By Aaron Darc
Posts tagged sexism
ALL TOGETHER NOW…
May 21st
“One down,” my friend laughed with me, upon the fall of NRL legend, Andrew Johns; “O
ne more to go.” That’s that, then, I guess. Or is it?
Long, long ago, in a far away land, the feisty, 30-something writer – who feels so strongly about his ability to navigate this life, he spends a great deal of time writing about it for others – was a very different person, indeed. People often say to me, “I bet you were always this feisty!” and I generally laugh wickedly, in character, and say, “Well, yes, I must confess I was!” And the bizarre thing is, I often convince myself. It is very true that I was always a very bright car that tore down the road at a thousand miles an hour. But my feistiness, as charismatic as it is, as entertaining as it is, as effective as it can often be, is really born from a kind of anger. And anger comes from pain. It can come from all different kinds of pain – but it is a reaction to pain, nonetheless. I went into my teenhood very much in love with life. I left it very angry. More >
CATHERINE LUMBY TO THE RESCUE. OF THE NRL.
Mar 10th
In the wake of the latest NRL sexual assault scandal, Catherine Lumby rears her head with yet another soapbox rant that betrays and exploits the very social issue she pretends to support (the actual website it has been published on is currently down while uploading this, so CLICK HERE to go a forum wher
e someone has copied it), now being used as a basis for discussion of the horrifying allegations against star player, Brett Stewart. Which, as a carefully penned PR exercise, is precisely the point of it. Academia for sale?
Another week, another high profile, overpaid, male superstar allegedly abusing another woman. This site’s beginning to look like it’s devoted to nothing else; but if only this cultural disease would go away, I could get back to laughing at bad television. But, it’s not going anywhere. Far from the idealistic, convenient notions many harbor about our “progressive” society – where women being an oppressed gender and subject to a range of ill behaviours manifested and accepted within the misogyny and disrespect of men, is a thing of that past we (oh, good) don’t have to deal with (because that’s just so much easier) – here we are. Again. And this one involves… oh, my… a footballer?! Who would have thought?! But, lucky for us, Catherine Lumby, God’s gift to academia-slash-media-slash-humanity, has come forth with her corporate funded pearls of wisdom, to remind us that the issue of sexual abuse of women is by no means confined merely to football. Thanks, Catherine, ’cause, you know, it never dawned on me that it happened, any place else. For a minute there, I almost made a valid observation that threatened the publicity of the people who pay you.
LADETTE TO LADY – A CLASS ACT
Apr 1st
The Nine Network takes on Ten’s “watercooler” programming, and comes up trumps.
I think it’s fair to say that because of this site’s origins, the readership of this website is comprised predominantly of those of the Network Ten demographic. But Ten have been in trouble, for the past year or so, and has partly kept the audience it has had pretty much under it’s thumb (that may mean you, of course), only because the two other major commercial networks have steered clear of that distinctly Ten programming – the controversial, the gimmicky, the trashy, and, yes, perhaps a little bit nasty. But with Big Brother stumbling, Australian Idol’s star falling, and The Biggest Loser, well, losing, there has been a new opportunity to grab the watercooler right out of Ten’s hands. So You Think You Can Dance? has come through for Ten; but with Nine’s 2008 programming schedule, so far, it has begun to steal the attention from its younger rival. And while it goes without saying that Underbelly will go down in TV publicity history, Tuesday nights on Nine have become very (dare we say) Ten-ish; and if you’re yet to jump on the latest TV shocker bandwagons, you’re in an increasingly small percentage of the 18 – 40 commercial demographic. I tuned in, this evening, to see what all the fuss is about, and found three back to back shows that, yes, I happily ate my Dominoes pizza right through. Let’s pull up a couch, and have a look at the kind of programming that must be making the boys at Ten a tad nervous.