Gender

Picture a woman. She might live anywhere in the world. She could be part of any socio-economic group, of any ethnicity, of any religion.

On a typical day this woman starts her day before the sun rises. She works for 8-12 hours in a store or on a farm or at a factory or in someone’s home for a small wage, but her children and elderly relatives depend on her income for survival.

When she comes home, she asks her children what they learned that day at school and what they want to be when they grow up. She spends hours bent over a small stove or fireplace preparing meals for an extended family. In many parts of the world, she also grows the food that feeds everyone at her table.

Continue reading "Strike a woman and you strike all of society" »

Ever since second-wave feminism kicked off four decades ago, people have been wondering if an equivalent movement for men would emerge. There was a short-lived media frenzy in the 90s when a handful of men took to banging on drums and declaiming bad poetry about their neglected inner warrior, but that turned out to be a false dawn.

Nowadays, leaving aside those fathers’ rights groups who like to create a public nuisance while wearing ill-fitting Batman costumes, there’s really no such thing as a masculinist movement.

Except maybe there is. Or at least the beginnings of one. The pick-up artist (PUA) subculture has been around in some form for two decades but it crossed over into the mainstream about six years ago.

Continue reading "Is the pick-up movement men’s answer to feminism?" »

A Canadian couple is deliberately raising a ‘genderless’ baby, so it can be free of society’s expectations. The first question on everyone’s lips is, of course: “What would Amy Chua say?”.

Now the fabulously strict ‘Tiger Mother’ and law professor Amy Chua is a busy woman over the other side of the world. But thankfully she put all her parenting know-how into her tidy little book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

So I decided it would be entirely appropriate to use the book as an Oracle from which one can glean wisdom on the topic at hand by randomly picking quotes.

Continue reading "A Tiger Mother’s take on raising a ‘genderless’ baby" »

True equality is impossible. We are not born equal, and we cannot be made equal.

But equal opportunity for all is a noble and realistic goal.

In a fairly short time – say, a century – women’s position in society has altered dramatically. This time one hundred years ago women had few rights. They were second-class citizens.

Continue reading "All men (and women) were not created equal" »

Today marks the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day.  It is an occasion to celebrate the achievements of women, to reflect on how far women have progressed on the journey towards equality in the last century, but also to recognise that significant challenges remain, here and abroad. 

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “Female Leadership and Political Participation” and, on this score, Australia has much to celebrate.  One hundred years ago, we were one of only three countries in the world that could boast women’s suffrage.

The significance of this achievement is evident when one reflects that Kuwait’s Parliament extended suffrage to women in 2005 and only then by a 35-23 vote, and in Saudi Arabia women are still deprived of voting rights. 

Continue reading "Aussie women: You think you’ve got it bad?" »

How convenient to caricature someone whose work you oppose by reducing them to a cartoon parody. Like I haven’t had enough Helen Lovejoy clichés to last a lifetime? Oh, and look, another media studies academic watching The Simpsons. Are we impressed yet?

Warning: Contains graphic violent and sexual images

Where Stephen Harrington sees “a graphic critique of post-feminist female sexuality”, I see Kanye West holding a woman’s decapitated head. Where those like Harrington see ambiguous, complicated narrative and linear narrative fantasy, I see semi-naked dead women swinging from ropes around their necks.

When I see Rick Ross in the ‘Behind the scenes’ You Tube clip tucking into a plate of raw meat before a spreadeagled dead woman on the table, I see the brutalization and degradation of female sexuality. I don’t think ‘check out that satire!’

Continue reading "Counterpunch: women aren’t playthings, slaves and bitches" »

Not so many fin-de-siècles ago, it was widely assumed that women’s place was in the home.

Gallivanting about polling booths was supposed to render us unladylike and – quelle horreur! – unmarriageable. 

Suffragette writer Alice Duer Miller responded to these oppressive stereotypes by turning the tables in a satirical piece entitled Why We Don’t Want Men To Vote.

