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Blog
Spinifex intern Kate Page wonders how much nuptial equality and inclusion we
can really take
As a socially progressive heterosexual single mum (with lots of relatives touting a step- prefix), I say: let’s shake the heterosexual foundations of marriage. And yes, I deliberately leave out any religious affiliation, because let's face it, 60% of us choose not to marry within religious institutions these days, so the religious argument must be dead and buried. Julia Gillard would surely agree, being of no specified religion, and yet, her stance is aligned with that of her predecessor Kevin Rudd.
Julia and the Party have opposed same-sex marriage and in doing so promote a culture of marginalisation around this issue. This is a human rights issue and one of legal and economic equality. This is an issue of personal autonomy and the right to choose. Sixty percent of Australians support same-sex marriage. A recent senate enquiry received 11,000 submissions in support of same-sex marriage (the largest number ever received in a senate enquiry) yet our two major parties are refusing to listen.
By staying where we are on this issue, we are effectively saying that the quality of committed relationships and the quality of love relationships between same-sex couples is lesser than that of the heterosexual community.
I stumbled upon an article that opposed same-sex marriage and reprimanded proponents for using “rhetoric”, like “inclusion”, “tolerance” and “equality” when forming their argument. If you laugh in a confused kind of way here, I am laughing with you. I wonder how many articles in support of same-sex marriage this writer would have needed to read before these three words stood out? Living in Australia, in a democracy, inclusion, tolerance and equality should be for everyone. Yes, I am stating the obvious. And it does seem out-of-date to be grappling with this issue today.
Personally I hold great optimism that we will legalise same-sex marriage before too much longer. The argument against carries little weight and quite simply, is not aligned with the views of the majority of Australians.
Mexico City recently legalised same-sex marriage and in the four months since the bill was passed, 271 same-sex couples got hitched. (That is two or more weddings per day.) A gay friend of mine is looking forward to Australia legalising same-sex marriage. She says, “it’ll be a busy year of weddings for me”. Let's hope when it does happen we don’t overwhelm ourselves with too much tolerance, inclusion and equality!
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A guest post by Getting Real editor Melinda Tankard Reist. Originally posted on Melinda's blog.
What’s happening to our boys?: Maggie Hamilton’s new book
When I first began turning my attention to the sexualisation of girls in the media and popular culture, a book that significantly echoed my own thoughts was What’s happening to our girls: Too much too soon, how our kids are overstimulated, oversold and oversexed (Penguin, 2008) by author, publisher and teacher Maggie Hamilton. Not long after, I approached Maggie and asked if she would be willing to write a chapter for my book Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls (Spinifex Press, 2009). I was delighted when she agreed. In her chapter ‘The Seduction of girls: the human cost’, Maggie combined research and her own thoughtful observation to analyse the impacts of the onslaught of sexualised messaging on girls. She explored the decline in imagination, slowing cognitive development, plummeting self-esteem, self-harm, performance culture, sexual assault and how girls were socialized to be objects. Since then Maggie and I have shared a few platforms and friendship has developed. I am blessed to have the support of a woman of her calibre.
Maggie has now turned her attention to what we are doing to boys. What’s Happening to Our Boys?: At Risk, how the new technologies, drugs and alcohol, peer pressure and porn affect our boys will be launched in Sydney today at a private event, following by public events during the week.
Increasingly, as I traverse the country speaking about the effects of a toxic culture on the health and wellbeing of girls, I’m asked about boys. What can be done for boys? It has been helpful to be able to point to Maggie’s book and say, this will be a good place to start. What’s happening to our boys? is a major and in many ways overdue resource to help us address the problems boys are facing, which cannot help but improve the situation for girls.
This is an interview I did with Maggie in the lead up to the launch.
Maggie, what inspired you to write this book?
