall is in response to the campaigning by the 'big polluter' mining companies against the Gillard government initiating a price on carbon. It is intended to be ironic.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-24T23:09:00.000-07:00

This wall was in response to the Black Saturday fires in February 2009, in which 173 Victorians lost their lives.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

This wall scored the performances of Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop as opposed industry ministers in 2009. (8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours play, was the demand won by the Stonemasons and building workers in 1856)

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-24T22:57:00.001-07:00

This wall was in response to Prime Minister John Howard's call for an inquiry into the feasibility of a local nuclear industry and a debate on the viability of a nuclear industry in Australia in mid 2006.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-24T22:49:00.001-07:00

This wall was a remembrance to a 13-year-old Somali girl who was gang raped, and then stoned to death after she reported it to al-Shabab, in the southern port of Kismayu, in late 2008.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-24T22:18:00.001-07:00

This wall commented on the common backing by the Labour and Liberal parties for the proposed Gunns' Pulp Mill, in the Tamar valley, Tasmania in late 2006. To avoid forestry becoming an election issue the parties stitched up a bipartisan deal changing the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement. It made logging, that the courts had found to be illegal, legal. The mill would have consumed 4.5 million tonnes of forest per year. In addition secret dealings between the Tasmanian Lennon government and Gunns had been revealed.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-24T21:41:00.001-07:00

This wall responded to revelations on ABC's 'Four Corners', in October 2008, of the infiltration of environmental groups by packaging corporation Amcor. It created a covert group, the A-team, in cahoots with the CFMEU, and stacked the Victorian Labor party's environment policy committee influencing Labor party forestry policy.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-22T01:23:00.000-07:00

This wall was inspired by the documentary Outfoxed, which exposed the bias, undue influence and corruption of Rupert Murdoch's media empire

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

This wall was in response to then PM John Howard signing off on logging more old growth forests.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-22T01:10:00.000-07:00

This wall was on the release of Tarantino's 'Kill Bill' in 2003.

Writing on the Wall

2011-07-22T01:04:00.000-07:00

This was the second Graffiti wall. The first read, 'Jeff Kennett Needs His Bottom Smacked'. This one was at the height of the Wik Native Title Dispute in which then PM John Howard propogated much of Pauline Hanson's racial sentiment, to reclaim the National party constituents haemorraging to her One Nation party. Thanks to Tasmanian conservative senator Brian Harradine, Howard's bill, which required amending the racial discrimination act, Howard's 10 Point Plan passed in 1998.

On a closer look Porntopia turns out to be a gender dystopia.

2011-06-28T01:11:00.000-07:00

If I were to tell you the world’s largest scientific experiment has just been completed what would you guess it took as its subject matter? The human genome? The cosmos? The unbounded inanity of schlock jocks? None of the above.

This limitless enterprise necessarily drew on a vast archive, a database of infinite yet accessible data. Indeed, it successfully surveyed a control group of one hundred million and they were all human. What could be keeping us humans so busy? Our genitals it seems.

The experiment by neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gassmam analyzed the sexual behavior of a good swathe of humanity by surveying our most private, yet electronically footprinted, activity – our online porn encounters. They took in ‘a billion web searches, a million web sites, a million erotic videos, a million erotic stories, millions of personal ads, and tens of thousands of digitized romance novels’.

The findings are heartening for those of us who have no problem with explicit material, but have a very big problem with violent and misogynistic porn. This exhaustive study found violent porn is 'truly rare', both in terms of number of searches, and percentage of productions. They also refute that such material has any causal relation to rape. In fact they found an inverse relation between the two.

However, as neuroscientists their report may suffer from a lack of nuance. They found that ‘youth’ was by a large margin the most popular category of porn - as in the teen, 'barely legal' and cheerleader variety. And they noted that dominance and submission was a prevalent theme split down the gender divide predictably.

Nevertheless their findings do not confirm those of radical anti-porn feminists such as Gail Dines, and here in Australia Meagan Tyler, who have in their own research found that violence and misogyny so pervade pornography that it is inherently anti-woman. Anti-porn feminists have for decades drawn upon utterly horrific instances of explicit representations of sexual violence to characterize all pornography as misogynist. Yet larger samples such as this most recent, and to date most definitive study, have not supported their contention.

In fact studies diverge in their methodology, such as McKee’s Porn Report, which did not count physical aggression against women as violent porn unless the woman reacted negatively. In a wide ranging survey of recent studies Michael Flood found that ‘Consumption of pornography is exacerbating some male’s tolerance for sexual violence, intensifying their investments in narratives of female nymphomania and male sexual prowess, and shifting their sexual practices and relations.’

Flood also found that consumers of porn are overwhelmingly young men, with ‘close to half of males aged between sixteen and twenty-nine using pornography’. Meta-analysis of studies over recent years found an ‘association between men’s everyday pornography consumption and their attitudes supporting violence against women’, particularly with violent material, but also present in non-violent material. All this on top of truly appalling production values poses a challenge to the industry claims that porn is harmless fun. Even if you put aside the findings of Flood and others, porn’s status as a marginal representational gene means that the creators, producers and participants are hardly taking up their roles fresh out of Gender Studies and while this may be a gross generalization, my guess is they are in general uncritical about the uses and abuses of power and conservatively oriented. I’m implying you might as well give cameras to the lowest orders of the US military and ask them to become filmmakers. A work of pure genius might emerge, sure, but mostly you might expect all the nuance, complexity and reflection of mainstream porn. It is almost entirely woeful and to add insult to industry the interventions into the bodies and faces of the participants makes most of them look weird, even ugly. But as the Flood study shows, that is the least of porns’ problems.

The crusade of anti-porn feminists has achieved nothing in over 40 years because the association of explicitness with inherent misogyny is easily refuted. If it is a matter of explicitness why aren’t men denigrated? Clearly there is more to it, such as the wider context of power inequity, or a backlash against feminism. In fact, why men hate women and want to do violence to them has to be more of a perennial inscrutability than what women want.

Anti-porn feminists should be credited for the violent material they have unearthed, because once you have been exposed, it never leaves you.

Take the novella Insatiable Masochist, in which a child is raped by her father, who delights in bursting her cervix. She thereafter cannot control her urge for aggravated rape, which is detailed in a battering of both graphic and explicit scenarios. Or take the DVD Fuck Slaves which, as Meagan Tyler reports, sports a woman strung upside down as a punching bag on the dust cover and is reviewed in the industry rag, Adult Video News, as a ‘misogynist gem’. Tyler’s and number of other studies have documented the new practice ATM or arse-to-mouth, which the women participants of course have an insatiable desire for. Nothing could better illustrate that the line between representation and actual activity is blurred and that porn sex acts can be light years from anything any woman would enjoy. But that is the point.

Once you have repressed the violent urges such material does indeed cause you to feel – towards the producers and distributors of such material – the question remains: is the problem here explicitness? If the problem is violence and misogyny then surely we can also draw upon a vast archive of material that is not explicit. Obviously rape is by its nature explicit, but so much misogynistic material falls under the radar simply because bits are covered. The tactical error of anti-porn feminists was to claim that all explicit material is as unconscionable as Insatiable Masochist, and to assume that the more explicit its content the more graphic its violence. However, there is now clear and irrefutable evidence that even if we establish that explicitness is not inherently violent, the porn industry, probably overwhelming produced my morons, has become a representational realm in which callousness and misogyny are rife. Something about women’s desireability and sexuality invokes deep hatred in an awful lot of young men, the majority of the consumers of porn. It is as though they move through three stages: desire, inaccessibility, assassination.

The debate has been hamstrung between polarized positions, the libertarian/industry position that minimizes violent material as a negligible percentage, and the radical feminist/Christian right position that says all explicit material is inherently degrading.

Violent porn should be likened to the Indonesian end of the meat market. I can assure you the community response would be no less resounding if ordinary Australians were exposed to it. I am not talking about spanking or bondage or hair pulling or even name calling – though a discussion about why these things have become entrenched in the sexual repertoire is long overdue. I am talking about material that would make people turn away. Whether or not an image or DVD goes so far as to actually uncover a lurking nipple or leave in focus bits, there is still no justification, ever, for the portrayal of violence against women that endorses, or celebrates, or eroticizes it. If men, or even women, are getting off on rape that is self-evidently a social ill, and certainly not an expression of sexual liberation.

Adult entertainment industry bodies, such as the Eros Foundation, and their political arm, the Sex Party, need to dissociate themselves from violent porn if they want to have any credibility, and condemn it rather than defend it as cathartic fantasy. If there is a section of the industry that produces and deliberately profits from violent porn, and the premise of porn is that the activity is not simulated but actual, that is cause enough to shut these production companies down. Either that or have Chris Lilley demolish them through a new series. A strong community sentiment needs to be developed against companies involved in violent porn. Naming and shaming would be far more effective than censorship which has only ever acted as another dead end in the debate.

In fact each polarity in this debate has a case to argue. Explicit material that is non-violent and produced within workplace constraints has the potential to be harmless. Likewise violent porn, regardless of its incidence, volume or percentage of production is a very big concern, for what justification can there ever be for any amount of representation that sanctions violence against women and markets it as a masturbatory tool?

Perhaps in the world’s biggest social experiment, we could try moving away from a preoccupation with the explicit and focus on violence. Only then can we finally come to some resolution in the dejavu of the porn debate. And we might find even stranger bedfellows.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Sunday Age, 26 June 2011

Consexual Sense

2011-03-10T18:35:00.001-08:00

As Wikileak’s frontman Julian Assange appeals his order in London for extradition to Sweden and prosecution for four accusations ranging from rape to sexual misconduct, I’ve been wondering from distant shores if Sweden isn’t experiencing its own Helen Garner moment.

Garner’s book The First Stone lobbed a bombshell into Australian feminism, and indeed gender relations, when she appropriated an actual incident of sexual harassment to argue women enfeebled themselves when they called on police to fend off unwanted sexual advances they should have the wherewithal to repel themselves.

Ironically Garner used women’s experiences without their consent. Arguably they called upon a higher authority because of the University’s failure of process. But whatever side you took, in the end a drunken grab at a breast at a university college social event descended into national scandal because wheels were set in motion that ended up disproportionately damaging everyone involved.

The Assange scandal will add to this body count. The same incredulous question is left hanging over the two Swedish women who originally sought ‘advice’: They went to the police? This same sense of disproportion, added to heady mix of ‘dodgy’ opportunistic charges directed at Assange, hinges off unresolved tension from the ‘sexual revolution’ in which the status of women’s sexual autonomy is still unclear when viewed over the sights of persistent, endemic sexual violence.

I mean, these girls ought to be a little more careful, a little less drunk, a little less willing oughtn’t they? Or so the unspoken thinking might go.

Ardin and Wilen initially inquired as to whether they could legally compel Assange to undergo an STI test. Their accounts were grounds for sex crime charges for the duty officer, who then leaked them to the Swedish press. The rape charge was rescinded by the chief prosecutor for the Stockholm region, but the ‘annoyance’ charge remained. A few days later, however, a lawyer, Borgstrom, and former ‘gender equality ombudsman’, became involved. She approached the head of a ‘crime development unit’, Ny, who is a specialist in the development of sex crime law, and who reconstituted formal charges against Assange, which have provided Interpol with the grounds to extradite him to Sweden.

Critical to unfolding events is the fact that no accusation has been made that consent was withdrawn. Whether the accusations are pursued is now in the hands of the Swedish prosecution.

It goes without saying that the women themselves have come under intense scrutiny; proof of their various equivocations is now well known, from withdrawn tweets to advice on getting revenge on ex-boyfriends posted on the web since withdrawn. For many observers at issue is how decades of rape law reform, as demanded by feminists, can be misappropriated by lawyers to expedite the unrelated legal process of Assange’s extradition by the US. Crikey’s Guy Rundle has pointed to the paradox of a radical movement such a feminism finding itself ‘laced into’ the machinery of government—a Swedish government no less that is compromising its cherished neutrality though its increasing involvement with NATO and ties to the US.

Like the Garner scandal, there is a clear disjunct between the nature of the allegations and proportional legal redress, not to mention public perception of all those involved, claimants and accused. The reverberations through gender relations in both scenarios centre on the ambivalent reception of women’s relatively recently asserted sexual autonomy. The lingering bitterness is that all the women involved had no desire for their experiences to form the basis for a reexamination of contemporary definitions of sexual interaction.

Yet the Pandora’s box has been flung open again and under attack are hard won gains against ongoing epidemic levels of sexual violence against women and children. As a cult-hero Assange’s perceived victimization by these accusations threatens to wind those gains back. In defending rape victims, feminism has become the persecutor. Assange himself dubbed Sweden the ‘Saudi Arabia of feminism’, and prosecutor Ny, now stands accused of being a ‘radical feminist’, and ‘preoccupied’ with women’s victimization and ‘biased’ against men. Feminists such as Kathleen Maltzahn have argued the two women have a right to have their allegations heard in a court of law, yet the whimsy of their complaints throws this into doubt. However, the blaze of events since their accusations were aired, from the censorship of the Wikileaks website, the refusal of paypal and VISA to process its donations, and attempts by Interpol to extradict Assange, are not the responsibility of Ardin and Wilen.

And here again is the Garner rub. In defending the women’s sexual autonomy a machinery has been set in motion that has brought into question whether such allegations should be the province of the law, or left to recently declared autonomous women to handle as they best see fit. Grinding a heel into the foot of an assailant became the badge of feminist home-remedy during the Garner/Ormond College affair. Like the Swedish claimants, these women were shown to have demonstrated all manner of autonomy in their young, feminist-informed lives. Indeed, their prior aggressive behavior – vengeful postings - was lent new significance, while Garner unfairly dissembled the characters of the women involved in the Ormond College affair in her First Stone.

Here we have two scenarios where women’s attempts to use legal process to assert their sexual autonomy have set in motion a series of events for which they were then charged with responsibility. Ironically the examination of their histories, characters, and the actual events in question have created a mantle, a sexual history in disrepute, none will ever escape from. But nor will Assange. Perhaps the second worse thing to being raped, given that it can never be ‘minor’, is being saddled with a bogus accusation of ‘rapist’.

Clearly I would wish the scourge of sexual assault, and the damage it inflicts overwhelming on women to disintegrate forever in a boiling pit of battery acid. But the prosecution of these charges against Assange will not make the world a safer place for women.

In a scenario entirely devoid of violence, threat or coercion where entirely consensual activity has taken place, for whatever reason whatsoever, a woman has a right to withdraw her consent. She also has a responsibility to state that unequivocally. While consent can’t be assumed, neither can its withdrawal be second guessed. The danger arising from the Assange charges is that, after decades of feminist reform, rape will return to the status of a mere ‘annoyance’.

This article first appeared on The Drum, Unleashed, ABC Online, 8 March 2011.

What's in a Name?

2011-02-28T00:57:00.000-08:00

I shall have to sue Nicole Kidman for copyright, regrettable and unpatriotic though that seems. She has named her new baby girl Faith and I’m afraid it is taken. It is my nine-year-old daughter’s name. She is my article of Faith and I never had any wish to convert anyone to my newfound belief system.

Our little bit of Faith was born the month following 9/11. The morning after the twin towers were knocked in like New York’s two front teeth, our first daughter, Harriet, looked at me dejectedly when I came in to get her up. ‘Hugs and Kisses Elmo no more’, she mourned. She thought it was Sesame Street and everyone on it that had been annihilated.

I already had my doubts about bringing children into this apocalyptic world. Sure babies have always faced all manner of famine and strife. It is their suffering that most acutely presages our own helplessness in the face of these cyclic convulsions of ruthless cruelty.

Here in the West it is our conceit that our babies will be ‘part of the solution’. I think future projections on climate change have rather thrown that baby out with the bathwater. Anyone who has joined the dots on Black Saturday and this summer’s floods and cyclones, carries a rueful regret and an unshakable dread around the children they beget.

Even before the towers were felled I had been expressing my doubts to their Dad. How can we bring children into this world, I kept asking him, as the Iraq invasion, the East Timorese crisis, the Chechen war, the Eritrean-Ethiopian war and the second Intifada bled into one expression of merciless malevolence. I genuinely wanted an answer. I still think all mothers are owed that answer.

But it is there in the ineluctable daily existence of our children. If we really gave up on a future it would be children that we would first assign to the past. As nation-builders, eugenicists and assimilationists have frighteningly asserted, our children are the future.

But that doesn’t mean that children can make their present. That is entirely our responsibility and the principle of ‘intergenerational equity’ is daily undermined by those of us who invest only in the present. The ever shortening habit of hourly news consumption and the obsession with daily indicators leaves little time to consider the times we will bequest to our children. I’ve never forgotten the contempt my young friends in Berlin held for the war generation, who, when I was there, were their frail elderly.

All of these thoughts are embodied in our Faith. No wonder she’s a rather irascible little girl. As it happened both of our girls have namesakes who are women that devoted their lives to furthering their people’s unanswered claims for justice and freedom – Harriet Tubman and Faith Bandler.

Although they have Sri Lankan heritage, it is colonial Dutch Burger, so having enslaved and colonized heroines as namesakes is the sort of pretence that rightfully belongs on the Stuff White People Like website.

Children’s names are the first imposition of our own dreams and aspirations over their malleable little bodies. No wonder they are such a cultural flashpoint for contestation and dispute. The recently published Things Bogans Like devotes its best pages to the misspelt alliterations spawned on the newest McMansion housing estates from Jakxsen to Jorja. The authors describe it as the bogan’s constant quest for self-actualisation.

But when it comes to children’s names we are all guilty. We all feel a little riled when we hear our child’s carefully chosen, unique brand shrieked across the public swimming pool. Given the absurd load of cultural baggage I have already assigned to entirely other people, even if I did make them, it seems uncouth to argue for Faith no more.

That would make me ye of little Faith would it not? It would be in bad faith to disparage Nicole’s act of faith. Faith can move mountains and no doubt they have some earth moving planned in renovating the new nursery. But they will need to keep a constant check on her eyes, for as Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘When faith becomes blind it dies’.

If Nicole and Keith are also hoping to bring a little more Faith into the world, who am I to object? It’s the thousands of Fayths, Phaeths and Fyeths that will undoubtedly follow that I’m really worried about. And all of them born into a world barely able to keep the faith let alone spell it.

This article first appeared on Online Opinion, 22 February 2011.

Puppy Love

2010-12-28T14:52:00.000-08:00

Buzz Light Year has gone to infinity and beyond. The puppies chewed off his face, pulled out his stuffing and left him strewn across the bedroom floor. Strewn is the operative word. Since they were abducted from their mother our puppies have sought revenge. They have chewed through two modem leads, a laptop power chord, my favourite Funkis sandals, the matting under the money bars, the beach cricket stumps, bat and ball, the compost, all the washing baskets, innumerable super bouncy balls, the underside of two clubs lounges, and the seats of the rattan chairs, the mosquito nets, the heels of my runners, and most auspiciously the shitty underpants in the park.

You want more information on that last one right? Having endured the scene myself I feel compelled to make everyone else squirm, squeal, clutch their hair and hoist their knees in revulsion just as much. Do not read on if you, by happenstance, are tucking into carrot cake. Let me set the scene.

A man walks into a city park late at night, shits his pants, peels them off, puts his trousers back on and proceeds without them. Why a man? Not because I am a feminist and thus inclined to believe that women are always cleaning up after men’s shit. Though I did try not to look, they were bright blue jocks. Are you out there Bright Blue Jock Man? You’d better hope I don’t get to you first. I mean before the apocalypse.

This was all dystopian enough without the puppies entering the scene with their proclivity, nay, their compulsion, to stick their snuffly little noses into everything and clamp their little needle teeth onto anything comprised of matter.

It was these Guardians of the Underworld, in fact that drew my attention to the encrusted blue jocks. There was a time, perhaps a better time, when I might have wandered through the park blissfully unaware of any perfidious undergrowth of this nature.

By the time I looked over they were in a frenzy of shit-induced jubilation. Their Jack Russell spots were indecipherable. They each bit on either end and were engaged in a tug-of-war the future of all life forms depended on. They ground their little shoulders into it. They went belly-up and waved their gleeful little trotters about. They would’ve said, ‘Oh Yeah Mama’ with deep throaty intent if they could, I am sure of it.

They also would’ve said, ‘what’s with her!’ because they cocked their little heads and flipped over their rather laden little ears in incomprehension as I rounded on them screeching, ‘Leave It!’, ‘Drop It!, ‘Put that Down!’ as if the future of all life forms depended on it. To no avail.

Ever eager to please the puppies decided what I was really saying was ‘Grab it!’, ‘Roll in it!’, and it seems ‘Fetch!’. Yes, the puppies-so-dear resolved that I wanted those bog-trotters for myself. They careened out of the park, and sprang like Pepi Le Pew to our stoop where they deposited with great ceremony and pride the said item that doesn’t bear mentioning. How else might they account for my apoplectic frothing at the mouth?

What a lucky adoptive Puppy Mummy am I. What was there to do but, yay upon yays, go inside, get a plastic bag and a radiation suit, and scoop up this delightful game of craps into my very own shuddering hands and place it, with all the solemnity of a woman who never ever overreacts – you can picture the scene - into our newly scrubbed wheelie bin.

Truly bringing puppies into our lives has changed everything. We now live on Poo Corner like all other cuddly species of the emotionally deranged. Everything in our home is either bifurcated by needle-teeth punctures, or strewn over the floor. Oh, and if I don’t get to the litter tray first, they eat the cat shit. Are they allowed to stick their feverish little tongues up my nose anymore? You be the judge.

The puppies were given a hosing down, with perhaps a little more water pressure than was entirely necessary. How funny they looked suspended up the bricks, waggling their feet, trying to compose their furled back chops and see where the torrent was coming from. But when I come in the door I am still the Messiah, no matter what. And apart from on Blue Jock Day, I fully requite this unconditional love. For it is Puppy Love. It knows no bounds and is expressed with all manner of good tidings.

One ‘Cup of Milo’ - among hundreds every night.

2010-10-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

In Krakow in 1988 I was a ‘stray’ young girl and I partook of Peter Everitt’s ‘Cup of Milo’. I rarely think about what happened but Kennerley’s and Everitt’s comments have acted as a trigger, lobbed like a brick through the fragile memories of too many women. They excavated the encounter and compelled me to write immeadiately, my hands shaking over my keyboard.

What happened has much to say about the grey areas of casual sexual liaisons, and with what disorientating alacrity they can move from grey to black-and-white unless we are absolutely crystal clear about our semantics around rape. The message that needs to get through is that rape is a simple matter of a woman saying ‘no’ at any point in the proceedings. A man who disregard her wishes has crossed into entirely different territory, and he will leave her damaged. What also isn’t understood within the present fascination with opportunistic and triumphalist ‘footy chicks’, is that young women can be terribly vulnerable.

As a campaigner against sexual violence the thing I knew, with a pathos I could not contain, was that the damage done just isn’t understood.* So as I wrote I placed an asterisk at each interval it spilled out of me.

With ‘starry eyes’ I set off backpacking in Europe in 1987. I found myself in Poland after breaking up with my Beloved in Lisbon, meeting up with a German medical student and traveling with him. He kicked me out because I rather disliked the attitude he took at Auschwitz, which was to sulk and blame the French, so I found myself staying in a Pension in the heart of Krakow. It was high summer and in the late evening I took a stroll through the ancient square.

A young man, who looked something like how we idealise Jesus, ducked across my path calling me Bella. He walked me back to my pension and went to kiss me. But traveling Europe on my own had not been the experience of self-determination I had expected. I was beleaguered with male attention, which was occasionally gratifying, mostly bewildering, sometimes frightening.

So I politely refused his kiss, and he offered to introduce his friend, Olaf, the next day. Why did I agree?* Because I was in Europe to meet people, to make friends,* to see new worlds through their eyes. The next day I stood before a blue-eyed, blonde soldier on R+R who blew smoke out of his nostrils like a Prussian dragon and who did not smile, but looked down at me with an intensity that made me weak at the knees. I got him all wrong. You see, I was too young to read men, and to know that I was an offering between mates. I trusted and wanted to be admired and to have adventures. I was as open as a book. Why shouldn’t I be?*

Olaf took me to an exquisite café with wood wrought chairs and plush wallpaper where we discovered we barely spoke a word of each others’ languages. So he drew pictures and used song lyrics and book titles to tell me I was Tess of the D’urberville* and he then asked me in writing, would I have a ‘love adventure’ with him. I consented to this cup before me. Not Milo as it transpired.

We danced at a party later that night. He told me women who had abortions were whores and so were western tourists and I still didn’t hear the warning bells. God he was beautiful and god that shit matters when you are 19. He and I were laboring under the mistaken idea that beautiful young people harbour some mystical meaning that can unlock the truth. Tess my arse. I was a chick from Greensborough who didn’t know her Germaine from her Gerkins.

He took me to a friend’s house and left me in a room while he guffawed with a gang of men in the lounge. This was new and strange behaviour I still didn’t know how to read. He came into the room and onto the bed where I discovered that his idea of casual sex was to brutalise a woman. I’m talking fists for foreplay. So I stopped consenting. I told him no. I said stop. I tipped him off the bed 4 times. I told him unequivocally, This is Rape.*

The next morning I called him into the bathroom, ‘You think that was sex’, I said, pointing out the bruises he’d left. I leveled him off. ‘I could show you sex you would never recover from’. If I was a Western Whore that also meant I had the means to scare the living daylights out of him. I was clawing at the autonomy we all hanker for. But over the next days I wrote in my journal, ‘I can’t feel the chair I’m sitting on’, so disassociated was I from what was going on.* I suppose I was in shock and as events unfolded I fought to stay afloat with some Anais Nin - libertarian ideal of sexual adventure in which I had all the agency when in fact it had run out of my hands like sand.

Olaf stood me up the next night and I wandered around Kracow in the rain a few weeks after Chernobyl in a self-destructive trance. Things became surreal. A little guy accosted me in the dark, said he would take me to Olaf, took me to his room, put me in his bed and filmed me as he tried to undress me. Somewhere in Kracow there is a VHS tape where I deliver, in a moment of searing clarity, a tirade against the abuses of men, while trying to hold my dressing gown together. This fellow told me Olaf and his gang were notorious for ‘preying’ on young western tourists.

Olaf met me the next day. Yes, I am putting myself on the record as being even more stupid than Kerri-Anne could envisage of her strays, because I actually met him again. You see, I was frightened, young and alone in a strange city and I needed to understand what was going on.* After informing me that my video host was a member of the KGB, he took me to a citadel of highrise flats on the outskirts where a tubby, lonely man babysat me while Olaf went out, probably, to meet some other girl. In my journal I write over and over, in larger and larger capitals ‘He’s still staring at me’. When Olaf didn’t return his friend informed me, he’d been told he could ‘have’ me.

I finally came to my senses. No you cannot have me, I conjugated with an array of Germaine-lie expletives. I railed against Olaf. I explained I needed to escape. He also metamorphosed, into a sensitive young man who put me on a bus to Katowice. There I bought a fake wedding band, threw my suitcase at a man in the train station licking his lips and insisting I come to his flat, and tried to convince customs that their stricture that I must pay my way out with western money when it was illegal to bring it into the country was utterly absurd. I was getting on that train regardless, Just You Try And Stop Me. Bless you Germaine.

On the train to Berlin a group of even younger kids were so taken with my nouveaux punk attire, they photographed me, copied my address from my suitcase and sent me a tribute. You see they thought the way I looked harboured some mystical meaning, that could unlock some truth for them. I knew the way I looked was dangerous, it made me a ‘Stray’ in so many men’s eyes,* but at least one who could now pick her cup of poison from her Milo.

We need to wake up to the fact that the message is not getting through to young men. This might be because it is competing with an array of messages, from ‘strays’ to porn that eroticises rape, to men meshing as one homoerotic body as teammates. But nowhere in this confusion is the vulnerability of the young woman who called for help after the replay; her shock, confusion and disassociation. Nowhere are the asterixes that will interval the page of her life. You see, starry eyed and wanting adventure, she read it all wrong.* But the Collingwood footballers I was cheering on from the Rookery Nook Hotel in Wye River, they read her like the open book she was,* and will never, ever, be again.

Morphing to Matron

2010-09-14T18:11:00.000-07:00

You might think the Intimates fitting room at Myer an unlikely place to be granted a most auspicious promotion. But it was here in these surreal quarters that I was appointed to a more weighty status than many women can aspire to. I submitted to an intimate ceremony, and under warm and gentle hands I was granted the status of Matron.

Twenty years ago, when I could only dream of such becomings, I myself fitted women in the changing rooms of what was then known as the ‘Intimate Apparel’ Department of Myer. In those days I wore a bra that was more of a salute while I coaxed the looser flesh of older women into devices that creaked like harnesses. I amused myself by imagining attaching reins and running off a matrons’ derby across the hushed aisles. I had no respect.

What exquisite, translucent things festooned my working days that summer. What a dream world of enticement I wandered through. Now of course I have acquired the wisdom to be impervious to things that better flatter hangers than human bodies. For I am a Matron. I know these things.

On this day I was recruited from the wireless section. I clearly needed help, for not only was I failing in my duty to give myself adequate support, but my cups were all over the shop. ‘Why are they all padded these days’, I asked compressing foam between fingers. ‘It’s not padding dear, it’s just a bit more support’. I was a woman who needed to be taken in hand. ‘I’ll fit you’. I was marched off to a curtained cloister of corporeal reckoning.

My fitter winced at the sight of my globes. Her tender handling gave new meaning to global warming. ‘I never would have said you were a C!’ and she dashed out in search of more fortified sills. ‘You see … just here … this is really where a D is letting you down. This is where your milk ducts are and they need support.’ I thought they were switched off, however, for their sakes a double D was summoned.

Double D! Woohoo. I pranced around the vestiary feeling like a red spot special. After all isn’t this how escorts advertise their wares? When my fitter returned she strapped me in and plumped my bosomy excess. Alas, she shook her blonde bob. ‘I think we should try an E’.

Now advancing to E is no small matter. It was no use protesting that my ‘Balcony’ bra at home (otherwise known as my mid-life-crisis bra, or just Thwang) was C cupped. My new status could not be shrugged off with the relative sizes of brands in the hope that Elle might size me down to a girly C. Only escorts of the Big Mama variety would admit to being an E. As ‘the place where emotions are felt’ (breast n literary) molded snugly into their E cups I entered new territory.

I happen to know a thing or two about underwear. It is commonly believed that corsets were abandoned in the 1920s. In fact they made way for what famous Australian Health advocate Annette Kellerman dubbed ‘the muscular corset’. Our own Annette, the ‘Australian Venus’, and reputedly the first American pin-up, was once arrested in Boston for wearing a one piece bathing costume. She had no time for the ‘trickery’ of corsets, which ‘laced in fat’, and passed it off as ‘form’.

But despite Annette’s stern warnings, women continued to measure up to the ‘Berlei Indicator’ in which they might come to know themselves as ‘Average, Tall Slender, Short Slender, Curved Back, Short Waisted, Tall Heavy, Short Heavy, Large Above Waist, Large Below Waist’, and accordingly purchase the right sized corset.

Dress Liberation? Not in Annette’s day and judging by the latest Kaiser indicator of ‘Apple, Pear, Column or Hourglass’ not in our day either. It begs the question, has any woman, since standardized sizing began in the 1920s, and largely for the convenience of prêt-a-porter clothes manufacturers, ever felt they are The Right Size?

Esteemed Matron Catherine Deneuve famously said that after a certain age a woman must choose between her face or form. That is, if she attempted to maintain her coltish young limbs, she might look good in clothes but out of them she would invoke a bag of badly assembled Nancy Reagans. Her face, her true site of worldly encounter, would literally lose its substance.

But would I go so far as to call it ‘form’? Any Matron can tell you that you can tone thigh muscle sufficient to snap a man in half, but as you get older it bears less and less relation to all the flobble that sits on top of it. Since becoming older is no reason, it seems, to tolerate the baggy surrounds of our own skin, women continue to ‘tailor underneath’. These days we submit to a new regime of hosiery ‘trickery’ called control-top pantyhose. In between writhing, wriggling and rebirthing into these woman-traps we might well ask: will we women ever simply Fit In?

This defining e-moment in the Myer fitting room set me back $64.95. Was I any the wiser for it? Any Matron could have told Einstein it’s all relative: the cup/back continuum might range a woman anywhere from a 10E to a 14B. The next brand on the shelf might summarily demote me to B. But, having pulled the wire out of my harness, I’m happy to assume the heavier-weight title of Matron. I suspect Matrons know better than anyone that we’re entitled to take up all the space we need, and preferably in devices that don’t constrain or creak.

Black Saturday Anniversary

2010-08-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

One Year On, Everything but the Photos.

We thought the photos were burnt too. The last thing my brother-in-law did was pitch the Chinese laundry bag, with the Albums bundled inside, out onto the middle of the lawn, hoping against hope they would survive outside. They knew at that moment nothing would inside. The flames were licking across the ceiling and the house was filling with fumes from the insulation bats. The dogs were yelping and shitting on the floor. Having bravely wet towels and hosed walls the girls were now under blankets, screaming, wetting themselves. They wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.

As suffocation took hold, they put palm to glass to gauge the temperature outside. They could now go outside without blistering, so they left their home and everything in it - except Lucy had crawled over and grabbed her teddy. The two Dogs, Chaz and Cooch, tore out the open door, ripping their leads from the girls’ hands.

We finally picked up my sister Angie, her Husband Drew, their girls Lucy 12 and Grace 11, from the Diamond Creek emergency centre at midnight. In the hours between they had survived and in the days that followed they found it was a miracle. 12 of their neighbours had died in St Andrews. They had gone down to the road because it was the only thing around them not on fire. As they walked they had drenched themselves under a blanket until their petrol pump ran out of line. And they had wandered silent and awed up the road through the black apocalypse.

The CFA truck shouldn’t have been there. It had crossed the line they could defend. As the soles of their boots bubbled and warped they saw the flashing lights and the family materialized out of the smoke. The gallant CFA bathed their eyes, hydrated them and tended Grace’s burnt hand. My sister’s saviours then cut them up the road to St Andrews. They covered them with a blanket so they didn't see the dead motorcyclist who had rode panicked back and forth past their gate, hemmed in by fallen trees. They had tried to get his attention and give him shelter but he didn't hear them over the unholy din. His wife was waiting at the St Andrews pub until midnight saying,’ he'll be here, he'll be here’.

From the truck Drew called me on one of the fire-fighter’s phones. He was euphoric. Together they had fought off four fire fronts. They had watched the air tumbling in ignited balls against their window panes. They had got out.

At the emergency centre they took a seat among the people soon to think themselves lucky, still under stiffened ashen blankets, coughing and cowed. They were each handed a survival card that could fasten to their bodies. They unfolded through four stages: 'Walking Wounded', 'Priority One', 'Priority Two', and ‘Dead’. Lucy unfolded her card next to me and looked up from under the ember burn on her eyelid and pronounced with adolescent drollery, 'Well, that's helpful'.

What Drew didn’t know when he heaved that bag out onto the lawn was that Angie had taken all of the photos out of the Albums inside and put them in a metal box. Just to be sure. He found out after they got the call two days later that Chaz had been found sitting waiting next to the bag on the only patch of lawn that was green.

They spent a few months tripping over each other in the barn/camper trailer combination at our parents and then bought a lovely home in Wattleglen. There Angie is back to standing on the teak table top meticulously picking the caterpillars off the hop vine. Her legendary nurturance of all the living things around her is starting to show. The Geese found alive in a yard strewn with dead chooks and ducks, are now followed by little Ping, Ming, Sing, Ling and Ding. The chook who lost her toe doesn’t seem too fussed. The only remaining section of fence from what is now ‘the property’ is installed, and Chaz has a new companion, a puppy he pretends he’s pulling the other end of sticks with. Cooch was never found. Angie sleeps, badly at night and like a car crash during the day. As the insulation of shock wore off the girls became jumpy and preoccupied with where the pets are. Their world is no longer safe. Their new home and garden feel hollow. They are torn between knowing how lucky they are and not feeling at home.

