Is ‘Chick’ Chic or Retrograde?

In the Swinging Sixties, that magic era of Carnaby Street, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, free love and the Pill, horny young chaps in stovepipes and mop tops flitted around getting it on with as many cool chicks as they could manage to lure back to their groovy pads. Things got so bad that the chicks went out and created Second Wave Feminism.
 

Of course, everything’s changed now, right? In some twenty-something inner city circles the chick is now the female equivalent of the hipster. She’s easygoing yet focused, joining her brothers in her preference for flannelette shirts featuring obscure band names, fixed-gear bicycles and Pabst beer. She’s got tats, is constantly instagramming and probably spends most of her work day in a coffee roastery, hunched over her laptop.

A distinct yet overlapping demographic – savvy professional women heading micro and small businesses – have embraced ‘chick’ as a marketing tool. The internet is littered with SEO chicks, PR and marketing chicks, legal chicks (as opposed to legal eagles I guess) – even a chicken chick.

And now that older women are claiming their goddess-given right to flaunt their booty at any age, they’re refusing to relinquish the word once the first flush of youth fades. If a chick is hip, contemporary and down-to-earth, who says you can’t be a chick at fifty? At sixty? Why stop there?

Yet whole groups of people would rather guzzle toilet paper than use the word. My seventeen-year-old nephew, when quizzed, mumbled that if one of his male friends used it he sounded – this is my translation of what he actually said – fake, pretentious and trying too hard. My forty-something sister, an English coordinator at a secondary girls’ school, simply shook her head and shuddered when I mentioned the word.

Perhaps this is because the nasty version of chick is always lurking around the interwebs, like the class bully who crashes your birthday party, hits on your boyfriend then trashes your house. The ‘hot chick’ is a woman’s body with the humanity sucked out like air from a balloon. She’s the bad girl in the madonna/whore dynamic of patriarchy, the pin-up girl of retrosexism, a twenty-first century version of the compliant, vacantly smiling sixties chick – just add porn and stir.

You can be repurposed into a ‘hot chick’ online whether or not your pose was deliberately sexy. Type ‘hot chicks’ into Google and you’ll get everything from everyday situations that have been lovingly pornified, eg ‘hot chicks picking up dog shit’ and ‘hot chicks in nerd panties’ to mainstream porn. There are even ‘hot chicks’ next to fixie bikes, which is truly depressing.

The gender politics of ‘chick’ echo in the continuing feminist rage against the term ‘chick lit’ for the way it denigrates women’s literary contribution. The idea of Wuthering Heights being labelled chick lit is horrifying, and there were howls of derision across the internet when Sylvia Plath’s acidic novel The Bell Jar got a disastrous ‘chick lit’ makeover for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. ‘Chick flick’ is just as suspect, according to Gloria Steinem.

If ‘chick’ somehow survived the feminist revolution, ‘bird’ is one of its casualties. It’s now redolent of sad late middle-aged men with comb-overs who never got the memo that the era of sideburns and sleazy feel-ups at the photocopier was over for good, or the acres of female flesh that romped through Alvin Purple and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

Other terms for women derived from the animal world hang on for dear life despite themselves. In 2012 Grahame Morris was forced to apologise to Leigh Sales for calling her a cow after she interviewed him on radio.

What about ‘bitch’? How did this word not only get through to the keeper, but manage to widen its remit? Used to be a bitch was spiteful and overly competitive; now thanks to rap culture you can be someone’s bitch even if you’re mild as a lamb, or just hanging around trying to look cool, as in (’cos you know, I’m so up with these things) ‘Yo! wassup bitches?’ A male friend once congratulated me on being his ‘publicity bitch’ at an event where he was selling his books. He was just trying to express how great I was but I felt deflated.

Even ‘girl’ has the power to offend in some contexts, particularly when male sports commentators use it to describe female athletes who would slaughter them in seconds in any competition. In March 2014, the BBC edited out the word girl in some footage where the male reporter said he couldn’t believe he’d been beaten at judo by a nineteen-year-old girl – who happened to be a Commonwealth Games judo champion.

Maybe words like chick are the same as the derogatory terms for any oppressed group – the group itself can use the word, but woe betide anyone else who does?

Or perhaps our nearest and dearest can fondly call us bitch, cow, girl or even Hornytits to their hearts’ content, yet the random in the street who yells it out at us cops a torrent of abuse.

But I can’t help thinking – why does the word woman sound so odd, so exotic, even sexualised? Is a woman still a mysterious, ethereal being who is unpredictable and perhaps a tiny bit evil?

And is ‘chick’ a sexist term, or should we embrace its changing uses – what do you think?

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Things that Go Bump in the Daytime: The Spooky Fun of Ghost Videos

Some people consume amateur porn on line. I am a sucker for amateur fright night videos.

I only properly discovered YouTube a couple of years ago. It wasn’t till then that I fully understood the power of the internet to effortlessly dispose of time. Here you’ll find every pleasant television memory, every edgy advertisement that didn’t get aired on TV, every pop song that held special meaning and that you had previously thought could only be called up from your own internal hard drive, every possible interview featuring your favourite celebrity and every single amateur video, however lacking in basic intellectual or artistic merit, ever uploaded by Josephine or Joe Average.

The amateur ghost vids are a genre unto themselves. The first question we lovers of the paranormal are supposed to ask ourselves is: ‘Is it real?’ This question is often unintentionally answered in the negative by the makers themselves: the urge to go overboard is just too tempting. The orbs are pleasantly spooky (orbs are surely the ecotoplasm of the twenty-first century), but then the light of the bathroom turns on by itself, followed soon after by the faucet doing the same. Sleeper ‘wakes up’ to investigate. I didn’t come down in the last shower, along with the restless spirits of the dead.

