|
Blog
By: Danielle Binks
I’m not a big fan of ‘cop shows’ or police procedurals. The Australian shows tend to be overly-blokey, as if they’re all still working from the ‘Division 4’ blueprint. American crime shows are often overly-stylized with impossibly beautiful people (‘CSI’) or they’ve been around for so long and become so stale that you can’t help but poke fun at the abundance of spin-offs they’ve spawned (‘CSI’, ‘Law & Order’). British crime shows go the other way, more often than not based around a crotchety old white guy who hates the world but is intent on doing his job for Queen and Country (‘Taggart’, ‘A Touch of Frost’, ‘Inspector Morse’ … the list goes on and on).
If you’re like me and sick of these same-same crime shows overpopulated with prickly male officers, then allow me to offer you a worthwhile alternative in ‘The Bletchley Circle’, a British three-part show which just finished airing on ITV.
‘The Bletchley Circle’ begins in 1943, at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking HQ. We meet a young woman named Susan (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) who is on the brink of decrypting an important German code that will decipher artillery movement. Susan’s colleagues include confident Millie (Rachael Stirling) and quiet girl Lucy (Sophie Rundle) who also happens to have a valuable photographic memory. Overseeing these women’s work is formidable Jean (Julie Graham). Having top office acknowledge that her sixth-sense about an encrypted message was accurate and will be put to use on the frontlines, Susan goes to bed amazed that she, an ordinary woman, has quite possibly informed the movements of an entire battalion of soldiers. Millie quips that Susan couldn’t be ordinary if she tried, and Susan wonders what life will be like for them after the war.
Skip ahead nine years later and Susan is a mother of two, and wife to Timothy, who works a dull (but impressive, to him at least) job at the Department of Transportation. Timothy served in the war and has a bad leg thanks to a near-miss. As with all of the Bletchley women code-breakers, Susan has never spoken of her time at the Park – her husband believes she did clerical work during the war effort, nothing more. The fact that she’s a deft hand at the morning crossword puzzle is the most thought Timothy has given to his wife’s extraordinary brain . Until, that is, a news story captures Susan’s attention.
A fourth brutally murdered woman has just been discovered, following on from three previous murders of young, travelling, single women that have Londoners on edge. But with this fourth discovered body, the pattern is all wrong and something does not sit right with Susan. Because she has been following the story over the wireless, and mapping the patterns – following the killer’s routine and habits. So convinced is she that Susan rings in her husband’s old wartime connection to the police commissioner, and she tries to explain her discovered pattern to him, with little success.
So Susan is forced to connect with her old Park friends – Millie, Lucy and Jean. She needs their help to figure out the patterns, and capture the killer.
This show is brilliant. On the one hand, it’s wonderful to see a show that pays tribute to the Bletchley Park female code-breakers. The Park was the hub of Allied cryptography during WWII, and many of the code-breakers secretly working there were women; in fact, 80% of them. The Park was where Germany’s infamous ‘Enigma’ code was broken, with the help of the female-operated ‘Bombe’ electromechanical device.
The Bletchley code-breakers are an incredible slice of history, and it’s not really until very recently that their wartime stories were even heard. They had to keep their silence for thirty years for one thing, because of secrecy laws that remained in place until 1975 – after which a slew of autobiographies were released (to little fanfare) detailing the women’s work. In fact, it was only last year that the Queen unveiled a memorial to them at the Bletchley Park museum.
There’s one scene in ‘The Bletchley Circle’ when Susan’s husband, Timothy, appears dressed in his old service uniform, having prepared to pay tribute to the soldier who saved his life – but he’s annoyed at the fact that Susan is running late (to catch a killer, admittedly) and he couldn’t attend the service. One wonders how those Bletchley women felt, seeing all the ceremonies and parades the men received and the continuing memorials – a chance to come together with old comrades. And the women had nothing so grand and public to remember and reminisce about what they did during the war. The secrets they had to keep.