We christened their new home by having Christmas there. It is starting to house a store of memories too. But all year I had thought about the photos. When all is lost it seems critical to have accurate memories, for the girls to have their childhood returned and see themselves in the rasberry patch and among the trees. Surely they need something more to hold in their hands beyond the four unmelted letters from the office furniture in the shed that had spelt ‘Reception’ and now read C-O-P-E.

I’d also taken photos out of those albums when Angie had a 40th birthday 6 months before Black Saturday. I’d scanned the best ones and put on a slide show. Then I’d given her the disk.

So when another sister called from Queensland and said she had all of them, including reels of shots she took of the family at what was their beloved ‘Loralie’, I was overjoyed. I would give them to her as a surprise.

They came in a package today. I’ve just regained my composure. I had eagerly opened the disk and clicked through. There is the 1858 original homestead whose history they had felt custodians of. Angie in a tiara and bare feet feeding the goats. The girls sitting on top of the hills’ hoist. Angie in Drew’s shirt and rolled up pants moving the lawn. Gracie hoisting a shovel longer than her from the wheelbarrow of gravel while Angie looks on, smiling, perched on the stone wall they built. My vision started swimming. My throat wrung. My heart didn’t quite fit in its cavity. Is this how my sister feels all the time?

Survival can be a cruel blessing. I still feel she was wronged by 13 years of drought that the CSIRO now calls climate change, and the hottest day on record. We might explain the first spark with fallen power lines or arson, but they doesn’t explain what happened next. I am awed and cowed by what else our weather, that once seemed a daily banality, might bring us.

When I tell Angie I don’t know how to give her back the photos, my brave sister reminds me how much crueler it is for those who have neither the photos nor the people in them.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Age, on the first anniversary of Black Saturday. Parts of it come from an earlier piece on this blog.

The Cronulla Cape is a White Shroud

2010-08-11T18:41:00.000-07:00

Out in the park there is an unscooped dog poo with a tiny Australian flag toothpicked into it. This delicately placed little icon has given me nationalist yearnings. ‘That’s the spirit’ I find myself thinking.

I have only just recovered from all that fatuous flag waving by white Australians on Australia Day. That’s right. They were all white people. Every. Last. One I saw. The media was of course, at pains to show Australians of non-Anglo descent under the Cronulla Cape. They embodied Multinationalism, and our media is inclusive. Good on ‘em.

But it wasn’t representative.

I took a broad survey looking behind the windscreens of every flag-bearing hearse, I mean car, from here to Angelsea, and noting all the beach flag paraphernalia on the way. How well our navy blue goes with alabaster, freckled and scorched complexions.

I took another survey at the Big Day Out, the year the organizers created a furor by requesting patrons be sensitive to multiculturalism and leave the flag at home. Implicitly they were saying what I’m saying. Only white Australians swathe themselves in our flag. And everyone but them knows it.

They were of course roundly accused of denying people’s freedom of expression, and that old chestnut of inanity, of ‘political correctness’.

Tell me someone, anyone, how isn’t it political to swathe yourself in your national flag? Isn’t it being correct to one of the most overt expressions of political allegiance?

But just to be sure I pretended to be a journo and ‘interviewed’ a number of these sprightly young nationalists. Everywhere one looked that Southern Cross had fluttered down from the national mast, and shrouded more parts of the body politic than ever imagined by our fallen servicemen. Given that flags are generally used as shrouds it certainly is a revival.

So I stood tippy-toed within a stand of young men, who explained they hadn’t taken the flag off since Australia Day and had been sleeping with them. I ventured to ask, did they prefer them on top, and they said, rather quixotically, ‘well, you have to get by somehow’ and made oblique references to inflatables. They must’ve meant boxing Kangaroos.

‘Oz Pride!’ another group explained and said that for them Australia was ‘this’ – that is, getting shickered and shouldering swaying girls to the Violent Femmes. Fine. I’m up for that kind of nationalism. But then they said that wearing the flag was about ‘mates’ and when I asked did they leave their Chinese, Aboriginal and Indian mates at home, they replied, by way of explanation, ‘We’re from Tasmania’.

And it seems tattooed Australian flags are becoming so popular one parlour alone is tattooing 12 ‘Aussie Swasis’ a week.

None of this helped me solve the mystery of this epidermal barr in our flag-waving habits. So being an egghead I leafed through some books with big words.

Nationalism it seems is a cultural artefact, and these nations we belong to so fervently, are imagined communities. And the problem with nations is when we confuse them with race. We invent these nations in our heads, and reinvent them everytime we wave the flag. So if predominantly white people in Australia wave our flag what kind of a nation are they inventing? They are inventing a nation that, like Pauline Hanson, confuses being Australian with Being White.

But I think their intentions are honorable. I don’t think they’re noticed their flag-waving comrades are overwhelmingly white, and most of them would be non-plussed and even delighted to see Australians of non-Anglo descent waving the flag. Because any expression of inclusion can invent a community of deep and genuine comraderie.

But the thing is, they’re not. So why has white flag-waving resurged right in the era of globalization? Right at the time we have shored up our borders to refugees and a strong anti-immigration sentiment is seeping through our parliament, in reaction to the biggest intake in our history?

I blame Howard – though I say that a lot even when I burn the toast. But Howard had never quite shaken off the cloak of white Australia. He grew up with it, it was part of the community he’d imagined as a child and I suspect he wanted to reinvent it as Prime Minister. And this flag-waving generation are Howard’s. They are his invention.

We’ve got a bit of a thing about racial homogeneity I’m afraid. It runs deep. Aside from trying to ‘breed out the colour’ by removing ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal kids from their communities, the central policy platform of our country from 1901 until 1973 was the immigration restriction act, better known as White Australia. It was, our first Prime Minister said, a ‘declaration of a racial identity’. But whiteness isn’t a racial identity is it? Whiteness isn’t a colour, and isn’t race only attributable to people of colour?

‘The position of speaking as a white person is one that white people never acknowledge and this is part of the condition and power of whiteness’, says Richard Dyer. Part of what made it impossible to have this argument with my kids in the car down to Angelsea is that they couldn’t see that only white people were flag-waving. Even if they are, they sensibly said, they’re not stopping everybody else waving flags are they?

So the question has to asked, do non-Anglo descent Australians feel uncomfortable waving the flag? Since it seems they do then why don’t white Australians notice? More importantly, has this even been a part of whites feeling more comfortable waving the flag?

Dyer has an answer to this. He says ‘whiteness needs to be made strange’ and strange to itself. The ways that whiteness is triumphal, narcissistic and, given our history, amnesiac, needs to be exposed.

A flag in dog poo is very strange, but it’s also irreverent and mocking of staid and unexamined expressions of an older, exclusive Australia. That’s the spirit.

This Donna ain't Mobile

2010-08-11T18:40:00.000-07:00

Everyday I am faced with the same disbelief when forced to explain my aberrant position in contemporary society. ‘You must be the only one’, a journalist once guffawed. ‘You’re kidding me’, new acquaintances marvel. But Doctors’ receptionists, who I have come to believe, are a very particular kind of women, they just pause their poised fingers over the keyboard, and reluctantly tab over to the next contact details window looking perplexed by the unaccustomed blank in my Personal Information.

I do not have a mobile – do I need to even specify phone? Perhaps it’s more important to clarify, I am not an animal.

A friend described me to a German about to meet me and included this apparently extraordinary fact in her characterization. ‘I have to meet this person’, he enthused, as I if she had gained special permission from the Powerhouse Museum to exhibit me privately.

People frequently want to know how I ‘survive without one’. I don’t mean to be contrary but I generally respond by asking how everyone else survives with one.

I mean I do see their utility. It isn’t enough to arrive on time anymore. Once must confirm that one is on one’s way somewhere else, and then coming in 10 minutes with the cat because they got the only appointment for the abyss under it’s eye, and they’ve had him for 17 years and can’t think what life would be life without him and it should only cost $75, and if you get there first just order me a skinny-late … puff pant … too.

I have come to understand there is a new etiquette with appointments. First you agree on Dench’s at 9.30, then you confirm Mixed Business at 10am, then you check on whether it was 10 or 10.30 and then, while waiting for the Green Man, you let your rendevous, who hasn’t arrived yet either, know that you’re running 3 minutes late. I just turn up where we first agreed, and luckily Dench’s do very yummy ricotta hotcakes, because my rendevous has no alternative but to be there since they can’t tell me otherwise. I call that efficient communication.

I hate the phone. Ask anyone who calls me up for a chat, ‘Yes!’ I prompt in a decidedly State-Your- Business manner. That old adage, ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say, say nothing’, applies with all the spades at the Crown Casino to me. When I signed up to the Do Not Call Register I looked everywhere for the ‘That goes for everyone’ button. I hardly needed to register. I must’ve been black banned by telephonists with scorched ears all over the sub-continent long ago.

This also means I don’t tweet, text or remote email. My kiddies have to explain what Soz, ppl and fotcl mean. I did get one once. I made the same friend cross over a late pizzeria date, I think because I didn’t get her message to be somewhere else, and then made my Mum, with her 4 baby bladder, wait cross-kneed out on in the park because I forgot she was coming and went to the Zoo. Too many car-pooling Mummies had pleaded with me to get one. I gave in.

I went to Crazy Larry’s or whatever and walked out with a free phone feeling like a thief and uncomfortably anticipating the billing regime. Once I got a Sim Card, thankfully not from a relative leaving for Glasgow airport, I was happily paddling in the Big Pond.

From then on not only did the fecking thing ring while I was wiping small children’s bums, but also while I was mediating their backseat disputes and unjamming their fingers after snibbing the ever-lasting whirring windows while fending off flying grapes and trying to remember whether red means go, all to hear that they’re on their way too with much the same cacophony emanating from their backseat.

I’m afraid it went the way of all 697 pairs of sunglasses once in my possession. I sometimes think modern hell is being consigned to the pile of waste you have generated over your lifetime. My phone is somewhere in there with the chewed Barrett’s Sherbet Fountain packets and Uncle Scrooge Comics. So long everyone I just about to meet in 4 minutes instead of 3 because I had to brake especially for the cop car with a speed camera pointing out the front window and Dench’s aren’t doing ricotta hotcakes today so let’s meet at that place that used to be called the Tinpot even though their hot chocolates are decidedly tepid and blather, blather until you inadvertently run up a pole in a paroxysm of Blankety-Blank dejavu.

How gratifying then, the latest findings about the safety of mobile phone use, notably funded by a mobile phone industry body. It seems that this worldwide experiment is inconclusive about the increased incidence of brain tumours. ‘Phew’ 6 billion minus-one people must’ve said down their phones to whoever was listening.

I’m afraid I couldn’t take part in the study. I was disqualified for never having wiped either my cheek or my fingerprints off an iphone down my trouser leg. But my relief was still tangible. I didn’t much fancy having to beget the entire human race from my rather fallible gene pool having traversed the remoter regions of the globe looking for a mate who also survived the Great Mobile Tumour Extinction.

The West should face off with itself on the Burka Ban

2010-08-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

I have a travel tip for young women. There are places where a Burqa makes a lot of sense. Working in Lisbon in 1987 meant running a daily gauntlet of sexual harassment. So persistent was the abuse I ended up stashing food scraps in my bag to deflect men. Judging by the money thrust under my nose accompanied by flicking tongues being young, Western and alone on the streets was tantamount to being a prostitute.

It never occurred to me then to wear a Burqa. But if it did I would’ve stuck to my ‘feminist principles’. I had a right to walk the streets, any streets at any time, in a bikini if I saw fit. It was up to men to change their behaviour and I was not responsible for their failure to keep a civil tongue in their mouths.

When I returned to Melbourne I copped as much street level abuse only without the tongue gesticulating. Big trucks blasted their horns as I sat reading quietly in bus stops. Carloads of curb-cruisers bawled out, ‘show us your tits’. When I remonstrated with them I was warned, ‘you want a smack in the face as well!’

Nice. These peckerheads made agrophobia seem a sanctuary. Little did I know then that this invasive scrutiny would soon dissolve by the simple device of pushing a pram. A mother’s exile from cultural invisibility often coincides with that baffling hinterland of femininity, from 40-ish years, when all that wearisome street surveillance slips behind an unarticulated veil.

Did I mention the veil and Western women’s public visibility in the same breath? Surely not. Women of the West have been ‘reclaiming the night’ through rallies and rape reform for generations. Unchaperoned street presence meant liberation in the late-nineteenth century. The pinnacle of dress reform was wearing a bikini and a tampon while prancing unbridled over warm sand. The idea that we assert our identities and our civic freedoms by our public visibility runs very deep.

The Burqa is indeed an affront to this historically engrained sensibility. It has been likened to an effacement of identity. Notably, less is said about the responsibility Muslim women purportedly lumber for male arousal by covering their skin, hair and faces. It is literally the idea of being veiled that bothers us most, and not from scrutiny, sexual harassment and hostility, but from a show of public presence which for us equates with democratic participation not to mention sexual autonomy.

By the 1960s however, feminists mounted their own backlash against a kind of commercially co-opted exposure, flogging everything from sanitary pads to perfume, and increasingly limited to young, blonde, slender, tall and sexually available women. Feminists dumped their bras into a bin outside the 1969 Miss America competition in Atlantic City. In many ways the anti-porn movement was a logical response to visibility purely on men’s terms, particularly when it was associated with the eroticisation of rape.

We face off with the Burqa under a veil of inextricably tangled emotions. We like to assert that we express Who We Are with make-up, wrinkle softeners and botox. It’s unlikely we’ll ever see any grace in being understated with Pussycat Dolls filling our screens. Geez, all their routines are missing is a speculum.

Of course what isn’t being admitted, what’s in fact veiled, is that we are facing off with difference - ethnic and religious. We haven’t bothered to ask Muslim women what the Burqa means to them, because we’ve fallen into an entrenched colonial habit of thinking ‘less civilised’ women are oppressed and need us to liberate them, this time with spectacular arrogance, by banning them from having any choice.

What if Muslim women look at Western women’s made up faces and see gender oppression? What if they see plastic surgery as an effacement of identity? What if they see wearing the Burqa as a means to deflect the behaviour of drunken drongos and louts, without having to carry smelly food scraps? Maybe showing their faces has become a display of intimacy, trust and love that means Being At Home? And what if Western women are beholden, nay deeply attached, to traditions that in their origin were patently oppressive? Doesn’t the monogamy that once secured patrilineal property inheritance now define romantic love? Whose daft idea was that? Talk about getting bilked by gender regimes!

The condemning of the Burqa is another round in our habitual failure of imagination when facing off with difference. If we listened respectfully we’d find a wealth of Muslim women who assert their identities unequivocally, with their voices. Needless to say wearing the Burqa is under constant discussion.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Age, 16 May 2010

The Barely Disguised Discrimination of Pack Panels

2009-05-19T21:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-14T19:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-03T18:17:00.001-07:00

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.

Beauty Products Deserve the Finger

2009-03-05T16:14:00.000-08:00

It is never the done thing for a woman to extol any part of herself as worthy. It is the done thing to be neurotic and thereby of especial remunerative value to the beauty industry. But I must say, lately my fingertips have been in very fine form.

They are smooth, unblemished, wrinkle free, and with enviably even skin tone.

You see, every time I smear eye gel and wrinkle softener and bio-oil and paw-paw ointment and sun-screen onto my face, it first gets gobbed onto the ends of my fingers which then prep with a little digital frottage. My fingertips probably absorb more Jurlique that the myriad ‘trouble spots’ that occupy the increasingly uneven terrain of my over-40 face.

By rights my plump little pads should be showing all the signs of having become the principal beneficiaries of a lotioning regime that no woman with a duty to beauty would ever dare to let lapse.

Thus it is surely our fingertips that should be held up as living proof of the virtues of moisturizing. They should be celebrated for their suppleness on the covers of Vogue and Madison and the fingertips of celebrities praised for their age-defying firmness in weekend magazine features.

Yet fingertips never appear full-frontal in cosmetic advertisements, even though, all of us unguent junkies are mostly treating these outer extremities. Sometimes they do make an appearance in those instructional ads that show with arrows exactly in which direction you need to apply your liniment for maximum firming impact. But as if resisting the paparazzi and the eye-focused world it panders to, fingertips are always coyly turned away from the camera.

Paring off the disproportionately over-represented and over-attended and frankly perfectly spoiled realm of Nails, why have we given so little attention to our fingertips when they have such a hand in our beauty maintenance? With every other part of our bodies, except perhaps our toes (as distinct from toenails), singled out for extreme makeovers and zoned for modification, improvement and treatment, how have our fingertips, the cats-cradle bridge between bottle and body, been so flagrantly cast aside?

If you were a dreadful cynic, and daily witnessed your brow furrowing under your wrinkle softener, you might think of two reasons.

Fingertips are unmodifiable.

Fingertips are in fact over-treated, yet unable to evince any sign of it.

As such fingertips are an audacious affront to the billion dollar cosmetic industry. They prove that our bodies are largely impervious to the thing that this incalculably opulent industry really sells. Lotioning. (Sun-screen aside - though I’ve never seen a freckled or sunburnt fingertip).

If we paid proper attention to fingertips we’d notice that they soak up a greater proportion of the oils, unguents and serums that are more expensive by the gram than uranium – and thereby, if you follow the logic of the beauty industry, are the most alluring part of a woman’s body.

Fingertips are on the pulse of beauty culture charlatanism. Forget statistics and a poignantly portrayed personal history of anorexia. Naomi Wolf needed to look no further than her most far-flung appendages to demolish the beauty myth.

For who has heard of fingertips being too fat, thin, disproportioned or aged? Aside from puckering quite becomingly in the bath I suspect our fingertips carry us through to the end of our mortality looking much the same on our deathbeds as they did when we clawed our way into life.

And, in the interim, what a service they perform! Have they ever been acknowledged as a sex-organ? Or, since the predominance of the keyboard, credited as the Membrane of Communication? In this ocularcentric world, once again doing the rounds of Golden-Globe and Oscar mania, is there an awards ceremony for excellence in touching and feeling anywhere that prizes fingertips rather than solar-plexes?

We are mesmerized by Nigella’s cuisine but never consider the role her pinkies play in all that saucy tip-to-tongue action. When it comes to Nigella all senses are reduced to that overstuffed and overrated organ of taste that doesn’t bear mention. But having excited so much controversy, not to mention fantasy, surely Nigella’s fingertips deserve their own agents?

The same goes for adored musicians of every genre. Habitually sensorily reductive we limit all aural pleasure to the ear, but forget the mechanics of music. The sheer haptic virtuosity of a pianist or harpist or violinist depends on the strike and stroke of their fingertips.

With all this brushing off, I’m surprised fingertips haven’t sought to annex themselves from the human body altogether. But as the croupiers of the digital world, they could also provide a perfect alibi for the world’s present economic crisis. A complete set of the finger prints of all the unregulated Bankers of Wall Street and we’d soon have our crooks with their hands up.

The point is fingertips are all over everything and yet most of us are stumped about whether fingertip is one word, or two, or hyphenated. We should never forget that it is the insouciantly moist fingertip that gives the beauty industry the finger, and deservedly so.

Angela's Ashes

2009-03-04T17:26:00.000-08:00

On the hottest day on record in Victorian history my sister's home in St Andrews, 45 minutes north of Melbourne, burnt to the ground. While temperatures peaked at 48.8 degrees Celsius, ferocious winds battered a state that had baked to a tinder through 2 weeks of over 40 degree-days, and through a 13-year drought.

All day Angie and Drew had cut back and hosed off. At about 4pm they fought off four fire fronts. Burning balls of fire were tumbling through the air outside every window. As the house filled with smoke the kids were screaming under blankets on the floor where the terrified dog was shitting. They had followed to the letter a detailed fire plan, but Angela tells me 'we had no intention to stay and defend, we were trapped, and there was no warning'.

They scrambled down an embankment on to the road because it was the only thing around them not on fire. Grace fell and burnt her palm on hot coals. They went up the road under a blanket until the length of hose from their petrol pump ran out. Soon they saw through the smoke the flashing lights of the Angels masquerading as the Country Fire Authority. The firefighter told them they looked like ghosts materialising out of the smoke, and most harrowing to them was that 2 of them were children. The CFA took hours to chainsaw them up the road to safety.

They lost their lovingly tended home and garden, a beloved old dog, their eccentric chooks, but they have their lives. ‘Chas the wonder dog’ was found 2 days later on the only patch of green guarding the bag of photos Drew had pitched onto the lawn before they fled. But, as Angela tells me they have 'lost the way our family lived'. Their self-sufficient daily lives that gave them so much happiness is now 'in chaos'. Worse than that, within the weld of emotions including survivor guilt and bewilderment, Angela feels that she nearly caused the deaths of her own beautiful girls.

We picked them up from the Diamond Creek Emergency centre after midnight where people with ears full of soot huddled under the stiff dried blankets that had shielded them from ember attack. They were handed apocalyptic cards, which folded out through the phases: 'Walking Wounded', 'Priority One', 'Priority Two', and ‘Dead’. My 12 year-old niece unfolded hers to 'Dead' next to me and looked up from under the ember burn on her eyelid and said with adolescent drollery, 'Well, that's helpful'.

Somehow Angela and their family escaped the unimaginable deaths that hundreds of Victorians suffered. But the ferocity of the inferno they perished within was unnatural. There is a class action being mounted against the Singapore power company whose pole came down in the wind spraying sparks. There is an arsonist refused bail for the fire that erased the township of Marysville. There is much recrimination directed to local councils about restrictions on back burning and fuel load. But how these conditions resulted in a firestorm, which exploded with the force of some 400 Hiroshimas, and incinerated as many as 300 Victorians points to another kind of Arson.

We were warned. Over and over again scientists told us of the increased danger of bushfires fueled by severe, protracted drought and record-breaking heat waves. But over the last decade governments have either turned their backs, or dragged their feet on the warnings of their own commissioned and credible reports on climate change, or the increasingly dire warnings of the International Panel on Climate Change, which now says its 2007 report substantially underestimated the severity and rapidity of global warming.

Scientists have also warned against attributing a direct causal relation between global warming and the devastation of the Victorian bushfires. Indeed there are a number of factors at play, from arson to the privatization of amenities, to our repeated failure to heed the ecological cycle of fire-stick farming established by Aborigines over millennia.

But common sense dictates that climate change is undeniably a major factor. The morning of the fires Victorians were warned to stay indoors and not venture out into ‘our worst day in history’ because of record-breaking temperatures fanned by high winds. Southeastern Australia had experienced a record-breaking heatwave over 2 weeks and the drought had primed fuel loads with combustible vegetation that no amount of back burning could possibly keep up with.

Yet the Australian government continues to subsidize our fossil fuel industries by 9 billion taxpayer dollars annually. They will offer to the emergency summit in Copenhagen next month a piddling 5 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 from 2000 levels when Professor Ross Garnaut, in his interim report on climate change, had recommended a 25 pc reduction.

The solace of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's quite genuine words has felt empty. He has walked through the ashes and held the grieving and called the Marysville arsonist a ‘mass murderer’. But he needs to heed the growing sense that that these fires were beyond our ability to fight because they were something altogether new. He needs to heed the fire ecologists and climatologists who are telling us these bushfires were not a once in a lifetime event. Under a 'low level global warming scenario' these firestorms may be experienced every 4-5 years in Victoria. The head of the bureau's of meteorology’s National Climate Centre has offered the chilling words, ‘We are in the build-up to the next El Nino and already the drought is as bad as it has ever been — in terms of the drought, this may be as good as things get’. In other words this drought is here to stay meeting the CSIRO prediction that parts of the pretty and lush garden state of Victoria will become desert within five decades.

Carl Sagan has said that 'the universe is neither benign nor hostile but merely indifferent to creatures such as us'. But we creatures are neither indifferent nor stupid. I am no scientist but I cannot help feeling that those who have failed to act on climate change imperiled my sister and her family's lives on ‘Black Saturday’ and put them through a literal hell.

My sister is now sick with fear for the danger our parents face in Cottlesbridge over the hill from what is now her ‘property’, and for our sister and her children whose township of Beechworth was spared because of a wind change. Angie now feels 'we will go through this again until the whole state is burnt'. They are reluctant to apportion blame amongst so much sorrow. But like many of the traumatised who have joined the dots on climate change and this tragedy, part of their healing will require assurances from those in power, all around the world, that they will provide climate security to all of us, whether it is from drowning coastlines, flood, loss of food production or fire.

That is, if it isn’t already too late, as it is for hundreds of our fellow Victorians, who I know with an immediacy I have never felt before, were just people like us.

Liz Conor is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne
1,193 words
17 February 2009

In One Stroke

2008-11-14T01:51:00.000-08:00

In One Stroke

The drive into South Mission Beach from the Bruce Highway bristles with Cassowary cautions. A giant bikini is crucified to a power pole. On the silent, half-hour return from the Tully hospital, we seemed a long way from home.

We’d woken up grumpy. It was raining again, and while we could not begrudge the drought stricken state of Queensland, we’d towed our trailer from Melbourne to Cooktown looking for sun and over 3 months saw little of it. And the confined space of a camper trailer can be somewhat exaggerated by two children, full of beans.

Jeremy was culling our book basket. He’d read a couple of titles and sorted them in piles on the seat. Then he read, ‘mmph woorph wprh mmfph’. We looked up at him in silent query, and he read the next title the same way. We hesitantly giggled. ‘Silly Daddy’ I said. And then the third title came the same. He remembers, clear as day, reading The Emperor’s New Clothes, which he put down with a little puzzled shake of his head.

At the moment it dawned on us that something was not right he half turned to me, rolled his eyes back and sat hard on the floor. He tried to get up, half fell out the door and rested there, assuring me he was fine through the right side of his face, drooling from the left.

In the instant I was screaming for help I knew it was a stroke but what I knew about stroke was not enough. Two burly campers got him up onto our bed while the girls stood, the eldest behind the youngest, stricken silent, eyes widened. Somehow they were swept into a neighbouring van, to play snap and nibble apple.

Until the ambulance arrived from Tully I ran around like a startled emu, darting into Jeremy who yawned benignly, telling me he was fine, and asking me to cancel the ambulance. He was the ostrich. I got him to squeeze my hands but his left side was warm and unresponsive: it struck me it had the sweetness of a sleeping child. So I conceded through a constricted throat and swimming vision that he was fine, darted into the neighbours van to tell the girls their Dad was fine and was told by the happy campers gathered, that he was fine. Yes, Fine I kept saying in between, Where is the freaking ambulance!!!

Emergency is defined by fineness. We are luckiest it seems when we are unlucky.

I cleared away the book basket and a pile of tropical maps so the paramedics could manoeuvre him onto a stretcher. It is a big part of Jeremy’s job to give the assembled public the assurance of his own calm competency. This he offered to the riveted campers, smiling half-faced through his oxygen mask. It made me ache. The little pockmark in his cheek I see as a love heart each time I settle into his shoulder had opened into a butterfly and he was taking flight.

The paramedics managed to perforate the surreal miasma I’d landed in and give me directions to the hospital. ‘This could reverse itself in a day’, they told me. ‘Silly boys’, I thought, ‘they’d say anything to get me to drive straight’. I had only remnants of information about stroke to make sense of what was happening. I had nannied a stroke victim in Amstelveen 20 years before and I had walked her to the toilet and packed her into an Arabian night of pillows each evening where she lay in the stress position of her own paralysis.

This was the understanding I packed his makeshift hospital bag under. He was emphatically gone and all around me were his articles of faith, the ordinary daily things that reify the belief that we will go on living, and wear that shirt and put away that toothbrush, and fold up that paper.

There is nothing so grave as these idiosyncratic articles and their silent testimony to the universe of a living soul – where and why he bought that ludicrous shirt, why he drinks from a mug a student gave him. The shrieking history of his personal items had me by the throat. He was not there. These things were what I now pieced together and their abandonment at that moment evoked in me a desperate love that I’d not felt since the moment of my daughters’ birth.

So we chased the ambulance, but it was out of sight. The eldest had regressed and was comforting herself with ludicrous silliness; the youngest was silently appraising the realm of mythological Cassowaries. I was snuffling and hiccuping back tears until finally I told them they needn’t be brave since I couldn’t manage it. Racing through my mind were the logistics of our world come tumbling down.

How to get him home. How to get the van home. The stairs at home. His job. My book. None of it mattered. All I wanted was for him to be there, half or whole, in any shape or form. For 15 years he had just been there. I would like to say that I treasured each moment, but that would rather understate what a cranky maenad I am. It dawned on me that the thing that made me most cranky was that he couldn’t be there enough. Just one more minute would suffice now, and he could fill it with as much laptop solitaire as he wanted.

We arrived at the Tully base hospital before him and it was then that I called his mother, my mother, his brothers, my sisters, his work mate and anyone who could share in the understanding of what it meant for Jeremy for fall down. Rocks may be buffeted by the vicissitudes of cranky lovers, demanding jobs and very loud children, but over time they show a little wear, that’s all.

So I should have counted on him sitting up with on the casualty bed, his knees up at a jaunty angle and his arms sloping easily behind his head. I half did. I’d brought along a tome of the military history of colonial New York, and fittingly enough Jared Diamond’s Collapse. He wanted them now. The doctor flexed his feet, pushed against his arms and I watched open mouthed as the side of him that best describes him, his left, was put through its paces.

The miracle moment came when he buttoned up his own shirt. I thought my panicked perception had gone awry, and I actually felt my eyes widen when the doctor told me that Jeremy would most likely completely recover in 24 hours. He had suffered a TIA, a trans ischemia attack often colloquially referred to as a ‘mini-stroke’.

A TIA doesn’t call for an emu, it barely warrants an ostrich. But it was of little consequence now to have over-reacted. I didn’t know that 30% of strokes are fatal, 30% leave lasting and debilitating effects and 30% will be recovered from in a day.

Jeremy’s was a stroke of luck. It was also a portent of a major event potentially in the next 24 hours or over the coming weeks. Unless the cause was properly identified and managed, his new clothes were a cloak of vulnerability.

I have a dear, darling friend, now in Sydney, who has an other-worldly capacity to network. She is a film producer so by now it is second nature, but what she pulled off for me in Mission Beach defied even my expectations. An old uni acquaintance I knew through her had married and was in Mission Beach. Her husband was a retired neuro-surgeon. The girls and I left Jeremy to the gunfire of Harlem Heights and ate pasta with them that night. Not only was Gianni able to perfectly explain what was likely to have happened, but his new profession was psychiatry so he could offer all the insights of shock, recovery, what the girls should and shouldn’t know, the ongoing risks and the true evils of trans-fats. We had been sent angels, one a statuesque Germanic beauty, the other a roguishly delightful Italian and between them they staved off a sobbing fit until the next night.

Jeremy did the milk-run of Queensland hospitals between Tully and Cairns the next day for a cat scan. He arrived back at the hospital dog-tired. Not one to care about appearances he had given instructions on a complicated VCAT case through one side of his mouth to his colleague a few hours after the TIA. He sounded a lush and didn’t give a rats and this and every other little thing he did was cause for unqualified adoration. The disjunction between what he said and the fact that he sounded like most of the roos in his top paddock had been brutally culled was uncanny. I placed him under surveillance, looking for any signs of damage. It didn’t add up that he could appear so altered and still be my love, and the girls’ Dad. They too, were watching like hawks. To make completely sure the youngest conducted her own tests and got him to hop around the ward on one leg. But all we could find was that he was even more Zen, even more sweet, and perhaps from the shock, more ardent.

We waited in the van, getting on with loads of washing, home schooling, tent rolling. It seemed an honour to wash out the soft dried circle of tea in the bottom of his newly quaint mug and to put it away knowing he would get it out again and make himself a cup and I would complain about him not making me one and he would point to the one he’d made me earlier sitting cold by the sink.

I got through the teeth, wees, jarmies, stories and songs. The girls were on best behaviour. We were all terribly careful, though I slipped up when the youngest asked if I could hold my nose and blow through my tear ducts. I suggested it wasn’t a good idea as it put pressure on the brain. After all the brain talk, this was not wise. ‘You’re making me sad,’ she whimpered and wailed out in my arms her own carefully managed trauma. When finally I could draw my little curtains and fall back under a pillow I sobbed a torrent that made the 5.9 metre memorial gumboot in remembrance of Tully’s 1959 rainfall look like Paddington Bear’s Wellington. It was foolish I knew for Jeremy had had a lucky stroke but still it came on the way an extreme weather event reckons with an uncertain future.

The nurse reported that he had made a full recovery in the morning, but he had to wait to see the doctor before we could come and get him. She’d call. More washing, schooling, triumphant running up the beach. I’d used myself up by the time we mounted the hospital ramp. I now knew he was, in fact, Fine, and that ramp was a harder climb than the 1010 steps to Fans Horizon in the Warrumbungle. I know because we climbed them a few days later.

Crisis throws everything into relief. God only knows how the hundreds of stroke victims each day and their families cope. I’m still not exactly sure what the girls went through. But for us, it was three short hours of dire panic, riding on the edge of existence, only to be hauled back over the precipice by a rather blithe British doctor, who told us to ‘carry on as you were’.

Not as easy as it sounds. Sleep switches off around 3am and often I dream of Jeremy dissembling before my eyes, disintegrating like memories. The results of a battery of tests came in, all the wheels and cogs of his body divulging the correct data and telling us his ‘mini-stroke’ was a one-off. As things went back to normal and my infuriation at his solitaire habit almost returned to prior levels we settled back into the cement of simple presence.

It may be the extravagant picnics, or those monumental moments of birth and marriage that we photograph. But I can now imagine how in years to come, it is the green mug with the harlequin pattern that I will search for in those images. They are the things that acutely bear witness to the moments we pay little attention to, that celebrate nothing in particular. They mark the quiet ticking over and the truth of our togetherness. They were poised on the edge of memory. They have been reinstated as the quiet guardians of blissful banality.

Bill Henson and the Explicit Beauty of Children

2008-05-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

There is an unexpected moment early in Nabokov’s Lolita when the ‘bland’ and ‘goosefleshed’ Mrs Haze (Lolita’s mother), ‘had the cheek to take a photograph’ of the narrator Humbert Humbert. Meanwhile Humbert takes up vantages all around the house to spy on Lolita’s pubescent body, ‘the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood’ taking in ‘her tense narrow nates clothed in black’ as she sunbaths with her mother, hangs cloths on the line and walks the neighbourhood with her friends.

That snap is another little moment of inequity, in the careful tracery of Nabokov’s writing, that builds his narrator as a predator that ultimately harms the child in his care. Lolita is entirely unaware she is under this relentless and sexualising scrutiny. Later Humbert laments that he never filmed the mesmerizing grace of her tennis game. Photographs were insufficient for the delectation this paedophile takes in remembering his Lolita, and he remembers her principally as a visual object.

Earlier, Nabokov introduces his masterpiece as the journal of a dead pederast passed on to a Doctor to edit as a case history of ‘moral leprosy’. The conventionally good Doctor notes that as the book contains explicit scenes it will surely be condemned as obscene. But he appeals to Art. ‘”Offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.’

Over the long of career of photographer Bill Henson Australians still experience his pubescent nudes as a shocking surprise. However, Henson is an artist and his images are exhibited in the sanctified space of a gallery. He has been defended from the imputation, and now formal charge, of child pornographer because of the conventions of display and marketing by which his work is seen and known. His defenders have massed themselves on the ‘High’ side of the high art/mass culture divide. While arguing that part of the value of Henson’s work is that he is self-conscious and destabilizing of that divide, they now invoke it to defend that work.

His trouble is that the wider public, including the Prime Minister, are unwilling to make these distinctions of genre when it comes to explicitness. Despite a long history of the nude in art, photographic nudes are explicit because the explicit is industrial. No amount of high-falutin’ printing, framing and gallery-pricing can protect Henson’s works from the grubby taint of mass-production. Henson knows this and his adolescent nudes and landscapes ask us to think about the status of photography given its ever-expanding private, public and commercial uses.

