Fearless and indomitable? Me and my feminist anger

Recently I published a blog entry on the state of women’s rights in Australia, with some ideas for change. This post was the result of a gradual surge in my awareness of what was going on in the media and other major aspects of social life that was detrimental to women.

The trouble is, the more I’ve been focusing on the problem the more rattled I’ve become. So I thought I’d have another look at the issue, both at what was bugging me from an objective standpoint, and how some of my personal issues affect my feminism, sometimes detrimentally.

(Further on in this blog entry my family is going to come in for criticism. My aim here is not to bag my parents but just to make an observation about cause and effect.)

Loss of momentum
There are a couple of objective reasons for my personal feminist genie flying out of her bottle recently, although I have to say firstly that what I’m talking about here is very much the mainstream. I know there are young feminists out there, as well as older active feminists, fighting to move things forward. As a non-activist, I’m ignorant of what is probably a huge range of continuing initiatives and projects.

It’s just that this isn’t, in the main, reflected in the mainstream media. And what appears there is an incredible lack of interest in feminism – even though the issues are still as glaring as ever.

I think this is the difference between now and, say, ten years ago. Then, there was still a sense of a continuing need for change. Now, in the mainstream at least, the momentum’s just not there any more. And that is, frankly, a bit scary. We’ve had feminism since the late 1960s. If it’s abandoned as an issue of mainstream interest, what’s going to happen in the long term to women’s fragile status?

Recently a popular television program, The Gruen Transfer, ran an online discussion about a controversial fake advertisement that aimed to counter discrimination against ‘fat’ people, an ad that an agency had created for the show (in fact the discrimination under discussion was specifically the kind directed towards ‘fat’ women, as in the ‘fat chick jokes’ the panel discussed).

The discussion was all-male, and in high dudgeon I wrote to the program about my ongoing concerns about the sexism of the show as a whole, and how oblivious that discussion panel had been to the irony of the fact that they were an all-male group sitting around attacking discrimination (an article by Liz Conor with a similar point – much more articulate than my letter – appeared in The Age newspaper that weekend).

I got a very calm email back from Amelia in the show’s production office. She welcomed my letter and informed me that the reason why there were so few women on the show’s panel (just one of my complaints) was that only 6 per cent of creative directors were women. That was that. Discussion closed.

For me, of course, the discussion was just beginning. Only 6 per cent! Wasn’t that a worthwhile topic for debate, I thundered back. In fact, why not discuss on the show the following points (presenting a series of bullet points about the sexism of the Australian advertising industry). No response to this second letter, which was actually a bit more measured than the first.

Doesn’t she get it, I thought. Isn’t feminism a central issue, the major issue of our time besides climate change? How old is she? Was I becoming irrelevant, overreacting to a problem that was clearly not one at all to the younger generation? I was not a happy camper. I took her dismissal as a kind of death knell for the mainstream feminism I’d known.

Bring back the collective!
Another legitimate worry is that, again from my mainstream viewpoint, there don’t seem to be the same large numbers of nurturing groups and spaces that feminism created for women to develop their skills before taking them into the mainstream.

I’m not for a minute saying the collective is dead, or pretending that I’m up with what the women’s movement is doing these days. But in the 80s there were more cultural and activist collectives than you could poke a stick at. There were media collectives, writing collectives, printing collectives, feminist performing groups and feminist journal collectives (yes, not everyone in these groups was Leonardo Da Vinci but the same goes for men’s groups).

Activist collectives such as Healthsharing Women, women’s refuge collectives, pro-abortion groups and groups against incest and domestic violence also proliferated. Their main aims were to change the laws and conditions to improve women’s status, and empower and provide services to women, but they also enabled their members to develop important skills in an all-female environment.

Marion Halligan is just one example of a writer who benefited from being part of a collective. She is a successful baby boomer author who got a lot of early support in a women’s writing collective called Seven Writers. Why was it important that they were all women? Because such groups were less threatening for non-confident women and they didn’t have the blokey culture that could so easily intimidate and sideline.

In Australia at least, sexism and misogyny are stubborn beasts and I would argue that such nurturing spaces are still needed.

If collectives are not revivable then we need two alternatives:

More mentoring – this happens in business but needs to happen in all areas, including among high-profile successful women who are in a culture of individualism. Female comedians, for example, who don’t get a decent running on television any more, would especially benefit.

Industry campaigns – women in male-dominated industries, especially advertising and the media, need to get together and create public awareness campaigns about the need to seek gender balance in those industries, both for the good of the industry and Australia in general. These campaigns should include a call for the return of affirmative action, and if necessary should shame the organisations concerned into action.

I have some other, legitimate concerns too, before I get on to the personal stuff. As the recession grinds on and businesses get more desperate there’s more and more temptation to use images that objectify women to sell stuff.

I also reckon that since September 11 there’s been a huge surge of masculinism in Australia. In her book The Terror Dream Susan Faludi has identified this trend in the US. Why would we be immune?

This isn’t to say I’m a conspiracy theorist: I don’t think these trends need anyone to be gleefully rubbing their hands together in some backroom, planning the downfall of womankind. The thinking behind decisions that impact badly on women does not need to be conscious.

But it’s more than all this that is behind my extreme angst.

When the political is (too) personal
What worries me is that I’m taking all this very personally. I’m getting angry too often. I turn on the radio in the morning and I hear that Catholic students demonstrated against Obama when he spoke at a Catholic university because he’s pro-abortion, and I’m upset before I’ve even had my cornflakes (on the plus side I also know that he’s actually quite popular with a lot of Catholics, hopefully because of his social justice aims and credentials).

The point is, I have enough things to be angry about to write an angry letter every day, but I don’t have the time or the energy. And it’s not good to get as upset about gender discrimination as I am becoming.

Where does this river of anger stem from? My parents were both lower middle class Catholics. Although their upbringings and family life were not that similar, the households they grew up in were both a toxic mix of religion and misogyny, bound up with personality and age factors in each set of grandparents. This toxicity continues to have effects on my mother, my aunties on both sides, and at least one of my sisters, sometimes in their ability to make decisions within their households.