Another strength of the ITV show, is that it examines the very different, and somewhat unsatisfactory, lives that these four Bletchley women built for themselves after the excitement and purposefulness they experienced during the war. Susan became a wife and mother, and it’s during scenes when she’s in the kitchen or at the dinner table that viewers can see how tightly-coiled she is. This is a woman with a brilliant, mathematical and analytical mind who spends her days preparing a roast and listening to her husband talk about his possible promotion at the Department of Transportation. Not bad unto itself, but she wants more, craves it even. At one point Timothy, infuriatingly, promises to bring a new book of puzzles home for Susan to chew through – as if that will satisfy her. It’s not that she doesn’t love her life and family, it’s that she can’t show them who she really is, or once was.
Then there’s Millie, who had a great adventure after the war travelling all over the world. Millie harbours a small resentment towards Susan, who promised she’d go travelling with her but chose her husband instead. Not even a postcard picture imploring Susan to “Never be ordinary!” could persuade her to join Millie in Africa and beyond. Nine years later and Millie is a fiery independent single woman working as a waitress, but clearly longing for more adventures.
Jean became a librarian, and while she resents Susan’s implication that they’re all missing the feeling of being useful and important, it doesn’t take long before Jean is looking around at her life and seeing the gaps that Bletchley Park left in her. Jean does a brilliant job of rallying past female War volunteers to their investigation, proving that she’s just as resourceful as she was when overseeing the Park code-breakers work.
And then there’s Lucy, who has had the worst lot since leaving Bletchley Park – married to a mean and violent husband. A shy and beautiful young woman, she is plagued with a photographic memory that becomes dastardly handy and burdensome during their murder investigation. She remembers everything.
The four-strong female cast of ‘The Bletchley Circle’ is what really makes this show – and though the murder investigation is heart-palpitating and cunning, it’s the renewed friendship of the women that’s really touching and incredible.
‘The Bletchley Circle’s is one of the smartest whodunits I've seen in a long time – it’s more Agatha Christie than Inspector Morse (and Thank God for that!) With a nod to the fascinating history of the Bletchley Park code-breakers, and examining the lives of women after the war effort, this is not your typical crime show and should not be missed.
View/Add Comments .....
|
By: Bernadette Green
Recently, I’ve noticed quite a bit of pro-prostitution articles, movies and TV shows circulating. There’s the upcoming US series starring Jennifer Love Hewitt who plays a Texan mum living a double life, The Client List. Then there are the movies Careless Love and The Girlfriend Experience, to name but two. All something to look forward to I’m sure but an article that really lit a fire under me was Hannah Bett’s interview with Dr Brooke Magnanti, author of the bestsellers, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl, adapted into a TV series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl. The article did the rounds overseas and was published here in The Age. Hannah reports that Dr Magnanti, while completing her doctorate in informantics, epidemiology and forensic science, worked as a London call girl for fourteen months, in order to fund her London lifestyle. The article made for fascinating reading but what really inspired me, was Dr Magnanti asked Hannah to ‘be an ally,’ comparing the way prostitutes are treated by law and society today, to how gays were treated twenty years ago. Dr Magnanti tells Hannah that what they need are people like her to say, ‘I myself am not a prostitute but I do not object to their existence’. Hannah finishes off her piece with these wise words, ‘Magnanti’s book will have me – and legions of others – ready to join the cause’.
I’m with Hannah. I’m putting up my hand to join the cause and I urge others to do the same. But before we get too excited we need to understand that the road will not be easy. The prostitution industry has a pretty bad track record, sexual abuse, human trafficking, drug dependency, and exploitation of the poor and underprivileged, you get my drift. But let’s not condemn it, many industries with dirty pasts have been able to clean themselves up and the prostitution industry should be no different. However, it will take a complete overhaul, new policies and practices will need to adopted. The best way to achieve this is to aim for those lofty pinnacles of goodness and transparency, Organic and Fairtrade certification. I’m not kidding, once the industry has those stamps of approval we can all feel proud to say, ‘I myself am not a prostitute but I do not object to their existence’. So let’s put our heads and hearts together and get certified.