But some of his nudes of young people on the cusp of childhood ask us to consider, as Nabokov did, the peculiar beauty in girls and boys of what Humbert called the Nymphet, and others have variously called the Maiden, and the Youth. The texture of pubescent skin, its sometimes whimsical and sometimes stark relation to light, is a point of fascination for Nabokov and Henson. They both have a facility to evoke a complex mesh of feeling through the physical qualities of young bodies and faces, though Nabokov does it better. This mesh includes the nostalgia of lost childhood, and the poignancy of an unknown future, the vulnerability of exposure and the power of commanding the gaze.

Some of his nudes I can't stomach. The gothic urban scenes of young adults in rape scenarios - one a girl crawling through the dark away from the camera with blood running down her thigh from her cunt - are, I think, unconscionable. I'm told they refer to Bosch and Carvagio. I wonder how they don't refer to aggravated rape. But why should a photographer not refer to sexual violence? How am I to know if these images are critical? I think the beauty of the models invites a gaze that eroticises the rape depicted. That's a big concern when the rape of children and young women is as endemic as it is. Another 2 images of sleeping girls with their legs open knowingly evoke the conventions of kiddie porn - though in the magazines I've viewed the perpetrator is creeping his hands into the tweetie-bird nightie. They are irrefutably child abuse scenarios and I think Henson has a responsibility with these images to explain himself.

But in that mix is the awareness of sexual potential, the memory of our own intense sexual responses as young adults and the conceit and bewilderment of how our sexual appeal positions us in the world we’re coming into as adults.

Both Nabokov and Henson are men artists who are preoccupied with that mesh of feeling. Both confront us with the reality of child sexuality and through their own artistry get us to feel distinctly uneasy about the confusion between sexual response and aesthetic pleasure. Both of them throw us back on the cultural mire of sexualised childhood, from ‘piccaninnies’ to fashion advertising and they insist that this mire absolutely clouds the ways we see children. It is an inescapable fact that children have been sexualized, it’s the soup we swim in. There is also an epidemic of child sexual abuse that cannot be extricated from this established and entrenched cultural frame. But Henson, it has to be owned, also goes beyond this frame is his dystopic images of exposed and misused adolescents seemingly abandoned to remote landscapes.

What child protection advocate Hetty Johnson has done, in instigating the police investigation of child pornography into 20 of Henson’s exhibited works, is clear-fell the complex scene that surrounds these works and reduce them to one possible interpretation. Since they are naked, the children are shown in a sexual context. Since the image as explicit, the creator is a pornographer who betrays in his work that he has sexual feeling towards children which he celebrates and promotes and then sells to paedophiles for the purpose of sexually arousing them.

My girls are beautiful. I’m often told this and I see their beauty both as their mother and as an observer and consumer of imagery that, from Audrey Tatou to Bratz dolls, has reduced human beauty to the gangling physiognomy and tensile unblemished skin of adolescence. It frightens me that their children’s bodies are proportioned exactly as fashion models, only in miniature, without breasts. I’ve twice seen passing men’s eyes linger with pleasure over their wide-open faces and coltish forms. I fear for them because before they were even born their status as girls was sexualised and their beauty as children was appropriated to the intensely sexualised world of commodity fashion and beauty. I’ve also worked in services for child sexual abuse victims and I know with more detail than I care to remember that no matter what I do, my girls are vulnerable to that abuse –it is certainly not a ‘remote’, Aboriginal problem. It is such a damaging crime that many of us would eradicate it at any cost.

But repression, as censorship, never eradicates. Prohibition produces desire. And Hetty has unwittingly drawn the gaze of paedophiles to Henson’s work, and we can be sure, they will not be looking for nostalgia, ambiguity or the relation of young skin to light. They will be looking for explicitness and intensifying their pleasure in the knowledge and transgression of looking at images that are banned.

I life-modeled for my sister when I was 13. A series of white on black nudes, some of which she sold, and some of which are still hanging around the families’ homes. They are lovely, but there is one that still invokes that peculiarly epidermal feeling of exposure because I remember a neighbour ogling it when she first drew it. Young women negotiate that gaze everywhere they go. And mostly their peculiar loveliness, which is undoubtedly sexual, is ogled and harassed. I would not send one of Hensen’s models, fully clothed, to walk the gauntlet of King Street on a Friday night.

Henson’s status as an artist does not protect him from the accusation that his imagery participates in the sexualistion of children, not if we accept the argument of his work, that the art/mass distinction is a furphy. But it’s a conversation we need to have. While Nabokov insists on that conversation, Henson doesn’t and I have always found that a troubling aspect his more menacing young-nudes. But it is also a limitation of his medium. As a photographer he can’t inscribe any moral viewpoint but only a scopic viewpoint.
Hensen is knowing about all the conventions of child sex that frame his images. Like Nabakov his work provoke us to be honest about that, to see these young people as both disturbingly part of a culture that exposes them before they have a full understanding of the status and meaning of their own bodies. But in his nudes these young men and women also stand apart from this culture. They are inelubtably born into it, in their own beautiful skins. Does and should beauty command respect? Why does it instead command obsessive fascination with no regard for the sexual autonomy of young men and women? We need to have this conversation, but not with police.

Ain't Nobody Home but us Parents

2008-04-28T04:18:00.000-07:00

On Mothers Day 6.30-7.30pm is still **** O’Clock

6.31 pm. Second child is wailing because her one designated packet of skittles from the school chocolate drive has run out. You will have to grieve until you are over it, I dispassionately explain while cursing chocolate drives. First born has stormed off to bedroom and is trashing something for effect, because she has been banned from her computer time by provoking second child to crescendo wail to ear-shattering screech.

6.33 pm. I am seeking the emotional distance of desktop parenting to balance out the physical distance of other parent being at meeting. But let’s call him ‘Dad’, because ‘parent’ is a utopian fantasy of mothers and fathers equally contributing such that they become non-gender specific.

6.37 pm. Small ones have sought the emotional distance of the second series of I Dream of Jeannie. Therein they can fully indulge the fantasy of being all powerful by making things like oh I don’t know, people, while remaining sweet tempered, retaining spectacular midriffs, and being endowed with eye-lashes of such battering power they can sweep away household detritus in a blink and call upon the armies of ancient civilizations.

6.41 pm. Dad’s ailing mother has rung to update on the bile-duct infection operation of Dad’s hospitalised father. The cat has pissed in the rice cooker, the unread readers are strewn on the floor, there are unsold maltese boxes, lost pyjama bottoms, not enough skittles in the world, and Major Nelson still won’t marry Jeannie.

6.41 and a half pm. My, time flies when you’re having fun. Now for the burning question you may well be asking because I sure as hell am: where is the man in question?

Depending on the number of domestic calamities accrued by Beep O’Clock, this very question might variously be muttered under my breath into the bubbling Bolognese, cast over my shoulder in the vague hope that it might smite someone who deserves it, or shrieked down the hallway at children making enough demands to overwhelm an entire village, let alone two ‘parents’. Two! Whose idea was that? Another brilliant though self-destructing social formation coming to us from killing-us-softly, carbonaceous, industrialised capitalism.

I’ve come to suspect there is a veritable chorus of – Where Is He?- between 6.30pm and 7.30pm, hissed into switched off mobile phones. Not finding its mark this chorus instead makes its way like a toxic vapour through the gas outlets of every kitchen stove to relentlessly seep towards one bottomless and unchartered cavern of geosequestrated mothers’ rage. I muse if only we could harness that power for good – like work-life balance, instead of evil – like marriage breakdown.

6.47 pm. Hold that thought - the Bolognese is all boil and trouble.

6.58 pm. Waterlogged pasta and another burnt saucepan bottom to deal with. And all while I was about to raise a mothers’ army to seize control of the state and legislate first off for all ‘parents’ to arrive home at a fecking reasonable hour.

7.06 pm. Short of a mother’s revolution, while casting aspersions into my stove I have devised a truly revolutionary strategy. Perhaps we ‘parents’ – I would say ‘mothers’ but it would be unwarranted to be gender specific, wouldn’t it? Perhaps we ‘parents’ of the scrubber-variety should go to these meetings too, with small wailing children in tow, their feet half into their pyjamas and their mouths whirring with dragon toothpaste. Perhaps right on the witching hour we should decamp to the serene and self-congratulatory ambience of late-night meetings, where those other ‘parents’ of the suited variety action plan farewells and other weird rituals worthy of anthropological study.

Wouldn’t you scrubber-parents out there like to march right in vested in the truer authority of parents who manage chocolate drives (and thereby the basis of the entire education system), and stand on the table (just to be contrary, fully-clothed), and give these suit-parents a shrewish earful – why aren’t you at home with your families?

I mean, what is this business of holding meetings on weeknights? Someone out whoever started this trend, because I want to see him up against the wall clutching at the impotent armour of his dark grey suit. Then I want a reality TV show where mothers and children unceremoniously evict these late-night meeting moles from their cheese platter world of adult-child apartheid and return home to the women they elected to spend their lives with and the children they fathered, we thought, in more than one sense.

From this mother’s day on the domesticated demand that work-related activities take place in work hours should be fought and won. Strictly Work Hours we could redub our kitchen-table revolution, the one dismantled in the 1980s by the false hopes of glass ceilings and now awaiting a resurgence of mother alienation.

7.30 pm. We're seeking the emotional proximity of cuddling up over stories. The readers are still languishing on the floor and there’s nobody home but us parents.

Coda

10.56pm. The man in question drags himself up the stairs like a drunk cat. He has been sitting on a panel in Cheltenham and is utterly wrung out. When I query how, 'not being home to make dinner' turned into coming home at 11pm, he explains that the panel went so late because he told the other members he was 'not available' on Saturdays. I tell him he has made one small step for man, and one giant step for womankind and that he is my hero. But the poor bastard is already asleep.

Spitzer and the losses of Monogamy

2007-12-28T02:19:00.000-08:00

This piece created a bit of a stink amongst that least reactive of the internet demographic - 'anonymous'. I asked my benighted beloved why it may have peeved 'anonymous' so and he replied, 'because you sound like a self-indulgent brat'. So, I 'took a look in the mirror' (all present and accounted for ... ?) 'smoked a joint' (at least I would've but I've lost that mouldy stash kept for dinner parties twenty years ago, so this didn't cause any seismic shifts in my thinking - that happened 20 years ago, although I can't remember that far back) I pondered whether I had committed crimes against humanity on a par with 'Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini' (let me know when I'm due at the International War Crimes Tribunal anonymous: ps does that make heterosexual monogamy a war or a crime?). I called up the object of my 'quiet outsource' (my seven exotic dancing boys) and cancelled forthwith though it was hard to access their number there in the deeper recesses of my unconscious, what with them being In My Dreams. So I've given it another crack having gleaned from anonymous' responses that whatever people seem to feel on the subject of monogamy they feel it strongly. It's impossible not to be personal with it, but the point I'm making is that this is one personal that is insufficiently thought of as political.

Liz Conor
24.12.07

Elliot Spitzer is a man who may have passed Australians by if it weren’t for the media- mesmerising fact that he not only solicited a 22-year-old ‘elite’ $4500-an-hour call girl, but he got caught and he was a high-profile public figure. His tryst with Ashley Alexandra Dupre has demoted him from New York Governor to prime cad. It isn’t hard for any of us to imagine the humiliation his wife experienced, standing primly beside him, asked to display her loyalty to a man who was disloyal to her.

It’s easy, even a little pleasurable to call Spitzer a complete tool. You’d have to take classes to become as selfish as this man. But the humiliation he perpetrated against his wife, the custodian of his sexual satisfaction, was to spotlight her as woman whose attractions under whelmed her husband such that he looked elsewhere.

Failures of the heart are never spoken of in such terms. Rather Spitzer is thought of as greedy, perverse, perhaps a ‘sex addict’ who experienced power as an aphrodisiac. But maybe he was also something else. Maybe he was in a long-term monogamous relationship and bored with the sex. Maybe he wanted something often lost in committed relationships, thrilling sex.

Does this excuse him? Hell no, the understanding he had with his wife was that the love they felt for each other was such that they wanted no other. No doubt they’d talked through the fact that love does not preclude desire for others. But it’s less likely that they openly acknowledged that while love does a lot of great things for sex it doesn’t insure against the loss of excitement and clearly this is what Spitzer wanted.

It’s a paradox in this post-sexual-revolution age that Spitzer’s actions were scandalous. He has clearly transgressed, but no one is spelling out exactly how. It’s a given that he was a bastard to his wife – he pretended he was honest with her, when in fact he was only honest with his call girl - who, we wrongly assume is another genre of woman to Spitzer’s wife, living in a parallel universe none of us inhabit and therefore suffers none of the ignominy of this exposure. He paid for sex. It isn’t only feminists who are thinking, oh for godsake, sort yourself out so that you’re capable of having an equal relationship with a woman on her terms, and without lining the pockets of organized criminals.

But why is this such big news? Unspoken within the outrage is the fact that these are desires we all negotiate with varying degrees of success, and that goes to the heart of the problem: monogamy serves our love badly. Spitzer is another moral corpse in a body count that demonstrates that monogamy is an unsustainable social system, which lamentably underpins most other social systems, yet too often ends either in tears, unspoken ‘understandings’, bitter recrimination, or worst of all, bewildered children with divorced parents.

It’s easier to think of the Spitzers of this world as giving heterosexual men a bad name. They don’t understand – the stereotype goes - that sex is really about love and intimacy. But women (assumedly unlike Dupre) will settle for pillow talk over head-on-collision sex because as the nurturing sex we are born with the knowledge that love is more important that lust.

Rot. Men and women struggle with the transition the vast majority of relationships make from constant to episodic lust that follows the comforts of familiarity, small-child-coupled-with-work-exhaustion (to the point where this can be the only coupling going on), and the alienation created by domestic inequity (and this one is men’s fault). But even if Spitzer had spent all afternoon dusting the top of the curtain rails, unprompted, we can speculate (since we already quietly are) that he and his wife might have then had a good time, but not quite the kind of time where you resurface having misplaced your name, first language and species. The kind of time we all think we invent in the first years of a relationship.

This transition is one most of us don't seem to want to acknowledge - not in the present climate where sexual identity is pre-eminent, sexual activity is essentialised, and pleasure is truth and liberty, charged with turbo-market profitability. So invested have we become in being sexually successful, it’s become taboo to talk honestly about how we manage the loss of frisson in frottage. We could put this down to us being caught up in a hopelessly unimaginative imagining about sexual intimacy. Or you could put it, and Spitzer’s dalliance, down to something far simpler. Monogamy doesn’t sustain exhilarating sex and we either wish, or pretend, it does, and if you’re particularly selfish and deceptive, you look for it elsewhere.

It’s possible that heterosexual mothers are more prepared for the transition having had to rebuild their utterly bulldozed identities after caring for young children. But I don’t think so. I’m going out on a limb and guessing that Spitzer and probably his wife were grieving the loss of excitement. She probably got over it, and on with it, since in the bigger picture of real contentment, it’s no big deal. But as happens too often the story didn’t end there. It was the fact that he, and a billion others, didn’t get over it (along with his selfish, lying bastardry) that lies behind the weary indignity of infidelity.

Isn’t it just possible that Spitzer’s wife was also betrayed by a construct of intimacy that, with a recurrence that ought to beg questions, does not always serve us well.

A PhD in Desktop Mothering

2007-12-06T03:36:00.000-08:00

While deep in the throws of writing a Ph.D, someone kindly told my Dad (B.Sc., Dip. Ed., M.App.Sc., Ph.D.) that it involves ‘learning more and more about less and less until finally you know everything there is to know about nothing’. He also tells me that detractors have described B.S, M.Bs and Ph.D as acronyms for Bullshit, More Bullshit and Piled Higher and Deeper. We’re all familiar with charges of mickey-mouse academics, who live in ivory-towers naval-gazing but there are more of us than ever either deep in the pile or close to someone buried. What we’re finding is that these ever diminishing circles of specialisation usually happen right about the time that families expand, along with the demands of careers and mortgages.

I ‘submitted’ my own Ph.D 6 years ago, and can testify to the surreal process of trying to stay immersed in the pile while managing, as many women do, the shrieking reality of first babies. I was devising a theory of the camera and how it changed the way women were seen and saw themselves forever. I’d chanced upon the Flapper while wandering around the newly arrived journals in the National Library and soon realised she was accompanied in the 1920s by a coterie of girly types – the City Girl, the Screen-Struck Girl, the Mannequin-Vivant – who, like the flirtatious flapper, used their ‘glad-eyes’ to appraise the changing scene before them and strike a pose within it. Thousands of Australian women broke with decorum and sent their studio portraits into a rash of newspaper beauty competitions, hoping they had a ‘film face’.

But finding the spotlight in this very modern and Australian scene depended on a play of looks with many blind spots. Aboriginal women barely took a dekko. While researching the beauty competitions I found a swag of cartoons that showed them missing the cues of looking modern by mistaking petticoats for party frocks and pipes for chic cigarettes.

So while the topic was literally chanced upon, the motivation to write a Ph.D in the first place was maybe inherited, for my Dad wrote his perched on the foam family couch at a tiny round table, while trying to shut out the distractions of teenage daughter angst. Over 10 years, he now says, ‘sitting on a thistle’, he measured the effects of photochemical oxidants (ozone) and acid gases on Australian plants. On a rooftop in Royal Parade he’d fumigate his tortured eucalypts and banksias while Mum stretched out in the sun looking fetching, drinking beer and identifying species for him. ‘He didn’t know his wattles from his gums’ she says, ‘but he got the Ph.D’.

So absorbed was he that we played tricks on him, swearing like troopers in his ear without getting so much as a smack on the bum. A Ph.D becomes a world unto itself exiled from day-to-day life. During my internment I stuck two images on my fridge – Stuart Diver looking into the sky the moment he was rescued from the collapsed ski lodge on Thredbo, and the first images taken by a robot of the vast, horizonless Mars.

I was 6 years ‘in’ when I fell pregnant. As the baby wedged under my ribs I identified with her entrapment while desperately calibrating piles of 1920s material into a first draft. Three days after I handed it over she was born, a soon-to-be ‘Ph.D victim’ as someone charitably noted.

That’s when the real fun began. Over another two years I naïvely tried Desktop Mothering. I had this fantastic notion that I could plonk my baby into a bassinette and gurgle in her vague direction while I clinched 120,000 words into one seamless argument.

I got that wrong.

Babies are smarter than we know and she loudly objected to desktop mothering. She devised ingenious ways to keep me out of the evil seat, including needing to freely partake of Mummy skin while being paced for hours. This was not unreasonable, it was just unwieldy. They call it ‘juggling’. I’d call it jugular drainage from the head, while all extremities are numbly entangled. I remember once switching on the light at the bottom of the stairs with my chin, since I had a baby on one hip, the Shorter Oxford on the other, A3 proofing notes and arse-wipes slung over one arm and a nappy bucket dangling from the other. I would’ve used my nose, but it was taken up with glasses.

As it happened this baby became – in a blink it seems - one of those full-throttle, fill-the-screen, bounce-off-the-wall kids. She hung from the upstairs windows inviting passer-bys to dinner, tore off my top in the supermarket queue to raspberry on my blushing bosom. She’d strip naked and cover every inch of her body in paint rather than compliantly using the paper set up on the easel. These riotous, knock-about kids will wear all their underpants at once for 4 months and then none at all for the next, and they are splendid people. But they fry their mother’s brains. By the time I was pregnant with our second Ph.D victim and finalising the draft, I was toast.

What were my symptoms of being psychologically carbonised? I wandered around Melbourne cemetery listening to Rachmaninoff piano trios while marvelling at the order of its mini-suburbia. I calmly spooned porridge into my lap, having failed for over an hour to deposit any in my toddler’s mouth. I decided buckling children into every seat they sit in was almost certainly carcinogenic to mothers. I called Lifeline for parenting tips. I routinely left my exhausted beloved only to return sheepishly each time saying, ‘when I say leaving, I actually just meant sitting out on the pavement for half an hour’.

Toast.

Many calming-drops, St John’s Worts and Bach Flower remedies later – not to mention parenting workshops, psychotherapy and raising a mothers’ army (which I called The Mothers of Intervention) to seize control of the state (we called for maternity leave by burning maternity bras of the steps of parliament) – I handed in the Ph.D a few days before my second daughter came forth into the paper-logged world.

Birth is of course one way to keep any other death-defying adventures, like writing a Ph.D, in perspective. Nothing else that is so unreasonably heinous ends so miraculously and ecstatically.

My readers’ reports arrived four months later and I sought out the most remote and dusty corral in the La Trobe Library to reverently unfold them. The first line read: ‘This is a superb dissertation, one the very best I have ever examined’. I wept with relief, and again when the Fed Ex truck rolled up with a book contract, and again when the first consignment of my book arrived.

Was it worth it? In her first week of school, after her library tour, our oldest daughter took her 72 page story-board of the Wizard of Oz and placed it gingerly on the library shelf. It seems my daughter lived in a world where people routinely make books and finally she had found the right place to put her own. Perhaps without my knowing it she’d also been immersed in the pile of flappers, just as when I was a kid I’d been deep in the pile of fumigated eucalypts. So had another sister who used Dad's results on the relative sensitivity of Aussie plants to industrial and vehicular air pollution, to give her show-and -tell class a presentation entitled "Air pollution is bad for your pants" (her teacher explained she meant plants).

Writing a Ph.D is a lot like having kids in that none of us understand the process until we’re doing it. But there are unexpected rewards. While breastfeeding at a book launch, a complete jerk turned to his friend and said, ‘the other one’s free’. When I told him where to get off he called me a cocky bitch and with stony relish I was able to reply, ‘that’s Doctor Cocky Bitch to you, mate.

The Liberal-Green Deals

2007-09-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

The ALP Pot calls the Green Kettle Black

It seems the Australian Labour Party can Do No Wrong - that is if you believe the polls. They’re positioned before the most important election in our nation’s history, poised on the crest of a monster wave of public approval.

Good for them. Who in their right or left brain hemisphere isn’t ‘gagging to see the back of John Howard’ as Catherine Deveny put it with customary delicacy. So thoroughly disillusioned have the electorate become with the incumbent government, our venerable PM may go down in history not as Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister, but rather as only the second PM to be ousted from his own seat.

With what gratuitous relish we can recount that history. Stanley Melbourne Bruce used the surprisingly resonant catchphrase 'Men, Money and Markets' as the basis for his economic strategy and pursued radical reform of the arbitration system that would have imposed penalties for industrial action, and new awards to drive down wages and increase hours. He was ignominiously unseated in 1929 by the Secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, E. J. Holloway. Maxine McKew would send Howard off with similar professional tidings - it would be just recompense for his stacking the ABC board with his handpicked cultural warhorses.

Where does that leave the party that has just been declared Australia’s third largest political party? Sleeping with the enemy by all accounts. With posters, print advertising, and now a You Tube message Labor claims the 3 newly elected Green upper house members have voted with the Liberal party 68% of the time.

Why? They ask, hoping to incite moral outrage, particularly amongst young green voters in Lindsay Tanner’s unsafe seat of Melbourne, traditionally a Labor stronghold.

Why indeed.

I can speak as a Green here. The truth is we are in fact pro-nuclear, anti-abortion, pro-whaling, clear-felling, Maccas-feasting, fur-wearing, chain-smoking, SUV-driving, RSL cadets and Paris Hilton sympathizers. Oh, and we feed our resexed cats coal briquettes. Yep, and ‘It’s Great to be Straight’ is our motto.

In politics who can you believe? We could try the Victorian Parliamentary voting record. A cursory glance reveals that Labor in fact voted with the Liberals 69.5% on bills alone.

When the Greens have voted with the Liberals we have stood by our policies. The confusion now criss-crossing the traditional left-to-right political spectrum is caused by Labor and Liberal behaving like much of a muchness.

There was the Gambling and Racing Legislation Amendment (Sports Betting) Bill 2007. The Greens and Liberals both moved amendments that would have reduced the number of poker machines in Victoria to 10,000 (Greens policy) or 22,000 (Liberal Policy) respectively (cap is currently 30,000). The Greens also voted against referring a request from the Legislative Council that certain members appear before the Gaming Committee. But Steve Bracks could probably explain that one better. It might have something to do with why Labor voted down establishing an Anticorruption committee.

The Greens opposed amendments to the Parliamentary Salaries and Superannuation Act 1968 to increase the remuneration of certain MPs serving in senior positions on joint investigatory parliamentary committees. And the Greens supported a motion which asserted the right of the Legislative Council to compel any document or person to be produced on demand.

But the bill that really riled the Labor party was the nuclear plebiscite bill. It vested a single minister with the power to frame the question and circumstances of any plebiscite put to the people. The Greens know from experience that Labor words plebiscites in such a way as to deliver their desired outcome. Tasmanian Labor removed a third, no dams, option on a plebiscite which then left two choices: voting for a dam on the Gordon river, or voting for a dam on the Franklin. On an issue as critical as nuclear activities the Greens were not courting the risk of a craftily worded plebiscite. This nuclear plebiscite bill is in fact the only government bill that’s been defeated, and not only by the Greens but by all non-government parties.

The record stands. It is the Greens in fact adhering to stated party policy. It is the Labor party, including the federal opposition, that is not being true to itself. On Dr Haneef and security issues, on the Gunns’ pulp mill, on setting a short term emissions limit to offset climate change, on mandatory detention of refugees, on dismantling AWAs and the human rights defiling Australian Building and Construction Commission, on market deregulation, on cross media-ownership, on uranium mining, and on interventions into Aboriginal communities, the Labor party is as symbiotically aligned with big business and industry as the Liberals. Consequently the Greens will assess each legislative proposal on a case-by-case basis, and in accordance with our policies.

So they want to invoke moral outrage that that the Greens sometimes vote with the Liberals – which is a bit rich given that their preferences elected Stephen Fielding’s Family First to the Senate and the DLP to the Victorian Legislative Council. That outrage rests on a premise that is sadly lost to history – that the Labor party is any different to the Liberal party. They would have the Greens automatically vote with them and against the Liberals, because what, they’re going to suddenly prove themselves poles apart in government?

It’s true Labor cannot take Greens support for granted anymore, and in the coming weeks they may find the unions feel the same way. I can speak with many members of the Greens, if Labor represented the values it once did, we’d neither exist as a party, nor be forced to act now at times like the opposition they once were. Does this then side us with the Liberals – it’s a question Labor ought to asking itself.

Facing Up To Ageing

2007-08-19T20:35:00.000-07:00

You’ve got to hand it to Leslie Cannold (http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/our-attitude-towards-cosmetic-surgery-needs-a-sharp-facelift/2007/08/19/1187462081028.html). In ‘fessing up to having ‘liquid’ facial hydraulics she broached a taboo more entrenched than admitting to shrieking regrettables at your children and eating your porridge on the pavement.

Leslie’s right. We should be having the debate on ageing interventions, because the visibility of women determines their worth and more insidiously, their political inclusion. But she and I (quite accustomed as we’ve become) part company on our ‘personal-is-political’ responses.

Does this infer that unlike Leslie I am ‘ageing gracefully’, and have the feminist rectitude to still recognise the self I’ve always known when I catch sight of myself in the cold light of day, unlocking the car, furrowed, slackened, creased and harried?

Hell no. I’m booked in for Thursday.

But the story behind that appointment does offer a different perspective on the intractable contraction of our mortal coil.

Having carried the entire contents of downstairs, upstairs, in preparation for gutting-with-an-excavator renovations, I carried two remaining chairs in heeled boots, slippery from ripping up floor tiles, up the unballistrated stairs. I fell from the 13th step onto my head. The temple of my glasses snapped off and gouged a nasty, jagged gash through my eyebrow. I broke my arm in 3 places and still have an unhelpful ridge across the already irregular terrain of one thigh. And it fecking hurt.

But, I was ‘lucky’. I fell from over 2 metres, which is not uncommonly fatal, and the temple didn’t gouge my eye out, or worse, and the breaks were just green something-or-others that soon healed.

I can notch it up to cat life number 4. There had already been the car accident off a frosty embankment outside Paris, in which we flipped over, and spun around 3 times and when we came-to the luggage was in a perfect arc across the morning field. There was the ectopic haemorrhage I decided was a twisted muscle and slept off. And the blanched Berlin bus driver who braked within inches of the bike, whose handle bars I was perched on with the French artist behind me was whispering French obscenities in my ear, while I swung an umbrella into the spokes of the front wheel which brought us to a rather abrupt halt, me landing on my teeth with the French artist following soon behind and busting one of them.

At least my near-deaths mostly have their origin in reckless hedonism. I didn’t hesitate to have my tooth capped. Indeed, if we are looking for some line between permissible interventions, I rather wish I’d had more ‘work’ on them having sucked my thumb until age 14. Nor did I display much rectitude about the voluptuous visitations of puberty on my skinny child’s frame. I resisted with 7 years of laxatives, 100 sit-ups a day and forms of self-torment that don’t bear broadsheet broadcasting.

Suffice to say, I am every bit beholden to the tyrannous constructs of beauty which took Leslie off to be pricked and plumped. I’ve had sun spots zapped, hair coloured, teeth crowned and invested recently in a tube of ‘wrinkle softener’ which was an incorrigible sum of money. I also do my darndest not to frown, but mothering under contemporary conditions, am often jacked off. I scowl and it shows.

The new scar indelibly imprinted itself as I turned 40, as if to drive home the galloping complications of my gradual perishment. I sensibly thought, it’s time to let go. I shall go one step further than Leslie and break another taboo. I was a pretty woman. Feeling squeamish? That’s because no matter how much time, energy and money we invest in our looks it is strictly verboten to admit to them. I hope I can be forgiven with the appraisal that I’m no longer a pretty woman. Because beauty is a youth designation as much as it is one of race. While I remain anglo-celt, forty is not the new thirty, at least not without makeovers of the scalpel variety.

Is it vanity that told me I was pretty, or is it that I lived under the same perceptual regime that ascribes virtue and talent to beauty, along with better career prospects, upward mobility and bestows all kinds of daily, minute friendly attentions.

Did I misuse being pretty? Yep sometimes. Not half as much I was misused however. If it had capital for me, it had far more for a large number of men, it seemed, who pinned all kinds of status and self-expression to association with feminine beauty and on a daily basis, seemed unable to suppress their thoughts, horns, gestures and other physical responses to the passing sight of a pretty girl.

Frankly those attentions, as the majority of young women will attest, were more than unwelcome, they became thoroughly dull, a pain in the freaking arse, inhibiting of movement, anxiety exacerbating, and on a handful of occasions, truly frightening. I ought to be relieved to no longer excite the three-point gaze: face, tits arse.

Instead I feel loss - of attention, of status, of visibility, of relational worth, of cultural clout, of political inclusion. And I’d venture that I share some degree of that sense of loss with every western and westernised woman. From age 30-40 I wrote a cultural history of what I called ‘feminine visibility’. I theorised the impact of industrialised image production on modern feminine identity and I concluded with a reckoning of my own. I revisted Naomi Wolf’s end question, ‘what will we see’, with, ‘how might women be spectacular subjects’ because spectacularised we manifestly have been since the 1920s. Kevin07, and an ever-widening wake of poll-dancing voyeur political wannabees can now testify to that and be proven ‘human’ rather than misogynist.

Being spectacular women is a condition of not just our possibilities, but of our very existence. Cognizant of these facts, I blithely went off to see a plastic about my scar. Easily fixed. Just a nip under the brow – but then wouldn’t that make my sagging eyelids uneven? Well, while we’re at it … it’s a slippery slide I can tell you.

A week before I was due to undergo the ‘procedure’ of ‘scar revision’ and ‘bilateral blethoplasty’, the ‘clinic’ in Canterbury (where else?) called to confirm and advise me of their separate fee of $1700. Which meant instead of spending $400 on a scar, I was about to blow $4500-ish on my erm eyelids. ‘That’s immoral’ I concluded on the spot and cancelled. That thorn in the consumerist west’s side, those 5,000 children dying of malnutrition-related disease everyday, it dug in … but I make no pretence of virtue. The thorn is pricking the $400 scar revision, but hasn’t pierced my resolve.

The thing is, women aren’t upgrading from wrinkle softener creams to botox to knife-work because they themselves are vain. It’s because for forty odd years their worth has been appraised by their looks. We know that this is unmitigated bullshit, as verily as we know that Kylie’s stellar career rests largely on the glorious talents of her bottom. Yet we still look, appraise other women and ourselves, assessing the ‘max factor’ in McKew’s chances of unseating Howard, the ‘yummy mummies’ with pretty babies we are more responsive to, over-familiarising ourselves with the unvarying features of Paris Hilton with such relentless regularity we actually come to dislike her … no wonder Muslim women find sanctuary under the hijab. Under all this surveillance and scrutiny, it’s a wonder that non-muslim women don’t find relief and comfort in the cultural oblivion of aging. Instead they experience invisibility as loss.

But not those women who measure their worth by who they love and who loves them. Sorry to be trite, but when I see myself looking altered, I take considerable comfort in this maxim. And I ‘reflect’ otherwise, on what a self-obsessed, righteously entitled, angry, self-loathing young woman I was, and would not wish all that confusion and angst on my own daughters – even when the 8 year old tells me that all the lines on my face spell ‘dumbhead’. I ‘reflect’ on how my Mum has aged, and I try not to stray from the thought that I have to model the same equanimity and self-possession for my girls – even when they say they want to ‘piss on my penis-head’.

I ‘reflect’ on who I’d now be if I remained assured of a bewildering array of false attentions - at least it became harder to tell the genuine from the false. Unless the fifth life turns out rather worse than the other four, one day I will be eighty and there will be nothing but pictures to testify to my fair youth. Sure, age interventions wouldn’t make any difference to the ways I aspire to contribute, as a scholar, mother, lover, friend. But it would make a big difference to who I know myself to be, to how I recognise myself, how I face up to aging and ultimately to who I am becoming through that indifferent, unstinting process.

Sound like I’ve learnt my lesson? Like I found some kind of ‘inner-truth’ about feminist/feminine identity that Leslie hasn’t? Nuh. I still experience loss. How can I not after all that gratuitous attention and undue emphasis? Trick is to bear that loss rather than avoid it. And there are times when, yes, it does seem unbearable. This is a measure of ocularcentric modernity and its intensifying appraisal of women’s value, or more specifically, their capitol. I’d like to say we should just shrug it off, to reflect on whether women in Dafur are worried about ageing, but visual identity runs far deeper than we realise. That’s why Leslie’s right to want this debate and can’t be roundly dismissed for getting herself injected. And it’s why I’m getting my scar ‘revised’ on Thursday.

Aboriginal Child Sexual Abuse

2007-06-26T00:08:00.000-07:00

Liz Conor

26 June 2007

I thought I knew. Until I read the Bringing them Home Report I was an Australian like any other non-indigenous Australian. I lived under a set of understandings about our past that were sketchy - well-intended but misinformed. Since reading that report and much of the highly contested but irrefutable Indigenous history, this knowledge has rebuilt me from the inside out. It is a way of ‘knowing’ that indelibly alters how I occupy this land and collect the dividends of colonialism.

Over the last week Mr Howard has read another report – Little Children Are Sacred – and has experienced, it seems, a similar epiphany. Yet given Mr Howard’s record of undermining Indigenous land rights through his response to the Wik decision, his dismantling of ATSIC, his marginalizing of Indigenous leaders, and his cutting of funding for a range of health, housing and education programs while espousing ‘practical reconciliation’ - it’s difficult not to view his epiphany with a grain of salt.

In fact Mr Howard has stated his motives. He wants to avoid the shame of inaction, such as that the Bush administration incurred through its abysmal failure to respond to hurricane Katrina and the ensuing ‘human misery and lawlessness’. Sadly, his call to arms, mandatory perineum examinations and forced taking over of leases are only likely to worsen the trauma of the communities, while they assist mining companies in the latest rush for dispossession. It is an extraordinary and unprecedented supposition that the army can operate as some kind of peacekeeping force for domestic violence.