Sadly, my parents were unable to give me, and to various extents my sisters, any sense of personal and psychic space, or of entitlement to our own wishes, desires and feelings. They had little vision for our futures beyond marriage and motherhood.

When I see women’s needs and rights ignored, when I see the invisibility of women in mainstream media, it’s me who’s being ignored, it’s my needs that are being trampled on.

The way my disorder manifests owes much to my being a female with an intellectual ‘bent’ in my family set-up. I feel helpless to change my own state, and that’s echoed in the helplessness I feel when I encounter sex discrimination.

I don’t make much money and I don’t have a lot of social power. I’m envious of men no more intelligent than me who are on large incomes and active in the world. But it’s difficult, if not impossible, for me to directly join the fight with other women to improve our status. Except of course, through the letters I write and my blogging.

So I immediately jack up. And jacking up every day is exhausting.

What would Jessie Street do?
Jessie Street was an Australian feminist and human rights activist. She first encountered sexism at the age of seven on a ship. The boys were allowed to climb up the rigging, and as a girl she wasn’t. She knew that wasn’t fair.

She was president of the United Associations [of Women] on and off from 1930 to 1950. With women having gained the vote, and decades before second wave feminism, she campaigned for equal rights for women in the public sphere – including equal pay and the right of married women to work. Among her achievements was helping to set up Sydney’s first contraceptive clinic in 1933.

She joined the Australian Labor Party and sought pre-selection as an ALP candidate. In 1943 the Labor machine men pre-selected her for an unwinnable Liberal seat, Wentworth (ironically now the seat of Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull). They would later curse themselves for not helping her win the seat after she gained a huge number of votes. She never gave up. She actually ran for the seat a second time, in 1946, and unfortunately was unsuccessful.

In 1945 Street was chosen by prime minister Curtin as Australia’s representative to the conference that formed the United Nations, and she made sure the aims of the UN charter included women’s equality.

If Jessie Street was in my situation, she wouldn’t stop fighting. She’d simply keep channelling the anger however she could.

Rage, anger, feeling indignant
Germaine Greer has said something to the effect that rage is destructive and crippling, because it prevents the person experiencing it from clearly articulating their anger. It’s not so much rage that cripples me as a feeling of being indignant.

Many feminists get angry. But being indignant suggests that a particular situation or event has hurt your dignity. You feel that it damages you personally. Anger can be a response to wrong doing. Being indignant is a sense of outrage at something negative directed at the self. I think I would rather respond to misogyny with anger than the personalised outrage I feel twenty times a day.

So what’s to be done? I’m not suggesting I become politically neutered, and I certainly won’t stop being angry and concerned.

But I do need to cultivate some kind of radical acceptance. I live in an imperfect world. I can’t change that world, although in small ways I may be able to influence its workings. I still struggle with these basic tenets. I grew up with the refrain ‘It’s not fair!’, and the assumption behind that protest is that it should be. But life is not fair.

One solution is to watch less tele and read more. This is a goal anyway, so it dovetails well with my desire to read more. Other solutions include:

Be more ‘discriminating’ about what I do watch. I already watch Medium because I like the family set-up and the power the heroine has. If I have to watch tele, I’m going to favour shows that portray women with personal and social power (one exception will have to be The Chaser).

Instead of always focusing on the bad (and there will always be bad) focus on the good things that are happening in regards to women and in the world generally: the small victories, the big successes, the grassroots projects.

Soothe myself by watching an internet clip of KD Lang belting out ‘Crying’ or by listening to Diana Krall. Cheer on Anna Bligh, the first woman in Australia to be elected state premier rather than achieving her position through a male stepping down. Find out more about what feminists are doing.

Remind myself that, as Liz Conor pointed out in her Age opinion piece, I am relatively lucky in many ways when it comes to discrimination. Race discrimination impacts on some men in far worse ways than misogyny impacts on me, and this is another issue to stay aware of.

I’m not saying for a minute that this will solve anything. But I’m always suggesting that the ABC bring some gender balance to their programming. Perhaps I need to do the same in my own life.

The back foot
What I’m coming to accept, in thinking through some of these issues, is that this is not a good time for feminism. Yet there have always been feminists, even between first and second wave feminism (this is one of the pieces of history that gets hidden). Jessie Street was not part of a mass movement for women’s rights yet she soldiered on. Perhaps the initial gains of second wave feminism (which was, incredibly, a mass movement with millions of women, at least for a short time) are the miracle. Who can expect to live in good times with amazing social change all their lives? I’ll keep fighting, keep the flame of feminism burning, but I’m beginning to understand on a deeper level that I will never take the world with me.

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The lost cousin

There I was in the backyard of a sterile McMansion, on a clear-skied winter’s day, having conversations with cousins I had known for decades – but one of them remained elusive.

I belong to an extended Catholic family on my mother’s side. On this side alone I have 21 cousins (one of them now deceased) and there are 26 of us altogether. The generations have remained close and still continue to socialise.

Big family Christmases presided over by my grandparents have continued, with the cousins who played together as children continuing to see each other at what is an annual gathering. As they’ve grown up and married they have brought along their own children, a bevy of rowdy third cousins happily mingling.

Family traditions stretch back for decades, like the children chasing Father (sometimes 'Mary') Christmas after (s)he'd handed out the presents and made a quick exit. The sole aim of this chase was to reveal Santa's true identity and remove by force the red hat and the snowy beard.

A decent number of all three (and soon to be four) generations – the third generation is just now coming of age – still come to family gatherings, like the engagement parties and sixtieth and seventieth birthday parties that are now going on. Of course not everyone is plugged in, and some who might otherwise be fixtures currently live or are travelling overseas. I’m somewhere in the middle, choosing the gatherings I attend with care.

Annette is one of my first cousins, the oldest daughter of one of my mother’s sisters. The sisters are only two years apart, but with hugely different personalities. Annette and I are almost exactly the same age, but as a child the peripatetic existence of her family meant our friendship took a while to cement.