According to the Australian Certified Organic website, organic systems work in harmony with nature, keeping harmful chemicals out of our land, water and air, creating a healthy environment rich in wildlife, woodlands and nutrients.
I have tweaked it a little bit to fit our purposes. Organic prostitution works in harmony with nature, keeping harmful chemicals out of our women, creating a healthy environment, thereby ensuring their woodlands are rich with wildlife and nutrients.
Five Step Plan to Organic Certified Hookers
- Firstly I propose bringing back the bush. We need to be sure we are attracting the kind of customers who want women, not the ones who are dreaming of little girls. And, according to Dr Emily Gibson, pubic hair removal increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. As reported on ninemsm, ‘Waxing pubic hair increases STI risk, doctor warns.’
- No anal bleaching, we don’t want everyone thinking the back door is the front door. It’s special entry only, and always at the discretion of the owner.
- No snatch snipping. We want the diversity our hookers were born with.
- No cosmetic surgery of any kind. Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.
- No drug addictions. The stuff that’s being popped, sniffed or shot-up is most likely not organic. Secondly we can’t be accused of having dependent girls, that might indicate they’d chosen this profession out of desperation rather than answering a true calling.
According to the Fairtrade Australia New Zealand website.
Fairtrade is about better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world. By requiring companies to pay sustainable prices, fairtrade addresses the injustices of conventional trade, which traditionally discriminates against the poorest, weakest producers. It enables them to improve their position and have more control over their lives.
Again a bit of tweaking. Better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for women in the prostitution industry, now that would be fairtrade. By requiring customers to pay sustainable prices, fairtrade addresses the injustices of current practices, which traditionally discriminates against the poorest, weakest women and girls. It enables prostitutes to improve their position and have more control over their lives.
Eleven Step Plan to Fairtrade Certified Hookers
- Prostitution should always be a free choice, therefore we need to level the playing field. To achieve this we need to fix the pay gap between boys and girls and encourage non-traditional trades for girls. You wouldn’t believe the difference in the pay packet of a qualified electrician and a qualified beauty technician.
2. A happy hooker is a safe hooker. All customers need to be vetoed before their money is accepted. Not all men who visit prostitutes are fans of the female sex.
3. Customers to pay sustainable prices. In Hannah Betts article, Dr Magnanti declared that she was paid three hundred pound an hour, which is roughly four hundred and fifty Australian dollars, that seems a reasonable place to start. Dr Maganti did also say that a third of this went to her Madame. That’s fair. The boss is going to need some serious money to fund the state of the art facilities necessary to guarantee the comfort and safety of these women. 4. The industry needs to be transparent; after all it does have a nasty reputation for being linked to crime syndicates. Know where your dollars are going.
5. Fairtrade addresses the injustices of current practices, which traditionally discriminates against the poorest, weakest women and girls. Trafficking. LET’S STOP IT NOW. Boys before handing over your bucks, make sure the girl didn’t enter the country thinking she’d committed to a nannying job and instead found herself the exotic fantasy of men who cared nothing for her humanity. Don’t be a part of the problem be a part of the solution.
6. If a university student is really that keen for copious amounts of sex then good for her, let her have the job. But let’s first ask how her male equivalents are paying their way through university? Are they turning to prostitution as well? Is this a class war? A sex war? Are only working class and middle class girls turning tricks for their degrees or are the rich girls and boys joining them and it’s all for a bit of fun? Let’s have universities asking these questions.
7. Now while you won’t find this sentiment shared by prostitutes across the world, there is the phenomenon of the woman who finds power in prostitution. Which is great, we should all have the good fortune of finding power in our work. But let’s make sure that turning tricks isn’t her only access to power. Whatever happened to Super Girl and why wasn’t there a Super Woman? Let’s create a culture where little girls are brought up with a sense of their power, not a belief that they are less powerful than boys. Then and only then, can we truly appreciate that the power a prostitute is feeling is real solid gold power.
