It was with great disappointment and disgruntlement that Spinifex yesterday learnt of Amazon’s decision to cease sales of IPG Kindle titles.



For those who don’t know, IPG is a US distributor offering services like marketing, sales and distribution to small publishing houses. They are a vital service for those of us who are a presence in the American book market, but cannot physically distribute over there. Spinifex is just one of IPG’s 400 clients whose eBook titles will no longer be available to purchase through Amazon, for the Kindle eReader. The publishing world is reporting on this news, and many articles make the salient point that IPG did nothing wrong in their negotiations with the conglomerate, but are simply the victims of Amazon’s cutthroat narrow margins.

It should be noted that print editions of Spinifex titles are still available to purchase through Amazon. It is only Kindle eBooks that are affected. But there are alternative booksellers for our American readers wishing to purchase from the Spinifex digital list. Spinifex eBooks can be purchased as NOOK books through Barnes & Noble. They are available through IndieBound, which sources titles from independent bookstores. And IPG sell our print and digital books direct.

It is especially unfortunate that this fall-out has come when the US release of Spinifex’s best-selling ‘Big Porn Inc’ is right around the corner. ‘Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry’ is officially released in America on March 1: but copies are now available from Barnes & Noble. The print & digital versions of ‘Big Porn Inc’ will be available as a B&N NOOK book and can be purchased directly from IPG.

Spinifex is proud to remain a client of the Independent Publishers Group, and we are very grateful to them for the superb work they do promoting and selling Spinifex’s titles overseas.


— The Spinifex Team

 

 

 

 I always knew there was something different about this man. Professionally he was used to being in power. At home he had a constant need to know where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. My attention had to be on him. After the birth of my three daughters, the emotional abuse increased. He also developed an addiction to pornography. I made a decision not to have my daughters grow up in an abusive household and I left with nothing. The violence continued after separation through letters and emails-it was hard but I would do it again,’   ….Tanya

 

 On February 16, Spinifex women attended Be The Hero! Held at the Melbourne Town Hall, the event was organised by the Victorian Women’s Trust. It was part of Storming Against Violence 2012, a week of action and awareness of violence against women, and the Trust’s ongoing work in the community.

 Dr Jackson Katz, a leading U.S violence prevention advocate, internationally recognised for his groundbreaking work in the field of gender violence prevention education, addressed the audience and called on men to do a lot more to prevent violence against women. ‘Domestic violence and sexual violence have been seen as woman’s issues but these are also men’s issues,’ he said. ‘Everywhere women look over their shoulders and limit themselves because of the threat of domestic violence’ said Katz. He said that few men have spoken up and taken a stand against domestic violence. He challenged men, particularly those in leadership positions to get involved and confront violence against women.

 

Katz explained that the current manner in which matters of domestic violence are referred to as women’s issues gives men an excuse not to do anything about it. ‘Men have been rendered invisible’, he said. This is perpetuated by the media which frequently reports that ‘a woman was raped’, omitting any mention of the perpetrator. He stressed the importance of inserting the active agent.

 

 Reporters at The Brisbane Times also need to learn how to report on domestic violence. Yesterday they reported the death of a small boy thrown off the Story Bridge in Brisbane by his father who then jumped. The news item did not identify this as domestic violence, instead it referred to the father, who had just murdered his son, as a ‘top bloke’. In this article the inevitable loss and suffering of the child’s mother was rendered invisible.

 

The VWT’s Be The Hero forum departed from previous protocol where the activists and researchers deliberating on matters of domestic violence were women. On this occasion it was Jackson Katz along with Dr Michael Flood, a sociologist at the University of Wollongong and a White Ribbon Ambassador, and Be-The-Hero co-ordinator Paul Zappa. Not everyone agrees with this change of order.  The executive director of the Victorian Women’s Trust, Mary Crooks told the audience she had received a call from a supporter who was highly critical of the Trust’s decision to invite only men to speak about domestic violence.

