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Search Results: feminism

  • MEDIA

    Would Crikey pay Doris Lessing?

    • Ellena Savage
    • 22 November 2013
    7 Comments

    Last week a letter circulated among freelance writers that called out Crikey's online arts daily, The Daily Review, for its decision not to pay freelance conributors, despite being a commercial, advertising-driven enterprise. The death this week of British writer and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing speaks further to this issue of whether writers should be paid for their work. The way she lived her life could not be disentangled from how and what she wrote.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Confessions of a fat, exploitative tourist

    • Ellena Savage
    • 25 October 2013
    5 Comments

    One person told me the story of going out to a gallery in a rural area and seeing the same man harvesting rice with a buffalo that they'd seen a few months earlier. When they asked the gallery owner if it was harvest time again, he was told that the man was not actually harvesting rice, he was just employed to look like he was. A spectacle for the tourists. Which I'm pretty sure is the most alienated labour possible.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Politicising the bimbo

    • Ellena Savage
    • 27 September 2013
    6 Comments

    The pleasure of not affecting one's native mode of speech to appease a kind of person who means to privilege the privileged, is unparalleled. Try speaking in a playful way to someone who's scared of bimbos, and then watch their brains literally explode. When a listener struggles to understand that when I say I 'literally died', and yet clearly am still alive, that I am using language in a playful and even ironic way, it's not really their fault. 

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  • EDUCATION

    Universities are changing, not dying

    • Jessica McLean
    • 23 September 2013
    4 Comments

    The 'renewal' of Sydney University's Fisher Library has raised eyebrows, with books removed to storage to make way for 'hot desking chill zones and break out areas'. Universities Australia found in 2013 that 88 per cent of survey respondents encourage their children to attend universities. This large pool of students requires educators to accommodate diverse learning needs, and do more than just set essays to assess learning.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Funny mummy slaps patriarchal Australia

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 20 September 2013
    5 Comments

    As a parent of a boy, I was concerned by Thomas' experiences doing 'sexual ethics theatre performances'. She recounts negative responses from teenage boys to one scenario dealing with pubic hair — the lads assuming that 'any girl with pubes would be so self-conscious about them that she'd avoid sex altogether', and that malekind is disgusted by non-exfoliated women.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Domestic violence reality check for the 'manosphere'

    • Sarah McKenzie
    • 13 September 2013
    96 Comments

    The 'battered husband' claim has flourished online where aggressive men's rights groups blame feminism for everything from high unemployment rates to shorter male lifespans. There is no doubt that some victims of domestic violence are men, and that these men are equally deserving of resources and support. But to suggest that domestic violence is a gender-equal crime is plainly incorrect, and dangerous.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The politics of disgust

    • Ellena Savage
    • 30 August 2013
    6 Comments

    The moral questions presented in this election demand rational action, and not responses based on aversion to 'illegal' boat arrivals, gay men kissing or the idea of giving hard earned money to government programs in the form of tax. As long as both major parties are vying for ‘politics of disgust’ votes on the backs of vulnerable people, we can’t expect a better nation. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia complicit in PNG's Bougainville blight

    • Ellena Savage
    • 02 August 2013
    1 Comment

    Even more disturbing than PNG's poverty and gender-based violence is its military and police human rights record. Evidence of abuses in the form of a military blockade, massacres, rape and torture during the Bougainville Crisis of the 1990s are well-documented. The history of this crisis reveals PNG as incapable of caring for its most vulnerable citizens due to systemic corruption.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Husic feels the chill of Australia's racist winter

    • Ellena Savage
    • 05 July 2013
    11 Comments

    The media response to the racial abuse Ed Husic suffered after the Qur'an affair in Parliament was as troubling as the abuse itself. Labor MP Stephen Jones called Husic an immigration success story. I wonder what an immigration disaster story would look like. Perhaps the British-descendent bullies who spat on a 14-year-old, headscarved girl in 2004.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's disgusting politics

    • Moira Rayner
    • 20 June 2013
    45 Comments

    Gillard is the most prominent woman in our country. She has been repeatedly humiliated, disparaged and ridiculed for that very reason. We may criticise her decisions, but always aware of the context in which they were made, which is dangerously toxic. Her courage under pressure is astonishing, but we ought to despair at her party which is willing itself into annihilation by adding more poison.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Sex is to pregnancy what racism is to genocide

    • Ellena Savage
    • 07 June 2013
    10 Comments

    This past fortnight, race has been high on the agenda. Can a 13-year-old be racist? Is what Eddie McGuire said racist? Meanwhile, revelations that police officers in one Melbourne suburb had printed and distributed 50 racist stubby holders hinted at a frightening culture of racialised violence. The reality is that racial violence is inextricable from racist language.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Exceptional Thatcher and the feminist fallacy

    • Ruby Hamad
    • 15 April 2013
    26 Comments

    Whereas feminism realises the inherent potential and worth in all women, Exceptional Women succeed because of their perceived likeness, not to other women, but to men. Consequently, they make things harder, not easier, for other women. Margaret Thatcher was many things, but she absolutely was not a feminist.

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