In early childhood there was fierce rivalry between me and my older sister Georgia for the affections of Annette. One night she came to our place for a sleepover and the three of us slept on the floor in the sunroom.

Although at that point Georgia got on much better with Annette than I did, I insisted on sleeping in the middle. Annette and Georgia clasped hands over my prone body, symbolically affirming their closeness in the face of my stubbornness.

Soon afterwards I gave up on Annette and turned to her sister Miranda for friendship. An easygoing tomboy, Miranda was two years younger than Annette.

But gradually things changed. For about three years the family lived in Melbourne, renting a humble house in the same suburb we lived in. Annette and Miranda even went to the same local Catholic school my sisters and I attended. The two of us became close and I was often at their place after school. Sometimes I stayed the night and we held midnight feasts or pleasantly scary seances, and I was allowed to watch the Sunday night 8.30 movie, a privilege denied to me at home.

Then the family were on the move again, back to the country town they’d lived in when I was a child. It was one of the many small losses of childhood but it was not a complete loss – I went and stayed with them a few times in the country. By then, sandwiched comfortably between Annette and Miranda in the friendship stakes, I experienced some of my happiest times.

In a few years they were back once more, this time living in the hills outside Melbourne where Annette’s parents had bought a milkbar. I continued to stay with them sometimes, and when I was 14, during one school hols, Annette and I felt like honorary grownups when we stayed with a much younger aunty and her small family in her newly built 'display' home in the sprouting wilds of the outer south-eastern suburbs. Precious times all of them: for me Annette had become a sister without the jealousy, anger and sibling rivalry that stopped me from enjoying the company of my actual siblings.

But as young adulthood loomed we began to grow apart – only it was Annette doing the growing, not me. I remember the precise time that I felt the old Annette had completely disappeared. With her parents she’d dropped in to our place for a flying visit one weekend, and she and I were walking back from the corner shop.

We were 16. I was still a child in many ways, scared of boys and already suffering the crippling social anxiety that would continue to dog me. By that stage she was getting to know the wild teenagers of the Dandenongs.

As we walked along Darling Road she was looking around and swinging her arms and talking too loudly and animatedly about people I had never met and had no interest in. I looked at her and wanted the old, quieter Annette back, the one who retreated into herself when she was in the wars. But I feared she was gone for good. The new one was clearly a complete fake.

Even then, with no understanding of psychology, I dimly perceived that Annette had taken on a new personality to cover up her childish insecurities rather than having outgrown them. I did not change this interpretation of the new Annette for the next three decades.

I saw Annette again, for the first time in about four years, at a recent family event. I had no expectations. I’d long ago stopped bothering to talk to her at such gatherings because she always ran away.

In earlier years, when she was still with her first husband, after a minute or two of distracted chat she would start to look around in consternation and say ‘Where’s Martin?’ and then abruptly excuse herself to go and look for him. Even I, slow on the uptake, eventually gave up. She had no interest in my life or what I was up to, and I might as well gravitate towards one of the cousins who did.

Our lives couldn’t have turned out more differently. After a false start with Martin, and with her true love Arthur, she eventually had five children. She lives a prosperous life on a large property in a house they had had built near the Hawkesbury River.

So there she was the other day, down from NSW to attend a huge family do in a too-large house I’d never stepped inside before. Her hair was dyed a stark black and looked permed, and she wore a red jacket with black trimmings. Her strong features were still striking, but like me she was undeniably middle aged: we had both recently turned 46. After all these years, I still remembered that her birthday was three weeks and three days before mine, making her a Taurus.

I hadn’t planned to talk to her, but there she was in the courtyard, on the fringes of another group, looking in my direction, and it would be churlish to ignore her. I leaned towards her. ‘We’re Facebook friends now’, I said. Another cousin was standing nearby and the three of us formed a group as we began to joke about the shortcomings of Facebook.

‘Are you on Twitter?’ I asked Annette. ‘I think it’s a complete waste of time’.

To my surprise, she didn’t know what Twitter was, so I started to explain it as best I could. We were all laughing and I was beginning to feel the old click.

An older lady came up to the group and started talking with the other cousin. Although she was addressing us all, it was one of those conversational moments when you sense a branching off is about to take place: she and the other cousin were reminiscing about a prestigious school they had both attended. It was turning into an alumni-type chat.

I didn’t feel at that point like leaving the conversation, but I could sense Annette’s impatience. For the first time I noticed that she still had the old restlessness. Her body wouldn’t stay still, and her right arm was – well – twanging. She looked as if she could begin to dance at any moment. Her head began to crane, searching around for something better. Any minute I would lose her, and this time it might be for good.

‘I’m going to get a drink’, she said and she was off.

I wonder now why I hadn’t taken charge and asked her about her children – how old the youngest was, for example, or what her oldest was doing. But perhaps I’d already decided that she wouldn’t be interested in talking to me alone. Perhaps without realising it I was playing it safe.

Later I saw her from a distance, talking in another group, and again I noticed that fluttering refusal to keep still. For the first time I looked back at our walk along Darling Road all those years ago, when I’d been so dismayed at the change in her, and I read it a bit differently.

Sure, Annette may well have been covering up her vulnerable child self, and perhaps she still was. But perhaps she was also trying to allow a new, social self to emerge, a self that was interested in the real world of human beings rather than the fantasy world of childhood that still held me captive. Perhaps the Annette that had confronted me that day was the real Annette after all.

Of course the sudden change I’d perceived all those years ago may have partly been due to Annette’s complex family circumstances, as well as the demands of puberty. But although she went on to stumble around a bit as a young adult – as most of us do – her social self eventually enabled her to find her place in the world. It certainly hasn’t stopped her being happy and successful. Perhaps all along she’s had more psychological sophistication than I’ve given her credit for.

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On (Not) Reading the Classics

I’m writing this entry for purely therapeutic reasons. It’s about an ongoing issue that I feel I have no control over, so putting it out into cyberspace might somehow, magically, transform it for me.

