Gender

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" »