Other times, as in the imaginatively titled Ghost Children in Our Basement Caught on Tape, the video looks genuine at first. These ghost kiddies slowly move toy cars around, rock chairs, gently throw a doll to the ground and then turn the tele on. They seem slightly sedated, and one commenter notes that she would much rather have these polite ghost children than her own brats who would probably trash the joint. The greenish tinge of the infrared light adds to the understated air of authenticity.

But this impression is soon spoilt by onscreen messages like ‘subscribe for more ghost children videos’. Would someone who was genuinely under assault by a poltergeist have the emotional fortitude to create a YouTube channel with 112 videos? And once you start reading the comments, which pick the video apart, you lose the forlorn hope that, despite your misgivings, perhaps this really  is a genuine depiction.

While the majority of these videos reveal themselves to be fake, for would-be believers like me it is the liminal area between the likelihood of fakery and the dim hope of authenticity that makes these tapes so compelling. Perhaps that’s why the comments calling out the fakes are sometimes so vitriolic. We’d rather remain uncertain than know for sure that someone's trying to pull our collective leg.

This one, which is obviously faked if you look carefully, shows a speeded-up version of the reason a couple supposedly argue about whether he makes the bed every day after she leaves for work. Delightful shivers up my spine before the trick became obvious.

And here is a ghost that does the vacuumming. I wish I had this type of ghost.

I found this one very creepy at first, not because it couldn’t be doctored – anything can be doctored – but because imaginatively this seems unlikely. If you were going to create a ghostly effect, would you do it like this? But then too many commenters declared that this was a speck of dust moving over the lens, and I reluctantly conceded they were probably right.

Even if the trick isn’t obvious, a sure warning sign of fakery in the majority of examples is that so much of the poltergeist action takes place squarely in the vision of the time lapse camera that the makers supposedly leave on for hours at a time.

Sometimes there is a dog involved, barking anxiously and staring at something the video maker can’t see. The makers always seem compelled to ask their dogs over and over again ‘What is it, Fluffy?’ (or Sid or whoever), perhaps expecting their dog to be shocked into speech by the drama of the moment: ‘Dog speaks for the first time after being asked “What is it?” twenty times during poltergeist episode’.

Dog See's [sic] a Ghost! is a good example of the ghost-and-dog subgenre. Featuring  a creepy attic ghost, it attracted no accusations of fakery, and the dog is genuinely terrified. If the authenticity of these videos should be judged purely by the comments, this one could be authentic (she says hopefully).

What scared me most in this video, though, was the terrible use of apostrophes and unnecessary commas. ‘See’s’? What’s that about? Can a verb possess something? Perhaps the apostrophe indicates that the verb is itself possessed by the ghost of bad punctuation.

The videos recorded on security cameras  seem by their very nature to be more authentic because of  the low pixel rate and the fact that they're often in black and white. What do readers think of this one, which is set in a video store? The person putting the videos away seems genuinely startled, but perhaps he’s just a good actor?

But in the final analysis, for genuine lovers of thrillers it doesn’t matter whether these are real or not, any more than it matters whether the people in amateur porn movies are really into each other. Because this is really a replica of an existing genre – the thriller that apes reality, pioneered by the brilliant Blair Witch Project, and carried further in the Paranormal Activity series – the first of which was pretty good, with the quality dwindling further with each sequel. We knew Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity weren’t real but it was the similitude that made them scary, not a mistaken belief that one was watching a doco.

The same goes for these amateur videos. When they don’t overreach themselves and you avoid reading the comments, they provide great cheap thrills. It’s the carefully timed depiction of boring domestic reality, with its combination of natural and technogical sounds, followed by sudden, inexplicable events at unpredictable intervals that produces the delightful eeriness. And of course the overly serious intertitles, which are usually white text on a black background, feature lots of full stops and are often accompanied by nothing but an ominous silence.

A decent supernatural thriller comes out only once every couple of years, so I am chronically thriller deprived. Amateur fright videos fill the gap in the meantime.

Ghost videos and the uncanny

Wikipedia tells us that the state known as the uncanny was first identified by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’. According to Jentsch, the uncanny is the result of ‘intellectual uncertainty’; it is always ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’. He goes on to say:

... one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.

This explains why splatter porn is horrifying but not thrilling, and why its consumers require increasing amounts of gore to get their kicks. Good supernatural thrillers play on this uncertainty rather than revealing the source of the fear, or at least putting off the revelation until late in the day.

Freud goes further, arguing that the uncanny is basically about taboos like sex and death. Because these taboos are traditionally not dealt with directly, we end up projecting all our ‘stuff’ onto them; the uncanny thus reminds us of our own repressed desires. It doesn’t bust the taboos, though – it plays on them. A decent thriller uses all this psychic possibility while not spoiling the effect by exposing the taboo. Thus ghosts should be either invisible or indistinguishable from humans, and gore should be kept to a minimum.

But for someone with anxiety there is another dimension. Anxiety means a constant fear of chimeras – the next social event, the next work assignment, and even stretches of time ranging from the next five minutes to the future itself. Watching a scary video is a way of controlling the way one is exposed to fear of the unknown, enabling the viewer to mediate their fear in a safe environment.

But as well as immediate fears, perhaps the uncanny also helps us mediate those unnamed fears that supercapitalism and the threat of climate change cultivate in the most balanced personalities. Given the Russian roulette we are playing with finance, people and environment, the future is terrifying. Much safer to be terrified by chimeras that we know probably aren’t real.

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Fame Junkies: Dr Drew and Celebrity Rehab

Okay, I admit it. I’ve recently been tuning into Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, on the not-so-venerable ABC2. It’s emotional car-crash television and I feel guilty watching it.

This low-rent reality TV program follows a group of the kind of people who qualify as celebrities these days – actors, porn stars, models, reality TV stars, rock stars, sports stars, and the parents of stars – as they attempt to recover from addictions to alcohol, drugs and prescription pills in a luxury treatment centre in Pasadena, California. Swollen lips, flouncy hair, floods of tears, tantrums and attitude problems abound. Perhaps the most poignant participant was Leif Garrett, a 1970s teen idol addicted to heroin and cocaine.