It’s about my reading life, which is constantly being blighted by my television life. I want to read the classics. That’s an abstract wish, but when I try to put it into practice my body and mind rebel.

(I know that this whole categorisation is a subject of scholarly dispute – for the purposes of this article, I’ll rather randomly define ‘the classics’ as any work of fiction popular enough to be in a cheap paperback edition at least 30 years after its original publication.)

Apart from those I read at school and uni, I have plodded through quite a few of them over the years (although perhaps sleep walked is a better term: what happened in The Brothers Karamazov, vols 1 and 2, and War and Peace? I couldn’t even give you the barest plot synopsis, except that the former is about addiction, a priest dies at the beginning and the brothers fight [I think] and the latter is about the Napoleonic wars and the fortunes of an upper class family and some soldiers). All those words, and so little recalled.

So what’s the problem, apart from a poor memory? Soon after I start to read a classic text, it gets too dense and I go off to the library and borrow a contemporary novel.

There are many exceptions, particularly Romantic novels filled with overblown emotion. I read Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment again a few years ago and was amazed at their emotional power. I can happily chomp through George Eliot.

Some Thomas Hardy, a tiny bit of Stendhal (again with not much plot recall), Balzac and Zola are okay, Dickens I like but any work of his takes a long time to get through. When I find a cheap edition of Vanity Fair I’ll get around to that – I already know something of the story of Becky from the miniseries, which helps.

Part of the problem is the cheap editions I tend to buy. The paper is yellow, the type tiny – not a very attractive proposition, especially at night when I do the bulk of my reading.

So what do I want to read or reread?

Currently I’m taking Kafka’s The Trial in small doses. I’ve borrowed a beautifiul hardback edition from the library. It has a nifty little page finder, text in a nice, good-sized font, and thick white paper. But I can only read small chunks at a time. The images are very strong but I’m experiencing too much of the hero’s bewilderment and sense of disorientation for comfort. And of course it’s a translation: however good, a translation is likely to be a bit dry compared with the original.

I have a cheap edition of Byron’s Don Juan and think it will be a sin if I never read this. It’s like wasting someone else’s genius. I have tried fruitlessly to put myself in the position of the typical female reader of the time: this spicy book would have been considered highly risque, liable to send me into paroxysms of passion that would cause me to madly wield my fan and take pinches of snuff. Perhaps if I could view it as a page turner I could race through it?

But of course it’s not as simple as a question of subject position. If I tried to race through works like that I’d be stumbling over the myriad associations that were then familiar but now make no sense. As far as I’m concerned a kind of translation in the form of notes is required for any work written before the twentieth century. And referring to notes slows down the pace, and therefore the fun.

That’s the difference between me and the academic or intellectual: I’m curious about the lives of people in other times but I need someone who has covered the territory to step forward and guide me, making the strange and unfamiliar emotionally comprehensible. I want to feel the common humanity of the writer and the world they’ve created but it doesn’t come easy.

There are so many references that would have been familiar to the book’s intended readers but now require scholars of archaelogical determination to nut out their meanings. And the tone is often so foreign. I admire the researchers because they can see through the superficial differences to the unchanging human concerns of the writer.

I read Dante’s Inferno a few years ago and it was a mammoth task. Again, very few of the strong, compelling images have stayed with me. The ending has though, and I almost gasped at the beautiful irony: the final circle of hell as a place of stasis so utter that it is frozen rather than burning.

But I got stalled by Thoreau’s Walden. Before starting this book I mistakenly thought it would be a cinch because of the subject matter, so akin to contemporary concerns – a protest against excessive materialism. But it soon began to irritate me. One reason was that there were a few lines that I simply could not make sense of – perhaps theythe language just too idiomatic.

The second reason was that, although I don’t consider myself that materialistic, the anti-materialism of the writer was just too strong for me: I wanted to argue with him about some of the advantages of modern life. That he was intent on proving how few mod cons one needs to live a good life was admirable, but his fundamentalist approach was too much. Still, I do want to finish the book.

I have very subtle ways of sabotaging my reading life. My electricity company gave me a free subscription to Marie Claire a while ago so the magazine magically arrives in the letterbox when the going gets difficult. And even buying the local broadsheet once a week – the Saturday issue is pretty crammed – means that I’ve always got old newspapers to catch up on.

There’s some good tele on at the moment and my willingness to sacrifice favourite shows is at an all-time low – I watch an average of two hours a night, sometimes less, sometimes more. And finally, here are my classic reasons for not reading the classics, given with the twelve-step adage in mind that we’re only as sick as our secrets:

The gas heater steals the oxygen from the room and makes me tired.

My brain’s not what it used to be.

I’ll just forget it all anyway so what’s the point?

I’ve read enough of the classics. From now on I’ll just focus on contemporary writing.

I never learned Greek or Latin. There’s no point reading the translations of works in these languages when the original would be so much better.

I’m lonely and tele keeps me company.

There! I’ve waved the magic blog wand, and hope all these excuses dissolve into nothingness.

Better go now. I have to see what awaits poor Joseph K in The Trial.

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Hit by pre-birthday depression

Every year without fail, around about mid-May, the air around me becomes distorted, unbalanced, distasteful. Things are not themselves. My life feels up for grabs. It’s a strange feeling, as if the future had been concertina-d and was being thrown at me.

The reason? My birthday looms.

The feeling lingers and hardens on the actual day, continuing into the evening, regardless of how I choose to spend the day. The following morning, I wake up and the horror has fled. Life feels normal, even a bit dulled and numb in a comfortable, comforting way.

I’ve spoken to other, more functional people about this feeling. No one owns up to experiencing the kind of pre-birthday depression I do.

It was so bad this year that I half-jokingly wondered to myself if I was re-experiencing some kind of birth trauma – as if every other person on this earth didn’t come into the world accompanied by various degrees of trauma.

Certainly it’s grown worse in recent years, and I think I know why it’s so powerful. On this one day, and leading up to it, I confront the difference between what I thought my life was going to be and what it is. Or rather, it confronts me.