8. Authors, movie companies, advertisers, clothes designers, teachers and parents, please stop your ceaseless campaign of pushing the idea to girls that their looks are more important than the rest of their being. That way, if they choose to become a hooker later in life, then we know it’s a calling, not an attempt at self-sabotage.
9. All prostitutes should have the right to refuse a client.
10. Any sexual act that could be considered harmful to ones physical or mental health should be refused or limited by these special women at their own discretion.
11. I’m really keen for this campaign to work and the only way to do that it to keep the fair in fairtrade. Let’s show our girls that they’re as important as the boys. Let them see that our community respects both its female and male sports heroes. Let them grow up as witnesses to strong female role models in a culture that takes them seriously. That way, in whatever choice they make, in whatever direction they go, we can say it was a fair choice.
Well there you have it. Let’s roll up our sleeves and make our culture one of opportunity and equality for all humans. Only then, can you be guaranteed that when you ask for an organic and fairtrade certified prostitute that you’ll receive the happy hooker you paid for.
And for some reading on the harmful practices of the current system, please check out Not for Sale edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant, The Idea of Prostitution by Sheila Jeffreys, Making Sex Work by Mary Lucille Sullivan and highly commended in the 2012 Australian Educational Publishing Awards Secondary Reference resource section, Big Porn Inc edited by Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray.
  
View/Add Comments .....
|
  On June 7, novelist Andrea Goldsmith helped launch Susan Hawthorne's new verse novella Limen at Collected Books Workshop. This is what she said: • • •
It gives me great pleasure to launch Susan Hawthorne’s Limen on a number of accounts.
- a new verse novel
- poetry by a poet whose work I admire
- it’s a beautiful book, a beautiful object
- poems circled by wonderful, imaginative artwork
- and that it is a new work by Sue Hawthorne.
I met Sue in the early 1980s, but it was not until several years later that we properly met. It was Melbourne Cup Day, 1988, an alternative cup day party in the wilds of Northcote. At the time Sue was working at Penguin as their fiction editor and I had just finished Gracious Living, the novel that would become my first published book – although perhaps not, if not for that cup day party.
Since that auspicious cup day party I have followed Sue’s career as she moved into a commissioning position with Penguin and then, together with Renate, started Spinifex. And I have read her work as it appeared. Sue has written both prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, but it is her poetry I have particularly welcomed. So when I was asked to launch Limen, despite a schedule which hardly allows the drawing of breath, I said yes. Quite simply I wanted to launch Sue’s latest book.
And how pleased I am. This is a deceptively simply book: two women and their dog go camping. It starts to rain – and rain and rain. The rivers rise, tracks disappear under water, the water threatens the car, the waters threaten their very survival.
It is the title Limen that alerts you to there being more to both the content and the structure of this book.
‘Limen’ – comes from the Latin limen: THRESHOLD. The OED defines ‘limen’ as a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived. The same Latin word produces the far more common LIMINAL.
But there’s also the other meaning of threshold – like that of a doorway.
Both meanings are relevant to Susan’s verse novel. Firstly there is the threat of the rising waters, the women never know if they are safe. Safety is above the threshold of perception. This definition of limen feeds the suspense and tension of this book.
LIMEN also suggests a transition, a state,, a threshold between earth and sky, between day and night, between water and heat, survival and drowning – and it is these paired states, together with many more that also drive narrative.
Both definitions of limen involve SPACE – intellectual and emotional space. This is enhanced by the space on the page. Many pages have just a few lines of poetry at the top and then space crossed with one of Jeanné Browne’s images. What this space does is create room for you, the reader, to enter the women’s journey. You, like the characters in the story, are suspended on the threshold, in the space between two often opposing possibilities. The space both on the page and in the poetry itself, is a source of narrative tension. Reading this book you live the experience of the women.