While we’re increasingly conscious that girls are vulnerable to a whole range of issues, we do tend to assume that boys can cope with whatever they’re faced with. But this isn’t necessarily the case.. Parents were constantly telling me really sad and concerning stories about incidents with their boys. Many were distressed they hadn’t seen these issues coming and, because they hadn’t faced these things themselves, were unsure of how best to respond. So it seemed like a good idea to take a closer look at our boys’ lives. I’m so glad I did – it’s given me a much more intimate sense of what boys are dealing with.
What is happening to our boys?
The marketers have realised boys are the last untapped demographic, so they’re spending millions to market to boys. We’re going to be seeing this in everything from the entertainment industry, to fashion and toiletries, to name but a few. Already this push is impacting our boys. We’re seeing a growth in anxiety around looks and possessions from preschool on. The boys as young as eight or nine who I spoke with were very preoccupied with having the right gear, and worried that if they didn’t they’d be seen as a loser. So by the time boys hit their teens we’re starting to see a spike in body issue concerns and self esteem problems. Basically our boys are going down the same track as girls in experiencing anxiety and self-loathing – perfect for advertisers, but not so great for our kids.
We’re also seeing the growth of secret lives as there’s so many ways boys can do their own thing, often right under parents’ noses. The growth in violence in video games is also affecting our boys, as is their growing addiction to online gambling and other unhelpful activities.
Do you think we have been ignoring the welfare of boys?
One of the big problems for boys is that there’s a whole range of issues we hadn’t dealt with for boys before the 21st century issues bit. We still have a long way to go to nurture boys more. Before they can be strong and independent, they have to be nurtured. Yet we tend to be more hands off with boys, which means they have to find their own way. We also need to pay more attention to promoting reading and communication skills from early on in the home. This can make a huge difference to a boy’s confidence, but still isn’t happening to nearly the level that’s needed. Boys also have the right to a rich emotional life, especially as they’re living in a far more emotionally complex world than previous generations. When you then add in the challenges of cyber-bullying, increased levels of violence in games and in the playground, the pressure to look a certain way, act out, concerns around body image, the pressure to drink and how to operate in an increasingly sexualised environment, you begin to realise this is a lot for any kid to deal with especially when parents aren’t up to speed.
Why have they been so neglected do you think?
Boys (and men) tend to keep on going regardless, which isn’t always ideal. So when we look at them we assume everything’s fine, when this mightn’t be the case. We’ve also become a little blind where many male issues from health to relationships are concerned. When we neglect our boys, everyone is impacted – families, future partners and children.
What was the most confronting thing you learnt about what boys were doing?
The explosion of pornography and the very easy access boys have to this material – sometimes at home, on their phones or at a friend’s place. It’s more than concerning when you realise just what they’re accessing – everything from bestiality to the deflowering of young girls. Studies show that repeated exposure to porn shuts down a boy’s feelings, and may even lead him to become a sexual abuser. Scratch the surface and you see just how many boys are viewing porn, and increasingly as a group activity. This isn’t just an activity high school boys are into. Increasingly primary school boys are getting into porn, and boys are also watching it together. Porn gives them a new language, a new way of relating, which can lead to significant harm.
I understand you had to take a break in the middle of writing the book because what you were finding out was so disturbing and you weren’t entirely prepared for that. Can you tell us more about what that time was like for you?
This has been a very hard book to write in some ways. I love working with boys and find them astonishingly expressive, but sometimes when you’re aware of what they’re up against it can seem overwhelming. I kept asking myself how come we moved so far from our duty of care? It was a pretty dark time, but then I had to remind myself that we can’t afford to despair. Ultimately I believe there’s lots we can do, but we can’t be complacent. We need to act on everything we see that we know is unhelpful to our kids. It’s not just the seduction of billboards, magazine and movie ads, and MTV clips we need to be concerned about. We need to be aware of how easily young boys can access porn, for example. “We’re now seeing kids sexually active way under ten, because of access to porn, or their parents’ own behaviour”, John, who works with troubled youth, told me. “I’ve seen many cases where porn is readily left around the home, where it’s part of the family culture. Then you’ve got parents who carefully stash their porn away, and kids have a way of finding it”.
How is boys’ behaviour impacting on girls?
