A couple of weeks ago, guest Hoyden Orlando asked why Triple J’s first draft of a “potted history of music” failed to showcase significant numbers of women. (The history has since been edited.)

The “Hottest 100 Of All Time” has since aired, and audiences have been shocked to find that only two songs in the top 100 – two! – were sung by women. Only six female-fronted songs made it into the second batch of 100, so it wasn’t as though the men just edged women out in the final vote – women are just overwhelmingly absent. This sort of discrepancy doesn’t happen by accident; we can quibble about the locus of the problem till we’re blue in the face, but it’s a clear sign of entrenched, largely-invisible sexism in action. Quibbling about the locus is pointless because the locus is everywhere. This is the Matrix.

TripleJ afternoon talkback show Hack today called for a bit of feedback on the testostofest finale. It was great to hear people phoning in making intelligent and feminist observations – women and men both.

A couple of folks stood out as particularly unhelpful, of course, too. One bloke phoned in talking about how women just can’t sing with the same emotion as men can, which was an eyeroll moment. And JJJ presenter Zan Rowe was flailingly defensive, taking the “It’s not us, it’s you!” approach and saying over and over and over again that it was “democratic” and not Triple J’s fault, instead of engaging with the issue in a substantive way or taking responsibility for a plan of action.

The show can be downloaded (it will be up for a week) at the Hack site.

Originally posted at Hoyden About Town.

So, any of you lurkers wrinkling your nose or rolling your eyes at my objection to the ad depicting a young "HAWT CHICK" with the tagline "Organ donation is probably your only chance to get inside her" is over-reaction? That it's "just an ad", that guys don't really think like that? That it's just fun and games?

Well, go read this. 

• One third of boys believe "it's not a big deal to hit a girl".
• One in seven thought "it's OK to make a girl have sex with you if she was flirting".
• 350,000 girls aged between 12 and 20 – one in seven – had experienced sexual assault or rape.
• Almost one third of girls in Year 10 had experienced unwanted sex.

While I don't know the details of how the study was conducted, it found that one in seven boys thought it was ok to foce a girl to have sex if she'd been flirting.

The ads aren't produced in a vacuum. I'm not going to spend forever pondering chicken and egg, suffice to say there are connections. You have teenage boys exposed to violence towards women in their home, boys having attitudes like this, you have advertising that plays into it, you have a culture of disrespect for women...and the result? That one in four women will be raped, women will be held responsible for ‘preventing' themselves being raped, as if the onus is on us, men will do jackshit, and society will continue to perpetuate disrespectful shit about women and not take rape seriously.

Go on, tell me I don't have a sense of humour, I dare you.