Continue reading "Woah, man! Sweeping gender generalisations" »

With respect to Top Gear host James May’s partner of ten years, he really needs to get out of the car and spend some time with a younger woman because his take on our “generation of useless men” is both offensive and alarmingly out-dated.

‘Women are getting a bit bored with blokes being useless,” May told the Radio Times in an interview promoting his new show, “Man Lab”, this week.

“The decline of practical skills, some of them very day-to-day, among a generation of British men is very worrying - they can’t put up a shelf, wire a plug, countersink a screw, iron a shirt…they believe it is endearing and cute to be useless whereas I think it’s boring and everyone’s getting sick of it,” he said.

Continue reading "Men don’t need a hammer to make women happy" »

For those of you – ok, us – who aren’t likely to be asked to pose for the cover of Sports Illustrated or GQ any time soon, here’s a piece of news that might be of interest.

A dating agency for unattractive people has been established in Britain which claims to be a website for the “aesthetically challenged”, has already had some success at matching those who have been hit one too many times with the ugly stick.

Tom Clifford, who says he has a face “that makes children cry” has found true love with a 31 year old shop assistant who still lives with her parents and they’re planning a wedding in the near future.

Continue reading "The perils of modern dating: #1 ugly people" »

The other day I was reading a popular men’s magazine. I won’t mention the name, all I’ll say is it was for men, and about their style. The style of men really, or more precisely, men’s style. All I’m saying is it wasn’t GQ.

After only a few page turns I realised that while I am in possession of a penis and an extra chromosome, this magazine was well and truly not talking to me. Which naturally lead me to but one conclusion - I am not a man.

I’m not a man, I’m a guy. A guy at best, a dude at worst, and so white the only way I could even think of being a bro is if I created my own hilarious and not-racist-at-all-god-where’s-your-sense-of-humour Red Faces routine.

Continue reading "Why I’m not a man" »

Call me a bit of an idealistic Charlotte from Sex & The City, but if I have experienced something amazing, I want the world to experience it too.

So now I am a mum, I’d love the whole world to experience the joy of motherhood, particularly the women who are having difficulty falling pregnant. That’s why I am so supportive of IVF. Strangers (even friends who have dared not ask for fear it’s too private) assume I had my twins via IVF. I did not. And I would be willing to shout it from the rooftops if I had.

I have seen people close to me finally get their wish to be a parent thanks to this miraculous medical procedure. A few of the beautiful mums in my twin prenatal class had their multiples thanks to IVF and I know just how eternally grateful they are that the procedure exists.

Continue reading "Choosing a baby’s sex: the next great leap for parents" »

By the looks of Facebook, Aussie rangas are taking great pride in one of their own grabbing the top job. So imagine how I’m feeling. As an unmarried, childless heathen it looks like someone who reflects my personal values has finally become Prime Minister.

I know she wouldn’t put it as bluntly as I’m about to, but I feel positive Julia privately holds my beliefs on some of the big issues: religion, marriage, and children.

On the first two I think what she actually once said was that they weren’t “important” to her, and on the question of kids that she thought it wasn’t fair for her to be a parent when she was so committed to her career. 

Continue reading "Gillard is doing it for all the unmarried barren atheists" »

Insiders have confirmed what we suspected…. the Sandra Bullock/Scarlett Johansson MTV Awards smooch was a pre-meditated act orchestrated by Bullock herself.

Yep, The Blind Side star rearranged the MTV award schedule so her award could be presented by the blonde bombshell instead of Zac Efron.

Because it seems when you need a profile resurrection, there’s nothing like a bit of girl on girl action to nab those headlines.

Continue reading "Girl on girl award kisses: what a load of Bullock" »

Union secretary Sally McManus urged women to do starjumps, take a nap, phone their mother and undertake various other activities to show their employers and fellow sisters and brothers that they really are serious about wanting equal pay.

