Is Misogyny really a Hate-Crime?

Now I have never exactly been a household name - except in one small area of a vast sub-continent - but I've come in for my share of public crits. and reviews. I've been called a "Ball buster" and had that fact trumpeted from every kiosk and newsagency in the land. (actually I thought that was more funny than anything else, though). I've been called "Our newest Funny Lady" and been somewhat disappointed that my serious work wasn't given much of a plug; I've been reviewed as "One of our Finest Up and Coming Writers" when in fact I'd been well and truly up for far longer than I had been coming; and, in common with most writers, I guess, had what I considered to be my finest piece of prose dismissed as "Not on a par with her other pieces".

But it wasn't until I'd submitted to an Internet publication that I was ever exposed to the power of hate. I remember first reading the comments to an article I had written on Shakespeare. It was a purely tongue-in-cheek piece of whimsy in which I had speculated that the great bard may have had the odd nut or bolt loose. In was taken from a paper I had written and submitted to one of my lecturers who, although subscribing himself to the view that William should be canonised, had ruefully conceded that I had managed to provide proof for my theory however much it went against his particular grain. We'd had a glass of wine and a giggle over it and he had asked if he could pass it on at his next meeting of the Shakesperean Society just to put the cat in amongst the pigeons.Now that particular man is an erudite and learned scholar whose views and opinions I admire and whose criticism I have been known to regard as Holy Writ.

But the opinions which were expressed by the general public in response to a precis extract of this self-same paper knocked me for six. I was accused of being ignorant, a poor scholar, someone who had no knowledge of my subject, an inadequate writer....and all by members of the public whom I had never met. I was gobsmacked. I showed these comments to one of my thesis supervisors who laughed contemptuously and told me not to be so daft as to take it to heart. But I did.

Yet that was nothing compared to the personal abuse I copped when I wrote an article on feminism.

Having, as I have explained elsewhere, come rather late to feminist theory, I gobbled up every book, pamphlet, blog, paper and debate I could lay my hands on. I spent the two years following my discovery of this theory doing an intense kind of crash course during which I devoured perhaps more literature on the subject than the average person would read up on in a life-time. I revelled in the revelation that what I had thought of as my own deepest, darkest subversive thoughts were shared by millions of others. The questions and queries I had thought my own were also keeping others awake! What I had thought others would label as disloyalty, ignorance or revolutionary were commonalities of thought amongst people all over the world. What I saw as injustice, nonsense, unfairness and plain idiocy others saw in the same light.The points of view I had never shared with another living soul were common currency amongst people of differing nations and creeds. I felt as though I was being reborn.

After that preliminary two years I settled down a little and, though I continued to digest feminist literature at a prodigious rate, I now began to include criticism, debate and rebuttal of feminism and to explore the different branches as it was applied in fields such as sociology, psychology etc. where I found as much to argue with as to agree with.

By the time I had started submitting to this online zyne, about 5 years had gone by since I first discovered the ideology and, my studies being rooted in the seventeenth century, had realised how female dissatisfaction with the state of the world, while not having had any unifying labels until relatively modern times, had existed and been expressed within the world for centuries.

This came as a huge and thought provoking surprise to me. I had always assumed that women were complicit in the way they were treated. I thought it was only we more enlightened, modern women who saw the unfairness in a society which treated women as dependent children.

It took a while before I reasoned that that was solely because I had never heard any women's voices from "the olden days". The only thing I had to go on was what men said about the state of the world. Until The Brontes and Austen, all the poetry and essays and books and pamphlets I had ever read had been written by men. And the same applied, I further reasoned, for the majority of people. Until I started ferreting about and discovered those feisty, outspoken, cunning women whose words had languished at the back of museums and in library back rooms for centuries, I had had no idea of what my foremothers thought and felt. When that famous visitor to England in the Seventeenth century made the quote about England being a "paradise" for women and horses, I was not quite silly enough to take him at face value - but I hadn't realised how far removed from paradise women felt.

So, acting on the assumption, from the gross distortions and actual rubbish that people connected with the word "feminist" ( some of which I had absorbed myself before I really knew anything about the subject) that a lot of animosity was simply because some people didn't know enough about womens' movements, I decided to share my findings. Obviously I had not been alone in my ignorance and, assuming that those who had also a dearth of knowledge on the subject would be pleased to know that they had been misinformed, I submitted and published a short essay. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5414 )

I don't know that I actually envisaged vast hordes of people yelling Hosanna and saying "Thank you Cireena Simcox, you have put my mind at ease". But what I wasn't prepared for was the fact that the majority of people who spouted all the wildest and weirdest "knowledge" of feminism and, by extension, of women, didn't want to come within a hair's breadth of anything that would change their opinions. They actually revelled in their ignorance: not the in the real sense of the word which infers nothing but a lack of knowledge - but in the sense of not WANTING to gain further knowledge. I was shaken.

