This year, winner of the Ernie was pastor Danny Nulliah, who tried to cosmically link the deadly bushfires in Victoria with Australia’s apparent lapse of morals: “God’s conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb.”

One of the winners of the Silver Ernie was radio host Kyle Sandilands, who, when learning on air that his fourteen year old interviewee had been raped when she was twelve, asked, “Right…  is that the only experience you’ve had?”

And the winner of the Elaine award (for comments least helpful to the sisterhood) was right-wing columnist Miranda Devine: “Decades of androgynous feminism (sic) have stamped on chivalry, deriding men who opened doors or stood back for women as being sexist and patronising.  It would have been better for women if feminism had appealed to men’s better natures.”

Another contender for the Elaine was Germaine Greer for her remark about Michelle Obama’s choice of fashion on election night, a dress with “an eye-burning red panel that splattered itself down the front like a geometrical haemorrhage.”

And my favourite?  Ernie Ecob, the man the Ernies are named after, on women in the workforce: “Women aren’t welcome in the shearing sheds.  They’re only after the sex.”

“I want to start by saying something that I believe with all my heart…  that the issues related to girls and women are not an annex to the important business of the world and the United Nations, they’re not an add-on, they’re not an afterthought; they are truly at the core of what we are attempting to do under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…  and what each of us in our own countries is called to do on behalf of equal opportunity and social justice.

“But violence against women and girls happens everywhere.  You have not only domestic violence, but female feticide, dowry-related murder, trafficking in women and girls.  It’s quite alarming that even among well-educated people in some countries, the rate of selective abortion against girls is alarming.  There are millions – some estimate as many as 100 million – missing girls.  And they are missing because they’re either aborted or they are still subjected to infanticide or they are denied nutrition and healthcare and allowed to die in alarming numbers before the age of five…

“In Thailand in the 1990s, I met girls who’d been sold into prostitution by their fathers, when they were as young as eight.  And by the time they were 12, many of them were dying of AIDS.  I drove around the area in northern Thailand, and one of the people with me said, ‘You can tell which homes have sold their girls, because they’re the ones with the satellites…’

“A third of all women will face gender-based violence at some point in their lifetime.  In some parts of the world, the number is as high as 70 per cent.  The United Nations estimates that at least 5,000 so-called honor killings take place each year.  Nearly 50 per cent of all sexual assaults worldwide are against girls aged 15 or younger.  And more than 130 million girls and young women have been subject to genital mutilation.

“All over the world, you find a higher value on male children, girls being coerced into early marriages, denied access to schools, adequate nutrition and healthcare, and enslaved in forced labor.  And so there are many stories…

“The story of Mukhtar Mai, a young woman who I’ve come to know, who was gang-raped in 2002 on the orders of her tribal council in rural Pakistan because of something her brother had done.  She was forced to walk home naked in front her village, and she was expected to kill herself.  I mean, that’s what you do.  You get humiliated, you get shamed, you get attacked.  It’s your fault, you go kill yourself.  And the crime, the best we could determine, was her brother was seen walking with a girl from an upper caste village.

“So what happened to her?  She refused to kill herself, and she refused to hide, and she refused to give in to the cultural milieu in which this attack had taken place.  And her case became something of an international cause.  And people began asking: What can we do for her?  They donated money.  She built the first school in her village.  She herself enrolled in that school.  And now, because of the money that has come in since she was courageous enough to speak out, the school has an ambulance service, a school bus, a woman’s shelter, a legal clinic, and a telephone hotline.

“Now, she’s a remarkable young woman, but she’s not alone…

“So let me just end with a call to action from the leaders of many religious faiths who came together last year to advocate for an end to violence against women, and here’s what they said: Each of our faith traditions speaks to the fundamental value of all human life.  Violence against women denies them their God-given dignity.  We cannot afford to remain silent when so many of our women and girls suffer the brutality of violence with impunity.”

Indeed, if women had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater.  But this is woman in fiction.  In fact…she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

A very queer, composite being emerges.  Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.  She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.  She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger.  Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

- Virginia Woolf, 1928

While ‘defining feminism’ wasn’t the point the post at all, the post intrigued me and made me think about two misconceptions of feminism (or at least feminism as I know it) that really bug me.

The first is that “feminists think there are no differences between men and women.”  And the second is that “all feminists think stay-at-home mothers are unfulfilled and should be working.”

