Published 15 June 200931 May 2012 · Main Posts Grimshaw, interviews and sexism Kalinda Ashton I was somewhat mystified and appalled by what ‘Dean of Sydney’ had to say about the Gordon Ramsey/Tracy Grimshaw debacle on the Meanjin blog. Unless it’s deadpan irony, too sophisticated for me, the comment was pretty odd. While I believe there is little doubt that in the Matthew Johns scenario, the solicitation of ‘consent’ from a young woman, intoxicated, disoriented, in the company of well-known sportsmen and possibly frightened, is questionable at best – the law doesn’t merely interpret the lack of resistance to a sexual advance as ‘consent’, the person needs to be able to proferr their consent freely, unimpeded by unconsciousness, severe drunkenness or forms of duress – whichever position you take on this question, it’s hard to see that Tracy Grimshaw is a ‘hypocrite’ for how she conducted her interview. Yes she was a determined, maybe even polemical, interview who kept returning to questions if she felt they had not been sufficiently addressed – although there are a vast store of male commentators who have conducted far more bracing and confronting interviews – but so what? Are we now to assume that if women presenters maintain a confident, assertive, persistent approach in interviews they then deserve to be compared with pigs, labelled “lesbians” and publicly derided for being ugly? This is backwards logic at its worst. Kalinda Ashton Kalinda Ashton is the author of The Danger Game (Sleepers, 2009). More by Kalinda Ashton › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 16 August 202416 August 2024 · Poetry pork lullaby Panda Wong but an alive pig / roots in the soil /turning it over / with its snout / softening the ground / is this a hymn 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body.