 

 While it’s easy to understand that this new approach might be interpreted as ‘fraternising with the enemy’, maybe it’s time to consider the role that men can play in reaching abusers and potential violators.

 

 In his presentation, Dr Michael Flood acknowledged the great debt that society owes to feminist research and activism. In the 1960s and 70s, the public interest and action around domestic violence grew after feminist activists established refuges for female victims and their children. Over the last forty years, both public and private funding has been provided for shelters, laws against domestic violence have been toughened and education programs for health care professionals to recognise the symptoms of DV have been established. But Domestic violence still poses the greatest risk for disease and premature death for women 15 to 44 years-old. In 2009 the economic cost of violence against women to the Australian community was 13.6 billion dollars.

Michael Flood spoke about the unequal gender roles that still exist in society today. ‘Men’s violence is grounded in systematic inequality between men and women,’ he said. ‘We have to stop using words ‘bitch’ and ‘cunt’ – our language has to change’. He said there is a real need for society to be aware of the way that woman are portrayed in pornography and he called on governments to end inequality and for men to mobilise and join movements such as The White Ribbon Campaign.

 

 Flood is understandably concerned about the influence of pornography on relationships between men and women. Currently we live in an increasingly pornographic world where brutal and violent images that depict porn stars having their vaginas and anuses penetrated by more than one penis at a time are instantly downloadable. Such brutal images cannot help but perpetuate the inequality between men and women and the sexual violence against all women.

 

 On the Spinifex Press table were many books written and published about violence against women such as Big Porn Inc which exposes the harms of the global pornographic industry, Pornland :  How porn has hijacked our sexuality, and Not For Sale: Feminists resisting prostitution and pornography.

 

Let’s hope they get the message and pass it on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Victorian Women’s Trust is holding a week of community action to protest against violence towards women.

Storming against violence runs from the 13 – 17^th February featuring
Be the Hero is the premier event with Insight, action & strategies that break cycles of violence. Hosted by Andrew O’Keefe, with Dr Jackson Katz, with contributions from Dr Michael Flood & Paul Zappa.

To mark the event initiated by the Victorian Women's Trust, Mary Crooks (VWT Executive Director) has penned an opinion piece which examines the undercurrents of sexism, violence & complacency existing in Australian society, where individuals fear to speak against the status quo, enforcing a culture of tolerators.

The end of the tolerator

True story. People hovered in the chemist shop waiting area. She felt one of the guys looking her up and down in a way that made her uneasy. In taking his turn to speak with the chemist, he said in a loud voice – ‘You can always tell a depressed lesbian can’t you?’ Mildly discomforted, the chemist remained silent.

 By choosing silence, the chemist becomes what filmmaker Abigail Disney describes as a ‘tolerator’ - someone who knows that another’s behaviour is unacceptable, but offers no resistance or contestation.  As a ‘tolerator’ he becomes complicit in the other’s action. Because he did not challenge his customer’s attitude, the guilty party receives tacit permission to continue behaving boorishly.

 Why did the chemist choose to be silent? It would not take much for him to challenge and contest this abusive behaviour. He could simply say with a soft smile, ‘Mate, there’s no need to talk like that,’ sending the other man a signal that he was not prepared to endorse his words. Without social sanction, his customer might think again and may even change his ways.

 This sort of action and response is acted out thousands of times a day, all over the country – the turning of a blind eye to situations that we know in our hearts and minds are unacceptable. By soft-peddling on abusive behaviours and insidious violence, we erode our collective capacity to exercise compassion and respect, as well as guaranteeing the safety and well-being of our fellow citizens, young and older.
 
When it comes to both sexual assault and violence within families, we are a nation of ‘tolerators’. The latest statistics tell us that these particular crimes are on the increase. In Victoria alone, the latest police crime report reveals that the rape offences recorded in 2010/11 increased by 9% on the previous year. Crime against the person offences arising from family incidents accounted for over a quarter of all such crime during 2010/2011, representing an increase of over 26% from the previous year. Even allowing for improved reporting mechanisms, these are deeply disturbing figures.
 
