One of the signs that feminism might be getting traction in places it hasn’t before is the rise of the idea of a men’s movement that advocates for ‘men’s rights.’ It’s a strange and sad idea as we shall see, but often not well understood or acknowledged.

If winning or losing in politics was merely a matter of who had the best one-liners to throw along with their stones, then Gillard won yesterday hands down. But politics is not simply about whip-smart wisecracks and cutting speeches.

Ninety years ago in the title of The Waste Land TS Eliot played with the Arthurian myth of the Fisher King, whose wounded genitals blighted the regenerative powers of his kingdom as they blighted his own. Both lay wasted. The poem’s opening line, ‘April is the cruellest month’, makes spring a time not of green abundance but of pain, and overturns Chaucer’s invocation to the fertility of April which opens his Canterbury Tales.

The following thoughts came to me after a recent Melbourne Free University lecture on the Future of Feminism. The insightful presentation given by Melbourne Feminist Collective’s Neda Monshat and Alexia Staker led to a fascinating discussion in the second part of the event. Two points in particular finally convinced me to write about feminism and […]

Feminism in Australia has many enemies. Some of them are more or less open opponents. For example, there is Miranda Devine. She complains about the ‘elitism, condescension and moral rootlessness’ demonstrated by the inexplicable opposition of many feminists to Sarah Palin. She has also complained about its devotion to ‘such trivial pursuits as trying to […]

I know women of the Left who have been raped. And who were they raped by? By men of the Left – their partners, lovers, friends. Did these cases ever reach court? No, to my knowledge they were never even reported to the police. Why not? Well, political objections to police and their function in […]

One of my most cherished friends is an angry feminist. Of all the people I know personally, she has probably had more influence on the way I understand the world, and particularly issues relating to gender, than anyone else. She could well be surprised to learn of this. We’ve argued about these issues many, many […]

A friend of mine, let’s call her K, has a son who just turned fourteen. She’s fairly committed to the idea of raising him as a relatively decent human being and, being a fairly active person online, she recently asked her blog for help finding books and DVDs and the like on how to be […]

2.30 at Fed Square and there’s a queue fifty people strong cluttering up the paving-stones, waiting to go in to ACMI for the Melbourne Writers Festival. The doors are shut. Chaos reigns. ‘Is this the museum?’ asks a lost tourist. The MWF volunteers are doing a sterling job, blithely ignoring any queue-disgruntlement and pointing the […]

In 2009, a choreographer from the television programme So you think you can dance said his routine involved ‘a bit of a peep show’ explaining, ‘They’re such hot looking girls, why wouldn’t I portray them as sex kittens?’ I then pulled the face that causes my teenaged daughter to exclaim, ‘I hate watching television with […]

Driving through the golden, locust-infested centre of New South Wales on Sunday, Radio National broadcast The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilmer. It was first published in 1892 in the New England Magazine. The story is a series of journal entries told in first person by the narrator, a woman locked in a room, after […]

In case you missed it, it’s International Women’s Day (IWD) this week. There’ll be the usual celebrations, most not that well attended, and a few feminists getting together to look back on past victories. But the feminist agenda, which in simple terms seeks equality for women, appears to have stalled. Feminists have never been part […]