24.07.2020
Another day, another woman calling out the rampant misogyny that governs our culture. This time the message landed loudly and like a brilliant red suited bomb, for reasons that have little to do with its many merits. Women have been howling in outrage for centuries but our cries for equality, decency and humanity have been ignored for just as long.
Julia Gillard's famous misogyny speech to parliament delivered as Australia's first female PM was way back in 2012. It was howled down despite its ringing truth, years before #metoo changed the landscape and historic prosecution began shrinking testicles and talking heads. But consequence remains as uneven and unequal as the gap between the sexes.
The boys club yet grips the keys to the kingdoms, our world dominated by men who never grew up. Never compelled to do better by a society that permits and in some cases still applauds their toxicity, their female bashing and their murderous spin on any who dares to call them out.
Because in everyday life the consequences are very real. Beyond criticism and censure, way outside the parameters of debate. They show in our horrendous domestic violence statistics. The horrific commonality of women and children harmed by those who claim to love them. In our lack of female representation in power. And most gallingly of all at our dining tables or our desks, where we are diminished or harmed for our fury and anger at how we are treated by men who refuse to do better by their wives or daughters, friends or employees, mothers and children.
It's fucked. It's dangerous. It's murder most foul. Like so many women, I no longer have time or space in my life for any man who cannot hear beyond their cossetted echo chamber. Who refuses to examine their conditioned misogyny. Who abuses women in any way, shape or form. Who uses attack as defence of their heinous behaviour. Who claims their handmaidens as evidence but uses them as shields. Who doesn't believe any woman telling them what it is like for women. We are well beyond the pathetic excuses of not-all-men, who in fact preserve the status quo with their lame defence of... themselves.
Do better or be left behind, choking on the sweet dust of a world moving beyond the entitled self serving man. This revolution begins within you. None of us expect the dinosaurs with dicks to do anything beyond gawp at the feminist meteor hurtling towards them. But we live in hope that the good men of the world and the ones we love will stand by us and for us.
Now if not sooner.
Photo of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez telling it like it is in the US Congress yesterday, an expression on her face we all wear having to painstakingly explain the bleeding obvious. Again.
You can watch AOC's powerful take down in Congress yesterday here.
And you can remind yourself of Australia's first female PM doing the same in Federal Parliament in 2012 here.
Show your kids. The call out or cancel generation need be armed only with facts.
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2020