Sexism

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" »

Colleges are being blamed for a culture we didn’t create. The focus is always on our worst behaviour. That’s understandable – it can get very bad, as events at Sydney University have shown.

But you can’t blame “college culture” and “tradition” - this is a youth culture which extends far past these privileged quadrangles.

The ‘tight and white’ wet t-shirt party could have been held at any backpacker hostel or suburban pub.

Continue reading "Colleges don’t cause misogyny in young men" »

Each year during Orientation week at Sydney University, boys from St Paul’s invite women from the all-female colleges to their bar, the Salisbury, for the “Tight and White” party.

The night pretty much does what it says on the tin. The tighter and whiter the clothes the better. Especially when the girls are soaked in water on arrival, their clothes now transparent and sticking to their bodies.

And even more so when they lie down on the bar while men drink shots of spirits off their bodies, off their bare stomachs, breasts and thighs.

Continue reading "Inside our sexist college culture, and how to fix it" »

Perhaps the elite all-male college at Sydney University, St Paul’s, needs to get some rugby league players to talk to its members about respecting women.

The ranks of the elite who would decry league players as “boofheads” and would have been most vocally repulsed by the exposure of player attitudes to the opposite sex have been revealed as nurturing a virtually identical culture of the sexual objectification of women.

Rugby league teams aren’t known for being overrun with players who are also top-flight academics but they could probably teach the boys at St Paul’s a thing or two. The students are supposed to be high achievers but for outright misogyny it’s pretty hard to beat setting up a Facebook group that basically endorses rape.

Continue reading "League players might teach rich boys a thing or two" »

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" »

My name is Yvette and I am a Masterchef addict. Not since Charlene married Scott on Neighbours have I looked forward so eagerly to my nightly fix of commercial TV.

Masterchef has been a revelation. With gripping culinary challenges, genuine emotion and insightful tips on cooking techniques it has become must watch TV. The prospect of its conclusion on Sunday night fills me with despair.

The show has also changed my mind about the culinary industry which up ‘til now I believed was full of offensive, egotistical, sexist chefs who thought it was OK for women to cook as long as they weren’t paid for it.

Continue reading "Macho-man chefs are now stuffed and skewered" »

Here’s an oldie but a goody: Why do women wear makeup and perfume? Because they are ugly and they stink.

Some would say that joke, like Gordon Ramsay’s behaviour in recent days, is pretty offensive. But that personal favourite differs from the celebrity chef on two important fronts.

The first difference is arguably it’s funny. The second is obviously it’s sexist.

Continue reading "Ramsay’s attack was many things, but it wasn’t sexist" »