The group leader and treating doctor is celebrity medico Drew Pinsky, who was also executive producer on the first five seasons of the show. True to the fact that the budget of ABC2 matches its trashy values, the fourth season, which first aired in the US in late 2010, is currently screening in Melbourne.

When I started researching the show I discovered I was hopelessly out of date; Pinsky finally ended the series this year after six seasons. He'd grown tired of the storm of criticism he received from doctors, psychologists and addiction experts every time a former participant died. Those critics were quick to point the finger when Mindy McCready, a country singer who had appeared on the show’s third season in early 2010, shot herself in February 2013, just a month after her boyfriend’s suicide; she was the fifth former participant of the show to die. 

The experts who slammed Pinsky accused him of having an inherent conflict of interest: his need for the show to be entertaining versus his interest in his patients’ recovery. They claimed that his methods were dangerous and outdated, and went against treatment guidelines from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Detoxing at the clinic was done quickly and painfully, a practice that was potentially deadly but conveniently dramatic; and contrary to Pinsky’s belief, 12-step programs and complete abstinence were not the only means of recovery, and not right for everyone.

They also criticised the fact that participants were paid to appear in the show – five hundred thousand dollars in some cases – because it amounted to luring addicts with the promise of money they could then splash on their addiction. This also goes against the whole concept of addiction recovery – the addict has to want to recover, and shouldn’t need a financial incentive to do so.

I’m in no position to make judgements about the causes of the deaths. The people concerned weren’t in Pinsky’s care at the time and in some cases it was years since he’d treated them, and addiction is a notoriously stubborn condition. But that’s not my main point here. My point is that the whole concept of filming a celebrity being treated for addiction is toxic.

Pinsky, by the way, is no Dr Phil - he is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Keck School of Medicine at the University of California.

Abusive therapy?

My issue with the show centres around narcissism. It’s the curse of our age, and the term narcissist is used as a term of derision, but narcissism is actually a crippling disorder. Many narcissists harbour deep childhood wounds from years of abuse. Pinsky himself has researched narcissism and fame, co-authoring a 2006 study that demonstrated that celebrities were significantly more narcissistic than the general population (which makes him doubly culpable for playing on his patients' incessant need for attention).

To be a celebrity these days almost automatically demands narcissism to begin with. To film these celebrity addicts is, I believe, a kind of abuse, because the presence of the camera actually encourages their narcissistic tendencies without dealing with those tendencies as part of the therapy.

A case in point is Janice Dickinson, who styles herself as the world’s first supermodel and these days makes her living as a talent agent, photographer and writer. With her face so plastered with filler she can barely move it, and beestung lips so thick she can hardly talk, this woman displays levels of anger and exhibitionism that suggest serious emotional damage. Dickinson has spoken out about the physical and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, and her decades-long drug habit. Given that she filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, it’s also likely she has a spending problem. 

In one scene she complains to Dr Pinsky that another patient has been playing up to the camera. She then stages a walk-out, declaring that she’s leaving the treatment centre. The camera keeps filming her and the question of whether she is acting or not suddenly becomes incredibly complicated. While she rants and packs, she accuses the camera of being intrusive. No doubt she too is playing up to it, and probably thinking about her own career, yet she also seems aware that the camera is actually part of the problem.

It strikes me that the last thing these people need is to have a camera pointed at them. The lure and promises of the camera – an increase in fame, recognition, attention, love – would be a barrier against effective recovery. And surely the first thing a good doctor would do, for a celeb or would-be celeb deep in addiction, would be to turn the camera off; to hide her away from the world so that she has the chance to heal. These are people at rock bottom, at their most vulnerable. Privacy is the very least they deserve. Giving Dickinson a camera to parade in front of may have simply played on her vulnerabilities, and actually worsened them. Just because you exploit yourself doesn’t mean you’re not also being exploited by others.

But the show itself is the thin end of the wedge; the use of Dickinson to promote the show is far worse. In this video, probably promoting the show’s fifth season, Dr Pinsky and two others, who appear to be producers, start a line of questioning about the penis size of the many famous men Dickinson has bedded, and then prompt her to list these men (don’t watch it if you’re easily offended). She’s slurring just a tiny bit, which suggests that she may be on some kind of tranquilliser or antidepressant. This promo goes so far against the ethics of the patient–doctor relationship that it’s breathtaking. It also demonstrates that for Pinsky at least, the line between entertainment and therapy, between staged drama and reality, has not simply blurred but completely disappeared.

Dickinson has written about a hellish childhood in which she was beaten repeatedly by her father, a paedophile, for refusing sex with him. If we assume that her addiction is linked to that childhood abuse, it’s beyond the pale that a woman who has never been fathered is being encouraged by her male therapist to boast about her sexual conquests with men in graphic terms. It is likely that she would seek the love and approval from her therapist that she never got from her father, and would use her sexuality to try to obtain that love. If so, this would amount to a toxic relationship that involved simply re-enacting her incessant need for attention rather than actually examining it.

Dickinson, it must be said, credits the show with getting her sober. Good luck to her; perhaps in between all the exploitation by self and others, she somehow got what she needed. But to take the risk that a minority of patients, even a tiny minority, could be damaged or even killed by such a flawed treatment method seems negligent in the extreme. And it’s sad and disheartening to see these vulnerable people, sometimes with faces ravaged by abuse, parading in front of the camera.