Now that I’ve come to expect this feeling and grown familiar with its rise and fall, I’m better able to deal with it. I get stressed planning my birthday and then I experience some relief when the day actually arrives. But a grim shadow follows me around all day.

Melbourne’s been experiencing a spell of weather disconcertingly warm for this time of year. On Saturday night, the night before my birthday, there was a humid, windless, outdoor feel to the air although the winter darkness fell hurriedly. The warmth continued into Sunday, my birthday.

The first half of the day was spent as positively as possible. With a friend I saw a cheery film that was quirky without trying too hard. It didn’t matter that throughout the film I was comparing myself unfavourably with the main character (why don’t I own my flat? why don’t I have dinner parties?).

Afterwards I drove the friend and me to Elwood. We went to a tiny, familiar café and had the overpriced food you’d expect from somewhere so close to the beach. Again, no major problem. My eggplant parmigiana was an undersized runt served in a small round china baking dish, but rich enough to just satisfy me and tasty enough to evince a determination to find a restaurant that serves a parmigiana of decent proportions (I mainly keep off dairy but will gladly make the odd exception).

We strolled along a prosperous residential street to the beach. When we got there the air was still, the water hardly moved. It was a grey-silver, a beautiful corollary to the neatly patterned cloud flurry that lay low over the water and seemed to tilt upwards in the direction of the horizon. The light behind the clouds placed everything into relief; every grey-bone grain of sand and the densely layered chinks of shell-bits.

A patch of blue sky close to distant shoreline looked cinematic, almost green-tinged. There were a few people around, but the atmosphere was pretty quiet – I wondered if people had taken advantage of the weather and gone away for the weekend.

We lingered and walked and threw the problems of the world at the calm water. I was dark, but it was manageable. We drove back to East Malvern and I had a nap before going to my parents’ place for a family dinner.

This started fine, although later there was an ‘incident’ (unfortunately family gatherings are prone to these) that caused a feeling of being sabotaged. I don’t want to go into it; the truth is, I was feeling bad anyway, so it didn’t really have much of a long-term effect.

The next morning I woke up in a calm daze, apart from an initial downer as soon as I remembered the incident. But really I was feeling so much better than the day before. My birthday was over. Normality had returned. I got up and put the kettle on.

One year on, I've written an update on pre-birthday and birthday depression and my experience on the birthday that followed the one described here. The update includes some suggestions (not advice) about dealing with birthday depression. Click here if you'd like to read it.

Please note: birthday depression is another term for birthday sadness. If you are having suicidal thoughts or think you may have clinical depression, please speak to your doctor or a family member, or ring one of the numbers listed here. Please reach out and seek help if you need to.

Want some more insights into birthday depression? I've written an ebook about it. 

Do you have a story of birthday depression you'd like to share?  Head over to the Birthday Depression website and share your story with others experiencing the same thing.

For a short time I'm offering a free mobi file of the book if you share your story on the website. 

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A dispatch from the loudness wars -- compression and the future of music

With much ‘gentle persuasion’ (arm twisting), I’ve managed to convince an audiophile mate, Michael, to write some words on a development that disturbs many people with a strong interest in sound quality – the increasing use of compression in commercially produced music. Below, Michael explains what compression is and why it’s bad for listeners and the music industry.

When music is played there is great variation in the loudness of different sounds. Lots of recorded music now compresses the recording so that the loudest bits become quieter. This enables engineers to turn up the overall sound. As a result, the recording as a whole is louder but with little variation in sound levels.

If you compare a CD made in the 1980s with a recent CD, you’ll probably find that the old CD sounds very quiet compared with the recent one. (It makes an even better demonstration if you have a recently remastered version and can compare the two versions of the same track.)

It is when you turn the old CD up so that it sounds as loud as the new CD that you really hear the effects of compression. The old CD will sound alive and like ‘real music’. This is because it reproduces all the natural peaks of real music. Drums sound like real drums.

The new CD doesn’t sound like real music. Even on a really good system it sounds as if you’re listening to a radio program.

Because a compressed track sounds louder than an uncompressed track, and more and more compression is being used as each recording strives to be just a bit louder than other recordings, the overuse of compression is known as ‘the loudness wars’.

There is a clip on YouTube which demonstrates the problem. (Note that unless you have very good computer speakers you might not hear much difference in this short clip. Also note that it is now common to use much more compression than is demonstrated on this clip.)

A little compression goes a long way
Some compression has always been used when recording, mixing and mastering music. This is fine when carried out appropriately in small doses, like a chef who uses a pinch of salt.

What is done now to music is like the waiter sprinkling a tablespoon of salt over each meal on the way to the table.

In the ‘olden days’ it was more common to spend time sitting down and actually listening to music rather than doing other things while music played in the background.

When all the natural peaks of the music are cut off by compression the sound is very different. At first the ear often thinks the music sounds good – compression can make some parts of the music sound clearer. But after 20 or so minutes the ear rebels against this unnatural and distorted sound. Not only do you want to turn the music down, but you lose interest in it and want to do something else.

Just as a meal with too much salt might be tasty at first but become inedible after a number of bites, today’s compressed music can be unlistenable if you try to sit down and listen to a whole album at a reasonable volume. In contrast, listening to loud music for a long time is enjoyable when it has not been overly compressed.

The music on most DVDs has a much more natural dynamic and much less compression than modern CDs. This is why you can still enjoy the audio of a DVD even towards the end. If you’ve ever wondered why music in the cinema or on a DVD sounds better and more lifelike than the CD, now you know that it’s all due to the movie version having less compression.

The compression of the dynamics of the music – discussed above – is totally different from the compression carried out for MP3 purposes. A low bit-rate MP3 file does lose some of the musical detail (which is why MP3s sound better if a higher bit rate is used), but making an MP3 file from a CD does not affect the dynamics.

Related developments
Some music is now released on vinyl as an audiophile option. Some audiophiles think that vinyl sounds better than CD and are prepared to pay extra for it. Even though a CD can record a greater dynamic range than vinyl, it is now common for the vinyl version to be less compressed than the CD. Irrespective of the debate between vinyl and CD, the less compressed vinyl really will sound better.