On your first reading you will gallop through. You can’t help yourself. On later readings you can linger over the poetry.
late in the day a wind drift of butterflies
echolalic laughter of kookaburras
in the melaleuca
its paperbark ruffled
as a frilled ballgown (p.8)
(Sue is terrific with birds)
And some more marvellous images
e.g. they lay out wet clothes and bedding to dry: ‘a bush laundromat/ on ancient rocks’ (p. 81)
at sunrise/clouds are crocheted close (p. 146)
My favourite poem is on p. 111.
I float feeling the wash of water beneath
arms extended like billabongs
never quite reaching the itchy point
where mosquitoes feed
the river is a psalm
singing like a full-throated choir
could my arms
be jabiru wings
in slow beat
coming in to land?
the dog interrupts
my river poems
kisses me
insists I play
she runs in wild circles
to the water’s edge
she is a crazed runner
jumping and turning in the air
I therefore officially launch Limen. May it have a long and illustrious journey.
Susan Hawthorne with Limen illustrator, Jeanné Browne
View/Add Comments .....
|
 
By: Nia Thomas
If you have ever had a conversation about prostitution and tried to question a man's 'right to buy', the following outcomes are likely to be familiar:
1: The subject reverts back to the choices (agency, if you're in academia) of the women working in prostitution.
2: You hear musings about prostitution 'the theory' – what it could be like in an ideal world if we work to improve it.
And, if you persist;
3: Grave warnings that challenging demand will result in endangering women by reinforcing stigma and driving prostitution underground.
That some men will want to use prostitutes is seen as inevitable. Discussion about it is off-limits: punters are invisible.
The Invisible Men is a political art project created to bring the words, attitudes and behaviours of punters into public focus, and to invite people to consider 'what do you think about his choice?' Launched on May 1 and running for one month, the project features a series of images of masks with price tags uploaded onto a Tumblr blog. The masks are overlaid with text, which are extracts from reviews punters have placed on the UK website PunterNet. The price on each tag indicates the amount the reviewer paid for his service.
The graphics represent the projection of demand onto women, but the blog offers no opportunity to deflect the question of choice away from the punter. His words are starkly presented and unavoidable.
I was introduced to PunterNet in 2006 after talking to a friend about the ‘choice’ argument. She sent me a link to the site, saying ‘I doubt these men have had to defend their choices in their lives’. That stayed with me. Reviews, known as ‘Field Reports’, take the following format: length of session, price paid, location, a description of the woman’s physical attributes and details of the ‘punt’. The review concludes by stating whether the woman is recommended. The reports paint a picture very different from the one promoted by advocates of the sex industry.
Conversations about the women’s choices never go into this kind of detail or mention the cold and distorted attitudes of punters who describe women like livestock. There is something disturbingly repetitive and casual about the way the punters discuss their actions. PunterNet is only one of many such sites: there are sites for other countries, for different cities, sites for men travelling overseas. As punters who use the internet to post reviews probably constitute a tiny percentage of punters worldwide, you begin to get a sense of how many men we're talking about and how widespread this is.
We can't talk about prostitution without looking at punters. They need to be visible.
The project has received very strong reactions. As expected, one criticism has been that particularly unpleasant reviews were selected to represent all punters. But such accounts are not rare and don't represent individual men. For example, Punter #2 comments that the woman he saw was Eastern European, exhausted, working long hours seven days a week. The reviewer will have been one of many men who saw exhausted women speaking broken English at the same establishment. The project has also prompted vows by some individuals to show the ‘other side’, that is, blogs with reviews by ‘nice’ punters and positive accounts by women working in prostitution. Considering that the PR machine of an industry worth billions already does this, I'm doubtful they will find a new angle. Positive response to the project has been overwhelming.
The New Statesman published a piece about it in the week it launched, and it has received support from a wide variety of groups tackling violence against women internationally, survivor-led organisations, exited women, and individuals. The most positive reaction to the project has been use of the blog as a resource to challenge demand and it has sparked interest in creating similar projects. One reaction that was doubtlessly well-intentioned was the creation of petitions calling for PunterNet to be shut down; however, such measures would do nothing to curb demand and would make the men invisible again.