I have a friend who regularly tells me I am naive. I laugh like a drain at this because my life experience is extremely broad. But, reading the comments that thread attracted I realised that, for all the "broadness" of my knowledge of people, I really am naive in many ways.

Word limits in an article such as I wrote constrain, and I was also well aware of the fact that I was writing for a very diverse readership so, yes, the article was neither in-depth or erudite. I had hoped that a broad outline, a quick foray into the reasons (or so I, in my naivete assumed) feminism was misunderstood by many to-day, and a reassurances that no evil conspiracies or coven-like activities were taking place, might lay some peoples hackles back down and perhaps inspire those who had been misguided to find out a bit more for themselves. Any criticisms of my actual writing would have been well-deserved on many counts and I was well prepared to bite the bullet and suck 'em up.

But what nothing had prepared me for was the fact that not everybody seeks the truth. That there are people who adopt a belief, regardless of its veracity, and, in the face of proof to the contrary, will not only cling steadfastly to it, and defend it, but revile those who do not adopt the same stance.

I am not, I hope, being disingenuous here. In my time I have swallowed hook, line and sinker the odd urban legend, public opinion "eye-witness" accounts and even information from the friend of a friend. And I'm not some George Washington type who will stand up tall with a pink and shiny face and accept I am wrong without feeling like a complete pratt. But being wrong, while embarrassing, is nothing actually to be ashamed of, is it? Surely one would, ultimately, feel worse knowing one was full of deliberate bull-shit, than mumbling to ones steel toe-caps that "Woops. Aren't I the wanker? I honestly did think that. " And surely people who choose the bullshit option do find it bad for their digestion, for it seems that the more off-the-wall the vision of feminism is, the more strident, angry and vitriolic the comments are. The following, I thought, was rather a beauty: repeating my title "What is a Feminist?" this good ole boy stated:

"A political idiot.A sexist supremacist.A paranoid and self fulfilling victim.A dork.A fool.A danger to themselves, their children and all of society.The enemy of all good men, women and children around the world.So to put it bluntly, in my opinion you understand, a feminist is simply, a human disgrace.
Posted by Maximus, Tuesday, 13 February 2007 8:10:53 PM"

Just a tad over-stated, perhaps?

So for the very first time in my wide-ranging and peripatetic life I came face to face with a truly scary proposition: what if there are men around who truly, and honestly, just don't like women? Once again I'm not being disingenuous. In the course of that wide-ranging and peripatetic life I have been raped, attacked, beaten, sodomised and had cigarettes extinguished on my bare belly and vagina. I've been made to do unspeakable things and been abused, reviled and slapped around while doing them. But I always reasoned that the persons who did these things to me were very sick puppies: one had been brought up in a war zone which had done his head in. Another had been abandoned by his mother while another actually was in the Military and we all know what that does to people. I considered these men were aberrations;the one in a million who are the exception. And I reasoned that to a person who, like me, has lived on several different continents, gone to fifteen different schools, lived in some of the worlds trouble spots, travelled around quite a bit and, as a journalist, got into many weird situations, it was just not so exceptional that I had managed to meet quite a few of the world's weird people.

But, perusing the comments that article engendered proved a milestone for me and certainly chipped away at that Pollyanna-type glad, glad, gladness. I knew, on a detached level, that men had treated women shockingly through the ages. I figured it was social constructs, and outside influences and childhood traumas that were to blame. Even witch hunts I put down to mass hysteria and religious over-zealousness. I had never, seriously considered that anyone would wish an entire gender ill. That's a conspiracist's delusion...isn't it? I mean, we, as a gender, are not culpable, are we?

Yet for the first time, despite all my academic knowledge and learned experiences I have at last been forced to consider seriously a question I had never even thought about before. Is it possible that a misogynist is not simply a curmudgeonly bloke-with-a-heart-of-gold like Professor Higgins? Or are there really men out there who actually do hate, despise or loathe women - not because of their mothers, or wars or for any other reason than that we are, well....women? And how does one ever, definitively, find out?

Amnesty, China, and Firewalls and Unsensoring

O.k., already, if the hype is accurate, by typing the above words from a computer in China, I've earned myself a one-way ticket to a jail, torture centre or re-education programme. Previous blogs featuring the word Lhasa in the title should have slammed me there already. So anyone who is reading this should already have an idea that my use of the word "hype" above was somewhat justified.