One irony is that as compression becomes more and more popular with mixers (who assume, I suppose, that their listeners want it), so musicians themselves seem to be agreeing to it, thinking it sounds good. Also ironic is the fact that all this is happening at a time when the ability to effectively transmute all the variations and permutations of sounds through high quality digital means has never been greater.

But there is worse. When you buy a remastered CD that has been heavily compressed the original master tape will remain uncompressed. This tape can be used again one day to re-release an uncompressed CD. But as compression has become the ‘industry standard’ it is becoming common to record and mix compressed music. If the master tapes are compressed then this music is compressed for all time.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this issue or would like to join the discussion, check out Turn Me Up, a site devoted to the fight against excessive compression. This site includes lots of links to references and news articles, and is a great place to find out more.

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A musician's progress

I recently bought the latest KD Lang album, Watershed. As soon as I’d managed to unwrap the CD (a skill I have yet to master) I checked out the photographs.

I’m always curious about how Lang represents herself – Lang is the only ‘lesbian’ singer I follow so she’s my only touchstone where lesbian iconography is concerned. But I also want to keep tabs on her development as an artist.

And is she developing as much as I’d like to think? The photos accompanying the CD suggest that here she’s at least partly harking back to her Ingenue period. This album of torch songs, dripping with deliciously forlorn emotion and apparently fuelled by her love for a woman already spoken for, rightly catapulted her into the dizzy heights of superstardom.

A couple of the pics seem to suggest that the ingenue is still around. Both show Lang in profile with eyes dreamily closed, wearing a tailored white shirt with elegant long cuffs and a white waistcoat. In one of these pics her solid fingers are clasped and pressed against her forehead as if in prayer. In the other she leans back against a wall, her arms stretched up on each side as if some heavenly force pulls her upwards.

As before, Lang presents herself as caught up in an interior world. But here she looks more peaceful than she appeared on the Ingenue album, possibly preoccupied with spirituality rather than an unavailable woman. There’s still a sense of the lesbian as endless quester, still alone in the existential sense. And of course, as before, Lang is also inviting us to eroticise her, eyes closed and the ghost of a tiny smile on her face as if to say ‘feel free to look’.

A few pictures quietly counterpoint these images, showing us a mature, reflective but music-focused KD. In one she looks like a nerdy 1950s male pop star. She’s in profile again, dressed casually, listening to a playback perhaps. Her headphones are tight against her spiky hair, which sticks up appealingly at the front as if someone has just run their fingers through it. She’s wearing glasses and looks cute and boyish but at the same time completely focused and singleminded.

In another she’s seated at a keyboard, clutching a piece of music that she gazes at. She wears a casual shirt with sleeves rolled up and her glasses are perched on her forehead. The look is more posed: peaceful, reflective, at ease. Lang seems to be showing a plethora of selves: sexy ingenue, spiritual quester, dedicated musician and mid-life, comfortable dyke.

But her invitation to be eroticised is of course political. I remember the time when it was fashionable to be lesbian (with all the silly contradictions that sexuality being fashionable entails).

During this period a butch-looking Lang appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair sitting on an old-fashioned barber’s chair, her face lathered up and her eyes closed in bliss as she leant against the bosom of a very femme Cindy Crawford, dressed in high heels and a sexy one-piece, who was pretending to shave her. And who could forget Madonna’s remark: ‘Elvis is alive, and she’s beautiful’? Or the stories of Lang at large in LA, running with the likes of Martina Navratilova in what sounded like some sort of lesbian brat pack?

And who could not melt when hearing that velvet voice? I’ve listened to the album only a few times and it sounds overly lush bordering on easy listening. In Ingenue Lang perfected a wonderful lesbian camp – is she trying for this again? I’ve always assumed she would keep doing new things with her music but perhaps she won’t. It’s too soon for me to tell, I’ll have to listen a few times before I get a proper sense of it.

For the moment, though, it’s good to hear that gorgeous voice again.

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Creeping misogyny

Often when I write about an issue that ‘gets up my goat’, as Kath Day-Night would say, the act of putting my ideas down soothes me. But since I’ve been focusing on the issue of women’s rights in Australia, the picture just seems to get more drastic – we need some smart, quick action across many fronts to make this a fairer country for everybody.

As a feminist spawned in the wild, rebellious, radical women’s movement of the early eighties I assumed things would just keep getting better for women, and in the nineties they seemed to be. But the issue of women’s social and economic progress is now on the backburner, and women are slipping behind in so many ways. At the same time the portrayal of women in the traditional media has gone sharply downhill along with a general ‘dumbing down’ of content.

In writing the following about my own country I’m fully aware that the majority of women in the developing world are in a far worse crisis. I don’t think the two are unconnected, of course. It amazes and saddens me that feminism is considered a dirty word in the West, or merely unfashionable, when so many women in the developing world have no control over their reproductive lives, no safe place to give birth, and suffer the effects of obscenely high infant mortality rates.

We still live in a world where millions of women can’t leave the house without male chaperones, where child brides are raped by their decades-older male ‘husbands’, where rape is a routine weapon of war in the Congo, and where many wives and sex workers risk contracting AIDS because they don’t have the social power to insist on protected sex. In such a world, what exactly is the alternative to feminism? There is none.

Below is a summary of some of the main issues related to feminism that desperately need some government and community attention in Australia.

Domestic violence
An amazing one in three women will experience some form of violence in their lifetime, prime minister Kevin Rudd said in a recent statement.

In 2005 the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that more than 1 million Australian women had experienced violence at the hands of a previous partner since the age of 15; this represents 15 per cent of women aged 18 years and over (ABS 2006, Personal safety survey Australia,. cat. no. 4906.0, ABS, Canberra). Women and children’s lives are still being shattered by such violence in their hundreds of thousands, although I acknowledge that a minority of men are also victims.

