Femme's Fatal Flaw in Logic

As observed before, Nicky and I enjoy reading Saturday's opinion pieces, they're good for a laugh.

Like this piece from androgynously named Chris Wallace entitled Women will tire of taking the back seat.

Will they, I wondered? One finds it fascinating to read pieces that purport to speak for all of us with a double-X chromosome.

DO KEVIN Rudd's staff hate women or are they just nasty to everyone?

Rudd press secretary Lachlan Harris is rude to female journalists, according to reports last week, which supplied several examples.

As well, on an overseas prime ministerial trip recently male reporters sat together in a bloc on the VIP jet with all the female reporters seated in a bloc behind them.

Rudd and the boys had a long chat over drinks at one stop on the trip, with the female reporters apparently excluded off to the side, Prime Minister-less.

Whinge, whinge, bleat and whinge.

C'mon Chrissie, sweetheart, you've obviously grown up in the feminist era, what's stopping you from going over and joining in? I do, it's my job.

Kevin Rudd, prima facie, has some powerful positives working for him with women.

Therese Rein, Rudd's wife, is a powerful professional in her own right and lends the PM good credentials on his underlying attitude to women.

Right, so Rudd's fem-friendly credentials have to earned by his wife?

That's, y'know, a bit sexist isn't it?

And besides, Therese Rein has earned her money on the back of expansive government contracts so it couldn't have hurt to have had extensive party influence in the form of her husband.

It's just like lauding as independent achievements, the sales of a real estate agent whose husband is the property developer.

Rudd appointed the talented Tanya Plibersek Minister for the Status of Women, another plus. Down a dark alley at night confronted by a pack of marauding men - or in Cabinet confronted by a pack of marauding men - Plibersek is the kind of person you'd be thrilled to have fighting shoulder to shoulder with you.

Often confronted by a pack of marauding men are you Chrissie, or is that just your victim fantasy emerging again?

Rudd appointed four women to really meaty Cabinet jobs, including Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister.

All good. So why did the story get any traction? Because it happened in this context.

Just four of Rudd's 18 Cabinet ministers are women - hardly benchmark-busting, and Plibersek isn't one of them.

The 2020 Summit got the symbolism on women wrong.

Oooh, do tell.

Julianne Schultz and Jackie Huggins' prominent roles alongside Cate Blanchett visibly saved the day in the end, but only just.

Right, just so long as women were visible it really didn't matter about their achievements.

There have been no "early wins" for women from Rudd's election. Yes, the Work Choices rollback helps, but that's not particular to women.

Contrast the treatment of the car industry and, say, parental leave since Rudd's election.

Let's, shall we?

Both got sent off for review - parental leave to the tough Productivity Commission, cars to the dinky Bracks Review.

The car industry gets prominent handouts even before Bracks has reported, but there'll be no parental leave initiative at least until the PC reports next year.

The definitive work on parental leave has already been done, UNSW academic Sarah Maddison points out - by the Human Rights & Equal Opportunities Commission a few years ago.

It may not have occurred to Chrissie that if (predominantly male) car workers lose their jobs, then the women and children those men support will be disadvantaged as well.

And another thing, women have been successfully raising children without the need for paid maternity leave for millennia, so tell me what the priority should be - ensuring there are jobs today or feel good tokenism?

While delighted about the Howard government's demise...

Yeah, what a surprise there.

...Maddison also points out that much backsliding on policies affecting women in the last decade happened under wall-to-wall state Labor governments.

Gee and one of those Labor Governments is headed by a woman too. Whatever happened to the sisterhood, sister?

I'm inclined to believe Lachlan Harris' defence - that he's rude to everyone, not just female journalists.

Well, that's magnanimous.

But the press gallery women's grief is part of a bigger pattern on women that Rudd ought to join the dots on. We had half the votes in 2007 and we've got half the votes in 2010 as well.

And how dare you assume that my opinions will fall lock-step into yours on gender lines, dearie?

We may be women, but we do have brains of our own.

-- Nora

Above Rubies

A wife - for a woman whose full time role is managing a household, what might her 'job description' include:

Running the household? Making sure there's enough food in the cupboard and ensuring the house is clean? Perhaps involvement with her husband's career - entertaining clients, acting as a personal assistant?

That doesn't sound so bad does it?