Ethical TV therapy
The idea of filming people in therapy is not necessarily bad. I thought Pamela Stephenson’s ShrinkRap one of the best things on television, suggesting its potential as a medium for genuine inquiry and discovery. Sitting opposite each other in comfy chairs in a dimly lit room, Stephenson confronted a tortured celebrity or artist, and asked them therapeutic questions about their childhoods and the way their pasts affected their careers and personal lives. The show featured megastars like Robin Williams, Salman Rushdie and Joan Rivers (ironically, Stephenson like a few of her own guests, sports ironed hair and face).

There is a sense of dignity and choice. Stephenson manages to cover tabloid topics in a way that probes for the reasons behind public scandals and private torment. Questions mimick those of a therapy session but are cleverly geared to television, and the whole thing takes about fifty minutes, the time of an average therapy session. Stephenson's demeanour is respectful yet fairly detached, her approach finding a balance between letting her guest go off in their own direction, and bringing them back to difficult topics. Imagining yourself in that particular therapy chair is neither difficult nor unpleasant.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like The mysterious life of the psyche: on watching United States of Tara and A tale of two talk show hosts.

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A New Direction for Slightly Nutty

Sorry that this blog has been left fallow for so long - I've finally decided the direction I want to go in blog-wise. I'm more or less amalgamating Slightly Nutty with my other blog, Melbarts, to create an informal arts/politics/culture blog.

The new blog is called Feminist Culture Muncher and really came out of a need to justify my frequent telly watching!

My Inspired Shopper book is not yet ready, but it won't be long now. In the meantime I've reactivated the Inspired Shopper blog.

It feels strange to be 'moving'. In fact, there are many things I would still love to write about on Slightly Nutty - it's just that the other projects take greater priority at this time. And many of the kinds of concerns I've been airing here I will continue to air on the new blog, although I'm not sure how frequent entries will be at the moment - I'm aiming for shorter, more frequent entries than the ones in Slightly Nutty, but we'll see.

Hope to see you all at my new locations!

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Australian media fiddles while Pakistan drowns

Australia is still awaiting the final results of our recent federal elections, which resulted in a hung parliament, the first time this has happened since the Second World War.

We were on the eve of the election campaign when news of the devastating floods in Pakistan gripped the world. The inability of the Australian media to sufficiently highlight the horror of the floods, huger than the 2004 tsunami and the Haitian earthquake combined, was appalling. I’m no news junkie but wherever I watched or listened, rarely if ever did a story about the floods headline a news bulletin, although it usually featured somewhere.

The numbers were difficult to comprehend: initially 14 million said to be displaced, with that number now at 20 million, almost the population of Australia.

This disaster is the future writ large, the massive effects of global warming evident in our lifetimes. It’s not just a matter of short-term relief: the entire infrastructure of the country will have to be rebuilt. Given the unprecedented scale of the tragedy, a national fundraising campaign should have been ubiquitous on all Australian media from day one, but this wasn’t the case.

Instead, an increasingly irrelevant media bored a population pissed off with the governing ALP for knifing a first-term PM and disgusted with the inability of the major parties to produce policies aimed at anyone but the most ignorant swinging voters. The result has been a hung parliament with independents demanding parliamentary and other reforms.

It was both heartening and sickening when, the election safely over, the ABC finally got around to holding a radiothon for Pakistani flood victims in conjunction with UNICEF's fundraising appeal – how many more lives could have been saved if they’d held it right from the start?

The response was overwhelming. UNICEF was hoping for $1 million, but in seeming record time $3 million had been raised. It appeared that Australians had been unsure of how to respond to the disaster and were just waiting for some guidance. Better late than never, but this enormous tragedy hasn’t magically disappeared – sustained and relentless media attention is still needed.

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‘Richmond’s not in his room!’ – Why I love the IT Crowd

I have spent too many hours of my life splayed out on the loungeroom floor watching reruns of a sitcom that has grabbed and colonised my heart, soul and mind. It’s called The IT Crowd and its controlled ridiculousness is keeping me semi-sane during what is proving to be a rather grim winter. This British comedy is written by the unfairly talented Graham Linehan, cowriter of Black Books.

Moss, Roy and Jen constitute the IT department of the chaotic but phenomenally successful Reynholm industries (that the company’s raison d’etre is never specified is a running joke of the show; one fan has set up a spoof company website). Stuck in the basement of the Reynholm tower, they’re cut off from the other workers in their airy offices who enjoy stunning views of London.

Moss and Roy are hapless nerds while Jen, their ‘relationship manager’, sees herself as their bridge to the normal world but too often is marginalised herself by association.

Then one day Jen spies a red door in the basement, and, as in Bluebeard’s castle, is only more determined to discover what’s behind it when Roy and Moss warn her that all hell will break lose if she does. After the initial terror of encountering Richmond, an unearthly Goth, she settles down for a chat with this sweet-tempered former high-flyer who has been banished to the server room because of his infatuation with the extreme metal band Cradle of Filth.

‘Richmond’s out of his room, he’s not in his room, he’s supposed to be in his room, why isn’t he in his room?’ laments Moss, his love of routine and predictability thwarted, the British pronunciation of ‘room’, less drawn out and therefore more formal sounding than the Australian version, adding weight to his objection.

Moss, despite Graham Linehan’s denials, is clearly meant to be an Aspergers person. Not only does he thrive on routine but he’s technically proficient to the point of genius, socially clumsy, and entirely oblivious to nuance and Machiavellian craftiness; he even walks and holds his head in a way that is awkwardly wooden.

However, given that Moss’s most salient and attractive quality is his childlike need for certainty, it’s highly unlikely that the character represents an accurate portrayal of an Aspergers person. Yet it’s his childlike aspects that contribute most to his appeal, and perhaps they defuse the kind of criticism you might expect such a portrayal to evoke in the Aspergers community – I couldn’t find any criticisms of the character on the web, although that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.

Another reason for the seeming lack of criticism could be that while we often laugh at Moss’s unintentional funniness, we also chortle at his deliberate jokes, delivered in a self-consciously signature style that fans find adorable.

