All Men Are Liars
"It's time that Australian women stop bemoaning the attitudes of Australian men and take responsibility for the views of their girlfriends, mothers and most of all their daughters."
I think it pays to define that women don't need the same rights as men, but both women and men (who are by no means in a perfect position) need equal rights to each other.
It's a shame that my biggest feminist idol is a 40-something self-professed chauvinist male. I am yet to find a strong role model who isn't so much into "feminism" as "human-ism". That is the best I can describe it; I don't believe in -isms and I am not an -ist. I never have been, I abhor labels and I will to my dying breath rage against the cage of categorisation.
As I've written previously, there's a saying that "every man becomes a feminist when he has a daughter" because suddenly guys see their attitudes and that of their mates through the prism of "that could be my little girl they're talking about."
It's a pity the same perception shift doesn't occur in so many women, with huge numbers of mothers continuing to transmit the trivial obsessions of shoe shopping, beauty products and fashion magazines to their baby girls.
It's a bit much to expect men to take the insoluble issues of western gender equality seriously - things like abortion rights, equal pay and sexual discrimination in the workplace - when millions of intelligent women spend their days consumed with what Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing.
If female opinion makers and power brokers spent a quarter of the time they devoted to worrying about which celebrity woman has had plastic surgery, to an issue like universal free day care - the groundswell of media and community pressure would be overwhelming.
Seriously, put free day care on the front page of every woman's magazine for the next six months and tell me it would not be pushed to the forefront of the national consciousness and to the top of the Federal government's agenda where it rightly should be ...
Imagine an Australia where every woman (and family) doesn't have to choose between career and their children's well-being because the country had spent say $42 billion ensuring that quality, nurturing day care was available nationally?
As with all social upheavals, it's not going to happen by saying 'Excuse me, Sir' or 'Would you mind if we discussed this topic?' it has to be slammed into the faces of the people who matter, and by default, the masses who need to be told what to think will stir and drag their heads out of the "what people are wearing section".
Tell me that the editors of every woman's magazine in this country (almost exclusively female, most of whom know each other or someone they work with) couldn't co-ordinate a united front on this issue?
But no, let's talk endlessly about cellulite and handbags and who Lindsay Lohan is shagging instead and pretend that's going to re-shape the world we live in and the one our daughters and sons will inherit.
It's time that Australian women stop bemoaning the attitudes of Australian men and take responsibility for the views of their girlfriends, mothers and most of all their daughters.
We now live in a country where a generation of Australian women don't even consider themselves feminists, having rejected the term because they think they'll be labelled a lesbian and won't get a boyfriend if they use the word.
Fearful, insecure men and the politicised lesbian activists who hijacked the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s can take equal responsibility for this perception problem but to correct it, modern women need look no further than their own backyards.
I could walk into any bar, supermarket or fashion boutique in this country and I guarantee I would know more about feminist issues than 90 per cent of the women in these establishments.
Ask a woman under 30 to even define what feminism is and I bet you'll get a pea soup of misconceptions about hairy armpits, man-hating and rabid activism instead of this: feminism is the belief that women should have equal political, social, sexual, intellectual and economic rights to men.
Who would not want this for their daughter?
The fact that that there is even resistance to this simple, self-evident truth illustrates how bad feminism's image problem is with our youth - and if you can't sell it to young women, how the hell are you going to get men to invest?
Body image and the depiction of gender in the media are important issues but they are not the main game; building a society where women have the exact-same opportunity to further themselves educationally and financially is the battlefront, because you then produce a female population articulate and unencumbered to make changes from the top down.
There's only so many hours in the day, so I say choose your battles.
Hopefully a day will come when my grand-daughter shakes her head in disbelief that we once lived in a society where day-care wasn't free, where equal pay and opportunities for women weren't just assumed, like we do now about women having the vote and their own bank account.
From Sam De Brito's blog here
I think it pays to define that women don't need the same rights as men, but both women and men (who are by no means in a perfect position) need equal rights to each other.
It's a shame that my biggest feminist idol is a 40-something self-professed chauvinist male. I am yet to find a strong role model who isn't so much into "feminism" as "human-ism". That is the best I can describe it; I don't believe in -isms and I am not an -ist. I never have been, I abhor labels and I will to my dying breath rage against the cage of categorisation.
As I've written previously, there's a saying that "every man becomes a feminist when he has a daughter" because suddenly guys see their attitudes and that of their mates through the prism of "that could be my little girl they're talking about."
It's a pity the same perception shift doesn't occur in so many women, with huge numbers of mothers continuing to transmit the trivial obsessions of shoe shopping, beauty products and fashion magazines to their baby girls.
It's a bit much to expect men to take the insoluble issues of western gender equality seriously - things like abortion rights, equal pay and sexual discrimination in the workplace - when millions of intelligent women spend their days consumed with what Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing.
If female opinion makers and power brokers spent a quarter of the time they devoted to worrying about which celebrity woman has had plastic surgery, to an issue like universal free day care - the groundswell of media and community pressure would be overwhelming.
Seriously, put free day care on the front page of every woman's magazine for the next six months and tell me it would not be pushed to the forefront of the national consciousness and to the top of the Federal government's agenda where it rightly should be ...
Imagine an Australia where every woman (and family) doesn't have to choose between career and their children's well-being because the country had spent say $42 billion ensuring that quality, nurturing day care was available nationally?
As with all social upheavals, it's not going to happen by saying 'Excuse me, Sir' or 'Would you mind if we discussed this topic?' it has to be slammed into the faces of the people who matter, and by default, the masses who need to be told what to think will stir and drag their heads out of the "what people are wearing section".
Tell me that the editors of every woman's magazine in this country (almost exclusively female, most of whom know each other or someone they work with) couldn't co-ordinate a united front on this issue?
But no, let's talk endlessly about cellulite and handbags and who Lindsay Lohan is shagging instead and pretend that's going to re-shape the world we live in and the one our daughters and sons will inherit.
It's time that Australian women stop bemoaning the attitudes of Australian men and take responsibility for the views of their girlfriends, mothers and most of all their daughters.
We now live in a country where a generation of Australian women don't even consider themselves feminists, having rejected the term because they think they'll be labelled a lesbian and won't get a boyfriend if they use the word.
Fearful, insecure men and the politicised lesbian activists who hijacked the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s can take equal responsibility for this perception problem but to correct it, modern women need look no further than their own backyards.
I could walk into any bar, supermarket or fashion boutique in this country and I guarantee I would know more about feminist issues than 90 per cent of the women in these establishments.
Ask a woman under 30 to even define what feminism is and I bet you'll get a pea soup of misconceptions about hairy armpits, man-hating and rabid activism instead of this: feminism is the belief that women should have equal political, social, sexual, intellectual and economic rights to men.
Who would not want this for their daughter?
The fact that that there is even resistance to this simple, self-evident truth illustrates how bad feminism's image problem is with our youth - and if you can't sell it to young women, how the hell are you going to get men to invest?
Body image and the depiction of gender in the media are important issues but they are not the main game; building a society where women have the exact-same opportunity to further themselves educationally and financially is the battlefront, because you then produce a female population articulate and unencumbered to make changes from the top down.
There's only so many hours in the day, so I say choose your battles.
Hopefully a day will come when my grand-daughter shakes her head in disbelief that we once lived in a society where day-care wasn't free, where equal pay and opportunities for women weren't just assumed, like we do now about women having the vote and their own bank account.
From Sam De Brito's blog here