A friend this morning alerted me to the Amnesty site which calls for people to get together to fight to pull down the Great Firewall surrounding China's Internet. The fact that I was able to access this site, FROM CHINA, free to sign up if I so desired and that nothing in it was deleted should also give pause for thought.

Before I actually logged on, and reflecting solely upon the information my friend sent me - that there was a movement which wanted to unban all sites - I was already in a bit of a moral dilemma. Yes, technically, I believe in the right of free speech. When you have been born and brought up in the countries which pioneered free speech you are ready to champion the cause for all those whom we've come to regard as repressed. When it never actually affects you personally, its easy to take a moral stand on many of the social questions that cause so many of us angst. But I've spent a huge chunk of my life living in countries where such rights do not exist - and in terms of day to day life and social organisation, it becomes really difficult to take a stand. It seems that the more I see of life and the further I travel to experience it, the more I begin to doubt whether any of us are really qualified to take a moral stand on anything which we don't experience personally. A statement which would have shocked the person I used to be to the core.

I spent a long time (far too long) in South Africa - mostly post Mandela. I did arrive there in the last days of the old regime, however, and was immediately plucked out of the waiting queue in front of Customs at the airport and thrown into a cell, where I was held - with no explanation, no water, no toilet facilities - for around 12 hours. Well, that's one of the reasons everyone hailed Mandela you'll probably be thinking. He brought freedom and peace and tolerance.

No. He didn't.

At the risk of tearing down idols, the truth is that he was never really anything more than a figurehead and, once in power, ensured that the eyes of the rest of the world slid happily away from South Africa and focused elsewhere. Not, unhappily, on Rwanda because that was far too big a mess ever to get ones head around, and not, until the last few years, on Zimbabwe; - but far away onto Bosnia thus leaving South Africa to slide further and further into violence, corruption and repression.

As a (hopefully) illustrative segue back into life immediately after Mandela took over: the streets of Durban which, when I first arrived was a modern, fairly safe international capital city instead became a no-go area. Wimpy bars were terrorist target areas, rubbish bins were removed as they harboured bombs, beggars (both black and white) slept in the streets, people were knifed, shot and attacked in broad daylight. In the seaside town where I lived army Caspars were parked at the ends of the streets, sometimes we were unable to leave town because the highways became battle grounds, little boys could not access public lavatories unless their mothers were prepared to find them dead and bleeding with their little genitals removed and every kid, while not knowing perhaps who Tigger and Eeyore were, could spot an AK47 from 100 paces. Every garage in the street harboured at least 4 refugees - some up to 15 and we all, black and white attended weekly funerals of those we held dear.

During this time my father died and I flew back to England to make funeral, and other, arrangements. At a gathering of typical middle-class, upwardly mobile and very socially-concerned friends and acquaintances one evening I was handed a glass of Australian wine with the remark that though it was o.k. to drink South African wine again, people had discovered other brands out of the sheer desperation of being voluntarily deprived of their favourite tipple while they were "doing their bit" to protest apartheid. My mind flashed back to the land my children were living in and the way of life that none of these complacent, well-meaning idiots could comprehend and I had to go outside for a while to get myself together.

It was useless to tell these good people what they had done. They expected me to applaud the hardship they had endured in declining South African wine and signing pledges. They would never understand that the thousands and thousands of workers and families they had put out on the streets and condemned to slow death when the businesses closed down were their fault. Or that the violence of our lives initiated by street kids had caused the murder or so many of my own friends and acquaintances. Or that the mothers of South Africa, black and white, cursed them from the bottom of their souls. To this day people come up to me to tell me how they did their bit and, in their eagerness and expectation of my thanks and appreciation never dream that I won't fall upon their necks with glad cries and hail them as heroes.

I expect I sound bitter in the above. I am. I learned some terrible lesson the hardest of ways and my two children unwittingly learned them along with me. Those lessons, the sights we saw, the things we endured, will stay with us until the day we die. And the unquiet ghosts of all our dead haunt us still.

From South Africa to China is a huge step and the two situations in both countries are very different. But when I accessed that Amnesty site this morning my mind played strange tricks on me - my thoughts went straight back to the days we, my sons and I, have all put behind us now but that are an indelible part of who we are. Once again people with no complete understanding of the complexities of certain issues are being asked to step in and become pro-active. Once again well meaning citizens whose only desire is to change the world for the better are taking stands. Once again the brilliance of the white and the emptiness of the black sides of an issue are masking the shades of grey that lie between. And I, personally, have no idea what the right thing is to do.