Howard’s failure to respond to another national calamity of child abuse - namely the stolen generations - and his attempt to relegate it to a history that he had no part in, has already coloured the way he will be remembered. And after 10 years of sitting on ‘horrifying and sickening’ reports, he is too late to be remembered other than shamefully.

It’s been easy to argue; the Stolen Generations was then. Its national stain cannot be expunged because you can’t change the past. But the past indelibly shapes and determines our present and until we collectively reconcile ourselves to it, we will remain haunted by its ongoing impacts.

Arguably the trauma of the stolen generations is written through every page of the Little Children Are Sacred report. The sexual abuse of Aboriginal children was already endemic in mission settlements, church and government training homes, in pastoral and domestic work placements, and in foster and adoption placements.

Precisely because child sexual abuse is rife across all communities, it has a number of characteristics we can identity with confidence. It is cyclic, in that victims often become perpetrators. But this cycle is entirely decided by gender. Girls remain the overwhelming majority of victims, yet they do not go on to offend as adults. It seems paedophiles can pass on to their male victims a particular version of masculine identity, in which sexual intimacy is framed by violence and coercion, and the right of sexual access inheres in being an adult male. But for Aboriginal victims the cycle goes back further and is enmeshed in the ‘civilising’, ‘assimilation’ and ‘integrating’ projects.

From the first decades of settlement Europeans witnessed the calamitous impact of their presence on local Aborigines. Early colonials saw suffering through disease, alcoholism and violence. They sometimes wrote with dismay and resignation of the appalling toll of European occupation, but mostly they looked across the barrier of colour and imagined they were seeing a ‘Hobbesian nightmare’ as Howard calls it - a state of nature in which humanity is degraded by the daily grind for animal subsistence.

Yet they felt a deep ambivalence about making the ‘native’ over in their image. All their claims of racial superiority were beset with the insecurity that we were far from perfect and that ‘civilising’ ‘assimilating’ or ‘integrating’ Aborigines might not alleviate but rather contribute to their ‘benighted condition’. The drunken, brawling itinerant ‘savage’, of early colonial art was none other than our own civilisation’s portrait of Dorian Gray. By displacing that ‘moral vice’ on to the ‘Aboriginal problem’ we kept up an exulted image of ourselves.

All the contemporary signs of social dysfunction - alcoholism, pornography, domestic violence, child sexual assault: we’ve set ourselves apart from Aborigines by imagining that we’ve got a ‘handle’ on them. Indeed, over the past decades any causal relation between pornography and sexual assault has been roundly rejected. Not for Aborigines it seems. It is widely believed that Aborigines can’t ‘hold their drink’ and now ‘can’t handle their porn’. Perhaps what’s most confronting about the present crisis in remote Aboriginal communities are the implications for wider abuse of alcohol and access to porn in the non-indigenous community. Not because alcohol and porn disinhibit but because their modes of consumption can encode meanings of masculine heterosexual identity that tally with ideas of the right of sexual access through coercion.

From early settlement to now we’ve failed to relate the tragedy of ‘social breakdown and family dysfunction’ with dispossession: to see that loss of land was also the deprivation of economy, and without it law could not be sustained. Now we’re seeing a new push into Aboriginal traditional lands, under the guise of the moral absolute of child safety. We all agree child safety has to be established before it can be debated. And anyone who raises objections to Howard and Brough’s flouting of the recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred Report are thereby ethically checkmated.

But European Australians have never seen Aboriginal men as part of their families. In early accounts there was sometimes surprise at their tender involvement in the care of children, but they were mostly seen them as unaware of their biological paternity, as unable to provide for their families, and as undisciplinary of their children. Given the traditional organization of care, law and resource management around future generations, it is ironic that whites have never really thought of Aboriginal men as fathers. But if Aboriginal families were seen to be improperly headed, then the intervention of the paternal state seemed almost natural. Howard has thus cast himself in a fatherly light.

Then as now we rushed to ‘save’ the children without any reflection that our institutions – church run orphanages, police ‘protectors’ and now the army – may not be the ideal state apparatuses with which to induct a people into our laws, our language, our relation to property, our way of living. As though there is no other viable way to live. As if our way of living isn’t in fact the crux of the problem.

Throughout the debacle of the Stolen Generations, children who were removed because of ‘neglect’ suffered the most appalling deprivation of sanitation facilities, housing, food, maternal attachment along with their rightful inheritance and the denial of their aboriginal identities. Few non-indigenous Australians know the truth of the chronic underfunding of the settlements – often at a third of the rate of white orphanages - and resulting child mortality rates. Incredibly the story prevails: ‘they get heaps’. Anna Haebich’s Broken Circles and Rosalind Kidd’s The Way we Civilise should be mandatory reading for all Australians – only then will the ‘heaps’ of state engineered destitution and shameful neglect be exposed. The ‘horrifying and sickening’ reality of assimilation is that aspects of our way of living were ultimately destructive of this nation’s first peoples.

We have reached a moment of reckoning. If we want to ‘save’ indigenous children for their sake we also have to reconcile with the failings of our past and not attempt to shift white ‘dysfunction’ on to Aborigines. And if we ‘save’ Aboriginal children only for our nation’s future, as if it were some grandscale patriotic paternity claim, we’ll once again displace them from their distinct and rightful inheritance as first peoples. And we’ll only compound the cycle of trauma, dependency and alienation.

Liz Conor is a post-doctoral fellow at Melbourne University researching white imaginings of Aboriginal women and children. In 1990 she counselled at the Bendigo Sexual Assault Centre.

The Celebrity Makeover

2007-05-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

The 'Max Factor'

This week the challenge to John Howard's Federal seat of Bennelong became high stakes indeed as ex-ABC journalist Maxine McKew for the first time outpolled the Prime Minister.

Should McKew succeed Howard will go down in history as only the second Prime Minister to suffer the indignity of losing his seat. His predessor, Stanley Melbourne Bruce casts a ghostly aura of historical deja-vu around John Howard. Bruce used the surprisingly resonant catchphrase 'Men, Money and Markets' as the basis for his economic strategy and pursued radical reform of the arbitration system that would have imposed penalties for industrial action, and new awards to drive down wages and increase hours. His proposed IR policies were central to the 1929 federal election in which Bruce was ousted from his seat of Flinders by the Secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, E. J. Holloway.

Working under political shadows with such reach, along with the Galaxy poll results, McKew will surely become the most watched candidate in the coming election. How will her being a woman determine the nature of that appraisal?

In her characteristically unassuming manner Maxine McKew dismissed her recent description as the ‘sexiest woman in politics’. As an experienced journalist she knows that ‘two guys made that up in some office’.

McKew is right. Such appointments and rankings, from ‘pop divas’ to ‘gangster fashionistas’ to ‘celebrity intellectuals’ to ‘media tarts’, are very often made by journalists and very often they are men.

As journalists they are alive to the lenses through which the public appraises the persona. As men they know the conventions for viewing women in public: the persistent and pervasive judgement of their visual and sexual appeal. Celebrity itself ads the veneer of glamour and sex to public women whether they welcome it or not.

When McKew dismisses the significance of these cultural habits, she herself draws on an unstated edict that applies to all women who are publicly visible. If she were to respond, ‘It’s true that I’m a looker and of course it’s part of my political capital,’ it would spell the end of her Bennelong aspirations as surely as if she had driven a stake through the heart of Rupert Murdoch.

It is strictly verboten, an absolute taboo, for a woman to betray any self-awareness of her visual appeal - even women like Kylie Minogue who trade on their physical attractions in the absence of much else. When Andrew Denton asked the exquisite Natalie Imbruglia if she thought of herself as beautiful, she was stumped. She knew she’d been positioned on a perilous threshold. Own up to her looks and she risked capsizing her popular appeal. For a beautiful woman can never, ever state the bleeding obvious, ‘well, I’ve got eyes too’. A woman who trades on her visual appeal can never, ever admit to being calculating about it.

On her acceptance of a golden globe for her work in Monster Charlize Theron put a pretty hand to her lovely brow and declared, ‘This is insane. I grew up in a farm in South Africa’. Be that as it may, a cursory glance around the room would reveal the simple fact that every actress present, no matter how exceptional their ability, trades on her beauty. Not one of them put themselves forward for a Hollywood career without using their eyes, appraising the fact of their beauty and calculating its cultural worth. The beauty of the film star is etched into their contract as an ineluctable condition of their public recognition. Whatever else they may bring to their celebrity – genius, charm, grit, quirk, family connection, political conviction, or substance abuse - their beauty came first.

McKew also has eyes, and as a journalist she is aware that the conditions and conventions of feminine visibility cross over the increasingly porous line between celebrity and politician. They sometimes do for men with good looks. Keating was a case in point. When he also displayed a penchant for wicked irreverence, ruinous wit and passionate conviction, he had half the electorate at least swooning in their ballot boxes, and the other half wishing they could attract as many true believers.

For visible women, however, the appraisal of their looks precedes all other modes of recognition. Good looks aren’t a bonus as they were for Keating. While a seasoned and effective advocate will be respected for the fact of her good works, good looks are nevertheless increasingly a condition of women’s public visibility.

This the fray McKew enters. It’s hardly news, particularly for women television journalists for whom looks can be a measure of career prospects. But there are two separate claims operating within her appointment as the ‘sexiest woman in politics’. One is beauty, which is made up of a powerful mix of universally accepted traits and culturally determined values, such as clarity and symmetry of features, combined with youth and race. The other is sex, which is even more troubling when it comes to women politicians.

The sexual appeal of public women clearly is not reducible to the conventions of 'raunch culture', suggestive or explicit exposure, or flirtatious posturing. Sex appeal starts with beauty and then depends on a contradiction at work in the persona. The contradiction at work in Munroe was angel/whore, in Minogue it is child/woman, in Gillard it is strine/smart and in McKew it is competence/charm. She is coolly capable and warmly connected. As well as esteemed and liked, it made her a formidable interviewer.

‘Max Factor’ is a clever description; . It references the glamour of cosmetic couture, while it plays with an unstated recognition that McKew brings to the political stage qualities beyond the armoury needed to equip any political aspirant. McKew is good-looking, elegant and charming, none of which should have any bearing on her political prospects. No matter how she plays these traits – and she has signalled she will not consciously play them - her visibility will bear on the success of her campaign. That is, as long as too much consideration is given to presentation and personality and not enough to policy and power.

Liz Conor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne.

14.5.07

Aboriginal Mothers, Abjection and Racial Villification

2006-11-18T22:32:00.000-08:00

Gertrude Forum, 16 November 2006
Liz Conor

Last June David Barnett, journalist and former media adviser to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, wrote in his Canberra Times column about Aboriginal mothers, ‘We must ask ourselves whether it is right to condemn Australian children to be bought up … by mothers who don’t know enough about rearing children to wipe their noses and where the baby bonus sends the town on a drunken binge.’ He also said of Aboriginal women that they, ‘wipe themselves with a rag in the lavatory, and hang it up to dry for next time’.

In the national washover and splashback of politics, there are moments, not always obvious at the time, when something core is lost. It is the missing turbulence Barnett might once have churned up by his comments that makes his attack descriptive of such a moment. His wife, Pru Goward, was reportedly ‘too cross to yell at him’. Evidently she was also too sanguine to have passed on some of her understanding about racial vilification as the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission - the body currently investigating Barnett’s comments, following a complaint from Aboriginal lawyer George Vilaflor.

Barnett was not sacked or censured by his employer. No shock jock encouraged a dressing down in the public court of talk back. Aside from a writer at the National Indigenous Times there were no Howard appointed ABC or Arts Council board members fulminating in their broadsheet columns either.

It was an eloquent silence, a moment in which crucial things were washed out to the deeper, stiller waters of political dissipation. Out there in the surface calm we can spot Horlicks Howard inflating his battleships and aiming them at the ‘left-wing elite’. Not a squirt was fired at Barnett’s toilet slander.

It should have been plainly stated: Barnett indulged in racist stereotyping. Reacting to truly shocking revelations by Alice Springs Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers of child rape in remote Aboriginal settlements, he pointed the finger at mothers, who are not the culprits. He reinstated a long colonial convention that ties Aboriginal maternity to abjection, dereliction and incompetence. Time and time again in the colonial archives Aboriginal mothers are characterised as themselves ‘children of nature’, as suckling dogs, as perpetrating infanticide and cannibalism. Rather than contributing to their children’s ‘upbringing’ (by which was meant civilising), Aboriginal mothers exercised an ‘unwholesome influence’ over their ‘piccaninnies’, dragging them back to the ‘habits and customs’ of ‘stone age savagery’. Barnett’s slander drew on this expansive archive of popular colonial sentiment.

Virtually without recrimination he undermined the humanitarian sentiments that, for over a century of Aboriginal activism, have sought comparable government support for Aboriginal mothers and defended their custodial rights. Anna Haebich has pointed to the searing irony that white foster families in 1950s NSW were granted child endowment, plus twenty-five shillings a week, free dental and medical care, clothes and school tuition and uniform expenses for children removed from their mothers because of destitution. She also documents that some Aboriginal parents were required to pay maintenance for children removed without their proper consent. Any child endowment Aboriginal mothers did receive was, like any wages, paid into the various state Aboriginal welfare board trust accounts, from which hundreds of thousands of pounds were misappropriated. These funds might also be spent on building programs in the institutions in which their children were incarcerated.

Indeed the most enthusiastic and industrious child abductor in Australia’s history, WA Chief Protector A.O. Neville, might have had these misappropriated child endowments in mind when he spoke before the 1937 National Meeting of Ministers and Heads of Native Affairs Departments. He blithely said, ‘it really doesn’t matter’ if Aboriginal girls sent from the training homes to service into white homes return pregnant and have ‘half a dozen children’, since the kids never see their mothers again and ‘grow up as whites’.

Barnett’s racism is nostalgic for a paternalism so literal that by the 1930s the Chief Protectors of Aborigines in most states had been appointed as the default legal guardians of all Aboriginal children. As Marilyn Lake notes, ‘Aboriginal mothers were deemed ineligible for mothering by definition, their ‘unfitness’ residing in their racial identity’. White Australia felt a particular duty to ‘half-caste’ children fathered by white men. The Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland (1914-1941) John W. Bleakly stated before the 1913 South Australian Royal Commission on the Aborigines that children with ‘more white blood in them than black should be the care of the white man’. The paternal state stood in for absent white fathers. Aboriginal families without biological fathers were seen as improperly headed. The diffuse organization of children’s care within Aboriginal kinship structures did not strike whites as the fabled village it takes to raise a child. It struck them as unregulated and anarchic. It required the paternal guardianship of the manly state.

Barnett continues the notion that white Australians care for Aboriginal (or as he put it ‘Australian’) children more. In spite of the scandalous histories of child neglect and abuse at training institutions and mission homes, the state makes a better parent, specifically a father. Like so many administering Indigenous Affairs today Barnett sees Aboriginal families as errant and ungoverned. He imagines white Australians would demand state intervention into Aboriginal families if we weren’t so politically correct and cowered by the so-called ‘Aboriginal industry’. And yet who has denied it is imperative to give Aboriginal children vulnerable to abuse appropriate, adequately supported and culturally sensitive protection?

In 2001 the Howard Government appointed David Barnett to the National Museum Council along with Howard’s former speechwriter Christopher Pearson and former Liberal Party president Tony Staley. Barnett took issue with its Stolen Generations exhibit, calling it a "victim episode" and most of the displays "claptrap", influenced by "Marxist rubbish" . When the museum was exonerated of charges of political bias by historian Graeme Davison, Keith Windshuttle came to Barnett’s defense in Quadrant. Windschuttle refuted the (paraphrased) view of the Museum Director, Dawn Casey that “a democratic, egalitarian society should be applauding the roles of women, blacks, working people, migrants and other groups relatively powerless in the formal political sense.”
Windschuttle concurs these groups are a worthy inclusion to history, but their story should be told in specialist museums and not made a focus of our National Museum. He argues, ‘There are very good reasons … why history once paid only a small degree of attention to many of these worthy groups, and why it focused so much attention on Anglo-Celts of the male sex. Until the last thirty years, most history was written in the form of a narrative of causes … The "common folk" and most of the now familiar sexual and ethnic identity groups played only intermittent roles in this account. This was because for most of the time most of the people were not causally effective: they were the objects rather than the agents of history; they were on the receiving end of major historic events, not their instigators.’

By this criteria a stolen generations exhibit has no place in our National Museum, especially given that Windshuttle and others dispute whether Aboriginal child removal was anything done to anyone at all. I wonder if any of the Stolen Generations sceptics have reflected on whether generations of child removal has any causal relation to social dysfunction in Aboriginal communities. In spite of this dysfunction provoking Barnett’s outburst, such questions are for specialist historians. They are not causal to the national narrative, which should focus on things Anglo-Celts of the male sex did to others, and, says Keith, ‘how authority had been determined and deployed’, which incidentally never includes drinking immoderately, bashing wives or raping children. And anyway, even if Anglo-Celts of the male sex ever did do these things, David Barnett will tell you the blame lies with their wives lavatory hygiene.

It isn’t only the contents of Barnett’s lavatory comments that are of concern. It is his affective ties as a close personal friend to John Howard, whose biography he co-authored with his wife Pru Goward, the recently endorsed liberal candidate for the NSW’s seat of Goulbourn. In Anne Stolers’ history of the colonial Dutch Indies, intimacy, domesticity and affective ties, or the skin-to-skin relations such as, concubinage, servant care and wet nursing, are crucial to defining the essence of racial difference on which imperial expansion depended. Colonialism, the acquiring of not just territories but the human bodies that originally inhabited them, was a very intimate affair.

The manner of Barnett’s maligning confirms Stoler’s argument, but not only because of his disparaging of the affective ties of Aboriginal families, and his invoking of the toileting habits of Aboriginal women. His own affective ties interweave a hammock of political intimacy supporting his comments. Barry Jones once said, like a true Foucauldian, that ‘words are bricks’. Barnett lobbed his brick through the already cracked and splintering window of reconciliation. He did so largely with impunity (we are yet to know the outcome of the HREOC investigation) because of the public authority the likes of Barnett accrue through their affective ties to the higher echelons of decision making in this country, and the shameless cronyism that decides their appointments.

For Barnett white squeamishness about the stolen generations prevents Australians from facing the reality of Aboriginal maternity – as unhygienic, squalid, drunken, and therefore a realm so devoid of affective ties they need be given no consideration in Aboriginal child protection. Note that these are not the characteristics of abusive and dysfunctional families; they are how Barnett characterises Aboriginal maternity per se and it in this regard that he can be identified as a racist.

But ten years into Howard’s culture wars we are no longer forthcoming with such identifications. If we can take the silence surrounding Barnett’s comments as endorsement, it rather begs the question, would Pauline Hanson have been disendorsed as a liberal candidate in the forthcoming federal election?

Political allegiances are sustained through the intimacies of affective ties: they are the ties that ideologically bind. And yet none of these Liberal noteworthy close, intimate and loyal friends seem capable of sensing any affective ties within Aboriginal families. Howard is unrepentant about Aboriginal child removal in part because he is insensible to the trauma of separation and its ongoing impact. It is simply something he does not feel.

Perhaps he should restart the process of reconciliation by apologising for the company he keeps and the appointments he makes. And perhaps we should require David Barnett to divulge whether his own lavatory hygiene includes washing his mouth out with soap.

2006-10-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

Being plastered with a wet kiss from your three year old is for most parents a familiar contact sport. But when my daughter test-drove a full-romance, Disney-derived pash down my throat, I recoiled in horror before I could gather my mother-wits. For a moment she and I gaped at each other across a very complex cultural divide; the mismatch between a child’s and an adults’ understanding of sex and how we each relate to its pervasive presence in everyday media.
Emma Rush’s report on the sexualisation of children in advertising has struck a chord with parents already angry at retail products that sexualize kids. However, the image analysis which forms a part of Rush’s report seems literal and prematurely conclusive.
This Australia Institute report, rather intemperately entitled ‘Corporate Pedophilia’, is to be commended for attempting to hold retailers to account. There is no question their products and imagery are part of the broader malaise of shrinking childhood, and it is high time we surveyed the entire cultural landscape and thought about its impacts on our children.
However, Rush’s approach potentially damages an argument she in fact shares with many parents. Listing off ‘social indicators of sexual difference’ and then hunting from them in the content of images leaves her open to criticism that her reading is literal, out of context and subjective.
She describes one image of a girl as ‘pouting and her eyes are wide open, with eyebrows arched. The facial expression combined with the pose is suggestive of a sexual challenge or invitation, as is the ‘Hawaiian’ setting of beach, palm tree, and frangipani behind the ear’.
In spite of once convening a campaign ferociously called The Coalition Against Sexual Violence Propaganda, I cannot decipher a pout or arched eyebrow in this image, and it is not because, as Rush argues, such indicators of sexual availability have become so habituated they are now invisible. I see her body is arched in much the same way adult models pose. This is probably a function of displaying the cut of the dress, and yes, it might be careless of the retailers. If you were a pedophile I imagine that arch could play a role in fantisizing a sexual ‘challenge’ from a child in a tropical setting. But it is something of a leap to collapse the perception of a pedophile with that of retailers and advertisers.
Rush argues that all the girl models have long hair and because it is a social indicator of sexual difference, it is one of the details of the ads that sexualizes children. This begs the question, when is long hair not sexual? Rush finds that ‘cosmetics emphasise the secondary effects of sexual arousal. Lipstick mimics increased blood flow to the mucous membranes, and blush mimics temperature increase’. It also mimics good health and paradoxically, youth. But should we Mummies store our make-up in childproof medical cabinets?
Can we in fact, deflect pedophiles’ gaze from our utterly beautiful, shiny-faced children? In the same way that the possibility of predators in every park has led to the phenomena of the bubble-wrapped housebound kid, should we let the possibility that children can be sexualized stop us from buying them ‘bolero crossover tops that draw attention to the breast area’?
If Rush had made the distinction between dress-ups and clothes retailing, between say, kids pulling on their Mummies’ bras and heels, to bralettes and platform shoes being sold as necessary everyday wear for girls, her argument about retailers’ complicity in the sexualisation of children might have had more force.

There is a difference between kids playing at being adults, and retailers targeting that universal yearning as a ‘reptilian hot spot’ to inveigle small children into their ever-expanding markets. Bralettes for 2 years olds are a classic instance of characterising children’s bodies with adult sexuality, an important point Rush makes. In a wider culture where sexual abuse of girls is still prevalent, this is reckless and irresponsible of retailers. I think about the room set aside, at the rural sexual assault centre I once worked in, jammed from floor to ceiling with disclosure files and I want to string the manufacturers of those bralettes up with their own shoe-string straps.
Just this week I’ve been scouring the retailers Rush tackles, for cotton bicycle shorts so my eight-year-old can hang off a monkey-bar without attracting comments from her playmates. She is aware that her body is seen in ways which don’t match with her experience of it as a physically irrepressible child. She and her playmates are entitled to a childhood, a time of their life which is distinguished by all sorts of innocent pleasures, including a hazy picture about adult sexuality. The imposition of that knowledge on children is part of what makes pedophilia abusive, and Rush is to be applauded for raising the alarm.
There is however a broader picture we need to attend to if we want to protect childhood from the interference by marketers. Why have products like bralettes and Bratz dolls, which are all about ‘strutting’ your desirability, sold so well? Why have parents and relatives become such passive consumers? Why are the dictates of the designers in clothing and toy companies uncritically accepted? Rush’s answer is advertising. But why is this advertising so effective? Because in myriad ways we aspire for our kids to be adults and as a result we are failing to protect their childhood.
Consider kids’ film and their highly articulate, precocious stars, be they animated or otherwise. Say you’re a kid that speaks like a kid and not some postgraduate New York lawyer who can outsmart any psychotherapist your woeful but well-meaning parents sick on you. You might wonder, should I try to be smarter, or should I dispense with childhood altogether and skip straight to adulthood?
We’re increasingly invested in our children being more like adults. It is as though we have become less tolerant of their difference and dependence. While there is no question that supersonically advanced kids need to be better provided for in our public schools do we really need some 30 accelerated SEAL programs for ‘gifted’ kids in Victoria? Does this facilitate kid’s aspirations or their parents?
Sexualised imagery of children is one facet of a much broader cultural malaise – the cult of the accelerated child. When we rush kids into adulthood one of the effects is to sexualize them, and when our cultural wallpaper is put up with sex-saturated paste we can become inured to it. Rush’s report makes a valuable if somewhat compromised allegation. We are investing our children with adult desires.
22.10.06

Facts of History: The revisionism of Andrew Bolt

2006-09-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

I confess I belong to the school of postmodern history. I look at facts circumspectly. I wonder through what systems of
knowledge, and through which investments of power facts came to be known,shared and have significance for people.

Even worse, I am a 'cultural historian', I look at things such as beauty competitions in the 1920s Herald newspaper, and I write about how the photograph, print media and beauty culture forever changed the way women were seen and saw
themselves.

Tellingly, I'm writing this response to Andrew Bolt's claim that contemporary histories are not grounded in fact, from the foyer of the State Library of Victoria. What would a cultural historian, schooled in reams of critical theory yet unable to
name the exact date of the Gallipoli landing, be doing sending this missive from a terminal at the State Library of Victoria?

Waiting on the other side of the foyer is my trolley order of the entire journal Oceania, in which anthropologists wrote all manner of 'facts' about Australian aborigines and their childbirth, grieving, kinship structures,breastfeeding and initiation rites.

Why would a postmodern historian wade through all these 'facts'? To see if they fit in with a vast web of other 'facts' being made at the time about Aboriginal maternity, and whether all these 'facts' might have influenced state policies of child removal.

I'm also researching the Piccaninny, on tea towells,ceramics and garden ornaments in order to think about how they all might have played a role in widespread acceptance by white Australians of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and commnunities.I'm asking why the Piccaninny was almost always figured alone in the bush,and why were white Australians so fond of this figure?

Worse again, none of this history will ever be taught in the classrooms Mr Howard wants to create, because I don't believe that I'm arguing 'fact'. I think it's one way of looking at Aboriginal child removal, a way that might make connections across these vast webs of 'facts' about aboriginal maternity that haven't been made before. Along the way I have been dealing in
many historical facts, some presently disputed, such as the removal of Aboriginal children at all.I will be making a certain interpretation of our past, and therefore I will be 'making history'.

I have a challenge for Mr Bolt.

In the spirit of objective historical empiricism, let's put his theory - that postmodern histories are devoid of facts - to the test.

I would like him to read my decidedly postmodern book, 'The Spectacular Modern Woman', and count all the things that for him count as 'facts': let's limit it to just dates, events and names.

I bet Mr Bolt doesn't take up my challenge, because in my impressionistic historical book there are more facts than he will have time for and be able to accomodate.

Feeling Fat is Gross: Obesity and Depression

2006-09-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks obesity has become the measure of a great many lamentable social ills. They read like a litany of sins: greed, sloth, indulgence.

It seems the soup we’re drowning in includes rampant consumerism, junk food advertising, all-you-can-eat bistros, town planning that leaves precious little space for children to move, parents who can’t say no, and bubble-wrapped kids whose parents feel neighbourhoods are the terrain of child abductors and paedophiles.

It is self-evident these factors and more have contributed to the expanding girths of over half of Australians, and to Australia having the fastest rising rate of childhood obesity in the world. Yet none of these factors can fully account for why increasing numbers of men, women and children are overeating.

Somewhere between the mind and mouth of each overeater is a hunger that has no name.

Obese Australians are characterised as greedy, self-indulgent, ignorant, lazy, indifferent, resigned and heedless to well-publicised health warnings, not to mention social ostracism. But there is a good chance they are grappling with a whole set of other attributes we more readily associate with depression and anxiety. Could they in fact be addicted, compulsive, self-destructive, sad, numb, overwhelmed, guilt-ridden, panicked and self-loathing?

There was a time when I worried too much about my weight. This did not set me apart from any of the young women I knew. Only I was little more preoccupied, a little more vigilant, a little more determined. I was soon more than a little ill.

400 sit ups at a time, a bagel a day and measuring my finger with a piece of string before I went to sleep each night seems to bear little relation to the apparent apathy of the obese. Or does it? Over 7 lost years in my youth I assembled an intimate, ritualised knowledge of craving and addiction.

I knew exactly what the pungent smell of diarrhoea in the toilets before the aerobics class was about. I could spot the tell tale scuff behind the knuckles and the raw stretch in the corners of a friend’s mouth on her returning from the toilet straight after a meal. These were the deductions of a bulimic.

In retrospect, it was simply how I ‘did’ anxiety. The sugar highs gave credence to groundless panic, the emptied expanse of the mind after the jolt of the spine, the physical ordeal of purging, felt like quietude and calm.

I could have used heroin or alcohol, and like food they too would have become an addiction, not purely for their physiological effects but because they become personalised sites of emotional self-regulation.

I have a hard-won sixth sense when I see a waddling bottom. I see a person devoting a great deal of thought to food. I can guarantee they hate the fact of their fat. It’s likely that the guilt over things they shouldn’t have eaten that day is already spinning deep within their minds in a loop of such velocity that any perspective and self-forgiveness are simply deflected off. The craving to relieve the panic and self-loathing rotates with growing intensity and is met with the involuntary comfort of addiction – get me a thickshake and get it now.

With any addiction self-loathing and self-comfort become bound within a mutually sustaining, closed system. They feed off each other. They become all consuming. Overeating is simply a matter of putting this logic into effect.

I wonder that nobody has put this unembellished question to the arrayed academics and medical task forces and advisory expert panels on the epidemic of obesity. Precisely what is the hunger?

If they were to ask this question they might find that overeating is addictive, it manages depression or anxiety, and obesity is an eating disorder.

Twenty years on and paradoxically lighter I can say I eat widely and well, though sometimes I forget. I did not recover through dieting because I realised that placing food in opposing categories of good and bad would set the loop of failure and guilt spinning again.

I did three life-changing things that turned food from a prison hell to a mundane, occasionally delicious, nurturing part of everyday life. One day I bought fish and chips for lunch and discovered the difference between appetite and guilt. Another day I put a packet of chocolate biscuits in my room and discovered the difference between enjoyment and compulsion. They ended up being eaten mostly by my friends. Another day I took the bottle of laxatives out into the backyard and smashed it on the concrete path, leaving the tablets to dissolve in the grass. The vicious little bastards burnt brown pits in the turf.

It took a pilot ‘eating awareness programme’ to get me to this point. Thereafter food did not consume me.

We should offer the obese this relief because my hunch is that it’s not just their internal organs that are feeling like crap about themselves.

Ten Canoes: A timely Release

2006-07-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

A reverent hush descends over the theatre in the opening scenes of Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes. The entirely non-indigenous audience is watching and listening with a particular fascination, one with long traditions, that of Western Moderns appraising the difference of the 'Native'.

We already know that Ten Canoes is set in pre-contact times, some of the narrative takes place in the dreaming. This shimmering realm of myth, of law-making, of relation to place, is for most Australians an intriguing yet inscrutable descriptor of Aboriginal identity, a realm of knowledge that can only be accessed from our side of the colonial divide, our side of the story.

To be taken into a story of pre-contact Aboriginal life, which entirely absents white Australia, promises all the pleasures of our own dream of Aborginality, of an imagined pre-modern human purity, uncorrupted by industrialism and capitalism, a realm of natural harmony. Whatever Rolf de Heer may have intended it is going to difficult for Australians to shake off their investment in the noble savage, the native belle, the piccaninny.

With utmost respect the non-indigenous patrons take in the opening scene. Naked perfectly fit men, with all the gravitas of millennia of tradition, stride out in single file to hunt. Very intently we watch as the trailing man calls them to halt. This is surely serious but unfathomable “business” of some sort. “I refuse to walk at the back” he declares. Has some law been violated? Is this a challenge to customary command? Has the hunt lost its way, or an ancestor made a sign? “Somebody is farting” he says, and audible relief staggers down the aisles.

If we came to Ten Canoes expecting an anthropological field study de Heer punctures that inflated fancy with a fart. The day to day and its interplay with a dreaming that is inhabited, not by apparitions, but by people we recognise, this is the province of Ten Canoes. Its storyline is carried by events in the dreaming, and yet the ordinary and imperfect, human foible and fragility, drive the unhurried narrative.

If we are alert to the things that set pre-contact Aborigines apart from us, de Heer affirms that one real difference lies in the manner of storytelling. The gentle unwinding of events, which include murder, abduction, jealousy and longing, stands in contrast to the addictive heightened emotion of epic Hollywood.

De Heer is conscious of the lenses whites have focused on Aboriginal people. Many of his scenes step out of the dramatic yet emotionally contained tableau of anthropologist and photographer Donald Thomson. The achievement of Ten Canoes is the way it peoples Aboriginality with unexpected equanimity.

Racial difference has been sensational for Europeans. It has been a central fascination for explorers, antiquarians, colonial administrators, settlers, missionaries, and ethnologists. It has spawned skullduggery and museum displays, international expositions and freak shows, tea towels and comic books.

De Heer’s film is a timely release. The latest sensation has been Aboriginal family violence. There is another long tradition in white perceptions of Aboriginal communities - the fear of ‘primitive’ purity being corrupted by modernity and white deviance. For the earliest white writers, brawling Aborigines were shocking mimics of their own excess. Yet they also saw violence as inherent in the ‘savage’ and not as the manifestation of displaced peoples suffering loss of livelihood and status, and loss of the only place to be who they knew themselves to be.

Violence in Aboriginal communities is our Dorian-Gray-portrait of race relations that we would rather keep in a remote outback attic. Ten Canoes intervenes in the sensation, and manages to invoke a kind of fascination that is not about spectacle but about simple recognition and ordinary empathy.

A Labour of Life

2006-07-14T00:50:00.000-07:00

It is …

(these 2 words were as many as I was able to write without being interrupted by my children. What does it take for a mother to work? In this article I’m going to show what it took for me, the most accommodated mother I know. Rather than adhere to the prevailing demand on mothers, particularly working mothers, to pretend their children are not there, and to be closet mothers, instead I will write in my children whenever they stop me from working. It won’t be sequential because of redrafting. Here the interruption was Hattie, my 3 and a half-year-old, finishing on the toilet, wanting me wipe her bottom, help her into her bath and give her the orange duck).

As I was saying … it is … an uncanny feeling to write on a subject – loosely the political conditions of mothering — on which I have been trained, as a women’s studies post-graduate, without any of the bells and whistles I am accustomed to falling back on.

(Hattie is crying because the bath is cold, her head is ‘wibbly’ and she doesn’t want the duck anymore).

On the subject of Mothering I cannot be objective. As I write I am immersed. My hands even have suds on them.

(My partner is getting Hattie out the bath, but she is insisting that Mummy gets her out, I have dried her but she won’t let me put her pyjamas on. My partner is now changing Faith who is 8 months old).

By my bedside there are handouts from forums on maternity leave, not to mention books, from Jane Lazarre’s The Maternal Knot, to Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood, which I have not found time to read.

(Hattie is telling me, in no uncertain terms, about the heffalump having one trunk and that I therefore have to put the trunk back on her red hairband. I have no idea what she is talking about)

I cannot refer to my own notes from these forums, because my baby was on my lap wrestling me for the pen. I have no statistics, no research, no thesis. There is no fancy ‘textual analysis’ in what follows, it is simply the narrative of a mother trying to work.

(An alarming thump has come from Hattie’s room and a muffled yelp, on investigation Hattie has upended her bedding and told me to go to sleep)

If the experience of mothering has made manifest one feminist mantra for me, it is that the personal is political. Behind the closed doors of domesticity I have also realised that the personal cannot have political force until it is made public. I humbly enter another confessional onto the crowded ‘reality’ stage of real lives seeking absolution …

Let me begin by confessing that I am the most ‘privileged’ mother I know.