The impacts of this violence are immense. Sexual assault commonly means life-long trauma for victims. Family violence exacts a terrible toll, for both boys and girls as well. Australian Bureau of Statistics survey data reveal that over one third of family violence reports indicate that the violence was witnessed by children in the care of women experiencing the violence. Other research shows that exposure to violence in the family increases children’s risk of health, behavioural and learning difficulties in the short term; of developing mental health problems later in life; and in the case of some boys particularly, of being at risk of perpetrating violence as adults.
 
The economic costs are huge. Analyses carried out by leading accounting firms over the last decade suggest that violence currently costs the nation billions, yes billions, of dollars every year.
 
The stark reality is that sexual assault and family violence is highly gendered. Some rape is male against male, and some family violence is caused by women, but the overwhelming majority of sexual assault and family violence perpetrators are male. Women and girls know intimately the ways they order their lives around the threat of violence stemming from an unhealthy and anti-social masculinity that depends and thrives on entitlement, intimidation, domination and control.
 
Most men implicitly reject this form of masculinity, choosing not to have violence in their lives and not to exercise violence in their relationships with women. But here’s the nub of the argument as well as the pointer to positive social change, healthier gender relations and reduced social and economic costs of violence.
 
While many men reject violence in their own lives, they should also assume the pivotal role in violence prevention. Men (and boys) need to commit to the challenge of contestation, to learn and practice ways of confronting the particular culture of masculinity that breeds perpetrators and sustains violence. Increasingly, and with community education and positive support, they should to be prepared and equipped to confront their peers in everyday life situations – family gatherings, staff rooms, office corridors, building sites, club rooms, on-line, and at the chemist shop – sending clear signals that sexist and violent assumptions, attitudes and behaviour are just not on. 
 
To believe violence is somehow only a ‘women’s issue’ is a poor excuse. Victoria’s top policeman knows this. Assuming the mantle of Victoria’s Chief Commissioner in late 2011, Ken Lay acknowledged that domestic violence is one of the most complex, least visible and fastest growing areas of crime. Quite rightly, he said we are not going to solve it by locking people up. Instead, it requires urgent attention and a fresh approach.

Men making a difference is the critical ingredient of a new approach. This is the a key message of Jackson Katz, a leading United States’ violence prevention advocate who visits Melbourne and Sydney in February as a guest of the Victorian Women’s Trust. Author of The Macho Paradox and the film Tough Guise, Katz’s bystander approach is part and parcel of the fresh thinking that is needed to deal with one of our most pressing social issues.
 
We will continue to see unacceptably high levels of sexual assault and family violence as long as people remain ‘tolerators’. When men care deeply about the women and girls in their lives – mothers, daughters, partners and friends – then they should also be alert to, and troubled by, the fact that other men perpetrate terrible violence towards other women and girls. Silence and passivity (‘I don’t behave that way so I’m okay’) acts as potent cultural affirmation.
 
When everyone, especially men and boys, steps up and claims male violence as an issue that must involve them, and where they tackle it as best they can in a raft of day-to day practical ways, the ‘tolerator’ fabric will inexorably start to wear thin.
 
