Great piece in Jezebel about rape culture

This article in Jezebel, about rape culture in the student community of Missoula, US, and the attitudes from local police that support it, was written thoughtfully and with effort put into the research. The reporter, Katie J M Baker, approached it in  adirect but nuanced way, and managed to disntinguish her own feelings and thoughts from the interview subjects. This is really hard to do when writing about justice and violence against women, particularly sexual assault.

Not sledging, not joking, not expression, not political point-scoring, plain old violence against women

It's so much part of the landscape that it seems nobody at the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age or anywhere for that matter is calling out about it.

Why is it okay to for Grahame Morris to joke about kicking a woman to death? Why is that funny? Is it funny like the famous Alexander Downer line, 'the things that batter'?

Why do we go along with the idea that it could, possibly, very likely, be just a bit of fun? For those of you who don't understand we are calling you on your misogyny, here's an update by Clementine Ford, just published today, just in time to help you figure out if us feminists really are being wowsers or sour bitches or have gone too far.


I say 'gone too far' is saying the Prime Minister should be kicked to death. Who among us would say Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey should be kicked to death?

The headlines in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald claim that Grahame Morris has apologised, so it looks like the story has had its day and everyone's moving on. A thing that us women are always being told to do, whenever we complain about threats of violence, sexual assaults, etc etc.

The problem is, he hasn't done anything of the sort. The person who apologised is David Speers, on Morris' behalf. I can picture how that conversation went:

"Shit, mate, what did you say that for?"
"What? Well she does deserve a bloody big kicking"
"We know that, mate, but you just can't say things like that"
"OK"

Blokes know it's not a joke

Girls, don't swallow that tripe about it just being a bit of fun. The blokes do actually know and understand the impact of their violence. They know it's not funny. They take it really seriously, when we're not talking about women.

Just have a look at the weekly AFL tribunal commentary if you're in any doubt. For example, yesterday The Age was showing this graph. Note that almost 1,000 people had voted. There was extensive coverage of the minutae of striking charges, how much pressure was applied in the strike, who was standing where when it happened. Exhausting stuff.

The Australian also displayed a similar obsession.

But of course we don't notice anything unusual about this, because it's footy, and it's normal. Just like wanting to kick a female political leader to death is normal.

PS Here is an article in Wendy Harmer's The Hoopla about some of the worst comments about the Prime Minister.

Messing around with Empire Avenue

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This post is just me messing around with Empire Avenue.

Many social media commentators agree that 'gamification' will be the next thing to happen to marketing and social media, as the two things converge and the rocket fuel of games is added to the mix.

What does that mean for art, for the expression of authentic identity? What will it do to political expression? What would happen if Clive Palmer (for example) bought a major instrument in it?

This is the link if you feel like joining the experiment...

Sexism and retaliation

In a post in Forbes about sexism in the workplace, the author, Meghan Casserly, discusses the question of how (or whether, even) women can speak up about it at work without retaliation.


She did her homework and asked women to respond, and the story was quite interesting because of the colour of those responses. She found two women who had successfully raised it as an issue, and, not wanting to give up yet, is carrying the conversation on in Twitter and Facebook.

What bothers me, though, is that the article has missed the point about sexism in the workplace: sexism is designed to remind others that there are two groups, and that one is not as good to be in as the other one - to use a really blunt pencil. The article, however, uses a very common 'female' way of interrogating meaning: it assumed that the actual words the women used to call out sexism were some kind of magic medicine, which needed the correct dosage applied at the right time and the right place.

For example, the reason that the first successful caller-outer had not received backlash was because she had been really informal about it, and had used a light touch. She had just said "inappropriate" in passing, without making a big deal out of it, and it work. In other words, the right medicine at the right dose.

The second successful caller-outer said her successful technique was to speak to the two sexist-comment-makers one-on-one, privately - that way, they did not lose face. The right medicine, administered in private.

The problem with this whole way of conceiving the solution to sexism in the workplace is that it ignores the element that is central to sexism: the maintenance of power. The variable not controlled in any of the interactions described was whether the woman who did the calling-out had power over the person being sexist. In other words, what man is going to tell his female boss - or even someone a bit higher up in the social pecking order of the office - to get lost?

Sure, it seemed to solve the problem for those two women, but another woman in an identical setting saying "inappropriate", no matter how quietly, could be inviting serious retaliation.

For example:

Male supervisor in restaurant: I want all of you fillies out on the floor now, or you're sacked.
Woman waitress (to his disappearing back): Inappropriate.

or


Male supervisor in restaurant: I want all of you fillies out on the floor now, or you're sacked.
Woman waitress: Inappropriate.
Male supervisor: What did you just say to me?
Woman waitress: Inappropriate.
Male supervisor: How could it be inappropriate for me to tell you to get out on the floor?
Woman waitress: It's inappropriate language, because we're women, not 'fillies'.
Male supervisor: What? Look, I don't have time for this. Do you work here or not?