(Hattie tells me she will need her dressing gown and slippers when she takes her towel off. Faith has rolled under the chair and got her head stuck).

For a start I live in the west and I’m white. I belong to the 2% of the population that has adequate shelter, warmth and safe running water. I don’t walk for 6 hours a day to carry water. My children are not among the 75% of the 24,000 people who die of starvation related illnesses everyday. They have not been stolen from me, and sold into domestic service, or trafficked to Western paedophiles.

(Hattie informs me there is a lot of ‘insolence’ in the ‘orchstratra’)

They are not child labourers in bondage to western clothing manufacturers. I am not hoping and praying they won’t drown on a leaking fishing vessel. It has never occurred to me that their lives might be saved by fleeing our country.

(Hattie is asking ‘why was she was?’)

I am not dealing with traumatised toddlers at Woomera or Villawood and worrying about how their witnessing of and growing up under penal and disciplinary surveillance will impact on their self and world views.

(Hattie is rolling about behind me with my partner and having songs. Faith is too amused to notice she is stuck under a chair again, she nevertheless needs to be retrieved)

I am not trying to feed my family under Israeli curfew or sitting on the pile of bulldozed or shelled rubble that was once my home. I am not frightened everytime I stand with my children on a bustop. I’m not watching my children sniff petrol. And of all of these scenarios, most pressing on my mind, and most constant to my nightmares—I am not the mother of the 4 month old baby in Aceh, who died ‘some time after’, it was reported, an Indonesian soldier poured boiling water over her. I did not live the interval between the water being poured and my baby dying.

In addition to the good fortune of not mothering under any of the above conditions, I am tertiary educated.

(Hattie has hurt her finger, which I must kiss).

With a certain amount of wrangling, I commenced my career as a mother in the virtually unheard of position of not having to work. Instead, I battled tooth and nail, largely with my first child (to my ongoing guiltiness), to finish a protracted doctorate.

(Faith nearly pulled the propped up baby bath onto herself)

I could find excellent community-based occasional care and I was able to slowly settle my kids there (although my partner had to re-form its committee of management, after the previous committee imploded with exhaustion and despair, and over a year fend off the attempts by the local Council to close it). I have sisters with children around the same age to whinge over the phone with,

(Faith is now lying under the bath and Hattie needs me to listen to her appraisal of the situation).

My sexuality and marital status were never under question when I failed to conceive Faith for a year and was assisted by the reproductive unit at the Royal Women’s Hospital. The births of my daughters were both assisted by midwives in birthing centres in which I decided how much intervention, drugs and support I required. I was lucky enough to only brush with obstetricians twice throughout each pregnancy (which may be a very good indicator, in this technocratised age of birthing, as to why my births were so uncomplicated)

(Faith is crying, my partner is holding her … he, by the way, is reading work notes).

My partner is as supportive as he is able to be, given that he works 70 hours a week and when he is home he is effectively labouring in my workplace and needs as much guidance as I would if I turned up in his workplace and tried to keep it running.

On top of this extraordinary maternal serendipity, after Hattie was born a dear friend came and cooked me dinner once a week. My mother so wanted to help she was a bit miffed when I explained that I needed to know I could do it by myself first. I never suffered from mastitis, my babies fed well and slept as well as can be expected. I had access to a local maternal and infant welfare nurse whom I called on for advice. (Hattie is screeching in her bedroom) I had great books I could turn to for practical guidance and solace. My partner’s ex-wife handed me down a cot and pram (even if the wheels did fall off) and sisters and sisters-out-law bombarded me with highchairs, grow suits, bunny rugs and breast pads (Faith is crying, she is ready to be fed and bedded). My supermarket stocked organic baby food. I found a disposable nappy system that uses plantation pine instead of old growth forest. I could even go to the cry baby sessions at a nearby cinema, for crying out loud.

It gets better. Late in my second pregnancy a job fell into my lap that would not start until Faith was 6 months, and would prove to be the ideal workplace in terms of flexibility, breast feeding, consideration and acceptance of my being a mother.

(My partner is reading Hattie a story).

When I said I would find it difficult to leave Faith for 20 hours in the week, they offered me 2 days instead of 3.

(Hattie has a racking cough, and I’ve Vixed her chest)

When I first started, Faith slept in the office, I fed her there and colleagues nursed her when my hands were full, they even tip-toed around her and whispered when she was asleep.

(It’s time to sing Hattie her nighty-night songs).

I have been working any hours I choose and taking home work to make up hours.

(Here I fed Faith for half an hour and put her in her cot).

I have exercised every hard won choice available to Mothers. I also know that because women’s inclusion in the workforce was a hard won gain over a century, it is now sticking in our throats to give voice to the desire to be at home, to return, it seems to the domestic tyranny feminists fought so hard to liberate us from.

(Hattie has a fever. Faith, you’ll be relieved to read, has dropped off to sleep).

It is superfluous to say that my circumstance should not be considered privileged, but it should be considered the standard. The category worker has been modelled off men with wives. Women who mother are different, they are entitled for their differences to be accommodated. Men who attempt to contribute equally to childcare and the domestic load are finding that they are also different to the worker with wife. As Belinda Probert has said, there has not been a corresponding revolution in the home in the organisation of care as there has been in the labour market. Not only are mothers different, but there are differences amongst working mothers—mothers who’ve had caesars, mothers who are breastfeeding, mothers whose babies don’t sleep.

(Hattie’s fever has shot up, I’ve given her Panadol. As an aside, our household goes through periods when one of us comes down with a new infestation close to every week)

It is 4 days since I have been able to get back to writing. Hattie is at the co-op my partner managed to salvage with brilliant staff and an unflagging committee. I had to buy her spot back this morning having organised to pull her from Mondays for 2 weeks as an experiment to see if her having more time with me would make her any more bearable than she presently is. My partner and I were up until 2am arguing, futilely, about how to find the 4 hours of my job I couldn’t make up last week plus the 20 hours for this week, plus write this article [which was originally a conference paper] and give it, and edit another against deadline, and read an overdue manuscript, while he also prepares and gives a presentation on Tuesday, and supervises 16 adolescent boys on a overnight computer fest for his son’s birthday. I’ve read somewhere that the peak time for separation that leads to divorce is after the second child when the woman returns to work. And the principle reason is her feeling unsupported in the domestic sphere. The corrosive impact of the structural inequity that his workplace puts on our lives has, as I write, brought our relationship to the brink. We are both managing the excessive demands of our lives under a debilitating sense of alienation and sadness. I heard somewhere that a recent study found that couples with children talk an average 12 minutes a day to each other. Incidentally, I am yet to arrange the childcare this week for our relationship counselling. I find it alarming when my own life begins to mirror all the studies I read fleetingly while giving my kids their breakfast.

Faith is now in her cot. I had to let her cry herself to sleep so I could work … her cries pierced my brain like hot pokers and I am hoarse from cursing my too slow computer. Faith is awake again, but I can’t figure out how long she’s slept if at all, because I can’t fathom the time elapsed. Having sat down to make a start, I have to stop and most infuriatingly, find a way to actually kill time, until Faith sleeps again. Right at this moment I feel like I am sitting on blistering bitumen, between two carriageways of semi-trailors screaming past at high velocity. And I must get up and calmly reassure my baby.

I’ve decided to try and keep working, Faith is behind me on the floor jamming her fingers in a perspex box. I’ve fed her and it forced me to sit down. Faith gazed at my buttons and rings, reached up, tugged on my lip and gave me the impish look of a pirate. As she drank little puffs of baby breath opened around us like tiny coloured paper umbrellas. Her little chin shuddered, barely discernibly, between sucking. When we got up she fully contracted her little body into the curve of a crescent moon and gleefully dove into my neck, grabbed an ear and a handful of cheek and gummed my mouth. It is the simple, primal splendour of my children that restores me. The already everlasting fact of their own enmeshed and devoted relationship astounds me as much as their independently produced ear wax did after birth – these beings so unto themselves, busily going about the business of life, and showing me at every turn that business is primarily about beauty. It is the frantic attempts to work and keep my head just above the consuming sea of domestic grind that thieves the pleasures of my children from me. There isn’t the time to just watch them let alone marvel at them. And by sequestering our interactions onto one emotional plain, and rendering it the only level on which I feel, its pleasures are numbed. ‘I never thought I’d be a grumpy Mum’, a woman forlornly confessed to me in the playground. She had the look of a woman who had lost the conviction that her heart’s desire, having children, had in fact turned out to be desirable. Mother’s pass that muffled grimace of sympathy around in supermarkets, libraries, playgrounds.

So,

[Faith’s rolling out the door onto the stair landing]

the plan is to write the story of my going back to work, in the most—I’m not going to use ‘privileged’ anymore, perhaps ‘exemplary’— of circumstances. Let’s see how far I get.

(Faith has the phone cord in two hands and is about to pull it from the desk directly onto her head).

I thought knowing the job was coming up in 6 months meant that by the time I started I would have everything sorted.

(Faith is potentially dialling Alaska, by pounding her heels on the keys with the receiver in her hand).

I started with expressing, and trying to get Faith used to a bottle. The electric pump on loan from a neighbour could not extract a drop, so I bought a $90 hand pump. You can lead a baby to a bottle of expressed milk it seems, but you cannot make her drink. Being a baby, she’s not stupid. She knew a soft, perfectly temperatured, perfectly fitting nipple was lurking on the other side of my jumper and she would have none of it. Nor would she drink from the endless rounds of boiled bottles with her Father or my mother. I read Hattie Green Eggs and Ham (‘will you have it in a train, will you have it in the rain’) through increasingly gritted teeth.

Meanwhile, I had placed her on a waiting list for Wednesdays at Hattie’s co-op 6 months in advance.

(Isn’t Faith being good?)

As the weeks before my starting day approached I grew increasingly anxious. No Wednesday materialised. I went on hoping and failed to book her anywhere else. But since she was born I had been popping her in the cots, handing her over to carers and generally familiarising her with the centre and kids, and Hattie was there—I didn’t want to leave her anywhere else. With a dreadful feeling of guilt I arranged for my mother, now a full-time grandmother to 7 grandchildren—6 of them under 5— to get up a 5.30 am every Thursday and drive into Fitzroy in peak hour from Cottlesbridge, so I could then drive to St Kilda by 9am.

(Faith is grizzling, I’m typing one handed with her on my lap. I still can’t figure out if she’s had her sleep. My partner hasn’t come back from work, even though he’s on 2 weeks leave).

(It’s a few hours since I last worked, I walked around to the shops with the pram. The check-out operator told me I looked like I was about to explode when our card wouldn’t swipe. When I got home I changed Faith, fed her and put her in her cot. She screamed so I went back and let her drop off on the breast, which is a big no-no according to my infant welfare nurse and is ‘making a rod for my back’. Not as great a rod as pacing with her for 3 hours, and certainly a lot less cruel and stressful than leaving her to scream in high distress.)

Still, no Wednesday materialised. My partner arranged to go in to work late one morning a week, co-op agreed to have Faith until 11am when a regular child arrives late, my partner would then bring her over to St Kilda where I would feed her and stay at work if and for as long as she slept. This involved rejigging endless meetings for my partner with numerous colleagues who had to reschedule not only their weeks, but the time tables of hundreds of students. The ripples spread. The stresses fanned out, through countless lives. When I started, and still now, 10 weeks later, I have 20 hours work and 10 hours childcare. The childcare in my area is insufficient to meet demand, a number of centres have closed, and aside from 3 perpetually threatened community-run centres there is no diversity in the care⎯most of them resemble egg cartons.

2 weeks before starting I decided to do a couple of practice runs. On Wednesday my partner took both girls to co-op, armed with Hattie’s bag and blanket, Faith’s lambie and sling, 2 sachets of expressed milk (even though Faith still wouldn’t drink), one of 20 mls to try her, and another of 100mls in case she accepted the bottle, and a sterilised bottle. We settled her in and Hattie was so excited about having her sister there she forgot to kick up her customary stink (‘no one is allowed to ride Faith’, she solemnly advised the co-ordinator). I drove off to work having not allowed myself to feel any of the misgivings that tormented me when I first left Hattie.

(Faith is wailing. I’ve been and given her the breast again, purely for comfort, scandalous as that may be. She dropped off to sleep and I struggled not to).

The feeling I had scooting down Punt Rd, dodging the slick boys with their close haircuts in their fast cars, was one of pure liberation. I had been a stay-at-home mother for 3 and a half-years and according to Doctor Phil I was exhibiting all the ‘symptoms’ of post-natal psychosis. After months of planning and meticulous organisation, I was winging my way to the first proper job I’d held in 8 years. I felt I had every last detail covered … And then just past Commercial Rd I ran out of petrol. Because I could only buy a kitchen funnel, by the time I got to work to meet my colleagues I stunk to high heaven of petrol. I had to put my drenched shoes outside and reassure them I wasn’t into sniffing.

(It is another 2 days since I’ve been able to write. Faith is blissfully sleeping. Hattie is bouncing around downstairs while my partner does the crossword. I tried to go to work today, but my car broke down and a squadron of blokes leapt out of their cars to push me to the roadside. My partner got the two kids dressed and came down to rescue me. Our eyes barely met this morning and when I thanked him at the car for all the ways he helps me I erupted in tears and we clung together behind our raised bonnets, Faith crying in the car, Hattie getting fractious in her booster seat. )

The night before I actually started, co-op rang to say that there was still no Wednesday spot and in any event Faith, they felt, was too young. She couldn’t sit up by herself, she was in danger of being trampled, wouldn’t take the bottle and at one point had been quiet distressed. All those winging feelings twisted round themselves into a knot in the pit of my stomach. Soon after my mother rang to say she’d just realised she’d double booked herself babysitting for me and my sister. When we tried to find a way round it, she burst into tears (usually reserved for funerals) confessed she hadn’t had a day without grandchildren in 6 weeks, was too old to mind little children everyday, and wanted us to remember that she was only human. The knot tightened. I cried too.

(Hattie has climbed up the bookcase behind me, she is pulling the books off the bookcase and crooning ‘My body lies over the motion’, in my ear)

When I rang my sisters to tell them how upset Mum was, we ended up shouting at each other about who had used her the most. The statistics were reflecting back at me. I thought stress was merely this twisted welded knot in the pit of your gut, that you manage by yourself. In fact it erupts out of your gut like a Ridely Scott alien, gnashing its teeth at your most significant others.

(Hattie is telling me she wants her friend to come over for fish n’chips. When I distractedly ignored her she demanded, ‘Mummy, what did I tells you last night about the fip’nchips? Be nice to the people! I tell you fifteens! Listen to my words, straight now!’ I said no to fish n’chips and she thrashed on the floor next to me. We’ve just had a seesaw cuddle)

Since starting, I have worked 6 weeks, those hours where my grossly exploited mother has Faith I work uninterrupted for 7 hours.

(My partner has recovered some sleep after the marauding nerds went home and has taken Hattie downstairs to get dinner started)

I am the editor of a quarterly, refereed journal on Australian and Asian media. Everytime I draw upon my own distended file of rejection letters from editors, and reject someone new, I feel the misplaced revenge of a St Trinian with a hockey stick.

(Faith has woken, I’ve changed her and taken her down to my partner)

Everytime I think quietly, and allow an idea to take hold, develop and find expression I feel the transports of transcendental meditation—at least as I’ve heard them described. I come home and while Hattie still pays out on me she’s just starting to be OK about me going to work.

(I can hear Faith crying downstairs)

She’s figured out there’s more to life than the boredom and cabin fever of being one-on-one with an irascible mother day after day. Faith is somehow one of those babies that is perfectly fine without me, so far. At the end of each Thursday she latches on and I am glad to be home precisely because I haven’t been there all day, not to mention the fact that my breasts are like nuclear rockets. When two other families from co-op go away and 2 days came up for Faith, I got lost in the relief of looking forward to having as much childcare as the hours I work. But Faith became subdued. Whereas Hattie has always made her feelings known—with a megaphone—Faith you have to read, and she stopped beaming. She simply looked sad.

(We have eaten the meal my partner cooked, Hattie ran around making combinations of bits and pieces, sticking them in bags and giving them to us as presents, Faith watched me leave the room with wary apprehension).

I cut my hours back to 15. I thanked my editor-in-chief and told him it was rare for any workplace to be so accommodating—on the face of it, of my being a mother, in fact of my children’s’ needs as I read them. The decision wasn’t purely dictated by her needs, I have to confess, the cost of childcare is so prohibitive, we simply couldn’t afford it. I think of all those business lunches being written of as tax deductions—how has child care never been tax deductible?

Last night my mother called to tell me my sister has a hernia that requires surgery and she must stay with her in North-East Victoria for 3 weeks. The Monday spot at co-op won’t come up for 2 weeks, and the Wednesday spot for 8. This week I have no childcare at all. I have stopped feeding Faith at night and we started ‘controlled crying’ (really because it’s the only way to respond to her crying without the breast) last night. My supply has dropped dramatically since starting work, as has my weight. Without intending to, I have effectively begun weaning Faith. Yesterday she began having formula while I’m at work. Sitting with engorged breasts at my desk in St Kilda, I thought with some irony of the probably genetically modified ingredients (not that there is any labelling to tell me), such as ‘alpha tocopherhyl acetate and pyridoxine hydrochloride’.

The week over which this piece was written was ‘trying’.

(My partner has put Hattie in her bath, as she sings, ‘love and courage, love and courage, go together like a horse and curry’, Faith is on the floor crumpling a notice from Centrelink. After being stung, thrice, for over a grand, like 640,00 other families, Faith can crumple to her heart’s content).

A mother told me she feels she does a myriad of things, but all badly. At times I feel like I’m living a waking version of a nightmare I used to have as a kid when I would be in a life threatening situation, only to find my legs wouldn’t run. I seem to sprint everywhere, from the car to the clothesline, from the cot to the stove. Everything becomes trying, indeed I seem to never stop trying— trying to get the washing in before it rains, and the wet bed dry before their afternoon sleep; trying to figure out what heinous parenting on my part has made my child wet her bed (never combine lapsed Catholicism and a belief in the social construction of identity with mothering at home); trying to get back from shopping for their afternoon sleep,

(Faith was doing the phone cord trick again, she is on my lap and has dropped the phone into the desk drawer);

trying to remember to get the milk, and feed the immeasurably displaced and mournful cat; trying to not to shout at your kids when they are obstructing your every move, like not letting you do up their seat buckle (oh, the endless rounds of buckling) while you’re bent over with rain trickling down your bum crack; trying not to weep when you’ve just got to sleep and some senseless dickhead who’s never been sleep deprived blows his car horn outside in the street; trying not to arc up at your partner when he staggers in late from work wrung out like a dish rag; trying to forget the dream you had last night full of rampant sex because its been so long and you know that finding time in the near future again is lamentably unlikely and that to find ignition somehow you’ll have to overcome the alienation of never speaking; trying to stay on top of the rage, that volcanic erupting molten iron rage expanding in your chest like white noise that no one ever talks about; trying to find those mere 20 hours for your perfectly flexible job; trying half the time you are at work to phone around and organise child care for the next week; trying to fend off the latest cold from co-op; trying to get your kid to keep her shoes on wherever you go; trying to convince her, over and over again, sometimes over 3 hours, that shorts and a singlet and gumboots are not going to fend off winter; trying to do this without shouting, because while the first time you asked was model mothering, by the five-hundredth time, it’s pressing to be polite, even in Target; trying not to explode when it took 2 hours to get her warmly dressed in carefully negotiated ensembles, and just before you head out the door she emerges from her room in her knickers and fairy wings; trying to get the pram, laden with two kids and all the shopping, up the post office steps where the only local bank is; trying to push the pram with one hand while you carry the crying baby who isn’t even in it with the other and pull the string attached to the tricycle with some other hand that doesn’t exist while you catch your child’s artwork that just blew out of the pram to stop them screaming … and cross at the lights; trying to turn on the light at the bottom of the stairs with your nose, because you’ve got an emptied potty, a pair of slippers, a bucket of weenie pants in one hand, and a baby, saline drops, unproofed copy edits and a dictionary in the other; trying not to fall asleep at your desk, or the traffic lights, trying to remember the name of the person you just put on hold for your boss; trying to stop your kid from running out into the traffic while you unbuckle the other, trying to maintain a modicum of dignity when the bloke at a book launch spies you breastfeeding and says to his mate, ‘the other one’s free’ … and so on … always trying.

I’m a mother who’s got it good. And I know a mother whose baby cried without stopping for 10 months, and her husband didn’t come to see his new daughter for 14 days. There are mothers who will read this as proof of a very cushy situation, simply because I could find the time to write it.

(Faith is pulling my carefully categorized papers out of my pigeon holes)

And of course there are mothers who are so overwhelmed and unsupported that they will not find time of their own to read it. But to consider the even worse conditions under which other women are mothering offers none of the comfort of relative good fortune. It just makes me sad for them. And it begs the question … should mothering really be this trying?

Every day that passes as a blur of washing and feeding and changing and comforting is concluded with the evening news which seemingly unbeknownst to itself shows mothers struggling to keep their children alive, against the massively funded, disciplined disregard for human life of the world’s militaries and regimes. The needless death of each child is also the trashing of a mother’s minute by minute labour of life. And it occurs to you that the herculean effort of mothers is not just invisible and unpaid. It is constantly being undone, predominantly by men, who enforce the segregation of the world of mothers and children, who have never so much as changed a nappy, and who thereby have a limited understanding of what a human life is worth. Everytime a mother tends her child she reverses a dominant logic which disregards and destroys life, and places human relationships second to profit. Every workplace which denies a mother the choice of being with her baby is in small part confirming that logic, and the governments which fail to intervene and increasingly withdraw services and supports are perpetrating the criminal theft of developing human relationships. It might be hard for mothers to insist, having so recently claimed our rightful place in the workplace, and that place still being so precarious, that we are entitled to organise the care of our children, with our partners, as we see fit. Instead it is left to us mothers to deal with the fallout from the failure to organise that care, equitably within families and the community. Too often mothers feel the inadequacy and shame—of being a ‘grumpy Mum’, of hiding exhaustion in meetings, of fretting for their babies in care—that is not rightfully theirs.

20/11/02

The Defection of the Sierra Leone Athletes

2006-07-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

At first Australians were bemused by over half of the Sierra Leone Commonwealth games team “doing a runner”. However, the chortles were silenced when their stories of privation and despair came to light, along with the very real threats these young men and women face on their return to their homeland.

But there was another silence that will continue to prove difficult to broach, surrounding the fate of the young women in particular. It has its origins in the inherent conflict between universal human rights and cultural difference. It has proved divisive and irreconcilable for feminists around the globe.

The three young women seeking refugee status, Isha Conteh, Sarah Turay and Marion Bangura, alleged they would be subject to genital cutting if forcibly repatriated by our immigration department. Two of them have lost sisters who haemorrhaged to death after the procedure, allegedly performed by their aunts without medical anaesthetic, as is usually the case.

Female genital cutting occurs in more than 40 countries, 26 in Africa. About 5,500 procedures are carried out each day. They vary from removal of the clitoral hood, to excision of the clitoris, labia minora and majora, which are then stitched together and the girl’s legs bound for several weeks while the wound heals. For further explanations as to how FGM has become economically and culturally entrenched in women's lives in Sierra Leone visit
http://www.npwj.org/?q=node/2056
and
http://www.npwj.org/?q=node/2074

For western women, instilled in the values of sexual consent and agency, along with reproductive and therefore bodily self-determination, genital cutting is profoundly confronting and distressing, an unimaginable horror inflicted mostly on girls of three to ten years.

While this practice has been associated with Islam, authors such as Ronald Niezen have argued it is in fact an indigenous practice more than 6,000 years old that has assumed secondary religious justification.

For women around the world, it is a complex issue mired in ethical and political ambiguity.

It throws into doubt the universality of human rights. When states, historically the oppressors of indigenous peoples, intervene legally to suppress this practice they invoke the long shadow of colonial assimilation, wherein initiatory and ceremonial practices which identified a people as distinct were repressed. And how can states require their indigenous peoples to cease female genital cutting, where they are themselves frequently engaged in their ongoing violent abuse, including the sexual misappropriation and trafficking of Indigenous women and girls. How can states, which grant their indigenous peoples none of the rights of sovereignty, require that they assume responsibility in applying an imposed state law to end female genital mutilation?

Human rights, as developed in response to the the state oppression of minorities exemplified by the holocaust by the newly formed UN, enshrine the rights of individuals and are as such in many ways incompatible with the collective-based rights of traditional cultures. Human rights have a deeper origin in universalising modes of thought emanating out of the Enlightment Scientific Revolution. For the 'philosophes', social laws could be as universal Newtonian physics. The Lockean ideal of equality before the law required abolishing distinctions of either privilege or, in theory at least, of disadvantage. Another stumbling block in the application of univeral human rights is the entrenched perception of settler colonial descendents that minority peoples are victims of human rights violations and certainly not perpetrators.

In this complex and contradictory scene the insistence of white feminists, most of us the beneficiaries of colonialism and its destruction of Indigenous peoples, to put an end to female genital cutting harbours the ring of paternalism, especially while indigenous peoples make claims to cultural preservation through traditional practices.

Should we not ask about the Western medical intervention on children born of ‘indeterminate’ sex? What of plastic surgery and labioplasty, not to mention psychiatric operations ranging from lobotomy to removal of ovaries? What of unnecessary birth interventions such as episiotomy and some caesarian sections? And speaking of the violations of indigenous children, should we not be focused on our country men travelling to third world countries to rape trafficked children? How can these practices be reconciled against any demand to end female genital mutilation? Are there any politically tendentious feminist claims that are global, and when it comes to violation of children's human rights - girls between three and ten years - is it a question of who is better placed to speak, or of whether anyone should be silent?

I’m acutely aware that I risk the charge of paternalism by saying I am one of the Australian women, identified early on in the defection of the Sierra Leone women by a Sydney refugee advocate, that supports their application for asylum on the grounds that they seek protection from female genital mutilation. I’m also aware that within Howard’s culture wars multiculturalism and expressions of cultural difference are under direct attack by prominent commentators and politicians, indeed they can barely be thought about outside an assimilatory framework. In addition gender equality has been cynically appropriated to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq, ‘border protection’ and Howard’s attempted amendments to the immigration act. This is surely the worst of all times to raise this complex and unresolved issue. However, I feel more ethically compromised being silent in the face of the Sierra Leone women’s claims for asylum.

The specific context presented to Australian women by the plight of these young women requires that we voice our support, and advocate that genital mutilation be considered a gross violation of their human rights by our immigration department and considered foremost in their application for refugee status.

I think we are called to respond particularly by the proven record of our immigration department in disregarding the human rights of refugee applicants and repatriating asylum seekers regardless of their safety.

In 1998 a pregnant Chinese woman seeking protection from forced abortion was repatriated at 38 weeks. She begged to be either induced or to wait 2 weeks so that she could carry her baby back in her arms. The immigration department refused but guaranteed that she would be met at the airport and remain safe. Instead she was taken from her home by Chinese officials and the baby was carved out of her. Knowing our immigration departments complicity in human rights violations compels us to speak out in support of the Sierra Leone young women.

The fact that these women are claiming asylum status on the grounds of their exposure to genital cutting makes it unavoidable to take a position on genital cutting. It seems to me that the silence that surrounded their grounds for refugee status illustrates that when it comes to female genital cutting western feminists have either taken a position against it, and been roundly condemned, or made use of the privilege of distance to not take a position by being silent.

We could employ a lot of careful and disingenuous language to step around this incontrovertible fact: in the instance of female genital cutting, the values enshrined by human rights affords girls better protection against a traditional practice that is forced; causes severe pain, trauma and shock, risks exposure to HIV and blood borne diseases; risks death by infection and haemorrhaging; causes ongoing trauma when urinating, menstruating, having intercourse and giving birth; and increases infertility and infant mortality.

It needs to argued just how western this value is given firstly, the medical interventions practiced on western women and girls in the name of beauty and efficient birthing and given secondly, that there are many peoples, indigenous and otherwise, who do not practice female genital mutilation and given thirdly, that many women have left their communities and countries to spare their daughters the ordeal of effectively having their genitals removed without medical anaesthetic.

The wishes of the Sierra Leone teenagers simply take precedence over the complex moral and legal ambiguity that this issue entails. Of course we need to continue the discussion about that ambiguity, and be clear about how being white and western positions us in the debate. But to put that discussion before the needs of these young women, to the extent that we are unwilling to voice our support to them and respond to their appliction for asylum here with silence is to mistake analysis for taking a position.

In looking at the harm caused by infibulation scholar Catherine Annas speaks with unscholarly fervour, “When the effects of female genital mutilation are honestly faced, nothing can justify it. Not culture. Not tradition. Not parental rights. Nothing.” I would add another qualification, one that strips ambiguity from the issue.

They are children.

Children all over the world are individuals unaware of their rights and unable to organize around the advocacy of those rights. While we ought to know from globally recurring policies of child removal from indigenous communities that children are not the property of the state, in the instance of their being abused they are neither the property of either their parents or their cultures to the extent that the violation of their human rights can be justified. They are entitled to protection from the physical pain and shock, trauma, medical harm and suffering caused by female genital cutting.

No mother or father or community, no religion or traditions, no state or law, nothing and no one owns a child to the extent that the violation of their human rights are justified. The suffering of these children is a stand alone ethical instance into which no other consideration or qualification should intervene. No one should conscionably discourage those who want to advocate for their protection from this procedure. Speaking positions are not a priority, the children's protection is and everyone should participate in that advocacy, first and foremost by assisting the women in those communities where female genital cutting occurs already fighting this practice.

Visit http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0042-96862005001100005&lng=en&nrm=iso

to follow up on activism by Rugiatu Turay who was forcibly circumcised at 11 and who formed the Amazonian Initiative Movement (AIM), in 2002 with other women she met in refugee camps in Guinea during Sierra Leone's 1991–2001 civil war. AIM is one of several nongovernmental organizations that campaign in West Africa against the harmful traditional practice of female genital mutilation.

17.7.06

Remote Control: televising atrocity

2006-07-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve only just met Oliver at our child care centre. He came up while I was feeding my little one and, struck by the fact that she’s a baby, offered his thoughts on the subject. ‘Sometimes the babies, they get something wrong with them’ he said. When I asked what, he said: ‘Sometimes the babies get killed’. Stunned, I asked: ‘What babies Oliver?’ He replied matter of factly: ‘In the war, they get killed’, and he added that men have swords and guns. More than a little troubled, and wondering where this had come from, I thought it worth saying that babies are so precious to everyone that everyone always looks after them. I lied.

Oliver and I are witnesses, specifically of the visible effects of what some have called ‘the culture of trauma’. Oliver, all of three years old, felt we shared a common vantage on the world, so much so that I would understand his need to talk about the vulnerability of babies. He was right about our common vantage, most probably being the nightly news, but he was childlike in his conviction that the things we witness make passing conversation.

Our common vantage forms a community of knowledge which is assumed. So much so that it goes without saying, the information we share sitting on the periphery of our lives. It lurks in the mundane, resurfacing in our minds while filling the petrol tank, bathing the baby or feeding the cat. Ironically, given its public sources, this kind of knowing has become private and solitary.

When I mentioned to my mother that I felt I couldn’t cope with watching the Kosovo crisis, and that this felt cowardly in view of what the people themselves were coping with, she told me both of my sisters and many of her friends had switched off, because they found it too distressing. Then she pictured my frail Nanny as the tiny elderly Albanian woman, being carried bewildered in a blanket between two grandsons, and she choked on her words.

Being witness to the constant destruction of life has become systematised into our daily landscape. But while we are all witnesses, it seems we speak less and less of its meaning and implications amongst ourselves – perhaps because the implications are increasingly threatening. What it means to witnessing human suffering is historically transmuting because of the medium through which this information in communicated. We are literally more removed, even remote from the source. Restricted to sight and sound bites our understanding of the situation is simplified. It becomes less obvious to know how to respond, and how to attend.

But we know the rendering visible of human suffering does force response. Those who marched in the Vietnam moratoriums and swelled the peace movement were all witnesses of that war with a proximity that compelled them to act. Witnessing was the catalyst of that movement. So much so that it is now widely accepted that the gulf war was elaborately sanitised for our consumption in ways that accustomed our visual experience of war to that of fighter pilots, keeping them and our moral sensibility out of harms reach.

Precision warfare has become more that a rhetorical device, or given the estimated 1500 Serbian civilians dead, a baldfaced lie. It is a machinery of obscuring, dis-locating impact from our sight and knowledge. While our perspective literally hangs in the sky above grey and out of focus targets, human lives don’t even figure as ants, they don’t figure at all, either visually or ethically. Such imagery has created a different perspective on war and made our sense of control over human fate feel increasingly remote.

Curiously being close up to human tragedy only exacerbates this feeling of remote control. On the front page of The Age a Rwandan orphan had given in to the weight of horror housed in his skull. It drooped and rested on the parched ground, immobile. The atrocities witnessed by this child, against his own family, left him curled foetal like against any sensory input. He had simply shut down. It seems an affront to this child to communicate how the mere communication of terror is terrorising. And yet it also felt unliveable to witness that child’s suffering without walking across the room to bring relief.

As a narrative without culmination the story of human pain upsets our expectation as viewers that all stories resolve. It is a never ending mass orchestrated, mass communicated pain, while we mass atomised in our respective loungerooms numbed beyond prayer, pinned under the corrosive rhythm of witnessing without responding. When we do take up cause, its often after a process of selection from the proliferating images before us, not unlike choosing a program.

Is witnessing now marked by a resignation that things are out of our hands? Are violent computer games and video nasties a cultural space kids like Oliver have claimed in which to both ratify the inevitability of the spectacle of violence, while feeling that its at least in their hands?

Since witnessing is refracted through visual distance, there seems a different kind of trauma associated with seeing but being dislocated from directly bring relief. My own nightmares tell me this trauma is far less transient than the images that cause them. How this residue of witnessing informs our humanity into the next century is yet to be seen.

1.7.99

Nguyen Tuong Van: A Mother’s Right

2006-07-03T21:28:00.001-07:00

A Mother’s Right

In the final moments of Nguyen Tuong Van’s life mothers all around Australia were handing their children over to trusted teachers, kindergarten and crèche carers. His mother, Kim Nguyen, was forced by the Singapore High Commissioner to hand her son over to a hangman. Now the media glare has subsided the question remains why should Kim Nguyen be left to endure her grief?

The High Commissioner’s principle justification for Kim Nguyen’s ongoing suffering was that unless her son was hanged by the neck, thousands of other families would be shattered by their children’s drug addiction and overdoses. Families, it was argued, who never got to hug their sons and daughters goodbye either.

Now that her son is dead, it is Kim Nguyen who is left to suffer unimaginably. Why has she been punished? Why has her wellbeing been sacrificed to support an abstract and unproven idea that her son’s death would prevent others’ sons and daughters from dying? Why should this blameless mother be held accountable for the machinations of international drug syndicates, embroiled in the trafficking of arms, women and children, and, it has been alleged, implicated in Singapore government contracts with the corrupt state of Burma?

For 25 years Kim Nguyen cut her son’s lunches, made sure he was warm enough, that his shoes still fitted, his teeth were brushed, his hair was cut, his clothes were washed, sorted, folded and put away. No doubt she sometimes had to delouse him, clean up his vomit, teach him to blow his nose, and lift the seat. Perhaps she also gritted her teeth when he snatched, or ignored her fifth request to make his bed. Kim Nguyen engaged in the cyclic minutiae of maternity, the invisible and relentless labour and relating behind doors, that quietly keeps schools, workplaces, and indeed the nation’s economy ticking over.

On the morning of December 2nd, the essential fact that Kim Nguyen made Nguyen Tuong Van was repudiated and disavowed. Her birthing, breastfeeding, carrying in arms, potty training, her guidance over his first wonky steps … all that work, that love, all the moral authority that should accrue to any dedicated mother was trampled and trashed.