By naming the source but not linking to the quote, the project encourages people to read through PunterNet and sites like it themselves. Not just to look for reviews indicating trafficking or violence (though there are many of these) but to see what demand looks like and develop an awareness of what punters do during their visits. I want people to read the casual way punters view and talk about women in prostitution, what the abbreviations that pepper their reviews mean (owo, cim, ro, gfe, pse, ee, etc), what they consider a good service to be, what they feel irritated or 'ripped off' by, how they interpret the women's responses, and also consider how they reflect on their own actions, character and appearance. Reviews express little interest in the factors we hinge our debates on, e.g. is she trafficked? addicted to drugs? in pain? exhausted? scared? repulsed by him? Where these indicators are present and too obvious to ignore, punters express irritation that she is being ‘unprofessional’, concern for their own welfare (demanding a refund, anxiety about getting in trouble with the police), or a suspicion after the booking that they have been conned.
The invisible men who have accumulated a decade's worth of reviews on PunterNet are not the darkest characters in society. They are ordinary men, professionals, husbands, and fathers who believe that sexual consent can be purchased. They are all the ones who make prostitution dangerous, they are the reason it exists, and they have to be accountable.
Nia Thomas is a London-based feminist and political artist
View/Add Comments .....
|
Mothers’ Day is one of those days that it is easy to warm to and turn away from at the same time.
I adore my own mother and treasure every moment with her. But I don’t need there to be a Mothers’ Day to thank her for the immeasurable meaning she has given to my life. I am delighted to spend time with her on Mothers’ Day, but I am equally delighted to see her every other week of the year too.
As a mother myself, I don’t want my own daughter to feel pressured by commercially driven sickly ads imploring her to ‘make your Mum feel special’ by buying some outrageously priced item that panders to the idea that women belong in the kitchen or the bedroom. Seriously, just how many advertisements for frilly nighties and new saucepans can one handle?
I am also skeptical that the veneration of motherhood is also a thinly veiled disguise for a silent contempt and deep suspicion of women who don’t have children. Women like our own Prime Minister, who attracts enormous vitriol, which is apparently accepted because she is childless. I don’t like that the celebration of Mothers’ Day comes at the expense of dividing the sisterhood.
And while I love being a mother, I don’t necessarily love the pedestal that comes with it; a pedestal that sits on a shaky foundation and is poised ready to topple at the slightest bump. Because motherhood on a pedestal is about motherhood as some kind of perfection, and that is setting oneself up for failure.
It is also setting an impossible standard by which women judge themselves as never good enough. We torture ourselves about being stay-at-home or working mothers, and then try to do both. We pressure ourselves to have clean houses, home-cooked meals and perfectly ironed shirts. We can’t let ourselves go but are forbidden from any form of self-indulgence too. We are supposed to nurture children and partners but also have to make time to cover our grey hairs and wax our legs. Hey, there’s an image of motherhood to uphold!
And while we tread an ever-narrowing line about what we “should” be, we feel like failures 90% of the time for being too much or too little of something. We know too that the only thing worse that being childless for a woman is to be a ‘BAD MOTHER’ so we continue walking that diminishing line and judge others and ourselves far too harshly.
So this Mothers’ Day will be about the simple joys of sharing time and conversation with people. No restaurant meal. Nothing fancy. A gift? Maybe a book or two. Nothing perfect. Just as it should be.
View/Add Comments .....
|
|
Out Now
 In the cold winter of 1875, two rebellious spirits travel from the pale sunlight of England to the raw heat of Australia....  Beautifully written by First Nations women on Gurindji country where the fight for equal wages began. This book...  I am seen by many as a danger. As having failed to understand the new rules, the new paradigm of successful motherhood.
 NEW EDITION
The women in this book may be among the last to have babies without the medical stamp of approval.
Today's... |
