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Blog
A blog by Spinifex author Betty McLellan
In Australia, as in all other democratic countries, we’re expected to believe that the principle of Freedom of Speech covers everyone. When I took a closer look at the topic of “speech”, however, I saw that, far from being a universal privilege, speech is free for some but not for others. There’s a kind of power elite made up of mainstream men in influential positions in politics, business and the media who enjoy the power of speech while the rest of us get to listen. We’re bombarded with their words and are supposed to be fascinated as they speak to, argue with, praise and support each other.
The current debate in Australia over the mining tax is a classic example. The debate is between the federal government and the big mining companies, with the media largely siding with the mining companies. We, the people, are the audience. Players on each side of the debate are using “ordinary people” to make their case but neither is actually asking us what we think.
On one side, the government is arguing that the tax is necessary because the Australian people own the mining resources and should get more benefit in terms of money for the government to use to improve infrastructure. On the other side, mining magnates are arguing that the tax will have a negative effect on the Australian people in terms of fewer jobs and lower quality of life when mining companies are forced (by the mining tax) to close down their operations and withdraw their financial support from communities.
Both sides are quite happy to use us, “ordinary Australians”, as pawns in the debate but neither party will listen to, or be influenced by, anything we say. This is indicative of how so-called freedom of speech works in modern democracy – powerful governments, business leaders and the media exercising their right to speech, while the rest of us are silenced.
So, what about the principle of Freedom of Speech? Arundhati Roy was right when she said in her 2004 City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture: “… the doctrine of Free Speech has been substituted by the doctrine of Free If You Agree Speech”. Most people in society have access to speech when their speech agrees with that of the power elite, but the voices of those who disagree are silenced by being ignored or trivialised or misrepresented. The dissenting voices of radical, political feminists are among those who are silenced.
In Unspeakable: a feminist ethic of speech, I contend that, for speech to be free, it must first be fair. All citizens in democratic societies must have equal access to speech - they must be free to disagree, criticise, express their opinions AND BE HEARD - if the principle of Freedom of Speech is to become a meaningful concept.
Unspeakable is available in print format from OtherWise Publications and will be available next week as an eBook from Spinifex
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Susan Hawthorne, co-director of Spinifex Press, writing from the US after attending the Stop Porn conference in Boston.
A QUIT PORN campaign is what we need to get the consumption and production levels of porn down. When QUIT started sending out their message about smoking, many more smokers were quietly killing themselves (and the effect on others was not insignificant).
Do you remember when we used to be able to smoke on planes? How you could end up on a flight from Melbourne to London in the no-smoking section and still have smoke blown all over you because the next row was the first in the smoking section? Back then, even if you complained, nothing would happen.
The same happens now with porn. Complain about its pervasiveness, and nothing happens because it’s seen as “normal”. So what’s normal? Beating up women in front of a camera? Tying women into stress positions – the same ones used to torture Iraqis in Abu Ghraib? Getting little girls to wear “I want to be a porn star” T-shirts? Calling women bitches and ho’s? In other contexts, these would be seen as hate crimes. Is it any different to beating up a person of a different class or ethnicity? How is torture in one setting considered a breach of human rights and when it’s done in porn called a turn on? How is wearing a porn star T-shirt different from the yellow star or the pink triangle? Think about it. Why is hate language against women okay, when it’s called vilification in other settings?
If you doubt these statements above, then go and see these two films, The Price of Pleasure or The Pornography of Everyday Life. (A warning: these films might cause distress for some viewers.)
Porn is streaming into homes and onto mobile phones as each generation of technology has greater capacity, is more individualised, and stills have moved to video streaming wirelessly. The US is “ahead” of Australia in saturation level, but not by much and it won’t be long before we begin to see what will become generational effects of high-consumption consumers. Where “the consumers become the consumed”, as Cameron Murphey pointed out in his talk in a workshop on Working with Men at the Stop Porn Conference in Boston last weekend organised by Gail Dines, author of Pornland and Rebecca Whisnant co-editor of Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Pornography and Prostitution.
“Porn is bad for your health.” This is what Linda Thompson from the Women’s Support Project in Glasgow, Scotland discovered in her research. It’s long been known to be bad for women’s health. Sexually transmitted diseases and physical injury are obvious adverse effects for those involved in the production of pornography. Then there’s the post-traumatic stress disorders and the psychological effects of abuse. But these are not restricted to those involved in the production of porn. It is also an adverse effect for watchers, especially those who become compulsive watchers of porn. They lose their capacity to form (intimate) relationships with others.