And generally speaking, Moss suffers far less than the other characters; he’s naturally cheerful, wins out against bullies (as in the first episode in the third series) and is canny enough to take advantage of amorous and financial opportunities (returning the attentions of a glamorous female psychiatrist in the first series; unintentionally stealing money from thieves in the third).

Like many women and probably men, I’m in love with Moss. This is partly because the actor who plays him, Richard Ayoade, is a very attractive man, with large brown eyes, a snub nose, finely sculpted cheekbones and a cherubic mouth; because Moss’s social incapacities make him so vulnerable that he arouses maternal instincts; because his character, and the actor who plays him, are both extremely funny (and sometimes their personalities seem to blend together, as if Ayoade and Moss were in league with each other); and because the childlike aspects of his nature promise a temporary, atavistic return to childhood.

Yet I couldn’t find much on the web about Ayoade himself, except for a frustratingly short beginning of an interview that seemed to suggest that he himself might suffer from Aspergers (he mentions a difficulty in maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while speaking) but in fact appears to show him in a very understated role in a satire.

Ayoade seems to lack his own website, despite what is clearly a huge fan base out there. The Channel 4 website for the show has clips and episodes that are frustratingly off-limits to Australians (I can understand the downloadable episodes being off-limits, but why the clips, including an interview with the actress who plays Jen?).

Despite Moss’s vulnerabilities he succeeds in life (if not romantically), partly because Jen and Roy both protect him from himself; he needs them to smooth the social waters, just as his esoteric knowledge is vital to the company but also occasionally useful to Jen and Roy.

Soon after Jen joins the IT department Roy and Moss are about to complain to the CEO, Denholm Reynholm, that Jen has no understanding of IT and they don’t want her as their manager. But as the three sit opposite Denholm while he barks to his inferiors on the phone, his conversation makes clear that he will ruthlessly sack any team who can’t ‘work as a team’ (gloriously sending up company-speak).

Knowing that all three of them will be sacked if the complaint goes ahead, Roy and Jen have to drag Moss away, assuring Denholm they had only come to the office to install voice activation on his computer. Moss can’t understand why he and Roy aren’t going through with the complaint; he just hasn’t been able to transfer the meaning of Reynholm’s phone conversation to his own situation. But later, in the second series, Moss demonstrates the usefulness of his peculiar genius; he’s able to tell by smelling it that the creepy new boss of Reynholm Industries, Douglas Reynholm (Denholm's son), has put Rohypnol in Jen’s tea.

Prisoners of gender

Aspergers is associated with maleness, but Moss isn’t the only one burdened because he’s male; all three main characters are ‘prisoners of gender’. They are extreme in their habitation of gender roles and they all suffer for it.

Roy is a standard nerd who tries hard to succeed romantically (a cause for much of the comedy) but always fails. The harder he tries the more ludicrous he appears; in one episode in the first series, with carefully pomaded hair and an oversized retro jacket, he attempts to proposition a girl while oblivious to the fact that a dollop of shit or chocolate (it’s deliberately never made quite clear which) is sitting in the centre of his forehead.

Jen is female in a way that is ludicrously stereotypical. When suffering from the monthly arrival of ‘Aunt Irma’ the cure lies in a girls’ night in, with Roy and Moss playing at being her faux girlfriends, all three dressed in terry towelling robes and watching predictable old chick flicks like Beaches and Steel Magnolias.

This should be offensive but largely isn’t because Jen’s workmates are equally stuck in their extreme masculinity. In fact, there’s only one moment when I was truly offended by the show’s portrayal of her.

It’s in the episode in which Jen becomes obsessed with a pair of red high-heeled shoes that are three sizes too small for her. While in this state of obsession she becomes incoherent. When asked for an idea about combating stress by the hyperactive Denholm, she responds ‘What? Shoes …’. But, back in the basement, while she’s mumbling about the shoes, when Roy calls her a ‘crazy bitch’ in an affectionate, condescending tone as he walks her into her office, it’s too much for this feminist to stomach. And the stereotype of women being obsessed with shoes is overwrought.

Return to childhood

Yet the whole show is overwrought, regularly venturing into surreal territory, making it difficult to be offended by the stereotyping. It’s basically a child’s world where the everyday and the magical are seamless parts of a whole, and where reality is often viewed as a series of extremes.

It’s a world of play, the unknown and the novel, girded by the iron certainties that children cling to because they are still so ignorant of its machinations, but also bounded by the terror that lurks when Roy and Moss enter social situations they aren’t equipped to deal with, and when Jen enters emotional situations in relationships that always seem to end badly.

This is why Moss is so vital to the show and why he is in some ways its central character; he’s a child who hasn’t grown up. His literal view of the world, his inability to understand nuance and sarcasm, in some ways reflect the child’s brain. Watching the show is an invitation to re-enter childhood.

And this is why Richmond is also an attractive character. Gentle and softly spoken, if a trifle melancholy, he adds to the fantastical nature of the show. Yet there is something very traditionally British about him; the way he speaks to Jen at his first appearance, not to mention his 19th-century costuming, has something of the period hero, as if Mr Rochester had blended with Bertha Mason to create not the madwoman in the attic but the sane gentleman in the basement; even his name has a 19th-century flavour.

As a social phobe I can’t help identifying with Richmond, stuck in the IT server room, not even the basement proper but a room off it, a secret room with a forbidding red door. Once out of his room, Richmond is ‘allowed’ to flutter freely around the basement in the first and second series but he never makes it back upstairs, although in the first series Jen tries valiantly to persuade Denholm to have him back.

A continuing obsession

I regret that this little world that Graham Linehan has created lives only in his head and those of his fans. I can’t bear that these characters do not actually exist, especially Moss and Richmond, although on some level I believe that they do. I'm hungry for information about the actors who portray them because that is a way of refusing to believe they aren’t real; the last thing I want is to see them in other shows playing different characters.