Mary Crooks
Executive Director
Victorian Women’s Trust

www.vwt.org.au

 

by Lise Weil




Several nights ago, on Facebook of all things, I happened on the news that the writer Christa Wolf had died—on December 1, in Berlin, at the age of 82. I am still reeling from the shock, not just the shock of her death but the shock of my not having known about her death for over six weeks. How could this have happened? Christa Wolf, originally of the GDR, is a writer whose words I have lived by, more or less consciously, for almost thirty years. No other living writer did as much to shape my literary consciousness and political imagination. The only book I possess that’s as beat-up as my copy of To the Lighthouse is her novel The Quest for Christa T (Nachdenken uber Christa T.). The Reader and the Writer is a close second. Passages from her novels and essays still return to me on a weekly basis. Not only that, she used to make regular appearances in my dreams. How could she have passed from this world without my having a clue?? This despite the fact that I regularly, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch, immerse myself in the information-drenched world of cyberspace. (Now that I know of her death of course I’ve been drowning in blogs, commentaries, obituaries, interviews). How did this vital piece of information fall through the cracks?

 I subscribe to U.S. and Canada-based feminist listserves, where deaths of literary figures in the U.S. and Canada are fairly well covered—though occasionally there are cracks here as well. But what of writers on another continent?  I’m talking about women writers of course and most particularly feminist writers.  Thirty, twenty, maybe even ten years ago a women’s magazine or newspaper would have brought me news of an important death (there was a feminist press then and it knew no borders). Or if not that a friend who had read it in one of those papers. There were gatherings then, often centered around books, if I hadn’t already found out from a newspaper or a friend it would certainly have come up at one of them.

 I don’t know how we’re all supposed to keep track of these deaths, today, the deaths of the feminist writers whose imaginations have rocked our worlds. No doubt there are fans of the great visionary Quebec writer Louky Bersianik in Europe, Australia, even in the U.S., who have no idea that she died also in December, two days after Wolf in fact, at the age of 81. Beyond keeping track of these deaths, how are we supposed to mourn them, dispersed as we all are?

 “Literature today must be peace research,” Wolf pronounced in her Buchner Prize speech. More than any other writer I know, she showed me what it is to be a writer of conscience.

***

For Christa Wolf, prose was an instrument of conscience and self-knowledge, a means of stirring up the hardened deposits of history, of laying bare lies and buried truths. She was a master diagnostician of the darkness of the 20^th-century. ”The main aim of my work in recent years has been the question of what it is that has brought our civilization to the brink of self-destruction” she once said in an interview. She understood that that self-destructiveness had its roots in dissociation: “How one could be there and not be there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century,” she wrote in Patterns of Childhood [in Australia published as A Model Childhood], a novel in which she tried to comes to terms with a Nazi childhood. And later: “Sin in our time consists of not wanting to know the truth about oneself.” Countering that dissociation, which Wolf saw at work everywhere, was one of her self-appointed tasks as a writer. The words spoken by Christa T. in her early and best-known novel The Quest for Christa T. could just as easily have come from her:  “We must know what has happened to us . . .One must know what happens to oneself.” (“Hope begins,” Wolf once said in an interview, “when one faces reality, when one simply sees what is.”) 

 “In the age of universal memory loss,” Wolf wrote in Patterns of Childhood [A Model Childhood], “we must realize that complete presence of mind can be achieved only when based on a clear past.” Always as a writer her project was to remove blinders, her own and others’, to make herself and the reader aware of blind spots, to see clearly. The relentless questioning that characterized her narrative voice was often directed at herself (the authorial “I” and the narrative “I” often appeared to be identical); she seemed always ready to expose her own failings, to open up even her rawest wounds for closer inspection. In the aftermath of the response to What Remains (Was Bleibt), a novella about the day in the life of a GDR writer whose every move is monitored by state secret police agents, she would try to come to terms with the fact that for three years, as a young woman, she herself worked for the Stasi.

As an East German writer, Wolf took social engagement as matter of course. “I can’t abstract myself from [society],” she once said in an interview. “It is this sense of always being touched by what touches society, although it sometimes drives me to despair, that is the source, amongst other things, of my creative drive.” At a time when, Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding, unfettered capitalism seems to be the model towards which all societies are leaning, it is bracing to read a writer for whom an alternative existed. “We East Germans had a vision, a utopia,” she once wrote, and even after reckoning with the abuses of the regime she continued to cling to that vision. Beginning with the collection of essays The Reader and the Writer, published in 1968, Wolf would develop a body of writing about writing marked by a steadfast refusal of alienation and a fervent wish that literature be effective, be useful, that it might help to bring about a more livable world, “help ensure that the things of this earth endure.” She considered hers an “aesthetics of resistance.”