The argument that Internet sites are monitored in China affects me not one whit. It would be an extremely naive person who did not know that the Internet sites of all countries are monitored by various governmental agencies. That FBI involvement with Wikipedia allows it to change, delete and provide misinformation is a cause never fought against. The fact that with the amendment of laws through the Howard and Bush governments key words flag posters in Australia and USA is no secret. If that were to be argued as a reason for change in China it would have to be a global movement against all governments.

But the censorship question? Ah, there I am caught indeed. Yep. Ladies and gentlemen there are indeed sites in China regarding which the firewall proves impenetrable to all but, one imagines, the most dedicated hacker. These are porn sites - kiddie porn most especially. I look around me to Australia and UK and the USA and I find that my knee-jerk reaction against censorship is here tested to the limit. Do I want to be part of a movement which would result in 1.3million more people in the world having access to and increasing the demand for the kind of industry that such sites represent? Do I want the little kids I see everyday to be as much at risk as the little kids in First-world countries? Do I think that Chinese society needs to live with the knowledge that their precious One Child families are so endangered?

Naturally, it would, in turn, be naive in me to assume that it was only porn and sex sites that were impenetrable. Of course there are political sites that are also banned. Not being a political activist I have no idea of which sites these are. In teaching Journalism classes I have never come across any sites that were not available. In my day to day dealings I am aware of no areas I may not go. So I am simply not qualified to gauge how many of our rights are being denied by the places we cannot go. I can, quite comfortably, say it doesn't affect either me or the majority of citizens. Yes. theoretically I can see why the fact that complete freedom is not available could be considered indicative of repression.

But, practically, I think of my students and the young people of China. Slowly their innocence is being stripped from them and they are beginning to discover the facts of life for themselves. I have complete faith in them however. It is their country, their government, their future. I feel perfectly confident that they will never countenance a halt to the increasing changes that are occurring in this country. They are not puppets but thinking, intelligent young men and women who, since the Lhasa coverage, are looking around them with different eyes. Sadly, I look with them at the world outside their borders where rights and justice and freedom are loudly proclaimed and see the accompanying sides of those coins: the drug culture, the paedophilia networks, the fact that corruption and greed and repressive ideas like fundamentalism are as rife under the name of democracy as they are under any other name.

I will not be adding my name to any Amnesty lists, I think. I don't wish to wear a badge on my site which would signal that I know what is right and what is wrong when I am so clearly undecided. I have learned my lessons not only in South Africa but in the trouble spots of the world to which my fathers job led us throughout my life. And I, as well as Pandora, am well aware that once one has lifted the lid, no power on earth or in the heavens can put all the undreamed of or unknown demons back in the box. I remember that Pandora was unaware of what consequences her actions would have and I know that in the current climate there are no guarantees that, whatever ones intentions, one won't allow the demons out too.

Books and Their Covers

I have always reassured myself that I am not a judgemental person. My friends all come from different age-groups, ethnicity's, genders, creeds, occupations and ideologies. I don't talk baby-talk to children or condescend to octogenarians.

But the other day, sitting sipping a coffee and gazing out the window at the passing parade, I was mortified to discover the worm i'the bud (and not, thank goodness, i'the coffee). Even I, that paragon of open-mindedness and acceptance, make assumptions - or at least have certain expectations - about people dependant on the way they present.

I was idly scanning the passers-by at the time. This is actually quite a unique and novel experience for me because usually it is the passers-by scanning me. An occupational hazard of being a foreigner in China. It suddenly occurred to me that there was something different about the usual Saturday afternoon conglomerate here compared with, say Sydney or London. Well, not different perhaps: it was the same assortment of smart secretaries, harried housewives, bombastic businessmen, languorous lovelies and cheap and cheerfulls to be seen on any city street anywhere.

And that's exactly where I cottoned on: I was assigning all these people persona, life-styles and occupations loosely based on their appearance. And o.k., if I wanted to wriggle out of the judgementalism I could claim that this was not actually unrealistic: secretaries do tend to wear suits and high-heels and look like corporate clones; housewives often wear a harried air, comfortable shoes and shopping bags with green stuff rather than designer labels prominent; and those on a budget, by necessity, tend to dress from chain-store racks and "brighten up" their choices with personalised accessories.

But the difference here, in China, is that none of the above has any relevance whatsoever.

It struck me then that this is perhaps the reason behind the fact that I feel so comfortable in China, too. Yes, its true that people stare and point. But its simply because they have never seen a foreigner of any ilk before. It has nothing whatsoever to do with how you are dressed - which is the main reason I get the subdued whispers, sidelong glances and different attitudes I have been known to encounter in some Western cities. (And let's not even MENTION the reaction in some Western suburbs!). Not that I am some deformed crone, or have a single eye in the middle of my forehead or anything, but, although it took me many years finally to admit what my teachers, best friends, lecturers, and assorted members of the public had been telling me all my life...I do tend to be a little...well..different. Oh, all right - the word eccentric has even been thrown around too.