And for good or ill, I’ve watched each episode of the first and second series so many times on DVD that I now have the funniest sections on standby in my head; I’m liable to start smiling to myself for no reason as I ‘play’ one back, which has both advantages and disadvantages. (The third series has aired on the ABC and Australian fans now await the fourth, which is currently being aired in Britain on Channel 4.)

I don't have the DVD of the third series, but recently I realised I could watch repeats of whole episodes on Youtube. Yet watching the show on my PC doesn’t do it for me at all; it’s not just the poor quality of the footage but the fact that I don’t associate sitting at my desk with leisure. I love the whole DVD experience of sinking against cushions and losing myself in three indulgent hours of comedy paradise.

However, having now seen the first and second series in full, I think the content of the third series, which I originally watched on telly, isn’t quite as good, and it’s not just the Youtube factor that’s making me feel that way. The show’s becoming more like Seinfeld by the minute; Seinfeld is not surprisingly one of Linehan’s inspirations, and worth imitating, but the particular magic of character-based dialogue needs to be preserved.

Just one tiny example: when Jen and Richmond have their first conversation, Richmond says of Roy and Moss ‘I don’t know their names’. In the context this line is simply brilliant, illustrating how cut off Richmond is from the world and yet how self-chosen is his exile; Roy and Moss are no more than functionaries who form part of the background of the catastrophe he finds himself in. Why this is so funny is difficult to pin down, but it has a lot to do with the rarefied worldview of this underrated and now sadly lost character – somewhere between the second and third series he ‘got scurvy’ and was never seen again.

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The Age newspaper loves Greens policies, but hates the Greens

This blog entry is a letter that I sent to the Age newspaper this morning, objecting to the newspaper's coverage of the Greens on the previous Saturday. For overseas readers: the Melbourne Age has always been a progressive newspaper but struggles to maintain its role under the current management of its owners, Fairfax Media.

Last year the ALP government failed to get its legislation for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) through the upper house. The scheme was never popular with progressives but was even worse after amendments made following negotiations with the main conservative opposition (the government refused the Greens suggestion of a carbon tax).

With an election due around November this year, the ALP has shelved any reintroduction of the ETS until 2013. Two columnists in Saturday's Age managed to have a go at the Greens for opposing the legislation in the Senate.

I’m writing a general letter of objection to the coverage of the Greens and their policies on global warming in the Age of Saturday 1 May 2010, but also directed at the two columnists concerned, Tony Wright and Ross Gittins. Tony Wright’s column appeared in the Insight section of the paper and Ross Gittins’s appeared in the Business Day section (the business commentators seem to be Fairfax rather than Age journalists – this in no way lets the Age off the hook). For the record, I’m not a Greens member but I support and vote for the Greens.

It’s fascinating that the only direct endorsement of the Greens’ carbon tax proposal is not only buried in the business section of that edition, in Paddy Manning’s column, but seems to have produced a flurry of opposing opinion by other columnists (a spurious attempt at ABC-style ‘balance’?). Manning’s endorsement is also months after the fact – I’m not objecting to the views of this columnist, but to the Age’s willingness to publish a point of view that supports evidence-based policy only when that support is given far too late to matter.

In contrast, the coverage of the Greens in the columns by Gittins and Wright would have conspiracy theorists who fear anti-Greens censorship tearing up their Age subscriptions. It seems that the Age wants to have it both ways: present itself as a progressive paper by criticising government and opposition policies; then trashing, or more usually ignoring, the one party that offers a clear alternative. The ethos seems to be: ensure business as usual while enabling readers to feel vindicated in their anger about the complete inability of the large parties to pursue policies that are genuinely in the national interest.

The media is part of this deterioration in our democratic process. One of the problems is that journalists such as Wright and Gittins have taken on, to some extent, the twisted mindset of politicians. According to this mindset, there are two realities: what’s actually going on in the world; and the need to create an impression of government activity and relevance through spin. This second, alternative reality, born of the Canberra hothouse, is considered by the politicians to be far more important than actual reality, and is one of the major reasons the Labor government has failed to move effectively on just about every issue it has tried to tackle.

Unfortunately, some journalists also come to view this alternative reality as far more important than the real world. It is certainly much more beguiling, because it’s far easier to commentate a never-ending football match than to take a strong stand on matters such as democracy, human rights and social justice.

Take Wright’s column. He starts off in the real world, by giving an impassioned description of a recent Catalyst program that highlighted the effects of global warming on Antarctica’s ice sheet. He then turns his attention to government and opposition behaviour towards climate change, bemoaning the fact that ‘hardly anyone seemed to give a stuff’.

It would be logical for Wright to support the policies of the party that has done far more than either of the larger ones to both alert Australians to the true extent of the dangers of global warming, and to offer policies and targets that actually square up with the science and set us on the road to a renewable energy industry. But in his upside-down version of reality, the version he’s absorbed from the political spin-merchants, the leader of this party, Bob Brown, is an irrelevant ideologue. And the only one left with real integrity is the man who, at the time when the government’s climate change policy was being negotiated, made what was already a dog of an emissions trading scheme even worse – Malcolm Turnbull:

Bob Brown’s Greens … well, they just kept being the Greens, complaining that the government hadn’t taken their proposals seriously, which is another way of saying that they had played themselves out of the equation.

About the only politician of simple integrity still standing was Malcolm Turnbull.

This is outrageous. In implying that Bob Brown lacks integrity, Wright is denouncing one of the few politicians in the federal parliament who actually has any. (Brown’s opposition to unfair increases to parliamentary salaries is just one example.)

In contrast, Turnbull’s principles in relation to the ETS, principles which Wright lauds to the skies, were based on ensuring that the coal industry continued to flourish in Australia till kingdom come.