Australia’s media focus on Kim Nguyen highlighted the miscarriage of justice perpetrated against, primarily, Nguyen Tuong Van’s mother. Her helpless subjection to her son’s imposed fate provoked an outcry across the country. Who could not feel distress at the picture of this broken mother, too frail to support herself, her hair whitening, her grief palpable and overwhelming.

If her suffering galvanised Australians’ opposition to the death penalty it also galvanised an unspoken fear in every mother: that our best efforts, our hard work—since it still largely falls to us—our delight and pride, our struggle and strife could all come to naught and end in tragedy.

Our children’s fate lies in our hands to some degree. But ultimately they become subject to the laws and whims of men most of whom have had little involvement in the daily care of small children. These are men who are able to reach positions of power because of their stay-at-home wives, and their wives, precisely because of the time out of the mainstream economy to do the unpaid and uncredited work of caring for children, will rarely attain such positions. Their particular needs as mothers therefore are rarely represented in public life. The men they support have dim recollections of what a mother is, what she knows about and feels for her children. They become capable of thinking of the death and mutilation of mothers and children as ‘collateral damage’.

When Peter Costello called upon Australian women to have ‘one for the country’ mothers were offended for good reason. Our sons and daughters are not fodder for a thriving economy that marginalises and disavows maternal labour. They are not fodder for armies that have been employed in the illegal invasion of lands where other mothers then try desperately to protect and provide for their children. Our families are not ‘economic units’. In the end families are relationships created, nurtured and maintained largely by the physical and intellectual work of mothers.

At times, mothers have asserted their inalienable right over the fate of their children. American mother Cindy Sheehan has demanded to meet President Bush to protest the death of her son Casey, a soldier in Iraq, and to insist on an explanation for the war. In 1970, five Australian mothers from the Save Our Sons protest group were jailed in Melbourne for handing out anti-conscription pamphlets whilst on government property. They included Jean Maclean who later became ALP member for Boronia province in the Legislative Council from 1985-92 and then for Melbourne West province until 1999.

Rather than actively cross over from the domestic realm and take her place as a public mother, as Cindy Sheehan and Jean Maclean have done, Kim Nguyen was dragged into the public spectacle of tragedy. I doubt she cares much if her son was misrepresented as a hero, or whether the impact and meaning of his crime were subsumed beneath the horror of his execution. A lifetime of care, a life that she created and had a right to, was stolen from her.

Every mother faces the prospect that our sons and daughter’s fate may be decided by forces outside our control. From freak accidents to culpable recklessness, drug addiction, climate change and terrorism, every mother knows and fears this helplessness. Our children may become subject to laws either proportionate or unjust. But when it comes to our children’s lives, the inalienable right of mothers should be enshrined and protected in international law. If maternal work and relating were given due credit and if mother’s experience and knowledge was represented in the higher echelons of decision making, Kim Nguyen would not have been made to suffer as she does and as she will until the day she dies.

Toy Story

2006-07-03T21:28:00.000-07:00

At our new daughter’s Coming Out Party she was bestowed with many gifts – beauty, grace, virtue. Actually none of these, but a modest pile of kiddie culture did make its way through our door.

Her big sister, who has appropriated all of her presents to date, was particularly enamoured with a Pooh Bear pram tie. Pooh Bear figures prominently in her toddler prattle and play, particularly the bottom drawing-on incident which she re-enacted, rather closer to the mark, thankfully with non-toxic textas. As I struggled with the pram tie packaging it informed me that this was not just a toy but a developmental aid.

Stringing Pooh, Tigger and Piglet over my baby’s head assists in achieving the following cognitive milestones: ‘coordination, dexterity, hearing skills and helping baby adapt to new sights’. I kid you not. My 10 week old is hard at it whenever we are out taking a stroll. For not an opportunity can be missed in her maturation and a ‘comprehensive range of nursery products’ are available that will have her speaking and acting like us grown ups quicker than if she had merely been exposed to a gum nut and a couple of sticks.

Her grandmother had one doll, five siblings and an orchard for her developmental aids. Nevertheless, she manages to string a sentence together quite well and can even read and write. Barbie was banned from my toy collection, which meant that I got my Barbie fix from playmates at school, and still ended up an avowed feminist—only with a unique ability to accessorise. When it comes to kiddie culture, things often cut both ways.

There has been a lot of talk, since the adaptation of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings to the screen, that visually transcribing such works limits the imaginative engagement of children to books. Imagination, in this context, refers to the ways kids visualise text. We like the idea that as readers kids become like authors, constructing their own scenes as they wander through the pages. Should we, then, stop illustrating children’s books? Or should we stop being so closed minded ourselves about kids and their playtime, and what they should be achieving and at what rate.

Our three year old is a case in point. She is an avid fan of Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclarey, which we have read and watched on video. From watching the video she can recite most of the series, which I guess means that it will assist in ‘word recognition’ on the page. This has not limited her imaginative play with the characters. Most of the neighbourhood dogs, her bath ducks and all of the family have been cast as Hairy Maclarey characters. I am Hairy Maclarey, shortened to ‘Hairy!’ in public places, her father was cast as Hercules Morse , who is reputedly ‘as big as a horse’ and I have also been assigned the role of Dragon from Shrek. In the casting of her imagination any resemblance is purely coincidence, of course.

Even the classics have proved fertile ground. Goldilocks became a big favourite just as her sister entered the scene. Three guesses which bald-as-a-bean newborn broke into the house, ate her sister’s porridge, busted her chair and appropriated her bed. But if Goldilocks could be adapted to a fable of sibling displacement, it could also reinstate traditional gender roles, making me middle-sized bear cooking the porridge in an apron, even though it is Papa bear who cooks in our house.

At xmas, baby bear probably got more toys than are good for her. Early childhood experts have been known to speak of the over-indulged child as, in fact, an abused child. Certainly excessive consumption structures desire as insatiable, and its rapid cycle of possession and disposal is environmentally unsustainable. But do her new toys defy imagination by being too detailed and too directive in their uses?

The blow up kiddie pool became a Hairy Maclarey character’s old basket under the stairs, and the dolly dress-up fridge magnets (of very hegemonic femininity) were put to good use as blow flies when clamped between hair clips. The wrapping paper became her teddies beds. I could have bought her one or two expensive well-made featureless toys, as advised, onto which she could project her fantasies and abstractions. Instead I went for the $2.00 shop’s gaudy paraphernalia which fell apart within the hour, only to be metamorphised into a variety of kiddie supplies including doctor’s equipment, sandpit cooking utensils, dolly’s headdress, xmas tree lights and even a cradle for the ‘Baby Geez’. It seems when it comes to children’s toys, and what we expect it to teach kids, it is only their overly aspiring parents that are lacking imagination.

8.8.01

To Barbie or Not To Barbie

2006-07-03T21:27:00.000-07:00

We arrived at school this morning looking somewhat bedraggled. Barbie had lost a red shoe and while this shouldn't have affected the rest of the families’ appearance the piercing urgency of the situation had undone any semblance of neat and orderly dress.

When I explained how the Red Shoe had set in motion a series of catastrophes that ended with my 3-year-old wailing on my hip while my 6-year-old was prized away for assembly, the otherwise assembled parents expressed surprise that I had succumbed to buying Barbie.

It's the hegemony I explained. No I didn't. But it was.

Barbie was banned in my childhood home. This did not cause any of us to fixate on her in later life because, really, she is an archetype of the natural order, that, if suppressed, will rupture through our feminist superegos at any time. It may have left me with an indifference to accessorise, but feeling otherwise unscarred I thought I'd leave her out of my girls' gender construction, thank you very much.

It was not to be countenanced. Barbie brand hats, bags, pencils and trinkets inveigled themselves into deceptively wrapped birthday presents and of course could be found lurking in the Nana present-freight that regularly disgorges in our post.

The eldest seemed under whelmed by Barbie, so I conducted a Barbie experiment - without ethics approval - when she was three. I braved Toys R' Us and led her, like a sacrificial lamb down the Barbie Aisle, fully expecting her innocence to be shed.
'AAAAH!' a choir seemed to chorus from some unearthly Busby Berkeley set. The clouds parted and a sunburst of variegated shades of pink flooded my brain. I swear a coiffed unicorn pranced on its royal blue jointed legs and King Edward nodded stiffly under his Perspex crown. Did this surreal consumer arcade at all impinge her tender imagination? Not a bit. She careered through barking like Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy.

It was the realignment of friendships at crèche along the 'P' axis - Princess, Pony and Pink that brought home the full social significance of Barbie and made me relent. This saccharine smiling Voodoo Doll of hegemonic femininity defines a girlie community of shared interests. Barbie possession makes little girls into desirable friends. She enables a shared language, not to mention a shared ability to accessories crèche bags, gumboots, lunchboxes, potties, pull-ups, you name it. Barbie's been everywhere man, and she left her logo.

I don't mind lots of kids having different consumer interests, but when most kids have the same interests as determined by some toy corporation in California, then kids uninitiated into the latest blockbuster tie-in phenomena (pant), become not kids with different interests, but 'different' kids. I feel unnerved by the idea that toy corporation executives are trying to figure out my children’s’ ‘reptilian hot spot’ and sell toys ‘in code’ with certain emotions like ‘accepted’ and ‘loyal’. I wish they’d spend more time putting her legs on properly and designing sleeves her hand can fit through.

But having finally established herself in our home Barbie became a victim of my children's diabolical imaginations. And I noticed, not without malice, that she underwent similar ordeals in the play rituals of other little girls. Her tresses were shorn, she was hung by the neck, stripped and paraded through the local shopping mall and pelted with stones. If they'd burnt her at the stake and bound her feet she'd have completed the circuit of special punishments meted out to women across the ages.

Actually Barbie does have ridiculously bendy feet which children have been known to chew off and which lends her that extra spring when thwacking her head against a hard surface, I notice. But this ‘interpretive play’ gave me faith that there is precious and uncharted terrain in children's grey matter and it remains uninfluenced by toy corporations, and unknown to demographic database companies who track our every purchase and sell our consumer preferences to advertisers.

Nevertheless, the six-year-old's letter to Santa last year requested a 'cirrige (carriage) and ‘I wont a man'. She got her man, for who could deny a child with such precocious ambitions. Anyway, he's a good accessory for Barbie in his velvet half pants, embroidered frock coat and red satin cravat. He comes with a plastic rose.

The three year old is less 'interpretive' and more 'literal' in her Barbie play. She’s much offended that I refer to her as ‘Blurbie’. This morning no amount of cajoling that Barbie can be a barefoot Californian hippie chick, could put her Barbie world back together again, and nor could any of the King's men. She needs a touch of Feral Barbie specially kitted out in Nimbin, to develop a true appreciation of Barbie's post structural permeability of identity.

Tired of putting 5c in my swear jar for cursing under my breath about reattaching Barbie fairy dresses, super gluing Barbie shoes, reattaching Barbie legs (who can keep up with her unique ability to accessorise?) I took my girls to Kmart to see if you can get Mummy-friendly Barbie attire. I was thinking, maybe yearning, for frocks that 3-year-olds can get Barbie in and out of while Mummy reads the paper. Undisturbed.

Right then my six-year-old made a statement that gave me confidence they'd survive all the Barbie exposure. There's a space in between what toy corporations think kids like to play with and what kids’ brains make of those ideas where everything is decidedly ‘off code’ in marketing parlance. We wandered into the Brazt Doll Aisle, and were faced with a giant Bratz. 'Look Mummy', she said, 'that's the biggest Brat I've ever seen!' 'So it is!’ I marveled.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE STREET KIND

2006-07-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

Walking the same street with a baby, and then without, is like taking two entirely streets. The with-baby street is a maze of indulgent gazing and at times invasive, unsolicited questioning. The without-baby street remains the terrain of appraising check-outs, as women on their own are cast in the same light they have been since they first traversed city streets on their own. The solitary woman ‘street walker’ can still find that she is in fact negotiating a definitional tight-rope of sexual ambiguity. Both kinds of public occupancy can prove obstructive and invasive for women – though at times they have their compensations by forging human contact and a sense of community.

While sitting at a café table on the street with my baby, lunching with a friend, a young woman approached whose head nearly exploded with rabidity at the sight of a baby in the adult dominated world of corporate William St. I would advise new mothers to learn up fast on the difference between passing baby ardour and very close encounters of the invasive kind. The young woman required a veritable tome of information about my baby, her sleeping and eating habits, developmental progress, birth details and finally – and this is where she crossed the line - whether my lunch companion and I were in fact lesbians.

I should qualify that my daughter is an unashamed magnet for every conceivable type of street perambulator. And she does like to put me in the awkward position of declaring ecstatically that every passing male is in fact her ‘DADA!!’ But her quest for familiarity also evokes human contact as she elicits smiles and coos from passers by. The truth is that while babies are handy prising devices into any passing mother’s life circumstances, we brand new mothers, too often stuck at home and isolated, can also be the worst offenders. Supermarket aisles are not for the faint-hearted when a couple of newly delivered mothers manoeuvre their prams into cue.

It can be a little disconcerting how readily women will speak in blood curdlingly explicit terms with women they hardly know once they’ve squeezed a baby out into the world. Anything, from hemmroid size to the number of stiches, even the occasional reenactment of grunts can be breezily shared about. I wondered if it was some kind of post partum maternal impulse to recount details that make the splatter genre seem a mere elaboration on sprinkler systems, and the Sexpo a rather coy family outing. But maybe the ready intimacy and sharing of personal detail that comes with the territory of having a baby out on the street is part of how women experience public space differently – particularly after years of walking the streets without baby, and being alienated from contact as a defence against appearing too ‘friendly’ to men.

Maybe the closeness women so readily share on the street, made permissible with baby, is one of the ongoing effects of women not being allowed to even walk about in public space without being chaperoned until the turn of the last century. As many women would attest, still fighting off the slings and arrows of verbally abusive men, means a chaperone, preferably long-haired and with very sharp teeth, can come in handy to this very day.

Last century (not so many eons ago) Truth Newspaper was warning of 1920s ‘Business Girls’ that their ‘contact with the opposite sex – even chance contact – affords a pleasure. It is flappers of this type who form obstructive groups on the footpaths of crowded thoroughfares, and who persistently defy the “keep to the right” injunction. Sex hunger, sub-conscious perhaps, but a yearning, nevertheless, for the vicarious satisfaction afforded by the bumping and squeezing of passing males’.

Hard to believe, isn’t it, that Truth ever held such prohibitive, indeed censoring views about the public visibility of young women. But this view of women in public space as ‘the sex’ unlike men who are simply ‘the humans’ has meant that women continue to be sexualised simply by being on the street. But rather than consider that maybe the stares and snickers of passing men is obstructive, women have been cast as the distracters and obstructors in the orderly flow of city life.

The curious thing is that during my travels up and down the bitumen I’ve always found, as have my women friends, that it is in fact men who obstruct this orderly flow. It is men who have proved incapable of adhering to the ‘would you let go of my bottom, no I will not sit on your face, I wonder if you could address me as distinct from my breasts, and could you keep a civil tongue in your head rather than gesticulate wildly at me with it’, injunctions.

But I suppose I should concede that not all men are ‘mashers’ as they were called in the 1920s. And not all women are excessively intimate as compensation for firstly, our radical exclusion from public space, and secondly, our persistent misapprehension as common street whores when we finally did put in an appearance.

Only this morning a very dapper elderly gent was shuffling past us when my daughter rapturously declared ‘Dada!’ He gave me the glad-eye from under the rim of his fedora and said with a wink, ‘It’s a blessed shame when your memory fails”.

9 August, 2001

Losing your e-mind

2006-07-03T21:24:00.000-07:00

The fact that I wrote this out in longhand ought to give away what this piece is about. The unthinkable has happened. Not crashed, Stolen. Great name for a rock band, most appropriately Heavy Metal, for banging one’s head seems a reasonable reaction to one’s entire e-life disappearing into the back of a truck.

Abruptly, I am forced to distinguish the uncanny and indefinable divide between e-life and life itself.

My dusty and forlorn desktop is a good start. Trying to account for a couple of gigabytes of files, films, photos and emails is surreal and disorienting. All those loose ends, my unfitted USB cables, trail like limp linguini over the surface of my lost e-mind.

And yet there is a paradoxical sense of tragedy and liberation. Perhaps this is how it feels to have one’s children taken into protective custody - as perhaps they would if I carelessly left them in an unlocked office.

The sense of tragedy of course, derives from how much of our personal life we now live out through our digital screens. All those emails might be documents of flirting, courtship, falling in love - the intimate residue of daily relating over years. The unculled photos that, once downloaded seemed to have gone into a vault, suddenly go out like lights. If I didn’t have such a mania for archiving I’d have lost all my kids’ baby photos, our unwedding album, my meticulous list of piano concertos, my shameless dance list including My Sharona, and so much more.

Our memories have become mediated by files. The void that opens up is the terror of remembering unassisted. Our motherboards are our emotional landscapes, our relationships networked, our memories safely stored. When it’s all gone we’re confronted with a scary and clinical revelation. We don’t remember anymore. We archive. We marshal memory through stored files and we relate through the mechanical blips of a yes/no binary.

The sense of liberation derives from the unexpected recovery of life bpc – before pc. There is the pleasure of lettering and its idiosyncratic attachment to voice. The mind meanders after one’s writing hand. Scribing is not the hand-eye coordination of keyboard, but somehow a hand-voice coordination. There is the deliciously monkish self-correlling of calligraphing, a very particular aloneness and quietude.

If this is not solace enough the fact that my computer, with whom I had ambivalent relations – it had difficulty waking up, no matter how much I poked its keyboard, shook it, and threatened to pitch hot coffee at it – will be replaced. My spanking new computer comes with an ominous little eye, a camera, which will peer at me from the casing. I suppose this should invoke the exhibitionist pleasures of become a
camcorder celebrity, famous in my own lunchbox. I’m told I can chat online.

But what should feel like new prospects for interfacing feels like an intrusion. I like speaking with words. I like relating to people when my children are asleep, when the time is right and not having grabbed a jangling phone while popping the toaster, stuffing cashews into lunchboxes and digging for shin guards on the way out the door.

A slash of masking tape, to superstitiously ward off any Big Brother paranoia, is set aside for the new camera encased computer. I shall return to quietly hermiting in the dreamscape of my restored e-desktop, having conversations with people who aren’t there, living through words, remembering through jpegs and scrolling through a web of distant home pages.

All of which sounds like I did lose my mind. Take it as a warning. I’ll spell it out in three little words. Back Up Now.

29.6.O6

THE EXPLICIT AND ILLICIT MEASURE OF SEXUAL OFFENCE

2006-07-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

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That it should have been the police - that representative body of moral order, regulation and containment - who copied and pirated the stolen 'intimate' video of Deborah Byrne confirms with almost classical precision the Foucauldian precept that the penal code is productive of crime. It also reveals something of the contemporary pornographic, that it needs to retain the Victorian pleasure of some kind of link to the illicit.

How the punters of table top clubs must savour the allegations that they are linked to the underworld of drugs trafficking or tax scams, for the naked feminine body must now emit the signs of the illicit to truly fulfil the requirements of the pornographic. Likewise, how corrosively respectable that the annual Sexpo has our venerable Premiers endorsement by taking place in his exhibition 'shed'. Lucky Jeff's a renegade and a larrikin, or these days porn would just be too clean to stick to the masculinist fantasy of the lawless male subject.

But the celebrity video, accessed through the unknown demi-monde networks of the metropolis, has emerged as the illicit's last stand in a wider visual field which has been undermining the pornographics transgressive credentials by poaching from its representational conventions, legitimising closer and closer views as they move in. How can porn remain distinct, its exchange value demarked for a certain market niche, if every smartypants advertiser continues to rip off its central icons, namely tits and arse, climax, nudity and bodily secretions?

Deborah Byrne has been brutally misused in a series of institutional and cultural ironies, to ultimately reinstate the illicit as the province of the explicit. Since the explicit can't claim to be anything special or exclusive to porn anymore it needs something more, something the police are in the best position to provide - something illegal. Her video and its use seems to make true the particular representational space of the celebrity as a reduction of being to images. But the woman celebrity is also a commodity spectacle, in which her consumption is enacted precisely at the level of the image.

The recent axing of Channel 10's Sex/Life evinces a different use of the explicit. In this program they unwittingly undermined the 'pull', so to speak, of explicit imagery with a kind of saccharine piousness about how 'natural' sex and nudity is. While others have pointed the finger at government pressure on Channel 10, only a cursory glance has been cast over the program's ratings and the truth is they weren't that hot. Senator Alston however, found the program rather elevated in temperature and trotted out biblical tropes of Sodom and Gomorrha, to give the program precisely what it needed, a re-rendering of the explicit as illicit. But he was too late or perhaps his backhand endorsement couldn't get around the host's tum, burgeoning with the reverence of illicit sex's opposites - family and maternity.

Sex/Life may have been explicit, but this hardly equates it anymore with the illicit or with 'pushing the envelope' in images of sex. Yet both Alston and Sex/Life relied on the explicit as a measure of the value of media representations of the body and sexuality. In Alston's case the value he determined through the explicit was 'offensive'. For Sex/Life the value of the explicit was determined as good through a profoundly naive idea of sexual liberty. The circulation of Deborah Byrne's video shows Alston that the explicit now needs the illicit to be pornographic, and her pain and sense of violation shows Sex/Life that sex is distinct from its representation, which is distinct in turn from the context in which it is shown.

During the defence of Sex/Life, the 'sexual liberty' advocates would have had us believe that we were debating the merits of sex itself, not its representation. And who would not agree that Yes, there is no greater thing than sex, in the whole world, ever. However, what we were debating was more aptly defined by the Byrne's video, namely, the public-isation of sexuality and the media forms through which we come into contact with it and the power relations inflected through such processes.

Images, even of lions on the Savanna are cultural, they don't reveal things unmediated, they convey meanings - even meanings in the case of Sex/Life, of the body and sex as natural. As a flag for sexual freedom the explicit acted in their program as a great equaliser, so that even in their reliance on the sex industry they still failed to register that our culture places women and men in quite different relations to sex as a commodity form. It is predominantly images of women's sexuality that is the commodity. And this has proved a devastating equation for Deborah Byrne, compounded by the fact that as celebrity she is image, as far as the police and others were concerned, there to be consumed.

In focusing inadvertently on the explicit as a measure of either offence or sexual freedom we distract ourselves from seeing how meanings about sexuality and gender relations need to be watched and discussed critically since they are constructed through representations and through the cultural contexts in which we consume them. Is table top dancing simply a 'natural' expression of men's desire to have women display their bodies to them, and women's desire to display their bodies? Does this make it natural that such women rarely earn a minimum wage in such venues, taking a cut from the tips? Is it just natural to watch Deborah Byrne's video, or does it only feel so because of the naturalised equation of the feminine celebrity with commodity spectacle and the appropriation of the explicit by commodity culture?

This is the trouble with being distracted by the explicit - compelling as it is - rather than focusing on cultural meanings and uses of power, in evaluating the merits of representations of sex. Leaving such meanings and uses to one side can actually work to leave us in the dark about sex. For instance, who explains to kids in sex education that when 'the man puts his penis in the woman's vagina' any number of things might be going on, like pleasure, transaction, marriage, consent or lack of - ie that this is not just a biological act but a profoundly cultural one. Who explains to kid's that their interest in sex, like food, has become appropriated in their formation as young consumers?

Sex/life could have been genuinely educative. If deconstructed in the context of public sex education sessions, kids could increase their savviness in reading representations critically. I'd guess it would soon be unveiled as mostly normative about men and women's sexuality, as commodified, limited to heterosexuality and as having a view of sex circumscribed by the sex industry and its punters, men. Although occasionally it might have been viewed as provoking alternative views of sexuality.

Wanting to install a critical gaze in thinking about how the meanings of sex are constructed through representations, and how these representations may be invested with power, does not place me in Senator Alston's censoring camp. Wanting to consider the historical contingency of notions of the explicit and the illicit and think through the work such ideas are put to in our contemporary perceptual field does not mean I only get my jollies from subscribing to the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books. As regards Senator's Alston's statements that programs have been 'pushing the envelope' in the portrayal of sex, I'd like to see that.

16.7.98.

I was a teenage activist

2006-07-03T21:22:00.000-07:00

➢ I started with a badly phrased petition on nuclear disarmament in the local fish ‘n ship shop. Since I worked there I soon learnt, as Pauline Hanson must also have observed, that most people care more about getting their dinner on time.

➢ Undeterred, I persisted and pestered with petitions. I screened films on the Franklin at school, and sold No Damns stickers (which did very well because they covered the school crest on our bags). I was more than passionate, like all good children raised on ABC current affairs, I could select from a raft of apocalyptic issues - I was incensed. I marched at all the boomer marches. I blockaded the Vice Chancellors office with the No Fees students, formed a Rape Action Collective on Campus, volunteered at WIRE, founded a campaign on the portrayal of sexual violence, and organised the native title armbands and ribbons.

➢ But I would have done one fifth of many of my contemporaries, presently being decried as apathetic and politically disinterested youth. I know anarchists involved in free presses, women involved in collectives to Reclaim the Night, for reproductive rights, against domestic violence, for working women, migrant women, lesbian visibility, outworkers. There are lobby groups for single mothers, feminist lawyers, prostitutes, and so on. Friends go to forest and uranium mine blockades, work on community art projects, and god knows, churn through hours of stamp sticking, envelope licking grind. Not surprisingly, few of these people self-consciously think of themselves as ‘young’- they feel too weary. It strikes me that if you don’t know where ‘young’ activists are its because you’re not involved yourself. So shut up and turn up.

None of my involvement gave me any consciousness of being young – as the boomers seem to imagine about their own refractory behaviour. Instead it meant I was a feminist and a Green. Youth only defines one in retrospect, when you wish you still had it. Boomers seem to think that youth is the propellant of participation, its precondition a naive faith in change, as though it was the desires and ideals of their youth that involved them in causes quite unrelated, like worker’s rights.

➢ This noble quest for ‘The Voice of Youth’, this tiresome lament that young people are politically detached seems to originate in some boomer fantasy that ‘we changed the world when we were young, why can’t they?’.

It’s assumed that the invisibility of young people is something of their own making. That their visibility would be constituted by iconic spokespeople like Germaine Greer, perhaps rather than diffuse networks of web sites. In truth, any campaign strategy routinely makes visibility, in the form of media exposure, its priority. Media stunts and symbolic actions, not mass moratoriums, are the stuff of present day activism. Its seems diabolical to me that the very press that so ardently wants to hear from young people is unaware that the single preoccupation of any campaign is how to get media attention? Its assumed that if young people did seek visibility for issues – necessarily defined by their age – they would not want to speak as gays, Muslims, aborigines, students, disabled, green, republican, post-colonial, etc - but as youth. What we’re encountering is more a resistance to speak as youth, which in itself may have had its historical moment with the boomers and passed on.

My feeling is that ‘young people’ involved in social change only think in terms of generation when they remark on the fact that the boomers have eaten the world, and we have to clear up the mess if we want another meal, let alone share the scraps around equitably.

It seems the baby boomers lament for lost youth, because what they are experiencing as loss is their own youth. It’s a romance that leaves them imagining that social change movements erupt out the firey bellies of free living youth. Nonsense. There were always older people involved in the causes I went along to though sometimes they separated over tactics – like in the recent reconciliation/native title campaigns. But even in the examples of kids blockading Jabiluka, while more seasoned activists set up the Sea of Hands – there were lots of exceptions. Perhaps the Boomers would feel better if they congratulated themselves on how many from their ranks are still active rather than how many young people aren’t. Perhaps the ‘boomers’ are feeling just as entrapped and misrepresented by market driven categories as the Xers are.

To all those entreating ‘youth’ to spring out of the ground like Messiahs to save the world and its haemorrhaging future aspirations – all of you with assured columns and radio spaces, attend one FOE meeting. Ask any of the young men and women there, ‘are you willing to speak as/for youth?’ Ask them what other campaigns they’ve been involved in. But most importantly ask how many press conferences they’ve organised and how often the press have turned up? And then, I dare you, give over one of your weekly columns, or one of your radio spots to some not-previously-famous kid who is talented and has something to say. You could start looking in the student newspapers – those that are still running.

➢ Anyway, enough said. Silenced by the clamourings of youth I must stick the booby in my baby’s mouth.

11.2.1999

SEX: THE PREGNANT PAUSE

2006-07-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

I remember we 'first-time-Mums' chortling at the local Mother's group about how readily women speak in explicit, blood curdling terms with women they hardly know once they squeeze a baby out into the world. Anything, from haemorrhoid size to number of stiches, even the occasional re-enactment of grunts can be exchanged blithely in supermarket cues. They are not places for the fainthearted.

Given this maternal impulse to recount details that make the splatter genre seem a mere elaboration on sprinkler systems, and the Sexpo a rather coy family outing, I was wondering why it took this mothers group a good four weeks to broach the question of 'resumption'. When the visiting family counsellor coaxed us to talk about 'time out' with our partners we were uncharacteristically discrete.

This was not merely a case of post-partum mush brain, it was more lack of recognition. 'Sex? What’s that again?' one woman jibed as the rest of us glanced down at the cranial diameters of our little treasures and gingerly crossed our legs.

Still I've heard rumours of couples rumpling the sheets during labour, which might seem premature to those of us still in shock over discovering our involuntary capacity in labour to roar like an elephant seal—an impulse that can cast something of a long shadow over one's inner-sex kitten.

Apart from reports warning that women can die from having intercourse too soon after birthing— and who can blame them—it seems terrain that only the brave are willing to even talk about. Who would have thought something so defining of our identity, such an incessant ploy in the manufacturing of our desire to consume, and so inherently jolly, could be so quickly forgotten?

To be perfectly frank, pregnancy can be quite an obstruction. Without the usual preliminaries of fleshy frottage you can feel a bit lost. Literally. 'Where are you', I recall bleating plaintively over the ever rising intermediary. 'Over here', my pleasure prince would cry from the far reaches of the mattress. If coo-eeing from either side of the bed doesn't seem like such engrossing foreplay, re-enacting 'Jack and Jill go up the hill' can be equally precarious.

As I beached on the bed (the elephant seal already making herself known) sex transferred to being, as they say, in my dreams. However, climactic scenes can be rudely interrupted by the real world and its barking dogs, revving engines and door slamming neighbours. And the unlikely people that lurk about in your unconscious as objects of desire! Of course when it comes to Australian women and their dreams Paul Keating needs no introduction (there ought to be anthology of women’s dreams about him, we could call it Keating Dreaming) But when Sam Newman made an appearance, perversely vacuuming my floor in nothing but an apron, I retrieved myself from that demonic nocturnal visitation to find my morning sickness was dramatically exacerbated.

If late pregnancy can make one forgetful, a newborn is a complete family planning kit. As if to kill off even the chance of a sibling who might displace them, babies are full of don't-even-think-about-it distractions. There‘s the nightly baptism of baby bodily fluids, the eruptions of posit trickling into your armpits, and as for their bottomly escapades, no high tech nappy can stem the tide. And there’s the quirky biological response in lactating women of leaking when aroused. Forget condoms, when there are babies around a seafaring vessel is more in order.

Then there’s babies uncontestable star billing as the object of desire. Who can look away from the mesmerising delights of newborn faces, their inspired character portraits of Hitchcock and Angry Anderson, and the ancient solemnity of their wrinkled hands. Then there’s the sheer unrelenting exhaustion, the kind that makes you forget who you just dialled and not know who to ask for, let alone what name to answer to.

Like all the other self-defining leisures and pleasures the vanquished post-partums once took for granted, sex can require a team of archaeologists to excavate it from the vestiges of your past life. Not a bad time to qualify the Cleo and Cosmo inspired mythologies that would have us all exercising our inalienable rights to multiple-extended orgasm, and get real about how sometimes the sublime raptures of sex take over our lives and sometimes they don’t. But there are still times when we are prodded, through the haze of exhaustion into a remembrance of things past. For a while my daughter put me in the awkward position of declaring ecstatically that every passing male was in fact her ‘DADA!!’ When she rapturously assigned a very dapper elderly man with this distinction, he gave me the glad-eye from under the rim of his fedora and said with a wink, ‘It’s a blessed shame when your memory fails’.

20.11.02

Pooh and Bears

2006-07-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

BEARS THAT ONLY LIVE IN THE IMAGINATION.

Winnie-the-Pooh has been brought out of his hermetically sealed glass cabinet in the New York public library and sat in the august Mayor's lap, in front of the international press. Pooh Bear, originally a stuffed teddy bear whisked out the arms of A.A. Milne's children to promote his book characters 'Winnie-the-Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, Kanga and Piglet' looked like he could do with a cuddle. But such intimacy, such homage to childhood symbols was distinctly marred by the surgical gloves worn by the benign Rudolph Giuliani.
It was a case of the hyperreal getting the better of this quaint story of bear homelessness and cultural displacement. For Pooh bear is out of reach of children's bacteria harbouring hands. Far too precious to us grown-ups as a symbol of childhood, Pooh bear can only be handled with latex, not even kid, gloves.
If it seems that poor old Pooh is being exploited by yet another show of "American Cultural Imperialism" (as it goes) there are worse things to consider in the history of stuffed teddy bears.
The New York major might think he was making wiley use of the media, championing Pooh as another rather eccentric New York resident, but he is small fry compared to the attention won by the President of the United States, one Theodore Roosevelt, when he refused to shoot a cub bear while on one his numerous hunting expeditions, in Mississippi in 1906. He'd been quite happy to shoot its mother, it seems, and who knows what happened to that poor little bear, left to his own devices.
So Pooh bear's precedent, the stuffed bear, was born out of a similar indeterminacy of identity. He was also not only orphaned in real terms, but in cultural terms his symbolism also orphaned the cub bear, or left him out of our reach. And similar to Pooh, this terrified cub gave rise to a craze of symbols including the popular sheet song hit "The Teddy Bear March" and a number of short films further lampooning the president, 'Teddy' Roosevelt. Both bears have been swallowed up by their own significance, devoured by the symbols accrued to them.
This process of symbolic devouring has been given much thought by cultural theorists with intimidating names and complex ideas. Jean Baudrillard calls it 'simulation' an argument which claims that the 'real' America is in fact Disneyland. While we may have once claimed some relation between symbols or signs and the real things they represent, it is 'the condition of postmodernity' that we no longer seek such a connection.
Signs like Pooh Bear and stuffed bears devour real bears. Pooh bear and stuffed bears don't even refer to real bears, instead they serve to mask the fact that they have been left out of our cultural scene, absent to the whole sit-in-the-mayor's-lap media enterprise. What we have in place of real bears is nostalgia, simulation, and I would argue a weird cultural disavowal of the plight of real bear populations right across the earth's surface, an indifference to their rapidly diminishing numbers born of a beatific obsession and childish indulgence in our own symbols.
This is not to say Pooh-Bear is unworthy of our attention and affection. It is to say that this kind of attention is a symptom of losing our way with 'reality', even if this is a term in hot dispute.
In May 1996, SBS took a ratings risk and ran a news story about bears being poached throughout North America, Asia and Russia, for their gall bladder bile and body parts used in Chinese Medicine and to supply the exotic food trade. The bile is worth its weight in cocaine and it is believed the Russian Mafia have become involved using helicopters and highly sophisticated arms.
It should come as no surprise that the bile is used in cosmetics and shampoos.
I suppose everyone has a saturation point of being witness to atrocities, screened on the other side of our living rooms. This footage was mine. The images of a bear screaming, trying to shake a bullet from its head while clinging to a tree, and its cub being cut from a tree while hunter's dogs literally tore it apart still wakes me at night two years later. At the time I barely ate or slept for a week.
Despite Disneyland, Pooh-bear, and the joys of stuffed bears this footage has lodged stubbornly in my consciousness, like the bear's bullet, and has come to stand in the place of the manifest despair I carry in the background about the fact that our natural world is dying around us, and when it goes, we go too.
Canadian Airlines has plastered cute bear pictures on Melbourne trams, asking us to "Bear them in Mind". Truth is, Canada's Black Bear population will come close to ceasing to exist in the wild in only three short years if the current rate of poaching keeps up.
Worth bearing in mind?
There may be times when questioning the 'reality' of representations, say of the Gulf War, is a very good way to place some of our most damaging myths in jeopardy. In the case of bears however, we have three years to reconnect our nostalgia and symbols to real bears who are in dire need of media attention and glove's off defence.
Pooh bear might make whimsical copy. The last sight of the cub I watched being torn apart was a circle of hunters, his flesh and limbs being strewn at their feet. Its an image for which Pooh bear offers small comfort.

