Women S Issues

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" »

As the media cycle turns once more to appalling allegations against one of our sport stars, it provides a timely opportunity to talk about a new phenomena that seems to be connected to the recent spate of indiscretions by sports people.

It’s a phenomena that I like to call the “let boneheads be boneheads” movement. You may have heard the movement’s devotees out in force.

They’re the ones calling in to talkback radio and defending the behaviour of their heroes by arguing that we should only focus on what happens whilst on the sporting arena.

Continue reading "Sports stars do not have the right to be boneheads" »

The two greatest experiences of my life occurred in a birthing suite.

The birth of a new baby is an exhilarating experience that produces emotions from deep within your soul.

Yet somehow I think the emotions that child birth produces in woman are even more significant.  Obviously pregnancy causes massive physical change but less obvious is the enormous emotional change having a baby ushers in.

Continue reading "Defending the right of Mums to have a safe home birth" »

Staring out at the ocean with a surfboard under my arm, I wondered if I had truly lost the plot. This was no Surfers’ Paradise.

I could feel neither my hands nor my feet, my nose was a block of ice and even my eyelashes were freezing. Breathing was becoming a challenge, too. No, this was not some kind of extreme sports challenge - I was on a hen’s weekend on a glorious spring morning in Cornwall, England.

On this day, however, the seaside town of Newquay more closely resembled a freezing winter’s day alongside the Great Australian Bight. Confused? Let me explain.

Continue reading "Ooo-er, let’s hear it for the saucy English hen’s night" »

One of the least fascinating things to come out of Triple J’s Hottest 100 Of All Time is that Nirvana’s grunge anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit is still considered to be THE cornerstone for Gen X & Ys musical landscape, and that “alternative” music has jumped so far over the shark that it should win an Olympic medal for both high and long jumping.

And while taking pot shots at the uninspired and predictable musical tastes of the new bogan elite who have taken over the Triple J airwaves is just as predictable as the contents of the Hottest 100 in the first place, the more intriguing aspect of this gigantic rock census comes down to a question of chromosomes.

Soon after the list was finalised, the penny dropped over the Twitterverse that apart from a guest female vocal on Massive Attack’s trip-hop ballad Teardrop and Jeff Buckley singing like a whiny bitch, not one artist in the list for the ages was forced to sit down to pee.

Continue reading "No women no cry - hottest misognyist poll of all time?" »

Staring out at the ocean with a surfboard under my arm, I wondered if I had truly lost the plot. This was no Surfers’ Paradise.

Continue reading "Pommy-style Hen’s Night the ultimate form of stimulus" »

AIN’T rape a hoot?

It seems like the good old boys at Carlton Football Club just can’t stop laughing about former president John Elliott’s claim that at least four women were paid not to pursue rape allegations against players in the 80s and 90s.

``We just sort of said, `Righto, here’s five grand, off you go’ and they’d leave,’’ Elliott told a charity event in Hobart last week. ``There’s some very ordinary people out there.’‘

Onya, Johnno.

Continue reading "Carlton legend John Elliott’s after-dinner rape gags" »

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" »

In 1991 I stood in a museum in Cambodia staring at a row of photos of people who’d been tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. I was a young journalist sent there to report on the United Nations arriving in Cambodia to set up democratic elections.

I dutifully took myself off to Tuol Sleng the former school where the Khmer Rouge tortured a bizarre array of people they thought were subverting their regime. No-one visits that museum without emerging horrified by the human capacity for irrational brutality. I wrote an article for the Sydney Morning Herald about my experience. Confident I’d broken new ground in feature writing, I asked a senior foreign correspondent what he thought of my effort. He told me: “Shallow and self indulgent.”

Moral outrage comes cheap.

Continue reading "Media moralists miss tough questions on group sex" »

There’s an extraordinary piece of journalism in today’s Daily Telegraph by “Coogee Cougar” Charmyne Palavi where she takes more positions than the Kama Sutra on the questions of sex and consent.

Palavi, who among other things has blown the whistle on the sub-culture of predatory women bedding sports stars as “scalps”, shot to prominence last week with her morally ambivalent star turn in the Four Corners report on the Matthew Johns sex scandal.

In today’s Tele Palavi speaks of her disappointment that many of her apparently positive experiences have been sullied by the white-hot debate over the Johns affair. She introduces a handy new term to the sexual lexicon - the concept of “mostly consensual” sex.

Continue reading "Sex-mad league bimbo takes women down dud route" »

In a week when the nation was confronted with a $58 billion budget deficit, when more than a million Australians were stripped of their private health rebate, when plans were unveiled to push the pension age to 67, there was obviously one story in town - Matthew Johns.

Knocking the federal budget off the front page of a major newspaper in budget week is no mean feat. The last people to do it were called Todd and Brant. They hijacked the coverage of Peter Costello’s 2006 Budget by spending the previous 14 days buried alive in a tiny air-pocket in the collapsed Beaconsfield mine.

While Costello was frustrated by his own burial on the inside pages, Wayne Swan might have been faintly relieved that, just two days after sheepishly unveiling our biggest-ever deficit, replete with some fingers-crossed growth forecasts which may have us not on the path to surplus but bankruptcy, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph devoted its first three pages to Matthew Johns affair.

Continue reading "Male silence at the core of Matthew Johns scandal" »

One positive feature of the dying days of the Howard Government was the cross party work among female MPs.

Sisters were doing it for ourselves - uniting on issues ranging from stem cell research to the removal of the restrictions on RU486; from changing the foreign aid funding criteria to seeking to ensure transparent advertising of pregnancy counselling.

We co-sponsored bills and held meetings, did the numbers and organised media.It was a rare but enjoyable and mostly successful example of networking among women of different parties, all driven by a commitment to issues affecting women. However, we were unable to attract overt cross-party support on the issue of Paid Maternity Leave (PML).

Continue reading "A belated, qualified victory for working mothers" »