There are feminists out there who believe men and women should be equal in every way, but I think it’s a misconception that all feminists or many feminists do think this.

For me, feminism is not about proving that men and women are exactly the same, but much more about equality of outcomes for men and women.  So, for example, in Australia, women earn on average 17 per cent less than men.  82 per cent of sexual assault victims are female.  There’s obviously inequality where women consistently earn less than men, where being female is the highest risk factor for being sexually assaulted.  And for me, this is the inequality that feminism is trying to address.

I also believe feminism is about making sure that women are free to make their own choices without being discriminated against in any way.  So if that’s a woman who wants to work full-time, feminism is about making sure that she earns as much as her male colleague who’s doing the same job.  If she wants to work part-time, feminism is about making sure that she can ask for part-time work and that childcare is readily available and not too expensive.  And if she wants to stay at home to care for children or the elderly, feminism is about supporting her choice of a caring role and making sure that she’s not financially worse off.

Sadly, I think there are some people out there who have valued a ‘working’ choice for women over a ‘caring’ choice, and perhaps this is the origin of the perception that feminists despise stay-at-home mothers.

Certainly for myself, and I’m sure many other feminists out there, that’s not true at all.  Women and men should be free to choose working, caring, or – the best – a bit of both!

- Kofi Annan, 2005

Well, you can imagine the can of worms opened right there.  The opinion pages have been running hot.  And I have some serious problems with many of the assumptions made.

There will be many more motherless children.  But we don’t need to worry about the fatherless children out there?

Women can be in the armed forces, but just shouldn’t serve on the front line.  That’s a little disingenuous.  There’s no hand-to-hand combat anymore.  In modern warfare the enemy targets all operations.  Women working as medics in the field are just as at risk as crack troops out on patrol.

It’s too difficult and dangerous for a woman.  Well, they also said that about politics, astronautics and construction.

Women will distract the men.  In a strange reversal of the armed forces’ (usually) conservative ideology: heterosexual love in the armed forces = bad, but homosexual love = all right.

Women aren’t as physically capable as men.  Because all men in the army are big and beefy?  Women in the armed forces have been trained to the same level as men, carry the same weapons, and in an emergency, their responses would be the same.

But the big one, the one that really gets me, is this.

The community doesn’t like the idea of a woman suffering a brutal death.  But it’s coped quite well for thousands of years with the idea of men being brutally murdered every day in all the conflict zones across the world?

When will you ever understand?  War is not the solution, and whoever the combatants are – men or women – it is a terrible, horrible act of injustice when they die.

I think Mr Combet, rather than advocating for more women in the armed forces, you had better start advocating for peace.

For local Afghan women, democracy is a male thing – The Age, August 21.

But then again, when the re-elected President Hamid Karzai approves a law condoning marital rape, starvation, and enforced seclusion if a wife does not fulfill her ‘conjugal duties’, you’d almost rather not have any contribution to propping up a government that so grossly ignores women’s human rights.

This Rosie is the child of Australia’s Equal Opportunity in the Workplace Agency.  Here, she is raising awareness about Equal Pay Day, in Australia the day when women’s wages finally catch up to men’s for that financial year.  The gender pay gap in Australia is 17 per cent.

In 2009, Equal Pay Day was September 1.  This means that while men worked the last financial year from July 1 2008 to June 31 2009, it took women until September 1 to ‘catch up’ and earn the same amount of money.  Of course, women never really catch up, as the average gender pay gap illustrates.

How times have changed!

What strikes me is the fact that women could do all the jobs advertised in the ‘men and boys’ columns.  Sure, women may not dominate the furnace and castings industry (yet).  But those jobs are available to women, and more than half advertised on this page are industries where women are commonly employed nowadays.

If the editors of 1980 – not that long ago – could blithely segregate the men and boys from the women and girls employment sections, it makes me wonder what kind of gender blinkers we still have on today.

An excerpt from ‘Listening to my dragons‘:

I am angry
because it often SUCKS
to be a woman
when you speak your mind,
all kinds of men get defensive
all kinds of men-
my own brother
my own father
suddenly
hollering up and down
about how you’re intimidating them,
you’re oppressing them,
cos you speak your mind

Let me tell you something,
BOYS
There is a difference
between the discomfort
of having
your fucked up ideas of
women, gender, and the world
challenged-

and
the pain
of
actually
being victimized
actually
being marginalized
actually
being underrepresented

So the dragon speaks.