The Feminism Mystique
I don’t think Paul Sheehan understands women or feminism, a condition that usually sees men avoiding the topic and letting women columnists and pundits to argue that feminism is wholly at odds with femininity. The idea that wearing high heels proves that Betty Friedan was an opportunistic middle class hack with no foundation for her argument is ludicrous. Blaming women for the social ailments of women is just blaming the victim, again. Short skirts don’t make rapists and they don’t preclude men making more money for the same work than the women. How is calling models “giraffes” not objectification, one of the very things Friedan – and other “Jurassic Feminists” – wrote and raised our consciousness about? If we look more closely into the fashion machine, how many of the houses are run by women? How many of the leading designers are women? I don’t follow this stuff much, but leaving aside the power of Anna Wintour at Vanity Fair – which isn’t nearly as much as The Devil Wears Prada would lead you to believe – the only one I can think of is Donna Karan, a perennial also-ran in the high-price/high-profile stakes. Ralph Lauren spends more effort on projecting idealisations of body type to women than other women do. But that’s all right, because really we’ve just survived a “demographic deformity caused by World War II”, not a great awakening to the possibility of changing power relationships that had women unable to easily obtain a divorce and without control over their own bodies. Yeah, the Pill had nothing to do with the changes wrought or the “distortions” initiated by Rosie the Riviter and elucidated by Friedan et al. It’s all about the babies, folks, and women need to get back to their real jobs.

Why does Fairfax pay for this guff?

”You Know, They Call Them ‘Killer’ Whales”
It’s always news when animals kill people, but hardly “man bites dog”, is it? These are wild animals, howsoever trained they may be, and without regard to whether or not it’s a zoo or we’re rehabilitating the creature. I’m sorry when people get hurt like this, I was sorry for Steve Irwin and his family, too, but nobody should be surprised. I’m glad to hear that they won’t be “putting down” the fish. That kind of retaliation is always wrong, too much like trying a pig for witchcraft.

(Thanks to Neko Case for the lyric; came to mind as soon as I heard the story.)