In one's own professional career, it is extremely common to encounter the husband and wife business owners where the wife's role in the business is bookkeeper, office manager and personal assistant in addition to managing a household.

That doesn't sound oppressive does it?

Well, it does in the bizarro world inhabited by feminists who have castigated a man who has give the label 'virtual wife' to a job advertisement as described above.

Domestic violence worker Chantal Eastwell, who is helping co-ordinate Brisbane's Feminist Conference, was shocked.

"What angers me is that some men do think they have the right to control women in this way," she said.

"It's terrible to have the attitude that women are subservient, and I hope no one wants to take this job."

Ms Eastwell obviously believes that a woman working in partnership with a man is the equivalent of servitude.

What would she rather women do? Just sit on their arses all day waiting for hubby to come home and shower them with jewels? Or live the Sex And The City self-indulgent and empty-headed neurosis first hand?

Stay angry Ms Eastwell, stew in your silly impotent rage - the rest of us women have work to do.

-- Nora

A Bet Each Way

It seems unlikely that Hillary Clinton will get the Democrats nomination in the upcoming US election.

The reason why is made plain by that fabulous observer of leftist feminism, Camille Paglia:

If they are to be truly equal, women must fight their own fights and not rely on a borrowed spotlight. Hillary has tried to have it both ways: to batten on her husband's nostalgic popularity while simultaneously claiming to be a victim of sexism. Well, which is it? Are men convenient sugar daddies or condescending oppressors?

As her presidential hopes have begun to evaporate, Hillary has upped the ante in the crusading feminist department. Her surrogates are beating the grievance drums, trying to scare every angry female out of the bush. From that rag-tag crew, she will build her army. Let the red flags fly! Hillary is positioning herself as the Crucified One, betrayed, mocked, flogged, and shunted aside for the cause of Ultimate Womanhood.

But doesn't this saccharine melodrama undermine the central goals of feminism?

Do read the rest.

-- Nora

If The Booty Fits...

Nicky and I enjoy reading the weekend opinion pieces on a Saturday morning. They generally give us a laugh.

Like this piece by the Herald Sun's Janine di Giovanni.

Apparently she's the author of Madness Visible: A Memoir of War - serious and depressing subject matter to be sure, which appears to have skewed Janine's thinking into unintentional comedy in her other writing.

THE SMS arrived close to 5am. I know because I was sleeping next to my husband's phone when it bleeped. He went on snoring. I, of course, read it.

If she was sleeping next to her husband as well, couldn't she have nudged him to say, 'you've got a message'? But okay, perhaps the di Giovanni household is like the Charles' where the one nearest to the phone opens the message.

To say it was hopefully romantic would be putting it mildly. This was a blatant message from someone who wanted sex with my husband, and from the sound of it, at that moment.

If this happened in the Charles' household the reaction would be a modern variation to this exchange from The Thin Man:

Nora Charles: Pretty girl.
Nick Charles: Yes. She's a very nice type.
Nora Charles: You got types?
Nick Charles: Only you, darling. Lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.

So how does Janine react?

When he woke up, I said he had five minutes to explain himself. My husband has many flaws, but lying is not one of them. He was as baffled as I was. He phoned the woman, a colleague, while I stood there fuming.

Gee, there ain't a lot of trust or respect going on in Janine's marriage is there?

She was sheepishly apologetic. She was drunk, she said, and she had a little crush on him.

She had a little crush? What woman doesn't mind having other women think 'her man' is a good sort? Janine apparently.

Didn't she know he was married with a small child, he asked in a perturbed voice (and that my wife checks my SMSs, I thought)?

See the subtext here: 'I'm pussywhipped'. I'd have thought more of Mr di Giovanni if he gave said woman a confident, firm and polite rebuff (rather than being sheepishly 'perturbed').

The woman apologised, profusely. She even asked to speak to me and breathlessly begged forgiveness, saying no harm was ever done. She was just trying to see if she could get lucky.

This woman is to be pitied, not pilloried. Obviously she lacks grace, wit, not to mention the emotional maturity to sustain a real relationship. The only way she can enjoy sex is to phone someone at random and say, in essence: 'let's fuck'. It's not the stuff a life long romance is made of, is it? Janine picks up on this but doesn't know where to run with it.

My spouse and I laughed about it, but it made me think. Now that I am old enough to say 'in my day', I will say it. In my day, it was the men who made the booty calls.