The thing is though, we’ve had equal pay for years!

Yes, women on average tend to earn 18% (almost a million dollars) less than men over the course of their lifetime. That 18% figure comes from an AMP.NATSEM report done a couple of years ago.

Continue reading "Counterpunch: Practical ways to raise women’s wages" »

Today rallies for Equal Pay will be held around Australia and all working women are being asked to down tools for ten minutes in support of the protest.

Why ten minutes? Well women earn on average 18 per cent less than men ­so ten minutes is the amount of time women work for free every hour.
The big question is ­ what would we do with those extra ten minutes? After extensive consultation with women workers, here are ten ideas for those wanting to join our protest today.

Continue reading "10 things women can do while dreaming of equal pay" »

Sydney barely averted a potentially violent mob scene last week that would have been caused by 5 foot 3 of trouble, namely the floppy-haired, permanently smirking boy-child chanteur, Justin Bieber.

While last Monday’s pheromone-fuelled fracas may have gotten all the attention, it’s another group of staunch Bieberites who are more a case for concern.

Peer a little closer and the Justin Bieber show isn’t all rainbows and hair gel. Somehow this boy with his ridiculous forward-swept mop of hair has, consciously or not, crossed into largely uncharted, sexually-confused territory in the popular culture maelstrom.

Continue reading "Bieber: underage boy and sex object for older women" »

Handbags. They can do a lot for us girls.

Big, small, clutch, tote, sleek, patent leather, tasselled and bedazzled. If you can dream it up, you can probably find it and you’ll probably enjoy the experience.

And while never as coveted as a great pair of shoes, handbags come a close second in the ever-expanding bevy of things considered essential to being ‘us’.

Continue reading "It’s all in the bag" »

It’s not hard to get a fight in Fred Brophy’s boxing tent – the last travelling tent left in Australia, or the world. It just gets hard when you get your fight. I wanted a fight.

I saw Brophy first at the Birdsville Races in 2008 but I knew about the tent – the round or two for a pound or two – to borrow a line from the other great boxing tent man Jimmy Sharman.

I talked about wanting a fight in the tent before heading up to Mt Isa for the rodeo, from the comfort of inner city Melbourne. No one believed me.  I’m a girl and I’ve never even done a boxing class.

Continue reading "How I started Ladies’ Day at Fred Brophy’s boxing tent" »

Anyone who enjoys making out with inanimate objects will be thrilled by the news that an American inventor has manufactured a life-size female sex robot called Roxxxy, equipped with flesh-like skin, a smattering of playful conversation, a busty chest and an insatiable appetite for getting it on.

More exciting though is the promise that Roxxxy will soon be followed a by a male sex doll who will replicate the characteristics of a real guy.

Ideas man Douglas Hines unveiled Roxxxy at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas on Saturday. ‘‘She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook, but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean,’’ he said, which may have been a nudge-nudge reference to her ability to knit, juggle and perform long division.

Continue reading "With Roxxxy complete, a sex doll that acts like a real man" »

UPDATE: Toyota has just pulled the ad.

It’s easily the worst ad of the year, one of the worst ads ever made, and while it’s obviously an attack on the dignity of women it does men a major disservice too by suggesting they’re so screwed-up that they actually say disgusting s**t like this.

The people at Toyota have besmirched their brand with this squalid effort, featured above, which revolves around a creepy play on words in which a father discusses her daughter’s virginity and sexual prowess with her young boyfriend.

It almost defies belief that a major company would associate itself with this garbage. It’s offensive on so many levels - the kids in the ad look really young, the idea of a father discussing his daughter in such a fashion is a total gross out, there’s a stupid hubba-hubba tit joke, the “give her a pounding in any direction” line, the girl at the end saying she’s ready to blow. In a perverse way it’s a credit to the creators that they managed to jam so much tasteless and desperately unfunny crap into just one minute and 14 seconds.

