Sharon Rundle
I began with the idea of writing a piece about the ongoing male versus female struggle.
The idea was generated when #Metoo was so quickly hijacked by males to further their own agendas. Women who had reported serious breaches of behaviour from male colleagues in confidence, had that confidence betrayed. It wasn’t long before males in Parliament, in the arts, in corporate circles and elsewhere started using the reports of assault or abuse from women to ‘out’ other males.
When women in Parliament began to admit to the toxic culture pervading the Canberra bubble, it prompted a call by one male for a Women’s party to battle a Men’s party, with the comment: If women are the purveyors of all things good and men the bastions of all things evil, then its (sic) time for the faux war to end, and the real fight to begin.
The idea of power is a heady elixir. One way of gaining power over others is to first decide they are inferior – an attempt to justify behaviour is essential to enable control to be exerted – and then to persuade others to follow the same belief.
One only needs to look at how the English language can be used to shape beliefs and demonise the ‘other’. There is the common use of loaded words or words that denigrate by association. For example, what word association comes to your mind if I write ‘Nagging … ‘ or ‘Rabid … ‘?
When someone is violent and attacks another person in public this is rightly viewed as and called an assault, sometimes with added tags, for example, assault occasioning bodily harm. When the assault is within the home, however, it is given the more benign term of domestic violence, notwithstanding that the level of violence may be just as great or greater than an assault on a member of the general public.
An article in The Guardian by Van Badham has the headline: Julia Banks and Jacinda Ardern show it’s women’s fate to be diminished and objectified.
Van Badham writes “Gendered cultural logic follows that women with power will be ‘glanced at’, negatively assessed and devalued as a result”
These two women, Julia Banks a parliamentarian in Australia and the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, are subject to a particular kind of judgement. Van Badham quotes Julia Banks,
“Often when good women call out or are subject to bad behaviour, the reprisals, backlash and commentary portray them as the bad ones – the liar, the troublemaker, the emotionally unstable or weak, or someone who should be silenced.”
Banks said of the limited characters available for outspoken political women to play. Crooked Hillary, indeed.
*David Leser wrote that this violence against women – in all its myriad forms – is the most persistent, widespread form of violence on the planet today…
Every week almost two Australian women will be killed by a current or former partner. These are the real terrorists of our age.
Yet, women are not a minority: we make up more or less half of the population. While not diminishing or underestimating the continual struggle women have to be safe, to be taken seriously, and to be treated as equal members of society, nor the contribution made by loving and considerate husbands, partners, fathers, brothers and sons, nonetheless this pervasive violence against women is a manifestation of a wider Us versus Them problem.
Whether the difference is gender, race, colour, religion, citizenship status, tall/short, left/right-handed, private/public schooling, beliefs about climate change or whether the world is flat—there are opportunistic people who will pounce on any differences, and amplify them to make themselves appear superior.
I remember as a child in an Anglican girls’ school being told by Catholic schoolgirls that we would all burn in hell for not belonging to the ‘true’ church. We had our own joke at their expense which I probably should not share here – but it is of a particular time and place – so I will:
The Archbishop of Canterbury met St Peter at the Pearly Gates. The Archbishop thought Heaven was a delightful place. Then he noticed a wall of immense proportions and asked St Peter why walls were needed in Heaven. St Peter replied: That’s for the Catholics, they think they are the only ones here.
I am old enough, too, to remember the Irish Catholic/Protestant wars of the 1960s and 70s—and the bombing at Brighton in the UK, when Margaret Thatcher ‘The Iron Lady’ visited in 1984.
There are subcultures within cultures, factions within political parties, divided loyalties on boards and committees.
According to a newspaper reporter investigating a missing person, in a small town in Australia inhabited by ten people, there are three factions which have been feuding for years. Really, is there any hope for human beings at all?
Then there are the pale (and some not-so-pale), stale, surly, old males versus everyone else and opposing everyone else. A tidal wave of change threatens to engulf them. They cling on to their power and assets in our patriarchal systems for all they’re worth, in the belief that continuing to have some semblance of power will somehow save them from a fate that may befall the rest of us.
This makes me wonder, if there is a Heaven, an afterlife in Paradise – is Paradise a place where all of us finally unite and miraculously find a way to get along? Is it a place where everyone is accepted and treated equally? Or perhaps a series of places, each one a paradise for spirits of a particular colour, gender, outlook or ideology, as my not-so-subtle joke implies?