I think boys and girls are equally vulnerable – especially in the sexual arena. While boys can’t get pregnant and don’t face the same slurs a girl who is perceived to be overly sexually active faces, and have more ways of protecting themselves, we can’t be naive about the fact that boys are increasingly vulnerable to sexual assault. This doesn’t in any way lessen our concerns around the growing predatory behaviour we’re seeing towards girls. We have to face the fact that boys are now also stalked by determined often aggressive young girls who are encouraged by cultural messaging which teaches them to act in predatory ways . They send countless inappropriate texts to boys to try and gain their attention. It’s not just photos of low tops girls are sending around. This makes it very difficult for boys to know how to respond as it can seem very enticing. At the same time, boys consuming porn can place our girls at risk – and not just teenage girls. In one Brisbane primary school a seven-year-old girl was sexually assaulted over two months by a boy her age. Hitting her and threatening to kill her if she spoke out, the boy repeatedly forced this young girl to perform oral sex. In another school a group of six-year-old boys banded together and were forcing classmates to perform various sexual acts on them. According to one youth worker, “We are now seeing children grooming younger kids for sex, there’s a real seduction pattern going on. A lot of this appears to be exposure to porn”.
What is your message to parents of sons?
Love and nurture your boys, encourage them to be part of all the good things the new technologies and popular culture have to offer them, but don’t be naive about the dangers.
To educators?
I think there’s no doubt we need more men in the education system. Our boys lack good role models. There’s no substitute for a wealth of good men in their lives. What a wonderful thing it would be to have a positive recruitment drive for bright engaged young men – good for boys and girls.
To policy makers?
More work needs to be done on the 21st century issues boys face and how we can protect them. Making the Advertising Standards Board more accountable and more aware of the new issues we’re facing would be an excellent start. The growing violence in video games needs to be regulated and soon, as does the increasing blurring of sex and violence in games. We also need a strong and clearly drawn regulatory framework with which to deal with pornography now so available to our children.
To the community as a whole?
For too long we’ve seen boys as problematic. We get cross when we see skate-boarders and boys involved in other activities. Strong communities are inclusive. They accommodate and celebrate the needs of their citizens – and that includes our boys. It’s not hard, but it does need time and effort – resources that are well spent. The role of adults has always been to protect our young – that still stands, so we need to have the courage to be good gate-keepers, to question material we know to be harmful to our kids – if we don’t then who will?
Click here to listen to Maggie Hamilton on Life Matters, Radio National.
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A guest post by Getting Real editor Melinda Tankard Reist. Originally published on the National Times site and posted on Melinda's website.
Women, we’ve arrived. We’re equal now with men. The conditions for equality have been met. Am I talking about political, social and financial equality? No.
Access to maternity leave, child care, the opportunity to balance work and family life? No. The ability to live free from harassment and sexual bullying. No.
We know we are empowered because now we can buy men like they buy women. Men can be prostituted to provide sexual services for women. Here is proof of our newly won freedom: we can participate in the sexual objectification of men in the same way we have been objectified through history.
Free from restriction, the sex industry is now open to all. And there’s lots of pseudo-feminist rhetoric to make us all feel good about it. It’s all there in a piece in The Age, which reads like a free plug for a new male escort service (”She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s”).
But just because it’s women doing the buying — and the pimping — doesn’t make it liberating. Being able to trade in human flesh doesn’t mean that emulating the sexual behaviour of men and their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, is progress.
This move is part of a capitalist celebration of the female sexual consumer who can choose to buy dildos, botox, pole-dancing classes, new breasts, Brazilians, surgically altered and coloured labias – and men. These are the tokens of our emancipation? This is what ”freedom of choice” has delivered?
This is a parody of liberation in which women become a mere participant in a mass-marketed orgy of so-called sexual freedom.
I do have some sympathy, however, with the argument that women cannot find men they want to be with intimately. In our pornified culture we are raising men who are callous and insensitive to the needs and desires of women. We knock tenderness out of them with a diet of brutality from the earliest of ages. Boys’ role models are celebrities and sporting figures who see women as conquests, there for the taking.