Continue reading "Toyota: Oh what a creepy feeling" »

There has been a lot of giddiness and hoopla surrounding the use of Twitter by journalists to cover the leadership ructions in the Liberal Party this past fortnight. It certainly made for high-energy reading – with its rawness and immediacy, it made the readers feel as if they were there as journalists passed on factoids from the mayhem and provided links to news and analysis of running events.

The downside of course was that it also gave tweeting journalists the ability to be 100 per cent wrong in real time – and I include myself among their number – where rumour and conjecture was shot into cyberspace, sending frantic packs of gallery journalists sprinting down corridors searching for a reputed Julie Bishop press conference, to find nothing but a Coke machine.

This real-time dissemination of both fact and fiction is an issue for the political parties head of next year’s election, where any degree of tail-chasing undermines their desire for a stage-managed and risk-averse passage through the campaign.

Continue reading "Web women unleash cyber hell on Holy Tony" »

Not since Carrie Bradshaw tapped away at her laptop has a column started with a dafter question, but here goes: Could Germaine Greer be single-handedly responsible for the complete destruction of a society and its culture?

And not just any old society, the one that has exported its language, manners and mores to the rest of the world more than any other. The British.

As ridiculous as it sounds, our expat Sheila-in-chief has been accused of bringing Britain to its knees by one of the country’s most widely-read commentators.

Continue reading "Postcard from London: Greer blamed for British ladettes" »

A few weeks ago we ran a column here on The Punch examining the emergence of an angry core of Australian blokes who use cyberspace as a forum to unload on how women have done them wrong.

The piece documented how even the most innocent columns on breast cancer, maternity leave, childcare or body image become a vehicle whereby crotchety men can bemoan the apparent neglect of men’s health issues, the economic pressures which single dads face, the raw deal they get from the courts.

The article had the unsurprising effect of attracting, well, an angry core of Australian blokes who use cyberspace as a forum to unload on how women have done them wrong. There was a depressingly pertinent example of this mindset last week and it’s worth pinging the perpetrators over it, as it demonstrated all the nonsensical self-pity of the men-are-victims-too brigade.

Continue reading "Even White Ribbon Day is a sinister feminist plot" »

ALMOST 70 per cent of men say that a woman’s face is much more important than her breasts, legs or figure, a Punch survey of male attitudes on female body image has found.

And almost two-thirds of men believe that women spend far too much time worrying about their appearance, and should spend less time fretting about what men think - because you are all much hotter than you think you are.

The Punch has today assembled this special package of pieces about female body image through the eyes of blokes. Much of it is framed around our 100-man survey, but also includes columnist Joe Hildebrand talking about his love of fat chicks and former Zoo Weekly online editor Chris Deal’s essay on why men are as dumb as you probably suspect they are.

Continue reading "Guys talk about female body image" »

Are you gonna take me home tonight? 
Ah down beside that red firelight? 
Are you gonna let it all hang out? 
Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round. - Queen, 1978

My name’s Joe Hildebrand and I like fat chicks.* My best friend Byron likes fat chicks. My other best friend Matt likes fat chicks. My other best friend Darrin is actually fat himself. Even Queen likes fat chicks, and they’re all gay.

Yet fat chicks seem to think that nobody likes them at all.

Continue reading "Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round" »

A little known fact I like to trot out at feminist rallies and family gatherings is that I use to work for the esteemed gentlemen’s periodical, Zoo Weekly magazine. Officially my title was Online Editor, but unofficially it was You Tube surfer and talker to the hottest chicks planet earth has ever produced.

Sadly my tenure at the Encyclopaedia Tit-tanica was brief, and a decision that to the male ego sounds like the frothy rantings of a mad man. In bloke-speak the phrase “I quit a job at Zoo Weekly” roughly translates to “I’m a frightful shirtlifter, pass the amyl and pump up the Right Said Fred”.

But after I’ve stopped trying to use my penis for a brain, not only is the fleshy mirage of life at a lad’s mag revealed, but so too are a few finer points of the deluded male mind.