In the 1980’s, Wolf’s social critique, along with her poetics, took a feminist turn. In the process of researching the figure of Cassandra for her novel of that name that appeared in 1983, she began to study archaeology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Travelling to Crete, she was amazed and outraged to discover that women were the original seers, prophets and poets, that their powers had been usurped by priests of Apollo who took over the temple at Delphi, that women were subsequently either excluded or turned into objects. She began to consider the implications of the fact that for two thousand years women were barred from any significant role in shaping culture. “Does it seem misguided. . .to believe,” she wrote, “that if women had helped to think `thought’ over the last two thousand years, the life of thought would be different today?” 

Wolf’s Cassandra is a feminist parable. Even as her Cassandra comes to understand that the Trojan war, far from being an aberration, is deeply symptomatic of patriarchal consciousness, and that “we have no chance against a time that needs heroes,” she begins to feel a deep kinship with women from other layers of society. Wolf’s own feminist awakening is traced in her Frankfurt lectures, which later appeared as essays accompanying Cassandra. In terms of narrative, she writes in these essays, the necrophilia of patriarchal cultures is to be seen in the “strictly one-track-minded approach—the extraction of a single ‘skein’. . . a blood-red thread extracted from the fabric of human life, the narrative of the struggle and victory of the heroes, or their doom.” To these one-track stories Wolf suggests that we oppose something she calls “the living word”: “This word would not longer produce stories of heroes, or of antiheroes, either.  Instead, it would be inconspicuous and would seek to name the inconspicuous, the precious everyday, the concrete. . .Perhaps it would greet with a smile the wrath of Achilles, the conflict of Hamlet, the false alternatives of Faust.” 

In a speech she gave in 1980 on the occasion of receiving the Georg Buchner Prize (later published in a book of essays called The Author’s Dimension), Wolf indicted Western culture for its devaluing of women as sources of knowledge and insight, its idolatry of scientific thinking, its inner emptiness.  And she raised the question of the fate of literature, and of language itself, in a highly technologized world which increasingly seems bent on its own destruction. “Shall it then, the language of literature, fail us?” she asked. Her answer to this question comes in the following passage, and hinges upon the taking up a “simple, quiet word” – verkehrt (upside-down, reversed).  These words, I believe, ring truer than ever today.

“The condition of the world is reversed, we say tentatively, and notice: it is true. We can stand behind this sentence.  The word is not beautiful, only right, and it is thus a rest for our ears, which have been torn by the clamor of great words, a little relief too for our conscience, disturbed by too many false, falsely-used words.  Could it perhaps be the first word of another accurate language which we have in our ears but not yet on our tongues? Perhaps from it could develop. . .a chain of other equally accurate words which would express not only a negative of the old but an other, timely sense of values. . .  So that we can again speak to one another, and tell each other stories, without having to be ashamed.”

(Translation above is by Myra Love. I prefer it to Jan van Heurck’s in part because of the resonance of “reversed” with Mary Daly’s notion of “reversal.” Other translations are by the translators cited below.) 

REFERENCES

Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories. Tr. Joan Becker (New York: International Publishers, 1977)

Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood. Tr. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980)

Christa Wolf, The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and four Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994)

The Fourth Dimension:Interviews with Christa Wolf. tr. Hilary Pilkington with introduction by Karin McPherson (London: Verso, 1988).

 

Lise Weil lives in Montreal and teaches in Goddard College's IMA program. She was founder and editor of Trivia: A Journal of Ideas and later Trivia: Voices of Feminism. She has just completed a memoir, In Search of Pure Lust.