Cameron Murphey also pointed out that porn causes erectile dysfunction. Not surprising then to see the usual syndrome of technological failure creating a new market opportunity: and this time it’s Viagra.
Then there are the apologists on the left who call for the dismantling of capitalism, but vocally support the profiteering of pornographers. Is this because it might hamper their enjoyment? As Betty McLellan in her book Unspeakable points out, that while free trade is bad and fair trade is good, the free speech is good and fair speech is bad when it comes to pornography. Is justice so tradable?
Porn is about injustice. It’s about hatred.
It’s bad for you (have a look at Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself. Begin at p. 102 and read about the effects on adolescent brains).
It’s bad for boys (see What’s Happening to Our Boys?).
It’s bad for girls (see Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls).
It’s bad for women (see Not For Sale).
And it’s bad for men (see Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity).
It’s good for capitalism. And for organised crime. It’s good for the purveyors of violence such as the military and those engaged in genocide. It’s good for a handful of corporate exploiters. In short it’s good for patriarchy.
Who do you support? Perhaps it’s time to QUIT PORN.
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Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham writes on how women sit outside language in this expanded version of her editorial from Meanjin 2-2010.
I recently attended a lecture held at the Law School of the University of Melbourne. French feminist Luce Irigaray was being beamed in from Paris and she was, despite the inevitable technological hitches, awesome to behold. She was talking about natural differences versus constructed ones. She drew a link between culture’s preference for constructed relationships and the world’s inability to deal effectively with climate change. She said (and forgive me if I’m misquoting her slightly): “Patriarchy has failed in its duty to manage the Earth. It is ethically unfit to do so.”
I first read Luce Irigaray thirty years ago, and found her theory that language was constructed in a way which excluded women very powerful and relevant. It seems to me, in the thirty years since I began to engage with feminism, the treatment of women has become worse. Consider the following list of the ways in which women have been publically but, it seems, acceptably humiliated in this country in the last few months.
Louis Nowra described Germaine Greer as “a befuddled and exhausted old woman. She reminded me of my demented grandmother who, towards the end of her life, was often in a similarly unruly state.” Louis Nowra is, as journalist Caroline Overington pointed out, only ten years younger than Greer—so he can take the comment about his grandmother and shove it. Here is the fabulously badly behaved Helen Razer on the subject:
“Greer attracts violent spittle of this type not because she is a polemicist, but because she has a cunt. Her every utterance or teeny, tiny op-ed column is the subject of scrutiny and fuel to the flame of what is, let it be said, pure hatred of feminism … Greer DARES to say what we’d all be thinking several months later on the occasion of Steve Irwin’s death and she is called a hag. She DARES to write an informed history on the young male as visual object and she is called a dried-out old cougar. Fuck off. She’s a bright and occasionally charming old ratbag who is far more erudite than most of what passes for an Australian ‘public intellectual’ and should be revered. Greer may have done her utmost to change the world. Sadly, she was unable to undo the boring sexism that drives so many Australian female thinkers into silence.”
Around the same time senior sports commentator Peter Roebuck wrote the following in the Sydney Morning Herald: “Whatever the reality of her life, supposing reality makes an appearance now and then, Lara Bingle stumbles from public relations disaster to public relations calamity. Restaurateurs complain about her manners and the poor company she keeps. Fashionistas talk of her headstrong ways and dubious customs. Moreover she seems intent on boosting the sales of all those magazines purchased by the female of the species. In short, she craves attention and courts controversy. Yet Michael, the class act of the pairing, seems besotted. Beauty and danger have always been a potent combination.”
Christine Nixon, whose judgement on 7 February 2009 was undoubtedly questionable, has had to endure headlines such as ‘Police commissioner ate while Victoria burned’. As critic and blogger Kerryn Goldsworthy wrote on her blog: “Let me get this straight: Christine Nixon is to be crucified for taking an hour off, when she wasn’t even rostered on, in order to have dinner—but it’s cause for gasps of meeja admiration when the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition goes AWOL on a nine-day bike ride, taking yet another opportunity to wobble his budgie at slavering photographers and horrified truckies for the entire length of the Hume Highway … ask yourself how much more vile, ignorant, sniggering, misogynist fat-hate Nixon would be copping even than she already is if she were to emulate the Leader of the Opposition and say, in defence of the shocking crime of having an evening meal, ‘I’m just being myself.’”