It’s disappointing for a reader to feel she is more cluey than the paper’s national affairs editor. The ETS (both pre- and post-Coalition versions) was a dog because:

• it offered compensation to polluters, doing the opposite of what an ETS should do, which is to encourage alternative energy, not to enable ‘business as usual’. The Age itself has reported that most of the compensation specified in the ETS legislation was unnecessary

• it locked in, for the long term, both this compensation and a low emissions reduction target, with the distinct possibility that if the government increased the pathetic 5 per cent target, it would be liable for a commensurate increase in compensation to the polluting industries

• the 5 per cent was a furphy anyway, because much of the reduction would have been obtained from investment in overseas carbon sinks

• the 5 per cent was an absolute target, discouraging citizens from making their own changes – for example, if I had switched my electricity supply to green energy, that would have increased my electricity provider’s ability to pollute elsewhere

• no one understood it!

Eminent climate scientists agreed that the ETS would be useless, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Wright knows that the Greens were never merely naysayers, but offered a positive alternative, a carbon tax that might have squeaked through the Senate with the support of at least one of the two renegade Liberals and Nick Xenophon. Wasn’t the carbon tax option preferable to what’s happened now, with any action on carbon emissions being shelved till 2013?

This style of commentary illustrates the dangers of political commentators having the main say on climate change in the mainstream media. If the Age is to be relevant it needs to have a qualified science writer weighing up the parties’ climate change policies, not glorified football commentators like Wright.

Let’s now turn to Gittins. He makes an astounding claim in his column, yet doesn’t even attempt to back it up:

But why did the Greens pretend that 5 per cent was nothing when they must have known it wasn’t true? Because it didn’t suit the line they were running. It proves that the ever-virtuous Greens as [sic] just as capable of lying with statistics as the mainstream parties are.

Gittins produces no evidence to ‘prove’ that the Greens are ‘lying with statistics’ – he simply makes the assertion.

In considering the 5 per cent target too low, the Greens were merely listening to the climate scientists. The 5 per cent target has absolutely no relevance to climate science.

Similarly, Gittins seems to think that judging emissions reductions using per capita (head of population) measures would be a good thing. This is simply ludicrous because it would make targets meaningless as far as the actual climate is concerned. (In fact, the pollies would love it if they could use such standards to measure reductions in emissions, especially given Australia’s increasing population, and a couple have tried to do this.)

Again, it’s all about politics, not reality. Tony and Ross, isn’t ‘the greatest moral, environmental, economic and scientific challenge of our time’ worth more than a 5 per cent emissions reduction (on 2000 levels, by the way) and a bag of gold to the big polluters?

A newspaper in which the ‘ever virtuous’ Greens are treated with contempt because they’re more truthful, and the coal-friendly, Machiavellian Turnbull magically becomes ‘the only politician of simple integrity still standing’ may be terminally endangering its reputation as a progressive force.

It’s a shame, because the Age could be building strong customer loyalty based on an unswerving progressive vision, and on a genuine interest in engaging with its readers, rather like the UK’s Guardian. Instead, it seems almost entirely concerned with the advertising revenue it receives from the large parties. Many readers have already migrated online to sites like Crikey and New Matilda in response to the Age’s inability to respond adequately to the slow dismantling of democracy that Howard began and that Rudd has continued to engineer.

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Do your job: a plea for politicians and the media to stop pushing stupid policies

Warning: This is going to be one of my grumbling posts, one of the ones that points out what is wrong with our body politic and how yours truly would go about fixing it up.

Every now and then something shocks me into the realisation of just how poor our media is these days. I don’t want to pick on journalists and say they're lazy and kowtowing, because if they are – and not all fall into that category – it's the industry's fault. But they're the ones we see, hear and read so they will have to cop my vituperation!

For example, I'm usually these days moderately annoyed by Fran Kelly's interviews with federal pollies on Radio National's Breakfast program. She lets them get away with blatant lies. I'm talking about both major parties here, who tow lines that differ only slightly from those of the opposing party but share the characteristic that they have very little to do with reality.

The reasons are extremely complex and I won't go into them in any detail. But what we have now, on both sides, is shockingly poor policy based on trying to keep in favour with two different forces.

Populism
The first category of policies are there to look good to the electorate, sound dramatic to journos, and make everyone think the government is doing something. These policies are sweeping, poorly conceived ideas that will grab headlines. They are cooked up by unaccountable, taxpayer-funded media advisers. They usually bear little resemblance to social and economic research findings, and sometimes contradict them.

For example, it makes more sense to give more money to disadvantaged schools rather than the same amount of money to every school, regardless of how obscenely wealthy its clientele and how steep its fees. However, every school, no matter how wealthy, was eligible for federal Labor's school infrastructure program.

This meant that the nation's wealthiest schools, such as Melbourne's Scotch College, Wesley College and Haileybury College, Geelong Grammar, Brisbane Grammar and Adelaide's Scotch College, received millions of dollars in taxpayer funds for new halls and classrooms that they didn't need.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a teachers in schools program, or even a decent-toilets-and-sportsgrounds-in-schools program, for (government) schools? And how does this ridiculous gift to the rich square up with federal Labor's supposed commitment to 'social inclusion'?

It's also a bit silly to let the morale of child protection workers get so bad that the Human Services department has at least 70 (yes, 70) vacancies and then come out and say how shocked you are when the system breaks down and children get placed with known sex offenders. This is what the Victorian Labor government has done, ignoring realms of research on the long-term effects of poverty and abuse in an electorally unattractive area of social policy.

Now, after the expected outcry, Brumby has pulled out a few bells and whistles and announced 200 new child protection positions. It sounds good, but apart from the question of recruiting -- how are they going to find willing workers when there are already 70 vacancies -- the relevant union says that this is not nearly enough to answer the need, and address the 2000 children waiting for a case worker. Nor will there be wage increases for child protection staff, or a limit set on the number of children allocated to each worker, surely prerequisites for retaining staff in this difficult job. Never mind -- 200 is a nice round number and sounds good.