17.2.98

POLICING A WARY COMMUNITY

2006-07-03T21:18:00.001-07:00

There used to be a truism amongst feminist criminologists that confounded the claims of the 'anger management' experts on domestic violence - that if you threw a violent offender in the lock up for the night, you could shake him into a new understanding of the powers that be. He was more often left with the sobering thought that he is not the law maker and enforcer, the final authority in the home, he is in fact a criminal. Above him stands a whole structure of power and authority that can call him to account for his actions and displace him as the last word.

Faced with the latest startling evidence that the Victorian Police seem to answer to noone, not government edicts, not community requests for files under the Freedom of Information Act, it leaves you wondering whether being a law unto themselves hasn't had a similar effect on some, and I stress some, police and made them violent to innocent members of the community. Their understanding could be that they can practice this violence in a structure that protects them and decides with final authority that though they may assault, they remain the law and innocent people not victims, but criminals.

How do I know of police assaults? From anonymous graffiti scrawlings, from living in squats, dealing drugs, campaigning against racism? Sadly, it seems these are expected sources, but not mine. Any knowledge of police violence is alarming, but its perplexing to think how the police can be effective if as many people are aware of police violence through ordinary day to day living.

I know of five separate incidences - because people talk about being assaulted, it is profoundly traumatic, and the support of your friends and family can be all that remains when what has been swept from under your feet is the mind set of democracy - that we are all answerable to someone. An old boyfriend was taken behind a van at a No Fees rally and after the police had scrupulously removed their badges they lay into him. A friend of the family, a kid I grew up with, was taken to a local police station and beaten over hours. A student friend was picked up off the street, taken to the local police station and also beaten over hours. More recently, my neighbour was feeding his cat on the pavement we share and was dragged into a police van with no explanation, taken to the local station and beaten again for hours and racially taunted. This kid, who couldn't weigh more that 50kgs had been effectively abducted and assualted. He is now in hiding. He was so terrified his house mates had a hard time finding out what had happened.

All of these people were forced to sign statements that they had either resisted arrest or had attempted assault on police.

But the assault that I myself witnessed was the one that brought home the psychological void between seeking protection from police and finding them the assailants. We were sleeping downstairs because of the heat and I was woken by running and scuffling. Under our awning, on the pavement I heard a man being bashed. The assailant, who was one of many, was a vicious sadist clearly out of control. 'How does this feel?' I heard him ask before he delivered a blow, "hurts doesn't it? And how about this, hurts more doesn't it? Now I'm gonna use this, pretty bad isn't it?' In between the victim was groaning and pleading for him to stop.

I thought a gang of bikies was murdering someone on my stoop. I rang emergency and told them I was too frightened to look in case they came after me. I described what I heard and added that there seemed to be a two way radio. That was when he clicked. "Go and look" he barked at me, and when I did I saw a group of police and bouncers bashing a kid's head into a van before they threw him in and then standing around congratulating themselves. "Its you guys, you guys are beating the crap out of someone" I told the cop on the line. Silence. "Are you there?" I asked, unable to hide my disgust. "I'm cancelling the call", he said, and hung up.

When I called the ombudsman about making a formal complaint, the testimony of my neighbours would have been crucial. They plainly stated they were not going to place themselves in that kind of risk. When one of them phoned anonymously from a public phone she was screamed at by an officer and left in tears. Police cars cruised past her door throughout the afternoon. I've been wondering ever since if the later bashing of one their household was related.

The point is, how many of us know of police violence through similar experiences. How many of us hesitate before calling for police assistance, before reporting a crime, wondering if we're going to strike up against a good cop or a bad cop? How do violent police expect the community to absorb this information? With their own pat justifications such as the one we were offered when police came by in a plain car in damage control - "if this guy was climbing over the back of your fence and threatening your property ..." the officer insisted. What? I'd ring a local thug squad and ask them to teach him a lesson?

The community has no lock up to throw violent police over night to sober them up from the intoxication of omnipotence. All we can do is talk. I imagine there are some police men and women who have been watching their colleages and are counting on the community to assert itself, in this and all matters, as the body the police in fact serve, and to whom ultimately they are answerable.

29.1.98

Playschool: Restricted Viewing

2006-07-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

If one had to classify the visual diversity of women in the public eye, one would have to judge it restricted. If one had to note the importance attributed to the looks of any woman who ventures into the public eye — including the Cheryl Kernots who are not there for their looks — one would have to give five stars.

The recent weeks in review. The demise of Benita Collings, a longstanding playschool presenter and no doubt a very affirming presence for all the invisible grandmothers who fill the increasingly yawning gaps in child care. Much attention to Cheryl Kernot’s hair colour change. The cultural wallpapering of Naomi Campbell. Campbell at least represents an incursion into the white dominated world of fashion modelling, though some have argued she represents a token black presence, and a quick look around suggests they might be right.

This is not the first time Benita Collings has been dumped from the playschool cast. Around 8 years ago she was sacked, but the outcry, specifically about the relevance of her age to a children’s program, saw her reinstated. This time she has been dumped along with a swag of younger presenters to deflect a re-enactment of the clamour that forced the A.B.C’s hand. But few of us are expecting a woman of similar generation among the new appointees.

It begs the questions: is her loss part of a self-fulfilling logic wherein the vast majority of children’s care providers are younger women — so that the ongoing sense of dependency on the presence of young women shows up later as a cultural bias. Are we so primally attached to our childhood carers that we require the indulgent smiles of young women literally everywhere we go? Is girlie culture nothing more than revived a security blanket? And is this why beauty is youth defined?

What is it that we want to see in the endless sea of young women’s faces? Recently I met an aspiring actress, who’d had muscles in her face paralysed with toxic injections so that she wouldn’t line. I peered into her face with perhaps the very enthrallment that maintains the abiding omnipresence of cover girls. I was looking for her face to define beauty — as it has cultural currency. I was also looking for any signs that her beauty was a construct, which of course it always is. Whether it be at the level of make-up and surgery, or whether it be at the cultural level of strict exclusions from the category of beautiful on the basis of race and age.

Surely it was difficult (I bit back ironic) for an actress to convey a range of emotions with paralysed facial muscles. Oh no, I was assured, a frown can be conveyed in lots of ways. This woman’s face, like the squillions who have lovingly accompanied me as I’ve bought the milk and payed for my petrol, graphically depicted a prohibition on women’s frowning. When actresses are preferred because they aren’t facially expressive, something very kooky has happened to what we want women in the public eye to show us.

It seems that whereas mannequins were once moulded from women, now women who aspire to beauty and being in the public eye are being asked to model themselves on the inexpressive and passive faces of mannequins. Somewhere since the 1920s, when dress-maker’s dummies evolved into mannequins as replicas of idealised beauty, their still, non-responsive and ageless presence has in turn shaped our ideals of beauty. The impartial news anchor with her model looks is a perfect illustration.

The handy thing about a young face is that it is unmarked. History is ugly when it writes itself over our bodies. What we crave young women’s faces to show us is akin to a Seinfeld episode — nothing. We want an empty space that shows nothing of the woman in question nor anything of the world she walks around in. No sign of war, homelessness, cruelty or hunger. Just a benign representative of consumer plenitude.

The cover girl is uniformly anonymous with the exception of supermodels, who must tell us everything, from what cleanser they use to their stance on fur. The supermodel however is a celebrity and subject to a whole different kind of scrutiny. The cover girl represents our desire to be swathed in the unconditionally loving gaze of our primary infant carers. She can have one expression. She can smile.

No doubt Benita, eternally full of genuine smiles, has been given cause to frown from time to time, (perhaps by the A.B.C), and it shows. Better to wipe her than challenge the innocent minds of young children with the terrible and inadmissible truth that their carers might get tired and cranky and show it. At least Cheryl is back on the scene – I hope she raises an eyebrow and sneers at the cameras.

8.2.2000

Reporting on 9/11

2006-07-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

It was with an eerie sense of dejavu that kids at the local school reportedly watched news coverage of the strikes on Manhattan’s World Trade Centre. For they had seen it all before. The fireballs and the stampedes have featured in the Hollywood blockbuster First Strike (check name).

When I was their age I was similarly made aware of the symbolic importance of the twin towers to the American psyche when King Kong was gunned from their heights by helicopters, falling massively to the streets below. It was by scaling their heights that the amorous and misunderstood Kong exposed himself to American firepower, making himself a target by storming the sentinels of western economies, and by daring to hoist himself high over the human horizon.

Tragically, the horror of their symbolic destruction counts for little when faced with the sheer loss of human life. Reality takes unexpected turns – no one thought of the columns of engulfing dust, the heat and blinding smoke, the disorientation of the bereaved and terrified. And significantly, in the films no one thought that such destruction could be motivated by a blanket hate for the American people. It came from comets, tidal waves and martians.

George W. Bush would seem similarly disbelieving that there could be a source for such hatred, America was attacked, he said in his address to the nation, because it was a ‘beacon of freedom and opportunity’. The terrorism was motivated by antipathy for ‘democracy’, ‘civilisation’, ‘the free world’ and was as such simply ‘evil’ – a catch all for inexplicable atrocity.

But if Hollywood has so graphically visualised the attacks before, and we now watch them in disbelief and horror, but nevertheless with a peculiar sense of recognition, it is because somewhere we have been cognisant that being the worlds only superpower potentially has its costs.

There are reasons for this hate - base, indiscriminate and loathsome though it is. The wholesale slaughter of Iraqi soldiers as they retreated across the desert from Kuwait. The depleted uranium that Nato has left as its calling card there and in Bosnia, whose impact on those regions is still to unfold. The displacement and birth defects of the islanders on the Martial Islands. The charred bodies of the Branch Davidians, found after their compound had been torched by the FBI, the bones of the children broken through their own contortions after the compound was gassed.

The sanctions against Cuba and Iraq – and the estimated million infants who have died of treatable disease. The displacement of Indigenous Brazilians for deforestation by American interests and to service their gorging of beef products, 87% of which are controlled by four companies, in a population with epidemic and soaring obesity. The scuttling of Kyoto, admittedly, using the rational set by our own government, but also to settle the debt from the financing of Bush’s election campaign by major oil companies, not the least 2.3 million from Exxon Mobile. All the while America consumes 30% of the worlds resources, with less than 5% of the global population.

But perhaps most relevant to this tragedy (though we are still second guessing this), the unquestioned support successive American governments have given to the invasion, displacement, assassination and segregation of the Palestinian people.

Maintaining the ‘American way of life’, has destroyed lives, ways of life and species forever. But the mythology has provided a devastating rhetoric behind which is hidden a shameful record of disputed treaties – on war crimes, land mines, the execution of juveniles, arms control, test bans and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The accusation has emanated from more thoughtful quarters than fanatics and terrorists, that it is America that has in fact become a ‘rogue nation’, and its brutal history of colonisation, massacre and dispossession of native Americans not to mention slavery, suggests that its rhetoric of freedom is largely a discursive feat of myth making.
This ‘land of the free’ imprisons the highest proportion of its citizens in the world, and Bush himself, great defender of ‘freedom loving countries’ executed 152 of them, during his term as Texan governor.

The unthinkable suffering presently endured by the American people is so overwhelming, so devastating and causes all of us, including this writer, so much distress and heartbreak, that there is little space to make the qualifications above. But it is opportunistic of Bush and other western leaders to misuse this ghastly tragedy to consolidate a rhetoric of ‘freedom and liberty’ that is in fact indefensible on the American record. In spite of the devastation, terrorism is not the greatest threat to human civilisation. Global warming and the loss of biodiversity (believe it or not), famine, disease, dispossession and poverty pose the greatest threats to global security. These are inescapable facts asserted again and again by experts all over the world.

As we replay the images of the New York trade centre over and over again, desperately scanning for a way to react beyond helpless anguish and despair, we should take heart from the cues of Americans waiting to donate their own blood, and from the Americans about to die on those doomed flights who phoned their families to express love, not revenge and retribution.

The calls for war against an enemy produced through national boundaries and identity, yet not locatable within any are as futile as the billions Bush proposes to spend on his missile defence system, in the face of this kind of ‘low tech terrorism’. A ‘terrorist’, it seems, is a militant who commits atrocities against innocent people in the name of a defunct or disqualified national entity, as distinct from a ‘soldier’ who has been known to commit them in the name of an extant and recognised state. As the dust settles and our grief and sympathy deepen we can only justify and heed the calls to war by a questionable and unqualified rhetoric of ‘evil’ against ‘freedom’.

Censorship and the Female Body

2006-07-03T21:16:00.000-07:00

Nothing reveals the deceit of claims by the mainstream porn industry that it has 'liberated' women's bodies into cultural acceptance and thus brought us out from under the veil of Victorian prudery into unbounded pleasure, more so than the reaction women get when they show their bodies outside of the regimented, limited exhibition spaces of the sex industry.

During these past weeks our Premier, a man of considerable exposure, (much of which I would classify as highly offensive) has felt called upon to comment on the offensiveness of women breast feeding in public spaces. Given the widespread acceptance of Table Top Clubs (from which women spectators are discouraged) and the annual Sexpo at the spanking new Exhibition shed, one could begin to harbour the reasonable suspicion that mainstream porn and commodity culture have cornered something of a monopoly on the visual exposure of women's bodies. Perhaps a new double standard has emerged - women who show their bodies within a scenario of commodity exchange and a fraternity of male spectatorship are decorous, women who show their bodies outside of these new conventions of exposure are 'offensive'.

In February, ABC management initially censored the broadcasting, on Radio National's Art's Today program, of a forum on the Queer Aesthetic, held as part of the New Q exhibition at the hallowed National Gallery of Victoria. 'Pink bits' figured prominently in this incongruous cultural space, for during the forum Deborah Strutt and Maude Davey's prizewinning short film "My Cunt" was screened and discussed.

No doubt ABC management would also find incongruous, that atop some of the earliest and most pious churches in Europe - 16nth Century Irish churches - a carved woman squats deep into her open knees, holding her "vesica piscis" or vulva open for all to behold.

This figure, Shelia-na-gig, is a bit like the new feminist heroine, the breast feeding Mum in McDonalds. She is a representation which, similar to Maude Daveys and Deborah Strutt's film, diversifies the limited and commodified meanings now accrued to women's erotised corporeal zones in Western dominant culture. The meaning of her anatomy, as life giving, fierce and sacred, renders her the kind of woman ABC management and Premier Kennett would no doubt politely turn their eyes from. To them she might seem ironically a pornographic and perhaps obscene figure.

In the film Daveys, a reknowned and articulate performance artist delivers a complex monologue, which I thought effectively eschewed the increasingly circumscribed meaning of the contemporary western female genital, diversifying into realms which included wondering about her Grandmother's anatomy. It was characteristically confronting and thoughtful.

While it is unspeakably unfashionable to mention goddess culture in the same breath as feminism and Queer, I thought Shelia-na-gig had made a comeback, if only in the sense that her anatomy had shifted from explicit exposure to a motif in language. For Daveys explicitly refused to show her genitals in the film and yet the film explores the layers of meaning, misogynistic and experiential, of female genitals, critically reclaiming the word cunt from its derogatory usage.

The sad thing about poor Shelia-na-gig, is that she was defaced, or perhaps more accurately mutilated, by Victorian modesty. Perhaps not coincidentally this occured just as mass production and photographic technologies were recasting female nudity into the commodity icon it has become today. Its more recent use had been as a metaphor for liberation and a device of satire in the revolutionary movements that had swept across Europe.

It is only in this commodified form that female genitals appear in dominant culture. No longer a revered object of life giving force, a fearful object of power, it has been reduced by a regime of viewing that is pornographic and commodified. While I am neither asking for a return to worshipping the female body as 'the origin of the world', nor asking that we stop eroticising such a distinctly pleasurable site, I do think women's bodies should be allowed to be thought of as lived in by women and that women like Maude Daveys have every right to refer to it in whatever language they deem appropriate.

In this sense the decision of the ABC management to hold over broadcasting this discussion on Art's Today, not to allow women to propose new and different ideas of what it means to live as/with/because of our bodies to a "Queer" audience (that has already proved adept at reclaiming language from derogatory use as a deflection of precisely this kind of shaming) - this decision emanated from a pornographic imagination. This is an imagination that has colonised the meanings of the female body as exclusively a pornographic object and thus rendered it ironically unpalatable for all but "restricted" exhibition spaces, (notably ones controlled by, profited from and enjoyed largely by men).

One of the participating artists from the New Q exhibition, Deborah Kelly, has called the ABC's initial censorship an "aural infibulation" and it does indeed seem analogous to the longstanding cultural violation and inadmissibility of aspects of the female body - in spite of female genitals neither being seen in Strutt and Davey's film, nor able to be seen on radio.

Perhaps having just discovered that I am pregnant, and partaking shamelessly in Courbet's (also long banned) reverential depiction of the vulva as the Origin of the World, I am all the more offended by this partial but ongoing shaming of the feminine body. It seems to me since women live with our bodies, they are also ours to talk about and use in whatever way we chose. Perhaps the present monopoly of the visual and cultural presence of women's bodies by maintream porn and commodity culture would not be so objectionable, except when other definitions are censored because of an inability to think of female anatomy outside the terms that deem it obscene.

It seems ABC management has reenacted the defacing of Shelia, not out of Victorian prudery, but rather from being indebted to that underbelly of Victorian sexuality, which industrialised and commodified and confined the exhibition of feminine sexuality and thus its meanings to a fraternity of heterosexual visual access. For by relegating the broadcast of the monologue from "My Cunt" to a more appropriate time slot, this is the cultural space in which they left it.

If the ABC initially covered their ears and ours, to Maude Davey's prizewinning and internationally acclaimed film, then one can imagine even less them licking their fingers, as Hindus have done at the doors of their temples for centuries, to put in the Yoni of a figure closely resembling Shelia-na-gig, for luck. It seems over the centuries holes have been worn deep into these female genital fetishes from which more familiar icons such as the lucky horse shoe derive.

Perhaps if we allowed new ways to understand the female body, that kind of literal tactile interaction of defining it, taking place over centuries in Hindu temples, could be available to us all, metaphorically speaking. This openness of meaning could be part of our pleasure, or perhaps a show of reverence, or maybe a simple rite of indebtedness for us all. We might be suprised and find it a turn on or even more suprised and find its not. More importantly, it could mean any number of things about our bodies as yet unknown and unable to be thought of or articulated.

15.4.98

The Moon is High when Boys will be Boys

2006-07-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

You would think from the random street testimonials coming from young men themselves, that what they want to see more of in life is 'tits'. This unsolicited entreaty floating forth from passing cars and competing only in volume with their booming bass stereos, seemed to go hand in hand with this New Year's festivities.
Similar calls for feminine disrobing were infused with the kind of pro-feminist consciousness you would expect from young men of this generation: "More Pap Smears" I heard one fellow declare to anyone within ear shot - right on, women's health is clearly on their crowded political agenda.
At the Rock over the Falls concert a whole pack of blokes assembled under the skate ramp where a lone girl had bravely ventured where no girl has gone before. "Show us your tits" well over 300 of them chanted. She responded with a comradely wriggle at first but after a while, like half an hour, the insistently repeated chorus seemed only to cloak her in distinct discomfort.
If one of these fellows had been in her place, however, he would have been all too happy, from what I saw, to turn around and cheerfully drop his pants. The moon is high when Boys will be Boys. Mooning, or the more Australian 'dropping a brown eye', far excedes boys' desire for girls to show them their bozzies, hands down. Having seen more beer-engorged buttocks than I could count over the weekend, I am of the firm conviction that Boys Just Wanna Show Bum.
Now, exhibition spaces for bare breasts are highly regimented, even controlled in our 'liberated' culture. You don't see breasts lying around in parks dozing unperturbed as you do in Northern Europe. Here they are revealed within strict confines - beach, table top clubs, and the various advertising sites of commodity culture.
Mooning however, is expressely a boys own thing. Part of its game is to break through the accepted cultural locales of where bottoms are seen, which is pretty well everywhere. Its insignatory of celebration, of 'totally going sick'. Bottoms are naughty things to wave about in unlikely places, boys seem to have agreed, and the true cultural remark of the 'legend' who is accordingly 'huge' (though I found that more difficult to determine - unless they include 'the bulldog'). While the entreaties from boys for more breast visibility would suggest that they seek to liberate breasts from their ritualised and commodified exhibition spaces, dear lads, I suspect most boys would rather show their bums. By simply driving along the The Great Ocean Road to a rock festival I was involuntarily witness to the full spectrum of mooning activities.
Firstly there's the surfer's casual roadside genital towell down, invariably facing the van, knees out and bottom waggling to passing traffic. I saw reams of bottom, almost cheek to cheek all the way from Angelsea to Wye River. People say that stretch of road is among the most scenic in the world and I could only add, its truly startling at this time of year.
Then there's the random street moon, mostly making its appearance after dark, especially on New Years. I have to admire the cheekyness of these boys, targetting police patrols who couldn't keep up with those luminous, disorderly buttocks and must have decided to switch off their maglites and turn a blind eye.
Rock concert mooning is a logical extension of barely disguised pissing on anything upright, including passing crowds. I even heard one young man call out "Show us your piss". Just as I'd suspected, boy's scatological exhibitionism most certainly takes precedence over gathering in homosocial audiences for bosom gazing. And it is here that mooning comes into its own - it even includes stunts. Crowd surfing, for instance takes on new meaning when the pit hoists real surboards over their heads. The trick is to then stay on, pants down and doubled over for as long as possible.
Stunt mooning is an outstanding spectator sport that clearly merits consideration for inclusion in the Sydney Olympics. I mean, if we can include Aussie Crawl and syncronised swimming how can we leave out this worthy national pastime?
There are the Bum Puppets, a cabaret act that has two bums chatting and eating meat pies, and then there's Punk rocker's counter cultural mooning which involves lining the proscenium arch with audience bums, and all falling down, pants around their ankles, rutting.
What's it all about? Why don't girls moon? Why aren't we out there stretching the geographical bounds of our naked exposure like boys? Can we truly think of ourselves as libertated while still clinging to our G-Strings?
Mooning, as distinct from flashing, is thankfully not an indicator in police offender profiles of peodophilia. Its not about scaring lone kids walking home from school. Its not invested with some wanky sense of penile omnipresence - 'gee doesn't my enoooormous penis give you a dreadful fright', to which the most deflating reply was always, after discriminating scrutiny, 'well, (snicker) no'.
I can't say I've ever seen gay boys moon either, maybe its like stating the obvious; at least, the unashamedly eroticised bottom tends to appear in more nuanced fashion, and is hardly an insult. But it seems a touch defensive coming from hetero blokes, a bit like 'No Passeran!'. Maybe its another rite of deflection that all -hetro bloke have to undergo by way of saying, 'even though us being here together without girls might suggest we place undue emphasis, even desire on our single-sexdom, I just want to show you my bottom, to clarify our corporeal boundary lines, OK guys?'
Whatever the reason, bottoms are making a definite statement on behalf of the young man of today, 'bums 'r us', is the gendered identity declaration for the young aussie male. And who knows, maybe this generation will produce another larrikin Premier who commences press conferences with this Great Masculine Declaration of national identity - not to show us the moon, but rather his own appraisal of from whence the sun shines.

16.1.98

Lollita and Censorship

2006-07-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

Lolita: A Warning to Viewers.
(words)
Around the time when Jaws was released, not being a particularly empirically minded kid, I became too scared to swim in our backyard 3 foot 6 swimming pool. Silly enough, but even more senseless when you consider that to this day I have never seen Jaws. Rightfully, I had disqualified myself from any kind of response, rational or otherwise. But the impact of a film emanates from more than its production values, cast, direction and script.

Again and again we return to this question of censorship, suggesting we have yet to resolve the conflicting interests of commercial media, social responsibility and government intervention. In fact, the questions raised are unanswerable and to a certain extent what we are dealing with each time another scandal erupts is fear of the unknown. The complexity of identity and its relation to image and social meaning is simply beyond the scope of criminologists, spectator surveys, cultural critics and an array of lobbyists, from Family to Feminist.
In Lolita dissension surrounds the unknowable relationship between the incidence of child sexual abuse and its portrayal. Each of the arguments put forward betrays a dangerously vague and unrefined understanding of representation of any form, film or otherwise, in the workings of identity and society.
It is as though any contentious social issue is marked by the assumption that to make something visible or available is to promote and encourage its use. In truth, be it condoms, heroin or this film, the conditions of their exposure is more defining of their potential to do social harm.
The Office of Film and Literature Classification (our version of controlled conditions of availability) has given Lolita a R+ rating. This and the outcry surrounding its pending release will serve to increase its audience. They will also effect the way people view the film, making them watchful for whether it eroticises and romanticises child sexual abuse. It is precisely the encouragement of this critical viewing that can change the impact of this film from a damaging endorsement of child sexual abuse to inciting revulsion at the criminal victimisation of young girls through the coercive manipulations of abusive men.
The OFLC has viewed Lolita as already being a critical appraisal of paedophilia and the destructive impact of sexual abuse on young girls. It is their assessment that the intentions of the director are to expose the paedophile as a contemptible criminal. Though for this particular director the supposed ambiguity of women’s consent constitutes a theme in his films. But the problem remains, whatever his intentions and in spite of the scandal bolstering an audience attuned to the consequences of how the subject matter is treated, no guarantees can be made on how it will be viewed by men who actively look for romanticism of their paedophilia.
But such men needn’t look to notorious scandals for endorsement. One of the more dangerous aspects of this film is that it has monopolised the outrage we should be directing at a plethora of material, which eroticises child sexual abuse. In 1991, while counselling at the Bendigo Sexual Assault Centre I bought the pulp novel Insatiable Masochist from the local porn shop. A typical passage reads: “He liked the idea of turning his beautiful daughter into his sex toy” or “She knew that allowing a man to violate her in this way was part of being a good lover even if it did hurt a lot”. The passages that describe her rape and sexual torture are harrowingly explicit about her sensations of pain, bleeding, screaming, and about the pleasure she takes, which serves as a justification for the sheer sadism of her father, and ultimately the reader. I was so sickened I formed the Coalition against Sexual Violence Propaganda.
But explicitness should not be the focus of our concern. A film scene can be more justifying and mythologising of rape in the way it is joked about around a family dinner table than an explicit but critical depiction of rape. The late Stanley Kubrick’s film is insidious in its casting of Lolita as manipulative and as using the helpless sexual entrancement of Humbert as her means of power over him, which she then uses competitively against her oppressive, pathetic mother. Her later rejection of him seems more a callous disregard of his genuine ‘love’ for her, than her refusal to be the object of his obsession.
The liberal balancing act between social freedom and social harm remains at the heart of the debate - in spite of the daily evidence that harm of any kind, social or environmental, no longer has any bearing against the perpetually empty promises of economy and jobs. What is lost in the quest for empirical proof of cause in the portrayal of criminal acts is that any representation constructs social meaning which can grant or take power away. It is not only the incitement of paedophilia that could be at issue, but the delegitimising of victim’s pain, or its decriminalising in the eyes of the wider community.
Child sexual assault is epidemic in the west, and its individual and social damage warrants that any media dealing with the subject should be shown under special conditions. The dynamics of child sexual abuse, who its perpetrators and victims tend to be, how prevalent it is, and its individual and social impact should be screened as a notice before the film, in a similar format to the viewer warnings that precede television programs that include violence, atrocities or animal slaughter.
If the conventions in viewing Hollywood film are of consumption of entertainment, this should be counteracted by the encouragement to view any portrayal of child sexual abuse with a circumspect and vigilant eye.

15.3.99

Menstrual Maenads

2006-07-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

BLOODY TOUGH GRRLS
(750 words)

That green eyed Libra Jungle Grrl - she’s one tough chick. Her nails are switch blades, not some cutesy pastel accessory. She’s lured some boy with corrugated abdominals into her growly jungle den-pad. She’s gonna do him, because she’s imbued with power, with tiger tampon Menstrual Menace.

Like that noir Panty Liner Blonde. She soaks up her victim’s blood with her ready supply of sanitary napkins. Who says only women bleed. She’s outside the law not because she bleeds - once the rationale for our bodily exclusion from capital P Patriarchy - but because she makes men bleed, and to death no less. We’ll have none of that woosie-weepy, curl-up-with-a-good-book, pikerism. If you’re going to bleed you might as well have dead men to show for it.

When tampon and pad ads hit the telly screen I did that naive thing that late twentieth century popular culture seems premised on. I thought visibility = cultural presence = cultural participation. Here was the thing all girls would hate to see mentioned on the back of their dresses being blasted in front of their brother and his mates. We could Whisper out loud, we were Libra-rated.

Menstruation was our luminary. We girls were on the road to a supermarket aisle of brash attention seeking packing all to ourselves. None of this behind the counter, blushing at the check out bashfullness for us. It was the latest commodity feminist triumph. Its exposure guaranteed our Freedom. Now that our menstrual cycles were freely advertised we could frolic along the beach, ride horses bare back, fool cops and trap and kill grown men. When we bled we could rush the cultural gates like St Trinian’s, roaring Stay Free.

In fact, the bleeding girl is nothing new to market exposure. In 1920s women’s magazines she played an awful lot of golf in her ‘Sanitary Lingerie’ with rubber panelling that did not ‘silhouette’. She was ‘The Modern Woman’, said Menex in 1929, precisely because could ‘fling herself light-heartedly into the whirl of life – dance, motor, play tennis in the sheerest of frocks with no fear of embarrassment’. She was ‘up to the minute’ because she depended on the scientific management of her wayward bodily systems to sanitise, deodorise and regulate her feminine mysteries safely within the confidence of women.

The contemporary Menstrual Menace - nothing but a revamped version of the age old ‘curse’ - still works off the same paradox - how to promise women discretion, ‘protection’ and ‘freedom’ from embarrassment through its inverse, namely market exposure. The farcical part is that in trying to associate with the latest girlish fad, from horseriding to preying on men, these ads still deny that women bleed and that their products are designed to conceal and manage blood.

Menstrual products, for all their brazen cheek, still promise the masking of the inadmissible, namely the bleeding feminine body. Now the contemporary menstruating woman is brash, not at bleeding, but at the ways in which she hides the fact that she bleeds. If the Panty Liner Blonde conceals blood, its because it would incriminate her. Concealing blood takes the ingenuity and agency that she derives from commodity choice. Those men who would judge and police her for allowing blood to seep and show, she meets them with a surly, smug glare. She’s got her pads. She’s clean. We’ve got nothing on that bloody scary Grrl.

Throughout this century the menstruating girl has assumed the guise of the dominant type of womanhood, who not coincidentally has the most consuming power - be she modern girl, housewife or liberated teen. Since the menstruating woman leapt scandalously out of the pages of women’s mags to let men into her confidence, the cat’s out of the bag and she’s vengefully eating boys for breakfast.

This says nothing about our self-protection, freedom, liberation or how much we’ve got it over men, cops or stale older women who hire us to nanny their spoilt dogs. It seems to say more about the cardinal and ageless rule that women must go on cleaning up, perhaps because we are essentially the messy ones. It seems the blood of corpses, dog’s piss and menstrual flow have similar cultural standing. The imperative of women’s bodily self-regulation and concealment remain the same, only trussed up in the guise of the latest consumer feminine type, namely the one most likely to spend bags of money – which is why the feral type, for example, will never cut it as a Bloody Tough Grrl.

25.2.1999

Leunig and Maternal Repudiation

2006-07-03T21:11:00.001-07:00

So now Mothers are sows? That’s it Mr Leunig. I’ve taken your Mr Pajama letters from the toilet wall, your reconciliation jibes from the street-facing window, your Mr Curly farm scenes from the most hallowed position on the fridge. You have torn it with this feminist.

When I was flooded with e-mails from rankled feminist comrades after your dejected baby first appeared, alone with his confused and self-depreciating thoughts in the child-care cot, I stuck my neck out. I said, yes, but he’s drawn a new-born here, and maybe he’s having a go at putting brand new babies in big centres. And really, did you put your new-born into care if you could help it?

When I bothered to read the Bettina Arndt’s defence of your ‘savage attacks’ on working mothers I found my self turning the various conflicting arguments over in my mind. I was more than a little taken aback to find Ardnt had included opposing voices at all, given that this is generally a less efficient way to grind the eternally blunt anti-feminist axe. But I did feel the conflict of my experiences as a stay-at-home/work-at-home Mother with my pre-Mothering ideals.

For instance, are Mothers and Fathers interchangeable as parents? Not for me and my kid. Indeed, when she was first on the scene, her Daddy endeavoured to meet her needs to give me a bit of respite. But then, and still mostly now, she not only wanted me, but I needed to meet her needs. It wasn’t about rationally knowing I had a responsibility to her either, it was more like being compelled on a cellular level to hold her when she cried. I got some idea why we don’t hear from the mothers of the stolen generation. It seems to me Mothers need their babies to survive too. The suffering inflicted on those women might be akin to madness, in that it has no sensible register in our language or ways of thinking. Not while some of us can still find ways to sensibly state it was for the best. Their pain, I am guessing, is unspeakable, and so Mr Howard’s real crime is to play with words.

Because nothing, Mr Leunig, articulates the experience of mothering. From Freud, to assimilation policy, to your cartoons mothers and our experiences and our histories and our diversities and the emotional landscapes we daily occupy are simply not present to public discourse. When it comes to the purported collapse of the public and private realms the reality of mothering remains ensconced in the home. We’re only allowed out, it sometimes seems, when we dress up as childless. You may think our duty sacred, most mothers I know have been made to feel their world and experiences are something to be ashamed of. Where was your cartoon showing the mother back at her desk craving for her child, her breasts leaking over her spread sheets? Have you tried to imagine her feelings? Has it occurred to you that not allowing a mother the time with her child that she needs for her own wellbeing might be a contravention of her rights too?

Because I know many such mother’s Mr Leunig, who have not had a choice about leaving their young babies in full-time care. They are not away from their babies because their work has so much meaning to them they selfishly prefer to be away. They are there because of swine – speaking of pigs – who promised to support them and didn’t, who are legislating flexible workplaces out of reach, and who reply to their repeated pleas to go part-time with ‘sorry, that was not their job description’, as though you can have a baby and everything remain unchanged. Well, maybe if you have a wife, which is essentially what we mother’s suffer from – being wives rather than having them. I think you ought to be aware Mr Leunig that you made most of those women feel worse than they already were.

And this was about as mean as right to lifers beleaguering women about to go into abortion clinics with pictures of torn asunder foetuses. As though someone should tell these women, who are too heartless and braindead to figure it out for themselves, that there’s more to having an abortion than enacting a feminist ideal. Well, derr. Being sensate beings too I reckon some women might have had that figured. I reckon those women might have felt just a little torn about the circumstances of their lives – and gee, I wonder if it might not have been their working lives – that made having their child impossible. But what do we know about how they feel? What do we really know about the world of mothers?

Let me tell you a little about being a stay-at-home mother – and of course I should be aware that I’m one of the lucky ones who had a choice. Choice? This is another one of those words that slips unnoticed into the nappy bucket somewhere around the second week of your child’s life. It doesn’t figure, as far as I can tell, in the lives of mothers. Let me tell you about all those virtuous stay-at-home mummies who are actually on happy drugs. About the post-natally depressed mothers who throw their vacuum cleaners into the front-yard and get told that its hormones they’re suffering from.