Australia Post released its Australian Legends of the Written Word stamp series. Five men, one woman (Colleen McCullough). Only three of the thirty-four finalists of the Archibald Prize for 2010 were women (one of them, Kate Benyon, is a favourite artist of mine).
The judges of the Miles Franklin Award put out a long list with three women and eight men. The short list, which was announced in late April, included only two women. The winner will be announced on 22 June. Last year, after a similar proportion of men and women on the long list, no women made it to the short list. Much of the commentary around this in 2009 argued that you can’t pick a list based on political correctness—an argument I’d swallow if women writers published that year had not included Helen Garner, Joan London, Amanda Lohrey, Eva Hornung and Andrea Goldsmith.
Last year not a single female lead singer was included in Triple J’s hottest 100 survey. Catherine Strong explores the implications on this in her essay ‘The Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time 2009 and the Dominance of the Rock Canon’ in this issue.
I could go on. I won’t. I’ll just say this: either women can’t sing, paint, write or think as well as they used to—certainly not well enough to offset their tendency to become less beautiful with age—or we live in a culture that does not like the things women say or does not know how to hear them when they say it. In other words, Irigaray is right. Women sit outside language.
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Belgium's lower house of parliament last week voted for a law that would ban women from wearing the full Islamic face veil in public.
Yesterday South Australian Senator Corey Bernadi called for the burqa to be banned in Australia, warning that it was emerging as a "disguise of bandits and ne'er-do-wells” after an armed bandit used one for disguise in Sydney this week. His blogpost has been countered by Islamic groups concerned that to ban the burqa risks limiting Muslim women’s interaction in society.
The “full Islamic veil” is the burqa which covers the entire face and body, and covers the eyes with meshed cloth; the niqab is similarly full covering, but leaves the eyes clear. For visuals of the varying forms of veiling see this BBC site.
Several European nations are holding similar debates, with legislation mooted in France, Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands. Last month French President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered legislation calling the veils “an affront to women's dignity unwelcome in France”.
In northern Italy a Muslim woman has even been fined under anti-terrorism laws for wearing a burqa in public.
The debate has played out in France for the last two decades, and a great resource is Bronwyn Winter’s Hijab and the Republic.
The news in Belgium has been widely reported, with multitudinous opinions. Take for example the French imam who supports such bans. Hassen Chalghoumi is quoted in the UK Telegraph saying that women who wanted to cover their faces should move to Muslim countries where covering was a tradition and that "The burqa is a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination and Islamist indoctrination".
There is however a distinct lack of feminist voices – let alone Muslim women’s voices – on the issue. And it’s a divisive one. Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger weighed into the argument last year with a column which won her some support but gained her a lot of criticism, particularly from other women. It led to a brilliant debate at ANU with Haussegger alongside Julie Posetti and Dr Shakira Hussein
who both made a big point of declaring their respect for Haussegger, while respectfully disagreeing with her.
And Haussegger did make some decent points about why the topic should be discussed, hinting at the reasons such conversations get so heated, divided and ultimately undecided. But really she wasn’t preaching tolerance and understanding, rather more of the “them and us” argument that overtakes, arguing that a ban on the burqa would send a clear message that, “Here all women are free and equal participants in our society. No woman need cover her face or hide her identity.”
Of course all women should be free and equal participants in all societies, but we need to be very clear that that is what we are arguing for and not using persuasive ideals to promote other agendas.
Over the past week – and indeed whenever this topic raises its head – there has been much made of “safety” – the dangers of women in burqas driving, or the risk to bank staff serving women in burqas, but to me this also seems like a diversion. You can question the issue of “choice”, the appropriateness or otherwise of displays of religiosity in a secular society, or modern interpretations of the Koran, but not to obfuscate underlying arguments driven by fear, racism or control.
And of course to call for a ban of anything is to create polarisation, rather than solid debate or understanding. As Reed Brody, European press director for Human Rights Watch, said in response to the Belgian legislation, "Bans like this do more harm than good".
Geraldine Brooks deals eloquently with the issue of veiling in Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and summed it up aptly to me, “I wish politicians wouldn't keep trying to solve social problems through the bodies of women. Khomeini makes Iran look more Islamic overnight by ordering women into the veil, Belgium makes its immigration issues disappear overnight by ordering them out of it. No one wants to tackle the serious issues of underlying inequality. It's all so superficial and a real time waster and attention suck when the real issues are women's education, forced marriage and FGM. Let's see Belgium tackle those issues.”
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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.
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The women in this book may be among the last to have babies without the medical stamp of approval.
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