Rape culture v fathers' rights

Google Ngram viewer

After some inspiration from a guy called Ben Schmidt - who is a historian who specialises in looking at the enormous data sets that have been created since the world started digitising its history, geography, literature and so on - I started exploring the Google Ngram Viewer.

You can see more about Ben's work here - a more accurate description of the field is 'digital humanities research'. You can also see a bit of wicked historical geography (or geographical history?) at Spacial Analysis blog. End of digression.

The dataset and the graphing tool available at Google Ngram Viewer represents a 'big picture' view of what we think and how we think, which is of course one of my smaller obsessions.

For example, in the gay marriage rights debate, it is often argued by conservatives that legalising gay marriage would mess with an ancient tradition. Yet I suspect that in the thousands of years of human history, most couples have got together, had children, built a house, got on with life and so on without it, so to make marriage sound 'natural' or a default position of any kind is not at all accurate. If I could just figure out two approximately equally important phrases that represent 'married' and 'de facto' (sic, de facto can refer to lots of things) over 200 years, I could do a graph of it right now.

Instead, I made one which compared the phrase 'rape culture' with 'fathers' rights' from 1990 to 2000. And this is what it looks like:

To use a music metaphor, it looks like a jaunty little duet. It's not even a fugue or a call-and-response. It's two voices a third apart, rising and falling, but mostly rising. So I wondered if that was just a blip, and decided to try 'rape culture' against 'female graduates'. That graph produces another duet, but this time a fifth apart:

There are no controls, so weighting, and absolutely nothing else to tell you that this is some legit piece of research that you should bring up in polite (or even drunken) conversation. However, we now have ways of testing our ideas about things and looking more clearly into the deep pool that is human (literate) culture. We should use it not only for advertising, but also to settle arguments about Downton Abbey.

Find a husband and STOP having babies part 2:

:"It's the Inequality, Stupid."

The eleven charts created and shared by Mother Jones' Gilson and Perot show the other side of the story; the privilege enjoyed by the writers of the assholery in my previous post.

Find a husband and STOP having babies

Tenderness and bullshit side by side on the New York Times...

There's a long feature about the welfare system in the US and how it looked like such a good idea during the boom to cut back on cash payments and apply a bit of tough love. Various researchers put poverty at different numbers, but the article nominated four million women and children having no financial support - no income at all and surviving any way they can. It's a well-written and not too 'worthy' read.

What's fascinating is the very high quality commentary side by side with (seemingly not deliberate) conservative trolling in the comments section. Of course, the NYT was de facto trolling everyone in the first place by having the audacity to run an article about how America was treating its poor, huddled masses with disinterest or contempt. But the thoughtful comments far outclass the trolls. There are some genuine Christians (in other words, trying to live the commandment 'love one another as I have loved you'), arguing with care and persistence alongside others who are clearly not religious but who are committed to compassionate living.

I still stumble, though: why do people who leave the trolly comments assume there are going to be others who agree with them? Maybe since the boom, there are just as many Americans who would have once been poor who are now privileged, and this privilege is confusing to them.

Here are some jems from the assholery that is the comments section to this high quality, accessible piece of journalism about the poor:


Supporting illegal immigrants is BIG part of the problem. They sneak into the U.S.A. to have their babies (Who automatically become citizens). I can just now see the hordes of pregnant women camping in the Mexican dessert until the time is right...
Then collect money from the Social Security Admin., Welfare program & work under the table. All without contributing anything. No, they don't start businesses, they don't work cleaning toilets, the don't raise engineers to build roads.
Meanwhile we the American citizens & LEGAL immigrants foot the bill. Meaning, male, non-pregnant immigrants.


Actually, the article is about how America is not footing the bill.


And we may just have to accept that some people will willfully make such bad choices that they will be faced with destitution. It is sad and hard but you can't save everyone. That one had 17 thumbs-ups.


Why do these single (unwed I bet rather than widowed) women have kids they can't afford?????? That one had 30 thumbs-ups


Find a husband and STOP having babies. Its a very simple formula actually. 21


It's the women who had the children not the fathers. [...] Women should be the sole ones responsible for the kids. It would also eliminate most of the controversy over abortion.  From a reader unacquainted with the concept of conception, sperm, eggs etc. The reader went on to repeat gleefully the conspiracy theory of unwanted pregnancy.

But there is lovely kindness as well. Heartening reading for anyone who is thinking that this world is full of selfish, narcissistic voters-as-supporters rather than voters-as-policy-choosers. My fave is this one (there was a graph showing the rise in food stamp use mirroring the rise in unemployment and the (almost) flatlining of cash welfare payments:

There should be a graph that plots the growth of the number of mean, greedy people in the USA. It would look just like the one that reflects the number of persons receiving food stamps.