And my criticism of Ms Horny's maturity above applies equally here, but oddly enough Ms di Giovanni doesn't mind that in a man. A booty call is hardly elegant wooing is it?

But these days, it is women who are making the first moves. There's a lot of dirty SMS going out there.

The 600-page Study on Sexuality found that French women have twice as many partners as they did in the 1970s.

The study basically revealed that the old role of the male being the hunter of flesh and the female waiting patiently by the cave is long over. Now women are doing it for themselves.

As a feminist, you'd think she'd be delighted, you know, sisters are are doin' it for themselves:

Now, this is a song to celebrate
the conscious liberation of the female state.
Mothers, daughters,
and their daughters too, woh yeah,
woman to woman,
we're singing with you, ooh, ooh.
The "inferior sex" has got a new exterior.

But she's not:

I asked around, and my friends seemed to be having the same experience. One friend, the mother of two young girls, said her husband's assistant relentlessly pursued him.

He said no several times, then he caved in, she said sadly. I just don't think that would have happened a few years ago.

Oh dear.

The feminist principles a few decades ago, when I came of age, would have excluded women from going after other women's property, even if there was sexual liberation.

Eh? What's this? A man being another woman's 'property'?

Hang on, I thought the entire feminist movement was about reclaiming a woman's identity, that she wasn't her husband's property, that no person could 'own' another?

It seems I was mistaken - 'women's liberation' was all about getting their own back on the 'patriarchy'.

And, despite the image of an independent, liberated woman, there has always been a taboo about a sexually voracious woman.

By other women mainly.

"Its just unattractive to see a woman on the make," says Laurence, a male friend. "But if I have my coffee in the morning in a bar, I get lots of looks from the mothers who just dropped their kids off at school."

Another friend's husband ran off with one of those hungry mothers and says the woman made the first move.

Yay! Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

I blame it all on new French First Lady Carla Bruni.

That's a big call.

She said monogamy was boring and talked glowingly of conquests.

If monogamy is boring, it's because you're not doing it right.

The report says young women have sex earlier, and have more partners - an average of five in their lifetime. In the 1970s, it was under two. (Men still have had the same number for the past 40 years - an average of 13.)

Where will this lead us? To a society of Carla-like, Amazonian women who take the lead not only in industry but in sex?

But, but, 'girls can do anything' - that's what two generations of young women have been indoctrinated to believe. The problem is, as Janine here has just discovered, women have taken that to mean 'girls can do anything they want without consequence'.

I am too old-fashioned for this. Go back to the male booty call, I say. And girls, let the men make the first move.

Ah Janine, the first blow from the clue-bat always hits hardest.

-- Nora

Journalist Dismayed

Journalist Tory Maguire asks:

Who's teaching young women that the way to handle an encounter with police is to get violent?

Tory's confused, can't figure out a reason why:

It can't just be alcohol - Generation Y hardly invented binge drinking. And demographics seems to have little to do with it either.

The answer to the question is that when feminists pushed the 'girls can do anything' mantra, the unspoken bit was 'anything boys can do' and they neglected to add 'but you should't do everything'.

Water finds its own level and that level is usually down.

-- Nick

Update: Girls can do anything - except simple arithmetic, it seems, so it's somebody else's fault that even grown women is responsible managerial jobs get drunk:

Women tricked into binge drinking
By Ellen Connolly

...Professor Allsop said research had also shown that women's increased independence, both financially and socially, had led to females becoming heavy drinkers. Women in higher-paid jobs, particularly those in managerial positions, were especially vulnerable, research had found.

It's because they can't figure out how much they're drinking:

Lisa Chu, 28, said she found it difficult to keep track. "I never know how much I'm drinking," she said. "My wine glasses at home are large. How do you know?"

Here's a clue, Einstein - look on the back of the average 750ml wine bottle. If it says 7.5 standard drinks, then 100ml is a standard drink. If you can't visualise it, get a measuring cup from the kitchen.

The government response is legislation, of course, which they are 'forced' to do for the good of idiots:

The federal Government has been forced to respond to the problem and will introduce new standard-drink logos on wine bottles to better educate people. A Department of Health spokeswoman said the labels would more clearly identify the number of standard drinks within a product.

Because, of course, the above method is too complex even for executives.

Coming soon to wine labels - 'Alcohol Damages Your Health' and colour photos of rancid livers.