We need stronger laws nationwide to ensure that the violent partner always leaves the family home. We need tougher prison sentences to deal with men who kill their partners who try to leave. We need more funding for anger management and much greater police protection for those women who have left their partners and live in fear of their lives. And we need to recognise that some men do not bash their partners but seek to control them by keeping total control of the finances.

Housework and childcare
The quality of the public debate around responsibility for housework and childcare has degenerated to an extraordinary degree in recent years. It’s a given now that women have the main hands-on parenting and housework role and that they are the ones who have to do the balancing act if they want to work outside the home. Women are now constantly advising other women about how they can do it better; the Australian Women’s Weekly is full of stories about such women, held up as role models for the rest of us.

Recently there was a debate on Radio National about a book a woman wrote on the challenges of combining parenting with artistic endeavours. The author confided without irony that she had squeezed writing the book in between caring for her children. The women involved in this discussion did refer to their (male) partners, but always in terms of the degree to which their partners supported them in their juggle/struggle – there was no sense in which it was a responsibility that might be shared equally.

Sadly, an Australian rural journalist lost her life in unfortunate circumstances about a year ago. She seems to have been one of those women who fell into the job and was naturally good at it. But the media coverage of her untimely death emphasised that she felt that mothering was her most important role. But why should she have to choose? And why is it suggested that this is the definition of a good woman – one who puts her children before her career – and not a good man?

Now, when it comes to gender roles and parenting the notion of individual choice is sacrosanct in our culture and I do not want to challenge that. Plenty of couples with babies and young children work it out in their own way; plenty of women want to be the ones to give up their careers for the first years of their child’s life. That’s fine. But the way things stand now, the debate is totally skewed in favour of the female partner doing this, even if she’s better qualified and earning more than the male.

We also need to remember that, sadly, a huge percentage of marriages end in divorce. Women who compromise their careers are leaving themselves open to poverty and lack of superannuation should they divorce – the statistics certainly bear this out. We need a systematic change in job design and employer attitudes to ensure that if women choose the role of full-time parent for the first years of their children’s lives they are still able to advance their careers.

We also need more options for part time work and family friendly hours generally, for both men and women, so that men can better share the burden of parenting as the children get older.

Body image
We bring up our young girls to be narcissistic and overly concerned with their appearance, and through the media and consumerism the culture as a whole sexualises young girls. This is leading to a situation where young children are developing eating disorders even before they hit puberty. Too much focus on appearance and their bodies detracts from the ability of young girls to act on and in the world.

Women in the media
According to commercial television, women now have a bewildering variety of career choices – whether it be porn star, neurotic housewife or emotionally over-invested mother.

Images of women on television are, I would argue, at a crisis point, even on non-commercial stations. Just one example: there is a very popular half-hour evening program in Australia called The Gruen Transfer. It’s an ironic, humorous take on the role of advertising in our society, featuring a host who is a stand-up comic, two regulars from the advertising industry, and two guests from the industry. I enjoy watching this show because it uses humour to tell some home truths about a form of media often taken for granted.

But the host and the two regulars are both male, and only one of the guests is ever female. This means four men on the panel and one woman! (The word ‘token’ springs to mind.)

This show should have been planned with gender balance in mind – the ABC is obligated through its editorial policy to provide a range of views from a cross section of the community. But let’s just give the ABC the benefit of the doubt for a minute and assume the show is reflecting the realities of the advertising industry.

If this is the case, it’s a worry for two reasons. Any industry that in 2009 excludes women to such an extent (and this is one where top execs earn seriously big biccies) has a major problem and should take a good, hard look at itself. If it’s a boy’s club it’s putting up major barriers against the talent and creativity of half the population.

But there’s another, just as pressing issue: the people who design the ads we’re bombarded with every day have a huge influence on our lives. And increasingly they’re portraying women in the most retrograde ways.

A recent ad for Nutrigrain breakfast cereal featured a 30-something mother whose sole aim in life seemed to be to see her son grow up to be an iron man (shades of Nazi Germany, where women’s main role was to produce male fighters for the Aryan cause?)

Another one showed B-grade celebrity Sonia Kruger, having taken her vitamin pill for the day and ready for a morning out. She was wearing heels so high I wondered how, despite the vitamins, she was going to make it out the door.

In fact, high heels – which can cause serious foot and postural damage over time – are becoming increasingly common on ads with daytime settings, ie with women dressed in ‘daytime’ clothes.

Yet another ad, supposedly hip and ‘with-it’ on gendered attitudes to housework, seems in fact to be trying to resign us all to the status quo. It shows a young couple expecting visitors, with the woman fussing over the state of the house and the man trying to reassure her. But she insists on cleaning the toilet, with the advertised product, as he watches approvingly. So it’s fine for women to be ‘neurotic’ about housework – lets men off the hook nicely. We desperately need more female advertising executives to show more realistic, wide-ranging images of women.

I don’t even want to talk about the skewing of programming overwhelmingly towards men in the area of sport – it’s too depressing. Of course some women watch sport and listen to sports commentary on the radio.

But it would be interesting to do a large survey on the breakdown of viewers and listener types in terms of gender, and my guess is you’d find that they were overwhelmingly male – so both our taxes and consumer dollars (ie what we unwittingly pitch in for advertising costs) are skewed towards male viewing and listening.

My local ABC radio station, for example, turns into a sports station on the weekend. And Channel’s Ten’s only HD station shows sport only, most of it being played by males – if that’s not masculinist, what is?

Sexist language
I’m troubled by the increasing use of the word ‘mankind’ in the media. This is related to the use of ‘man’ to mean ‘humans’ and ‘men’ to mean ‘people’ (the last is far less common but I think the connection is important).

Why not say ‘humankind’ instead of ‘mankind’? It’s one more syllable and two more letters. And it sounds kinder and more inclusive, because it is. It reminds us of our common humanity, to boot.

But what’s so insidious about ‘mankind’, you might well ask. Everybody knows it means women as well. Aren’t there more important things to worry about?