They suffer not from loneliness and isolation and doing endlessly pointless things all day that no-one acknowledges and that get undone immediately, over and over until your understandings of what is permanent and impermanent, complete and incomplete, chaos and order get irrevocably scrambled. And why do they not suffer from these things? Because at home alone with a baby, no one hears you scream. Not even your baby, because you do it quietly in your head while calmly reading Slinky Malinky. And when you go outside you quickly learn that your reality must not enter into the ‘real’ world, but remain behind closed doors. This is how ‘Mother’ and Worker’ are kept mutually exclusive categories. And how men like you lose any sense of what it might be like to be a mother – invisible at home or disguised at work.

8.6.2000

Footballers and Rape

2006-07-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

In a League of Their Own

In the tawdry pile of sexual misdemeanours by footballers, recently come to light, there are two exchanges that will be hard for the AFL to erase from memory, in spite of expensive campaigns to win back women supporters. As the rape allegations surfaced the Canterbury football club was asked to verify whether the club had orchestrated gang-bangs with prostitutes to promote team bonding. In 2002 Wayne Carey had consensual sex with his vice captain’s wife. Carey resigned from North Melbourne in disgrace and his career was in doubt for the remainder of the season.
These consensual trysts are small fries against rape allegations. But they will stick in the AFL craw because they are instances of the same unwritten code. In male only organisations women become sexually exchanged between members as a means to affirm and express that membership. Carey transgressed that code by sexually possessing a woman who belonged to another member. To some extent his flouting of this code had more serious consequences than if he’d been accused of rape, which is within the code.
This code is not particular to football clubs. It can be found in any homosocial organization that is built on the exclusion of women. It can recruit some young men into a distinct sexual identity: a sexuality in league, in which men perform sexual acts in each others’ company – that is, with each other – via the medium of a woman’s body. I recent studies Australia has the dubious distinction of being the only country in which men visit prostititutes in groups and have sex in each others company.
Historically, homosocial organizations have included the Catholic church, the armed forces, the private business sector and government and the elite private boys’ schools that supply them. All have histories of sexual abuse of women and children. Some include the bastardisation of young men who resist recruitment into leaguesexuality. Statistically, studies have found a correlation between sexual assault and the lack of women’s participation in decision-making and positions of authority. Countries with no or few women in positions of government, for instance, are known to have higher incidences of sexual assault.
The privilege and authority of these organisations has gained legitimacy over time through the exclusion of women. Their anachronism today has been exposed in their responses to sexual assault. The football industry is going through the same upheavals the legal fraternity, the catholic church, the army, and many other ‘male bastions’ have variously negotiated. What none of them have seriously considered however, is how important women are in their identity as organisations: how the sexual exchange of women in fact organises the masculine identity of these ‘male bastions’. Nor have they considered how crucially important that exchange of women is in deflecting the uncomfortable association of homosociality with homosexuality.
The occasional admission of women into these fraternities for ritualised sexual acts, with prostitutes, in gang-bangs or rape scenarios, is how homosocial organizations enforce and guarantee their identity as heterosexual. The woman in question represents the feminine and has to be both repudiated and desired at the same time. She is positioned as central to the sex act, in fact the organising feature of homosocial sex is that men are fucking in each others’ company, which is a short leap from, together. The ambivalence about her very presence, not to mention about these men having sex together, makes her vulnerable to misogynistic derision and violence.
Sexual assault allegations strike at the core of the homosocial order – it’s no small wonder they’re so often mishandled. Unlike drink driving or drug abuse, rape unmasks the organising principle of homosociality: the operational exclusion and the sexual exchange of women between its members.
The kudos that comes with membership is used to exploit victims: the moral authority of the priest, the weaponry of the soldier, the celebrity of the footballer. The closing of ranks in the face of rape allegations shows up the real game as being men’s hierarchical relation with each other, and the game will go on. Not one charge of rape has been brought against a AFL footballer in twenty years. Mother’s day bonanza’s notwithstanding The Footy Show will never include women as anything more than bystanders, fans, or props for the real action between Newman and MacQuire. The AFL responded to calls to change its gender culture by launching a range of women’s lingerie in club’s colours, to coincide with Women’s Week. Female Board Members from Collingwood and Carlton criticised the launch describing it as inappropriate.
If the AFL is genuine about a culture of respect for women it needs to include more women in the decision-making of the league, drawing on years of voluntary labour and grassroots knowledge of the game. If it fails the AFL faces the prospect of women supporters and volunteers telling them, ‘you’re on your own boys. Really’.

Nicole Kidman and the Commodity Star

2006-07-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview, Ali MacGraw said of her sudden rise to fame on the release of Love Story, that every year has its girl and in 1970 she was it. Arguably things move a little faster in the film industry now and its seems more the case that every month has its girl. Nicole Kidman was certainly that in xxxx of last year around the release of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. And no doubt we will experience another blitz of Kidman exposure when she reappears in Baz Lurman’s much anticipated Moulin Rouge.

Needless to say, it is contradictory to make any comment about the omnipresence of Nicole Kidman surrounding the release of Kubricks’ Eyes Wide Shut because you simply add to the very phenomena you seek to understand. But Kidman’s exposure described something beyond national pride that she had hit the big time – she did that years ago. It was in fact formulaic of the use of the commodity star in the marketing of films. And the commodity star is invariably a woman. Why does this go without saying? How has it come to seem natural and inevitable?

Before the Kidman blitz swung into action I’d found myself wondering where she had been. I’d made no effort to know about Kidman, but I had at the very least been aware of her presence, like a neighbour, in supermarket aisles and doctor’s waiting rooms. Her celebrity had taken on the familiar proximity of shared locale and of knowing, again like a neighbour, quite by accident and without intention, details of her marriage, her adopted children, and visits to her family.

Against the obvious fact that I didn’t in fact know her, but only representations of her - I nevertheless found I quite liked her. She seemed to have a bit of grit, and I discovered in ‘To Die For’ she is no fluffy-pants whose fortune has been made from her face alone. As an actress she is a force to contend with.

But when our most revered current affairs anchorman, Kerry O’Brien, blushed beetroot during an interview over some inexplicable banter concerning whether you do or don’t wear clothes when having sex, it wasn’t just his embarrassment that became obvious. There was more to the Kidman phenomenon. What we were witnessing – and none of us can claim to have been impartial observers – was the manufacturing of a consensus of desire and visual enthrallment such as is requisite to the status of the commodity star.

Happily for marketing, the beauty of the female commodity star is a fascination that crosses the gender divide – in the way that male commodity stars cannot. Men stars stall before the desiring gaze of women and become obsolete objects to the male market. They threaten to ‘contaminate’ the heterosexual man’s look with homosexual pleasure, when really they simply make evident that this is in fact part of the male cinema goer’s covert pleasure, just as much as looking at sexualised women is part of heterosexual women’s covert pleasure. Heterosexual spectators get to look without being obliged to touch, or alter their self-conception as straight.

With all respect to Kidman as an intelligent, talented woman in her own right, she is a commodity-star and her visual omnipresence was a marketing effect. The desire to see more of Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut was manufactured by her careful placement right under our noses as we payed for the papers and groceries and filled the petrol tank – that is, as we moved through the cultural contours of our daily lives. She was unavoidable.

The diversity and sheer volume of images primed our pleasure in the expectation that Kidman could appear in various guises – from Edwardian society beauty, to Rock and Roll nymphette, to Hollywood glamour wife. Off screen her assumption of so many roles locked in our perception that as an image she could not be pinned down. Her image exerted the fascination of unpredictability, and ultimately, in spite of all we knew, unknowability. This is the fascination and function of the commodity star.

The reason we seek to know about the real lives of celebrities – as though the media through which we find out about them are any less representations than the films they appear in – is because since the inception of the camera we have doubted its veracity. This sits oddly against the intensity of emotion and fascination we invest in photographs and films. We are unnerved by the paradox that although ‘the camera does not lie’, it is put to the uses of fiction. We admire its effects and art so well we want to believe in them as truths.

Which is where the commodity star plays her most important role. She is the central focus of the dominant cinema world because she alone can place beyond doubt the veracity of the image as reproduced by the camera, and she does this with one extraordinarily simple accomplishment. She is beautiful, not just as an effect of the camera, but really. It is for this reason – our dubious relation with one of the most important instruments of the twentieth century – that we invest so much in the beauty of the commodity star. She affirms not some natural need to look at beautiful women, but the truth of the modern image as reproduced by the camera. She reassures our dependence on this instrument in the development of our own truths and understandings.

We become upset when the beauty of the commodity star becomes an effect of other interventions, such as make up and lighting. We feel duped as though she cheated us, when all she has done is make obvious that her beauty is an effect and a visual device. But interestingly, we forgive the cosmetically altered commodity-star, because it is not the camera that has tricked us. She remains ‘enhanced’ on and off screen.

Because feminine beauty carries so much cultural baggage, accruing meanings of exoticism, the natural, even the artificial, it has always been in the service of highly invested social meaning. What Kidman made essential during the marketing of Eyes Wide Shut was the ‘truth’ of feminine beauty. But she did this in the service of the cinema, which has from its inception battled to suspend our disbelief in its fictions in order to secure our faith that it tells human truths. We remain enthralled in the commodity star’s beauty as a guarantee of the camera’s truth. Yet we keep looking, hungry for the scandal rags’ revelations of ‘Stars Without Their Makeup’ to reassure ourselves, via the face of feminine beauty, that the camera does not lie.

25.11.00.

Infertility and the Culpable Modern Woman

2006-07-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

Infertility and the Culpable Modern Woman.

The reproductive and biology unit at the Royal Women’s Hospital peers through dusty windows over a rooftop building site, and way out, in the blue haze that envelopes the eucalypt landscape, you can see Mt Sugarloaf, softly wrapped on the farthest horizon. In the waiting room sits a diverse array of women and their partners, looking far out, seeming to ponder why their yearning for a softly wrapped bundle has become so distant and out of reach.

In our first interview with the obstetrician, I explained that I was just completing an 8 year PhD. Our two year old daughter was bouncing around the room displaying her usual irrepressible exuberance. The obstetrician surveyed the scene and shook his head. Accustomed to being chastised, by family, friends, neighbours and health professionals - for worrying too much about not falling pregnant in a year, for being too busy, too stressed, for wanting it too much, for concentrating on it too much, for not relaxing about it, for not accepting the karmic fate and timing of the spirit that would choose to enter me, for working too hard and exhausting myself, and so on ad nauseam - I braced for another lecture.

This particular obstetrician, however, was cut in a different mould, for which I was grateful and relieved. He simply informed me of the avenues I could pursue through their service. Perhaps years of experience in infertility had led him to identify its pervasive myths, and like me, to throw them out with the bathwater.

Infertility or ‘sub-fertility’ is a common enough experience for nearly everyone to be the ready custodian of a story from a sister, aunt, cousin, friend, colleague, etc. Being a culture enthralled by solution, these are stories which always come with clear narrative closure, namely, a baby. Sadly, this is of poor comfort if, despite your best efforts, that outcome remains elusive for you. Increasingly you question why there has been no solution for you, and of course, under the mythologising that surrounds infertility, it gets back to you and something you are either doing wrong, doing too much of, or not doing at all.

‘You’re never going to get pregnant until you stop thinking about it so much’, was one blunt response when I expressed frustration at the monthly cycle of mounting hope, then disappointment and grief. ‘Put it out of your mind for a couple of months’, my GP told me. Most of the myths fall into this category – the problem with women who can’t get pregnant is not in their reproductive systems, but in what’s going on in their minds. What we need to do, somehow, is do less and care less.

The solution-oriented stories come think and fast on this score, ‘I fell pregnant the day after I resigned from the job I hated – and I had one scarred fallopian tube that barely functioned’; ‘my daughter had just put her name down for adoption, after trying for 9 years, and that week found she was pregnant’; ‘we took a month off, stopped taking my temperature and just had a rest, and that’s when I conceived’. These are all true stories. They enter the realm of myth, however, when it is assumed that what has been true for one couple, can have universal truth for all.

These are also anecdotes told by people wanting to comfort, they are deeply personal offerings of hope in the spirit of sympathy and care. But the hope being offered is that infertile women do have some control over the situation, we need to engage our minds in a series of tricks that I personally found impossible; to put our bodies out of our minds, to do less in our lives, want less, be less affected by the monthly ‘negative’ or ‘failed’ pregnancy tests.

I began to wonder what assumptions about women, our relationships to our bodies, and mothering were being harboured in these myths. When a Chinese herbalist gently reproached me for having too much on my plate, I let the needle sink, released my breath and replied, ‘you tell me when women haven’t had too much on their plates?’

I thought about women conceiving in war zones, with family members missing, having witnessed unspeakable atrocities, and I questioned whether stress was really such an effective contraception. I recalled reading the desperate letters women wrote to birth control advocate Marie Stopes in the 1920s, pleading for advice having conceived more children than they could feed, who had narrowly escaped death in labour and suffered the repeated deaths of their babies. I thought of our great-grandmothers bearing 6, 8, 12 children and daily cooking and washing without ‘labour-saving devices’, and I questioned whether despair and exhaustion were so effective at inhibiting ovulation.

I had tried and failed to put my body out of my mind. Like many women, I knew about when I ovulated – it hurt like hell. But even when I stopped marking the calendar, I found I was nevertheless very aware of my cycle, it not being dissociated from mood, desire for certain foods and sex, and other less pleasurable corporeal realities, like sore breasts. I found I could not ignore my body. While bewildered at first from losing faith in the foundational idea that my body was something I directed from my mind, it eventually ceased to be a recalcitrant, disobedient territory that I inhabited. I found instead that my body was my mind.

I tried and failed to ‘do less’. The very idea was laughable. Could I leave my toddler to hang upside down over the table edge while I lounged on the couch? Could I not get her lunch, nor make sure she had enough pants, nor empty her potties? My daughter holds workshops with her comrades at creche, I am still convinced, devising devious ways to ensure she is the centre of my attention and the purpose for my every expenditure of energy. When I sat down to write the final words of acknowledgment for my thesis, she was thrashing next to me on the floor, screeching, ‘take off de glasses, Mummy!’. I was already cornered and fully occupied by motherhood, I reasoned. Regressing to chewing cuds in a paddock, with nary an complicated thought, nor a wayward gesture in the direction of having meaningful work of my own was not going to make me any more fertile.

I listened too to tragic life stories, and soon realised that most people feel thwarted by something uncontrollable that they had once believed had been a matter of self-determination. While there were some important lessons there, they did not offer much solace beyond feeling sad for them, as well as sad for me.

It was only women who had been unable to conceive after trying for years, or who were undergoing IVF, and who continued to live with that sense of not knowing, who offered ways to think about it that were helpful. One said, ‘it is completely out of my hands, there is nothing I can do about it, and I try not to blame myself, or to find reasons why’. Another said, ‘I’ve had to learn to just accept that it might never happen, and to look for the blessings in my life’. Simple, terribly painful, but most importantly, not blaming of the woman herself.

I decided to look for answers that went beyond the accusation that I was too modern, greedy and complicated. I booked in for a laparoscopy. Reproductive choice, I was discovering, covered a wide spectrum that extended from abortion to accessing assisted fertilisation. The findings of the laparoscopy and the lessons of my own body were in the end the most confronting ‘truths’ that I had to deal with. It seemed I had suffered an ectopic haemorrhage 9 years ago. Two sections of one tube were lost, one section from rupture, another from cut off blood supply from where the fetus had lodged and died. At the time, I thought I’d pulled a muscle, and while the pain was severe I had staggered off to bed to see how I’d feel in the morning. My obstetrician told me that generally, without intervention and surgery, women bleed to death. I was lucky to wake up alive. I was left with one working fallopian tube. And in the end I conceived immediately after the laparoscopy, but with an egg released from the side which had no way to convey it to my partner’s sperm. Technically this can’t happen. At the reproductive and biology unit the nurses have learnt to shrug. ‘There’s no accounting for eggs’ they told me. After a year of ‘sub-fertility’ I could only concur in amazement.

The baby was discovered while I was being scanned in order to ‘track my cycle’. The nurse said, ‘I’ll just get your landmarks’, pulled up short and said, ‘oh … there’s something in your uterus’. By this time I had lost so much faith I actually asked, ‘What could it be?’ Not even 4 months of morning sickness and passing out convinced me I was really pregnant. Not until the baby took to kick boxing my insides did I really believe it was there. Like many of the 5% of women who have trouble conceiving I continue to be apprehensive about the baby’s health and to feel wary that something is wrong.

My solution was in the order of conventional of narrative closure and we are ecstatic and humbled. And yet while I went looking for an empirical reason, I conceived in a manner that no doctor can explain. Certainly the ‘reasons’ for infertility should not be located within women’s levels of stress, work or excessive desire for children. And there is no natural justice waiting to grant the gift of conception when women learn to relax, accept fate, be less modern, or to have faith in the mysterious workings of their own bodies.

Life is random and while this is sometimes unbearably painful to cope with, it is not a matter of culpability. In the end it is beyond all measures of reasoning, be they empirical or mythological.

31.8.01

The Hijab and Western Feminism

2006-07-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

Myopic Feminists and the Hijab

In 1929 a cartoon appeared in Aussie magazine that showed a young woman stepping off a gutter. As she raised her skirts she realised with pleasure that she had drawn the attention of everyone on the street. The cartoon was captioned, ‘How she got the notion to shorten her skirts’ and it highlighted that women’s public visibility was becoming central to their sense of being liberated and therefore modern.

Without dress reform women could not take up the pleasures of new forms of mobility and independence. Raising one’s skirts meant women could stride about the streets without fear of tangling themselves up in voluminous material, nor of collecting disease-dealing dirt in their hems. Dress liberation was so called because it meant women could mount bicycles, ride trams to work and yes, flash their ankles.

The one great step forward for womankind was undoubtedly across the domestic threshold and feminists have defended our right to unchaperoned mobility and visibility ever since. Women dismissed warnings about bicycle riding disturbing their reproductive organs. They defied council regulations around Melbourne’s bay by displaying ‘bare limbs’ on our beaches. They resisted harassment and assaults through self-defense training and lobbying to reform rape laws.

Public presence and the visibility that goes with it means an awful lot to western women. It represents our economic independence, sexual agency and political participation. If all women weren’t convinced by feminist marches to ‘reclaim the streets’ they literally bought into the association of public visibility with freedom from domestic constraint, through advertising for sanitary napkins, pantihose, and all manner of women’s sundries. Running a distracted man up a lamp post became a vindication of women’s sexual power and freedom. Celebrity is the pinnacle of cultural legitimacy.

But after a century of struggle for freedom of expression that included discarding the bra, western women have called for banning the hijab in schools. They have developed, it would seem, a rather delimited view of what public visibility might mean to different women. The hijab is a challenge to the view of liberated visibility and freedom of self-expression unfettered by ‘the male gaze’. The possibility that covering up is not necessarily a backward step almost fails to compute.

I’m not in a position to speculate on what it might mean to wear the hijab. Apart from wrapping my head in a veil as an undergraduate, purely for glamour, I have not worn the veil as a religious observance and therefore have no understanding of its associations and experiences. I can only guess that while it may have its origins in deflecting men’s lust, it has come to mean a whole lot more for Muslim women.

Lipstick is obviously a very different matter to the duty of a religious observance such as wearing the veil. Yet it was also once said to defer to men’s desire. Within the community of women I’m part of, lipstick can represent stepping out together, work paint, self-expression, or making a mark. Like lots of women, I feel more comfortable, even paradoxically more myself, in lipstick. It’s my public face, my morning ritual, my mark-of-Mummy at school assembly. I may have inadvertently eaten kilos of the toxic stuff, but I negotiate all kinds of contradictory aspects of lipstick with my own desires and needs. That’s because I’m human. And lipstick may have any number of associations for different men, but frankly, that’s not my problem.

As a western feminist who grew up under the Australian ideal of the outdoors girl, with her exposed sun-kissed skin and wind-swept locks, I respond to the hijab in contradictory ways. I’ve actively campaigned to debunk myths around rape that hold women’s sexual provocation responsible for men’s violence. But I also found it a relief to hit my later 30s and come out from under the scrutinizing gaze that many men level at young women in public. I live in an explicit culture that uses images of women to draw constant attention to men’s sexual needs, their expression, satisfaction or control. With two little girls now in tow I get resentful for them. And I sometimes wonder if the male psyche isn’t just a little infantilised by the reminders of their sexual responses having to wallpaper every cultural surface. Oooh, oooh, it all seems to say, this is about my penis, it’s very important, don’t let it out of your mind for one second.

Any cultural or religious practice that seems to give all care and take all responsibility for men’s sexual responses raises my hackles. I stopped being a catholic because the Marionite myth of sexual purity seemed an untenable moral burden on women – and nobody ever asked of the immaculate conception, How was it for you God?

But even if the insistent and constant reminder of male sexual needs could be traced to cultural practices as contradictory as page three girls and covering up for modesty, that would not account for the understandings that Muslim women have created for themselves, amongst themselves about the hijab. Anymore than it can account for why women like myself adopted lipstick, once the stigmata of the bimbo, into our daily appearance.

As for my own responses to the hijab, they are certain to have their origin in longstanding and deeply held beliefs about women’s public visibility and its associated freedoms, and about male sexuality and its continued failure to take responsibility for itself—oh, and until I’m listening to Muslim women, my responses have their origin in ignorance. Frankly that should not be Muslim women’s problem.

The Heterosexual Scene

2006-07-03T21:07:00.000-07:00

Scene 1: Exclusion.
Melbourne tram. Early evening.
A woman is travelling to meet her lover. She is dressed in a polka dot dress, lipstick, a string of pearls, and sling-back pumps. Seeing her alone and reading from her appearance that she has gone to some effort, a group of young men take it upon themselves to pass judgement. ‘You Fucken’ Leso’, they remark as she stands to disembark. The woman turns to the group and asks with mock amazement, ‘How on earth did you guess?’

‘Outing’ women on public transport is not, in my extensive experience, the most preferred strategy adopted by aggressive men to threaten women. Unable to see past the ironic appropriations of Lesbian Chic these young men were remarking upon this woman’s heterosexuality, a heterosexuality that goes without saying – as everyone’s does. By calling her a lesbian they meant to mark her as a visual anomaly in the heterosexual scene. They stated uncategorically two things: firstly, that she was undesirable to them by their standards and therefore she should be excluded, (an inverse ‘outing’) from this scene and secondly, that this heterosexual scene is the dominant and only legitimate scene and one must appear in it within its visual conventions.

This ‘outing’ would not be so dire a banishment except that it is not generally felt that we move through diverse visual scenes in which we take on and emphasise different aspects of our identities – office worker, family member, clubbing fiend and so on. It is generally felt that we inhabit one perceptual horizon, and that if you fail to appear within the normative requirements of that scene, if you are aboriginal, homeless, lesbian, disabled, fat or hairy, you will be cast as a visual derelict within it. You will become located within the twin, contradictory sites of invisibility, only to gain visibility insofar as it describes your status as ‘normally’ outside the dominant scene. Ernie Dingo’s visibility is constantly qualified by the fact of his aboriginality, that is, by his usual status as unseen. He is always already visible as aboriginal. Heterosexual white men on the other hand are never visible principally as these things. They can assume a variety of mantles and guises, usually in terms of what they do, rather than who they are.

There are in fact two common streams in the verbal public harassment of women, both of which are about making explicit their heterosexuality. Firstly, there is threatening to enact a right of access to that sexual status, ie, ‘sit on face, suck my cock, you whore, you slut, you mole’, etc ad nauseam. Secondly, there is the passing of judgement that a woman has failed to successfully appear as heterosexual, that is, as visually appealing to the abusers, ie, ‘you dog, you leso’, and in one recently spotted bumper sticker, ‘Fat Girls: Shoot ‘em, Don’t Root ‘em’.

In both scenarios the cultural contours of heterosexuality are delineated. It is assumed and invisible, yet it is almost obsessively remarked upon, particularly by men about women. It cannot be let be, it must be brought up, remembered, and reinstated at every turn. It invests men and women with variable power. It is a means of cultural inclusion and exclusion. And most importantly to this piece, it is enacted at the level of the eye.

Heterosexuality is predominantly a visual practice. In terms of how it is invested with power and how it has cultural meaning and presence, it has far less to do with fucking than it does with looking. Arguably, fucking is such a pleasure because it’s a relief to hand heterosexuality over, so to speak, to other senses. It seems to loom closer and larger in the eyes of lovers until their eyes water and go out of focus from an excess of looking and they reach for each other, finally, with mouths and skin. Except in the instances of sexual harassment, and maybe ‘talking dirty’, heterosexuality is rarely spoken either. In fact in the process of writing this piece, as subject matter, it kept evading and slipping from my grasp, like an over lubricated dick, as though part of the very definition or operation of heterosexuality is that it is unmentionable. Like power itself, it loses its effectiveness when unmasked, exposed or named.

But it is at the level of the eye, and the modern prosthesis of the eye, namely the reproduced image, that heterosexuality is granted its status as everywhere to be seen and as thus ‘going without saying’. It is by its constant visual presence that is has become and remains the dominant scene. If modernity has been ocularcentric and its premise: “I am seen therefore I am”, then the dominance of a cultural practice such as heterosexuality or whiteness is expressed through their visual prevalence. But this omnipresence of heterosexuality is gendered.

The Girl-object acts as the visible manifestation of heterosexuality. She prevents it shrinking into the background and cultural obsolescence. As John Berger said, in one of the centuries most cogent theory-bites: men act, women appear. What he didn’t add was that this formula also perfectly describes the enactment of heterosexuality at the level of the eye. Women’s principle means of expressing their heterosexuality is to appear, men’s is to look.

Scene 2: Straightened Pictures
Nicole Kidman appearing as Edwardian Beauty in the supermarket checkout. Nicole Kidman appearing as Rock and Roll Nymphette outside the newsagency. Nicole Kidman appearing as Hollywood Glamour Wife at the doctor’s waiting Room.

Before Eyes Wide Shut was due to be released Nicole Kidman, its commodity star, was omnipresent. While she sometimes appeared with Cruise she mostly appeared alone and in spite of being solitary in the frame she represented heterosexuality through her placement as appearing before its exchange of looks. Her luminosity as star was a mass effect of the reproduced image of heterosexuality.

Kidman’s blitz exposure around the release of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut described something beyond national pride that she’d hit the big time – she did that years ago. The diversity and sheer volume of images primed our expectation that Kidman could appear in a variety of guises. Off screen her assumption of so many roles locked in our perception that as an image she could not be pinned down. Her image exerted the fascination of unpredictability, and ultimately, in spite of all we know about her, unknowability.

But what remains unstated is that all of these roles were bound by the visual conventions of heterosexuality and that Kidman herself is representative of the heterosexual scene. In scene 2 there is the society debutante as she was reproduced in upperclass women’s magazines such as The Home early this century. These photo portraits were themselves borrowed from oil portraiture that made the mistresses of landowning gentlemen their subject. There is the cheesecake shot taken from risque calendars in Girly Culture from the 1950s. The cheesecake was part of the consolidation of a fraternity of the male gaze through an elaborate system of stag and bunny clubs and the emergence and popularisation of the men’s magazine. And there is the celebrity couple, a more recent emanation with an ever ready cult following thanks to paparazzi and the spread of celebrity intrigue from women’s magazines to general media, including established broadsheets.

The Kidman blitz was formulaic of the use of the commodity star in the marketing of films. It was the careful manufacturing of a consensus of desire and visual enthrallment, such as is requisite to the status of the commodity star, that primed a mass audience with the desire to see more. But it also describes how the contemporary gaze is both gendered and commodified.

In modernity, through the use of the mass reproduced image, consumption has shifted from the exchange of money to the exchange of looks. Possession can be enacted at eye level. If seeing used to be believing, under the conditions of the reproduced commodity spectacle seeing is now consuming. The reaches of consumption have extended even further than this sensory take-over. Since the advent of advertising we have not been purchasing commodity objects but commodifying our very identities. Through the injunctions and suggestions of advertising commodity objects have been invested with transformative power. The ‘make-over’ is the blueprint of the capacity for identity reformation in the commodity object. What is made and forged in the commodity exchange is our remade selves. It has also become a cultural trope in films from My Fair Lady to Grease to The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Until recently it was predominantly women who were invited into experiencing themselves as image as an enticement into the pleasurable potential of the commodity object. Everything from Linoleum to baking flour, not to mention a cosmetic industry of truly cosmic proportions, was sold around the promise of making women appear to advantage. More often they appeared to men, who, with their purchases, were inversely promised the pleasure of looking at women, perhaps more closely, or even more intimately.

The Girl-Object has encapsulated the premise of the commodity spectacle as heterosexual visual appeal – the appeal to appear for women and the appeal to look for men. When women buy they look better, when men buy women either look better to them, or make them look better. The Girl-Object either embellishes the commodity object with sexual meaning or stands in for the object as its promise of consumption as coupling.

The commodity star, as mass produced spectacle, has something quite particular on offer. Kidman’s wares were feminine heterosexual identity in terms of how such an entity is described by appearing desirably.

This was handy to Kubrick since it was not far removed from what the film sold. Eyes Wide Shut was about heterosexuality in that it was about a marriage, but more particularly in that it was about men looking at women and women appearing to men. In this particular marriage the wife opens a Pandora’s box of perverse and illicit desire in her husband by telling him about overwhelming desire she felt for a Naval officer. For the rest of the film, she remains at home being a dutiful wife and mother. Though they were her fantasies it is her husband’s frustrating and increasingly dangerous forays into heterosex that are the central trajectory of the narrative.

That Kidman and Cruise are in fact married set the mise-en-scene of the film and this Freudian primal scene probably in itself excited a great deal cinema attendance. What is it about heterosexuality that makes us such compulsive witnesses? Why do we need to see it, almost everywhere we look? When Australia’s most revered current affairs anchorman, Kerry O’Brien, blushed beetroot during an interview with Kidman over banter concerning whether you do or don’t wear clothes when having sex, it wasn’t just his embarrassment that became obvious. He’d let slip the unstated – that heterosexuality was the subject of the film, but not so much as an activity of fucking, but as an activity of looking.

Like us spectators, Cruise’s character looked without touching. Not unlike a flaneur he wanders through a panorama of anonymous women appearing to him as image, most of them as the embodiment of the commodification of women’s visibility – namely the whore. Curiously, Kidman appeared to us, while the women who were prostitutes appeared to Cruise. If heterosexuality is predominantly a visual practice then it will be pictorially fashioned under the iconic conventions of any time and place. The iconography of Eyes Wide Shut seems peculiarly dated . The chateaux, the masks, even the body types of the women seemed to step out of The Story of O. They seemed nostalgic of 1970s art house porn.

If Kubrick considered women as spectators as well as spectacles, and I doubt he bothered, he knew he could wing their omission as heterosexual spectators by capitalising on the cultural habit of women looking at each other. Who needs to state and restate unequivocally, as one must for men, that women’s gaze is strictly and exclusively heterosexual? While appearing as image is the heterosexual act for women it is compromised in that it requires women to look at themselves, and at other women as exemplars of the pleasures of appearing as image. The self-reflective curve of this bent gaze has been iconic in advertising directed at women since the middle of the last century. It has by now resulted in a cultural habit that is only just beginning to be encouraged in men, in the ways they are being invited into looking at themselves and at other men. The fluidity of the female gaze often claimed in film theory, correctly, has us all identifying with multiple gendered and sexual positions as spectators, but is nevertheless historically circumscribed by such entrenched visual habits.

Happily for marketing, the beauty of the woman commodity star is a compelling fascination that crosses the gender divide – in a way that male commodity stars still cannot. They stall before the desiring gaze of women and become obsolete objects to the male market. Once women desire to see men as objects, this desire acts like a prohibitive veil over the heterosexual male gaze. The desiring gaze of women identifies the male commodity star as visually pleasurable and threatens to ‘contaminate’ the heterosexual man’s look with homosexual pleasure. And yet, of course, this is in fact part of the male cinema goer’s covert pleasure, just as much as looking at sexualised women is part of heterosexual women’s covert pleasure.

Heterosexuals get to look without being obliged to touch, or alter their self-conception as straight. Which is arguably why, in the face of such a proliferation of sexual vantages, heterosexuality is played out at the level of the eye and played down in words – it leaves unstated what is by now overt and very evidently exposed same sex visual pleasure. This disavowal is so much part of the heterosexual scene that once it is exposed it shows how that scene totters on this irreconcilable dishonesty. Like any kind of fetishism, the compulsion to witness heterosexuality at every turn is simply about disavowing the polymorphous perversity of sexuality as an activity of looking.

Scene 3: Girls, Girls, Girls.
“I mean, it just seems to be a more accepted view that women do it more than men, I mean not many people think of men being in pornography, like magazines and stuff. Someone says “pornos” and you instantly see these blonde bimbos, well, bottle blonde bimbos with red lipstick”. From ‘Vicki’, A ‘Home Girl of the Week’ appearing in Picture Magazine, 1991.

The heterosexual scene is replete with visual conventions for women. It depends on women to appear within it, and to represent it to political advantage. Appearing, as I call it, is the relation between feminine identity and visibility . It is a technique or practice, conscious and unconscious, in the performance of the feminine. It is historically contingent and insofar as it is exclusionary of some women who are vilified as unable to appear within the conventions of the heterosexual scene, such as aboriginal, aged or overweight women, it is invested with power. That many of the techniques of appearing as heterosexual are commodified is evident in the contradiction that while women are discouraged from breast feeding in public, topless bars and table top dancing are secured by location for an exclusively male, paying gaze.

While there has been a diverse, and sometimes at odds discussion of representations of women, it has never been asked how women experience themselves as image, and whether the cultural injunctions on women to appear within the conventions of the heterosexual scene are productive of our very identities as women or as heterosexual.

This is not to say women have not been self-conscious of appearing as a indelible practice of feminine identity. The visual configuration of the self around the expectation of being looked at is embedded in conscious and unconscious ways in the small rituals of our daily lives. And women have used appearing to refuse, disrupt, appropriate and subvert the visual conventions of heterosexuality, from Hippy to Lesbian Chic. Madonna has been a master technician of appearing, making it increasingly less viable with every new incarnation for us to claim that we simply express who are we with visual style. She asserts that what happens on the surface produces, not merely manifests, our identities. Its not to much that Madonna plays dress ups, when she appears she reincarnates. She is not so much a performer of gendered and sexual identity, as a technician.

Appearing is really a way to think about how the performance of identity has predominantly become a visual practice. If we perform our identities in specific historical times and cultural locations, and if modernity has elevated the eye as the dominant sense, appearing is simply a way to situate the performance of identity within this visually replete modern scene. It is also a way to think about the nature of the scenes we appear within, as constitutive of our identities through their visual conventions.

The visual conventions of the heterosexual scene are such that same sex identities are subsumed and rendered unstated and invisible within it. This is the coercion of ‘inning’ though enforced practices of appearing. The heterosexual scene, full of disavowals, likes to pretend that it has achieved a homogeneity of identity through two platitudes – that if you can’t see them they’re not there, and we are so everywhere you don’t even notice us.

I’m not advocating that gays and lesbian should make themselves known, or Show Themselves!, through visual style. I’m advocating we use appearing as way to understand, analyse and ultimately ‘out’ the heterosexual scene as coercive and exclusionary. Visibility achieved within that scene should be thought about in terms of how the imperative of heterosexual identity is being bolstered. The same goes for the White Scene.

The immanent release of Sex in the City is a good sample on which to initiate the kinds of questions I believe we must begin to ask. Is this program about ‘sex’ or about heterosex? Why should heterosex represent all sex? What is this cultural compulsion to witness heterosex about? Why is heterosex being played out here as an exchange of looks or an activity of the eye for its audience, if not also for its cast? Why are its four central protagonists women? Why does feminine spectacle in the form of these four visually appealing women represent heterosex? And finally, how might these women appear within this scene in ways which disrupt its unstated heterosexuality and their status as representative of that heterosexuality?

4.9.99