Corruption
The second category of poor policies are those based on the relentless need for both Labor and Liberal to make decisions that please or at least do not disturb business and corporations at the expense of every other aspect of human life and flourishing. These policies are based on the dependence of the major parties on donations from business, a kind of legalised corruption.

For example, it's a bit silly to admit climate change is happening and then plan new deals to sell massive amounts of dirty brown coal to India (Victorian Labor) and to support a coal mine in some of the most fertile farmland in NSW, the Liverpool Plains (NSW Labor).

And it's a bit silly to admit climate change is happening, live in one of the countries worst affected in terms of rising temperatures, but let promising solar energy projects fail through lack of investment (Victorian Labor).

Both of these types of decisions result in an appalling, criminal waste of taxpayers' funds that could otherwise be used for the genuine advancement of the whole country.

We live in the information age. We have never had access to so much human knowledge. We know more about human psychology, how and why communities flourish, the kinds of criminal justice policies that don't perpetuate crime, than we ever have. We know about the effects of disadvantage and how to create a fairer playing field for Australian children. Academics give away their knowledge for free. Yet it's becoming rarer and rarer for politicians of the two main parties to make decisions that are vaguely sensible, and that have some cognisance of what is actually happening in the world.

Journalists, of course, are not the sole reason for this. But I think in relation to these trends they are falling into some major traps, which I'll outline below.

Trap 1: Let the pollies spout garbage without challenging them

Busy as they are, I don’t think journos these days have the time or the willingness to do some of the basic research required to actually challenge statements of their interviewees that are blatantly untrue. Such an ability relies on the time to read not just newspapers but books written by sophisticated commentators. Not to mention the bravery required to lose the good will of increasingly defensive politicians.

Take the ridiculous rumble that opened up when Kevin Rudd dared to say recently that the Howard government had dithered. Peter Costello flung himself into the fray: how dare Rudd tell such outright lies?

A journalist who had read, say, Mark Davis's Land of Plenty or George Megalogenis's The Longest Decade would have felt compelled to challenge some of Costello's assertions about just how great the Liberal government was – a government that failed to invest in either skills or infrastructure, sat on its hands for a decade as Australia slid into a climate-change-induced drought, and threw money at the electorate not to reduce unfairness but to curry favour with the swinging voters.

Not Fran Kelly. She mainly just let him talk. It was a typical example of how she treats politicians these days – give a token 'devil's advocate' question that reflects the opinion of the opposing force, but fail to actually challenge the veracity of what the politician themselves is saying.

But Kelly's fallen into a common trap – she's entered the world of the politicians and now she thinks like them. She cares only about how their policies differ from the opposing party, not whether they're actually any good, or the extent to which they actually interact with reality. She's become part of the world of spin.

Trap 2: Fool readers into thinking we have a functional democracy by portraying politicians as individuals

Another popular trap is to take an in-depth look at politicians as individuals to disguise the fact that they have little agency to subvert dominant party ideologies and structures. So we get a profile on Environment minister Peter Garrett in a recent issue of Good Weekend that is supposed to humanise him and paint him as someone who may care about the environment after all. But the point is not whether Garrett cares, has a good family life, loves his dog, prays every day etc – the point is that he's part of a party system and style of action that prevents him from doing anything meaningful.

The only interesting personal aspect to puzzle over is why he joined the ALP when he seemed to be a much better fit for the Greens. This is an intriguing question but the decision is made now and Garrett ain't going anywhere. He's now part of the problem, not the solution. (Not only that, but the establishment must be happy that at least one former rabble rouser has been tamed and silenced.)

Such profiles beguile us into thinking that the system is still working and that individuals can make a difference within the major parties. This is increasingly simply untrue. This style of journalism doesn't rock the boat too much, in fact it puts journos in the politicians' good books because it gives the latter valuable publicity.

Trap 3: become so frightened of being criticised for bias that you are too scared to provide honest, factual commentary about what is actually going on

Recently, Australia Talks, the popular talkback program on Radio National, ran a program on whether politicians were too influenced by big business. The host, Paul Barclay, seemed obsessed with emphasising that even if there were no undue influence (huh?) the perception of influence within the public was a problem. I'm sorry, but my sister's dog Jordan, who is a cocker spaniel and not the brains trust, knows there's undue influence. You would have to be living on Jupiter not to be aware of this obvious fact. Yet the ABC believes this fact is actually an opinion, and way too dangerous for a program host to be mouthing.

So what was the juicy piece of information that shocked me into realising just how bad things are in terms of calling a spade a spade? John Faine's Conversation Hour on ABC local radio (a great program apart from the ponderous name of the station – and Faine at his best is often an exception to my complaints) featured a US investment banker turned author, John R Talbott.

Talbott basically said that no good policies occur in the US any more because Congress is hopelessly corrupted by big business. He cited the shocking lack of regulation that produced the Global Financial Crisis, and the way the bailouts protected executive salaries, and he castigated Obama for handing over the health insurance issue to Congress. He also complained about the emissions trading scheme that was in the offing there – like us, the US is planning to give huge subsidies to the big polluters.

He was so honest, brave and unfazed. But it's devastating when you think about what is actually at stake. The GFC has produced untold amounts of hardship among the working classes in the US, a degree of hardship that we rarely hear about. And it's decimated the black middle class. And what hope now for the 46.3 million Americans with no health insurance?

Commentators, especially those from overseas, safely invited here by toothless writers' festivals, are allowed to tell the truth in the media. The journos aren't.

Imagine if journalists took the obvious truths and relentlessly, unremittingly, challenged politicians of every rank and stripe about them until the population got furious and put pressure on them to make real changes. This is what is not happening in either Australia or the US. But it needs to.

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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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