But ‘mankind’ and ‘man’ as collective nouns don’t clearly mean either ‘men and women’ or ‘all members of the male gender’. They mean one or the other depending on the context, which can change without notice. This very slipperiness of the meanings is the problem – the impossibility of pinning the meaning down. These words render women as ghosts or mere shadows, liable to appear one minute and disappear the next. At very best they subsume women into men, just as Eve was born of Adam’s rib and was originally part of him. At worst, they simply cause women to vanish altogether. The language ‘disappears’ them.


Male defensiveness
I am amazed at the defensiveness of some men when they feel confronted by what they see as reversed sexism, and it bothers me how quick these men are to jump to this conclusion – revealing a misogyny and fear of women’s power.

This male defensiveness can be really over the top. A few months ago I was listening to two female hosts on my local ABC radio station, filling in for a male host because it was a public holiday. One male talkback caller rang to have a whinge about the fact that two women were hosting, as if it was some kind of feminist conspiracy.

In another talkback radio program on the subject of equal opportunity laws, one man complained about the title of an ABC television comedy, Stupid Stupid Man. He seemed to miss the point that the show was mainly about men, featuring at least four men and only two women.

Why does all this matter?
It matters because it is morally wrong to effectively castrate and in some cases sexually enslave half the population.

It matters because if we allow misogyny to go unchecked it feeds on itself. More than 20 years ago, in her book The Reproduction of Mothering, feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow theorised that misogyny was so widespread because it was women who mainly looked after male children. She wrote: ‘psychologists have demonstrated unequivocally that the very fact of being mothered by a woman [I assume she means solely] generates in men conflicts over masculinity, a psychology of male dominance and a feeling of being superior to women’. She called for ‘a fundamental reorganization of parenting, so that primary parenting is shared between men and women’.

This makes perfect sense to me. It is overwhelmingly mothers who frustrate us and deny us by giving us boundaries as we mature. But in many cases children also live with the resentment of mothers who want to do more with their lives than look after them. If there was more of a gender balance in parenting roles, not only would girls grow up with broader career horizons, but boys would be less misogynistic.

It matters because, as Thomas L. Friedman says in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, climate change and shrinking biodiversity threaten our existence on this planet, and we need all the human ingenuity and innovation we can get. We need the brains and energies of the 50 per cent of the population who are currently stymied in one way or another.

It matters on an international level because we desperately need every girl in the world to be educated, because she will have fewer children. I’m not being paternalistic here: educated women in general choose to have fewer children, and they may also have more economic and social power and more access to reproductive choices.

It matters because statistics show that the more rights women have in a particular country the more that country prospers. Ironic isn’t it? In those countries that oppress women the most, individual men may have undue sexual and social power – but the country as a whole will suffer.

Ideas for change
Here are just some possibilities for bringing the rights of women back into the spotlight in the Australian context.

A new book needs to be written about the state of women’s rights in Australia – what’s feminist Anne Summers been doing lately? There have been some new titles in the last couple of years but they’ve had a bit of publicity and then sunk. This new book should not have the word ‘feminism’ in it. Feminism is not the problem. Masculinism is. The book could be called something like: Masculinist Nation: The New Misogyny in Twenty-First Century Australia (even though it’s the same old stuff, just finding new inventive ways to manifest itself).

Start a new, national lobby group with a raft of aims/demands, something along the lines of the National Organisation of Women (NOW) in the US. It’s a great name and acronym – why can’t we steal it? We do have an organisation called the Women’s Electoral Lobby but it has a very low profile and the name suggests that it has a limited role.

Representatives from this national organisation could commence a speaking program for all schools, talking to both sexes about the history of feminism and the continuing struggles. (For non-Australian readers, the country is going through a drawn-out masculinist worship of all things warlike at the moment – this is not all bad, the average soldier needs to be remembered, but it must be balanced out with women’s ‘war stories’.)

For example, young people should know that in first wave feminism British women suffered force feeding (do they know how horrendous that is?) so women could have the vote. And in second wave feminism women put in untold hours of unpaid work to lobby for equal pay and equal opportunity, safety in the streets, equal access to uni education, safe places and legal safeguards for victims of domestic violence, legal safeguards against sexual harrassment, changes to divorce laws, etc etc etc.

Ask these young people to name one of the women who started second wave feminism in the US – they won’t be able to and no, Gloria Steinem was second generation – and then talk about and show images of some of these largely forgotten heroines.

Make a federal government minister responsible for improving the status of women, with no other ministerial responsibilities. She must report to parliament each year about progress according to set criteria. Don’t let her be Tanya Plibersek. She’s a nice woman but way too gentle. This woman needs to be a hard hitter, tough but fair.

Start an advertising campaign telling men they’re not doing enough around the house and that the house is just as much their responsibility as it is their partner’s. Make the ad cheeky and funny and suggest extremely subtly that they might get more nooky if they do their bit – but frame it mainly in terms of the fair go.

Start a new, non-government Australian website that is a portal to a range of Australian women’s groups and websites devoted to feminist issues.

Immediately legislate for paid maternity leave (no, we still don’t have it as a legal right in Australia).

Start an information campaign aimed at Australian male migrants to explain to them in their own languages the status of women in Australia and what the legal safeguards are. Provide funding for information campaigns in the languages of migrant women to inform them of their legal rights in relation to sexism, domestic violence, work and so on.

Bring back affirmative action, not just for women but for all minorities, gays and lesbians. Affirmative action is misunderstood: it is not about plucking women/minorities off the street to make up the numbers. It’s about looking at the barriers for full participation of various groups in politics, the workforce, education and training, recreation and the arts, and working to remove those barriers.

Empower Indigenous women to take leadership roles in their communities and provide funding for culturally sensitive campaigns and services for both men and women around domestic violence and alcohol addiction.

A brighter future
I guarantee you that life in Australia would be better, and over time our standard of living and reputation for innovation over many areas would improve, if the government and community worked together to improve the status of women in Australia.

South Australia was one of the earliest parts of the world to give women the vote, in 1894, and Australia was one of the first countries to legislate for a universal aged pension. We can recover our reputation for enlightened social policy – if we dare.

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