Continue reading "Men: we really are as dumb as you think" »

These are the raw numbers for the female body image survey.

1. Which of these physical qualities do you value most highly in a woman?

A.) Pretty face 68
B.) Great breasts 8
C.) Nice legs 8
D.) Perfect fat-free figure 16

Continue reading "This girl looks normal: The 100 man body image survey" »

The World Economic Forum recently released their 2009 Global Gender Gap Report, and unfortunately Australia has slipped markedly in the ranks over the past couple of years.

The report measures how equally the resources and opportunities of a nation are divided up between genders.

In 2006 Australia was ranked fifteenth. Now we are twentieth out of the 134 countries included in the report. The Nordic countries topped out the list with Iceland coming first, Finland second and Norway and Sweden were third and fourth respectively. New Zealand retained their position in fifth place.

Continue reading "Women by numbers: why we’re slipping on equality" »

In his deservingly scornful review of the book Iron John, Robert Bly’s absurd bible of the men’s movement in the United States, British author Martin Amis describes the comical pilgrimage made by maladjusted men into the American woods to sniff each other’s armpits, channel negative energy into circles of hate and howl at the moon at the fact that mum had them circumcised.

Happily, this quest to unleash what Amis ridicules as “the hairy satyr within” does not appear to have any formal and organised equivalent in Australia.

This is probably because most Australian men have nothing of any real magnitude to get off their chest, or simply find that the odd night at the pub or the occasional fishing weekend provides ample therapy for any lingering sense of gender injustice. That, and the fact that we’ve got too wry a sense of humour and too much self-awareness to engage in anything that silly.

Continue reading "Angry boys club needs a Bex and a good lie down" »

It is a running joke in my office that we should just pack up and relocate to Norway.

Norway has an enviable track record when it comes to gender equality initiatives.

And looking specifically at the issue of women in corporate leadership, Norway’s experience with the introduction of quotas for corporate boards has shown that such measures can radically alter gender equality outcomes for the better.

Continue reading "Why gender quotas would help Australian business" »

An endocrinologist, a gynaecologist, a gender expert and a psychologist are involved in a round of “gender verification” tests on Caster Semenya, who overnight won gold in the 800m at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin. The alarm bells were raised some time ago after Semenya, who has lived her whole life as a woman, started demolishing fields and winning by extraordinary margins.

The Daily Mail has an excellent round up here of the story, including some photos of previous female competitors who were later revealed as men - but there’s more photos and a video interview with Semenya below, where you can hear her speaking.

Continue reading "What do you reckon?" »

Oh. No. Really. Won’t someone please mop the tears of unreserved mirth? Apparently, Women Love Shoes! And Men Just Don’t Know What To Do With a Vacuum Cleaner! Oh, hahaha, the difference between the sexes. They’re just so funny because they’re just so true.

Jokes about the location of the clitoris or the importance of the shed are every bit as progressive and useful as beta-video. Equally acquainted with the pleasures of both, I’ve never understood the merit of these gags. 

Perhaps this is because I am a mannish girl.  Or perhaps it is because jokes about the “Gender Wars” have their place.  Viz. only on disgraced Austereo breakfast programs or in forwarded emails sent by my father-in-law.

Continue reading "The lame world of men-versus-women humour" »

People keep asking me does gender matter in politics? If this week’s news about the gender pay gap in managerial jobs is anything to go by, not as much as it does in management.

I’ve always believed that there is no more basic principle of fairness than equal pay for equal work. Yet it was no surprise to anyone that Macquarie University research highlighted in this week’s The Age found female managers are an average of $13,500 a year worse off than their male counterparts.

The research took into account that women managers work in lower-paid sectors such as health and community services and clock up slightly less hours than male managers. Even accounting for these factors, the work of a woman manager comes at a $13,500 discount.

Continue reading "The gender pay agenda: time women got on board" »