Posts by B Jones
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When rumour ran around my high school in the early 90s that one student had raped another, I remember trying to decide whether I believed it. I still bitterly regret that despite being raised an ardent feminist, I'd absorbed enough of the prevailing myths that I considered the sluttiness of the rumoured victim to be a factor in whether I believed her. I grew out of it fast enough, but the wrong lesson still managed to get in there somehow. If we want women and girls to be believed, we need to change that narrative, challenge it wherever it grows. And we need to do it from a young age.
I feel overwhelmed by the responsibility I have towards my daughters and their peers in that regard. The old script of staying safe by not being the one that the rapist picks isn't good enough.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Roger Douglas famously and apparently sincerely offered his resignation for some printed copies of the Budget getting accidentally released early. That's a very broad interpretation of ministerial responsibility. Most subsequent resignations have been over their personal actions, although Denis Marshall's resignation over Cave Creek is a classic example of real ministerial responsibility. He didn't build the platform, but he set the policies and budgets that led to its construction.
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Yeah. The reason I can't quite credit it is that even the misogynist crowd accept that in some limited circumstances, breaking into someone's house and assaulting them is probably worth prosecuting, if the complainant isn't going around being all feminist about it, which she wasn't until it all went wrong.
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Bart, Ministers do a lot more than their parliamentary duties. It's their job to sort the vast pile of reports they get presented with into those they can safely tick off, those they'll need to issue directions over, those that should have appeared but didn't, and those whose writers should have been doing something more useful.
I don't really understand how "minister, we have this tricky diplomatic issue" became "sorry minister, it didn't work out as we wanted" without some thought and direction being applied by the minister in question, possibly with stern conversations and regular updates. That's how the whole point of having a minister - to set direction to bureaucrats. I can only wonder if Mccully's views on feminist issues played a role, but even that seems hard to credit.
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Rape culture = the tide of stupid shit that rape etc complainants face that other crime victims do not, including nitpicking over their appearance, motives, behaviour and so on, that conspire to make it that much less likely for a complaint to be lodged.
It's certainly ironic to provide such good evidence for a concept at the same time as dismissing it.
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I dunno - I reckon that's a group who are noisier than their numbers might indicate.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to BenWilson,
The feminine absence feels ominous to me, rather like how the water rapidly disappearing from a beach does.
I remember reading about East Timor, when it was first independent, and the way the peacekeepers would judge whether a neighbourhood was a safe or about to blow up, and the presence of women on the streets was a marker of safety. That applies fairly well to discussions about sexual assault.
Two things I think about before I comment - has someone else got this (Danielle and I seem to have an informal tag team going), and is there any point.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to BenWilson,
I didn't read any criticism there. Also in the spirit of observation rather than criticism, when one party to a dispute stops engaging on it, things tend to go downhill. I doubt the walls are going to go up around Women's Country any time soon, but I'm sensing a lot of anger and not many places for it to go. Two things keep me positive: one is that a 22 year old, who would have been a preschooler when I studied feminist legal theory, feels she's on solid enough ground to go on national television calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs over the handling of her case. Wearing awesome red lipstick, no less. The other is the growing number of men who get it, and are prepared to argue with the dinosaurs when women get fed up with constantly having to fight the catch-22 rules around their behaviour.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to BenWilson,
It's an issue I feel strongly about but have lost all interest in discussing with men, and they seemed to be the only ones talking
I suspect that's because many women can relate to the first half of that sentence.
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Meh. Maybe there was a nice sentiment and context attached to Cunliffe's statement, but it felt a bit tone-deaf to me. There are so many better ways to express that concept of collective responsibility, and it's kind of in the job description of a political leader to find the best way to express something when they're writing a speech. I'm not interested in anyone donning a hairshirt or claiming a level of personal responsibility they don't have. It feels like an appeal to feminists of forty years ago rather than those of today, despite the context around it being modern.
Meanwhile I think Key's been very lucky that nobody has asked how he personally thinks abusive men should be held to account, and whether that includes appearing on their radio shows. It's nice that the Nats seem to have given up openly fretting about the sisterhood, though. The Overton Window's moved.