It has absolutely nothing to do with trying to make a statement of any kind. I just like clothes. And jewellery. And shoes. And I don't feel bound by any particular external need to arrange them in any particular order. Some mornings I get up and regard myself as a tabular Rosa - to be decorated like a Christmas tree with bells and chains and silk squares. Another morning I may feel the need to disguise my monthly bloat with scarves and flowing draperies; or an Indian sari or a Melanesian Meri-blous. On another (far less frequent, admittedly) day I'll feel like swanning around in sheer black stockings, tailored Chinese brocade, matching glasses and upswept hair. I kinda figure that its my body - I have complete autonomy over it and will adorn it to fit my passing fancy and not anyone else's. My only constant is that I wear a minimum of twelve rings, five bangles, a nose ring, a discreet star tattoo under my right ear (the other tat may well be the subject of a whole other blog) and bright pink, purple, blue or red hair. And not one single person in China makes any judgment based on this.

Actually to digress a moment (Ah hah! Bet you thought the last two paras. were one huge digression?) I had only been in China a few days when a newly acquired friend came to visit. I was cleaning out my flat at the time and dressed in an old goth. t.shirt with the sleeves ripped out and vast areas of red bra showing, a pair of stained and obscene cut-offs and a grubby anklet. My visitor suggested I take a break and asked me to come for a wander around the almost deserted campus. What he didn't tell me until I stood in his immaculate office, was that he was taking me to be introduced to the Dean of the University, to whom I offered a grubby paw reeking of bleach and rubber glove. When I afterward wailed about what a drastic first impression I must have made and asked him why he didn't get me to change first, my new friend looked amazed and then grinned. "Oh, don't worry. He probably thought it was the latest cool look from the West. I did!"

So, although visiting academics have been known to look a little sniffily in my direction, not one of the staff or students has ever considered there was anything remarkable about whatever I choose to wear. But it wasn't until last Saturday that I finally worked out why.

My sweeping generalisations above fitting people's occupations etc. to their clothes just don't apply in China. I have landed, finally, in a country where 1.3 billion people have exactly the same attitude towards dressing as I do: we please ourselves.

It is inevitable that I have from time to time attracted the label of New Age or Hippie - especially in summer when I favour long flowing skirts and leather sandals entirely for practical reasons. At other times I have been asked do I do my clothes shopping overseas - when I am wearing Vinnies designer label cast offs - or carrying any one of the six incredible pigskin leather handbags I picked up from the tip one joyous afternoon. I have been dismissed as inconsequential when I have pottered into the supermarket in paint-stained overalls and barefeet. Everyone can claim similar experiences.

Except in China.

Here in China there has never been a hippie movement, a New Age movement, a Green movement, an Eighties Big Hair movement. In Ningbo there are no goths or street gangs or emos or dole bludgers. No-one has ever been told that boys who wear pale pink or lavender or embroidered shirts are pansies. Or that girls who wear army fatigues and boots are butch. Everyone works hard and conscientiously and it doesn't matter whether that's as a painter, an office worker or a shop assistant. A persons image is not defined by their appearance. And in a big city in this newest capitalist country in the world, the incredible array of goods available are not regarded as "unsuitable" for any particular group.

The woman tottering past in a denim mini-skirt and incredibly high pencil thin heels is probably not a street walker but the harried housewife. The bloke over there with the oversized basketball-type shorts, silver chain and backward cap is probably an office worker. The girl with the gathered knee-length skirt, demure Peter pan blouse and flat pumps might be the street walker while the one with her, wearing the sequined top, gold threaded shorts and net stockings is probably her sister, the PhD candidate. Its beautiful, bizarre and entirely as it should be.

On the particular Saturday afternoon on which this revelation hit me I reached the end of my coffee with a somewhat melancholy feeling. I thought of all the people I knew in other countries who weren't so lucky. Imagine if clothing was not considered tarty, or bad taste, or cheap, or too young or too old in other countries?

The middle aged lady down the corner shop might emerge from the chrysalis of trackie daks and runners wearing paste diamond shoes and a dress made of layered net. Council workers could walk around in pin-stripes and ties after work and taxi drivers would call them "Sir". Your local chemist might emerge from his high counter wearing a pale pink embroidered shirt over black silk shorts and a pair of silver Keds. While your doctor could attend you sporting a pair of pearl-encrusted short-shorts and a t.shirt with with Minnie Mouse in hot-pink applique.

And it would never enter anyone's head to call me eccentric.