But buying a man won’t fix that. It is a reflection of distance, disconnection, a lack of intimacy and a subtraction of emotion from sex.
And it’s dishonest to tell women who want something more than a quick $500 f— that they can have ”the whole boyfriend experience” — hair stroked, hand held and even a walk in the park with her, her kids and her dog. For a mere $1200-$1500 a day. That’s a lot of money for simulated intimacy. That’s a pretend boyfriend, not a real one. How does that ”make a woman feel special”?
Hiring prostitutes remains fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men. When women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men, the porn industry is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. And there’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation.
The rise of male ”escort” services reflects a devaluation of sex because of the primacy of exchange and commodification of another person.
All we’re seeing with this new men-for-sale business is the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.
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This week the Australian Publishers Association and the Australia Council for the Arts presented Digital Revolution: Publishing in the 21st Century symposium. Spinifex Director, Susan Hawthorne, was involved as a member of the organising committee and as a speaker.
I attended the Melbourne session, which was a full day of speakers and Q&A sessions on Monday, followed by two talks on Tuesday: by Martin Taylor from NZ’s Digital Publishing Forum about the state of the New Zealand publishing industry vis-à-vis digital publishing, and Chris Palma from Google.
The international keynote speakers for the first day were Richard Charkin, Bloomsbury; Stephen Page, Faber & Faber; and Michael Tamblyn, Kobo. They were great to listen to because in a lot of ways they showed where the intersection of print and digital publishing in Australia might go in the future. Britain has had ereader devices easily available to the general public for a few years, due to partnership with Waterstones, the large ‘bricks and mortar’ bookshop chain.
Michael Tamblyn had a different perspective again. Kobo is a Canadian company that has been operating in various territories including the US. It was interesting to hear Kobo’s experience of the overseas ebook market as an antidote to endless pontificating as to whether this or that may be true of the Australian market in the future. Several speakers reiterated the need to bring out ebooks at the same time as paper books, and Kobo’s data reflected this. In their experience, 48% of the lifetime sales of a book happen in the first 90 days. Makes you wonder whether the practice of ‘windowing’ books (currently being trialled by Macmillan in the States) is either useful or sensible. If this is true, this means that it’s in the publisher’s best interest to try and release the physical and digital versions of a book at the same time.
The keynote speakers were joined by a host of locals, who gave a picture of the Australian industry as it is now. They spoke on various facets of future publishing from iPhone applications to DRM to accessible publishing. It was great to hear from a cross-section of the industry, too: educational publishers from primary through to tertiary and trade. It’s easy just to focus on the corner of the industry that you’re a part of and not be aware of the wider experience. Ebooks are also something that need to be approached very differently when publishing text-based trade books (like novels or non-illustrated non-fiction) than when publishing highly illustrated or formatted books like textbooks or recipe books, so different parts of the industry will have different things to struggle with.
The other thing that’s good to remember is that digital reading isn’t just about ebooks. Ebooks are what we’re focusing on, of course, but there’s also web-based digital reading, whether it’s a site like JSTOR that hosts scans of hundreds of academic journals; or Oxford University Press’s Ask Oxford website that allows you to search a few of its dictionaries and web-only content like “Ask the Experts”; or Mathletics, which is a digital answer to a maths textbook.
What I took away from the symposium was a new excitement of places that Spinifex might go next. Martin Taylor’s description of New Zealand’s journey and the advantages and disadvantages of being a small country were often directly applicable to the situation of being a small company, particularly the point that we often have time but not money to play with. Going digital is both exciting and scary (I’m a lover of the printed word and don’t want ‘real’ books to disappear!), and I’ll be fascinated to see where the industry goes from here.
Appropriately for a digital conversation, the symposium was covered via Twitter live. There’s since also been an ABC News article, and several Bookseller+Publisher blog posts ('Ebooks: Why readers will pay more (but not much more)' and 'Digital dilemmas: think like a reader') and articles (their report on the symposium here and on the Google chat here).
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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.
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