Then there are our outfits: I’m in lingerie all the way, and the Governor’s in a bikini. Yes, that bikini shot was a fake - just Sarah Palin’s head jauntily photoshopped onto the bikini model’s rifle-wielding body - but the zeitgeist is that it authentically conveys the Spirit of Sarah (Lord have mercy). That is, even in her sensible business suits, desert camo, cuddly parkas or hunting gear, and always in those sultry stern “Tina Fey” specs, Sarah Palin exudes sex.

Which brings up a big difference between the Governor and me: Sarah might exude sex, but she’s against sex education. I’m a sex educator. I believe that education is power, and sex education is sexual power, the power to attract and cultivate healthy, exciting, relatively safe, mutual beneficial relationships, the power to give and receive pleasure, the power to love and be loved. Why do we all need a good sex education? Because repression relies on ignorance. We need education in the sexual sciences to wipe out damaging, sometimes deadly superstitions and misinformation. [More]

Susan Block is VP candidate for Frank Moore . . read more

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.

Now there could be a number explanations for this:

It could be that the nerdy-head-banging-slightly-scared-of women over-grown boys make up a clear voting majority of Triple J's audience, it could also simply be that the music world was once male dominated and for whatever reason it has never caught up with the advances of wider society, or maybe it has been the sexy stereotypes that women have to fall into to succeed- stereotypes that just don't fit with stinging social critcism or a pioneering spirit. Or maybe it was just blatant sexism.

The response to this embarresment (as MusicMax viewers would be aware) was from Hummingbird, a women's beer company who organised a countdown of the 100 Hottest Female Songs of all Time.

Now I know what you're thinking, no this wasn't a marketing exercise; this was purely about enfranchising the disenfranchised and putting the lost voices of amazing women into the Pantheon of great artists where they've always belonged.

So if I was picking the under-listened, well off the top of my head you'd probably expect PJ Harvey with the stunning Good Fortune to be near the top.

I mean she was Nick Cave's muse and she ended up making Stories by the City, Stories by Sea- a break-up album that well outshined his depressing effort- The Boatman's Call.

You'd also probably expect to see Billie Holiday. A woman that was unbelievably beautiful, haunting and inspiring- especially when she sang the spine tingling Strange Fruit.

Now the purists out there might be angry because she didn't write it, but who cares?

Her cool, down-played voice and her bubbling bitterness turned a poem you'd be touched by, into a song that painted you an unforgettable picture of Southern lynchings.

Then for me you'd put up It's, Oh, So Quiet by Björk, the Icelandic Queen of Quirky. An amazing woman who has constantly experimented, constantly pushed the bounds of weird and wonderful and constantly given us a sound that is as rich as the Icelandic fishing industry used to be.

Then before I burst a blood vessel in anger with the news I have to tell you; I would also throw Joni Mitchell in, with California. I challenge anyone to find a voice more angellic than Joni's; she's absolutely stunning, has had a lot to say and always looks like she's enjoying herself when she 's playing.

So would you like me, be very disappointed to find out that not one of these amazing artists made it into Top 10 or even the Top 100 Hottest Female Songs of all Time?

Instead we got:

Just Dance and Poker Face both by Lady Gaga and both in the top 20, Katy Perry with I Kissed a Girl came in at 12th, ABBA with Dancing Queen at 4th.

I could continue but I wont.

So two quick questions to be controversial:

Should we be as worried by the absolute ignorance of these great pioneering women and their amazing art as we were at Triple J's 'gender bias'?

And when do we begin the re-education of the voters of this strange and bitter crop?

Sorry. If you were wondering, I'm not going to give you the link to the web-site. It is ridiculous and should be viewed by no-one

  . . read more

But there are worse things than disproportion. We believe in freedom from oppression, yet women are still – scandalously – the victims of appalling violence... Beyond our borders, the circumstances of women globally are desperate: 70% of the world’s poor are women; 80% of the world’s refugees are women and children; 2/3 of the world’s illiterate are women; worldwide violence against women accounts for more deaths than cancer, malaria, traffic injuries, and war combined...

Closer to home, our indigenous women, though themselves so victimised, have been the loyal guardians and warm nurturers of fragile lives. When Australia said ‘sorry’, many stories were told of the mothers, aunties and grandmothers, the women who’ve held communities and families together amid destruction. Quiet and unassuming, they have been harbours of dignity, humanity and hope for the lost generations... We need to listen – respectfully and truthfully – to their stories, and be inspired by their momentum, their resistance to the denigration of humanity.

In our own communities we need to re-engage and collaborate, to think harder about our obligations and connections, as women shaping our own futures. Above all, we need to require more of ourselves. Women are often accused of 'wanting it all.’ I think we should want more. [More]

Quentin Bryce AC has been announced as Australia's first female Governor-General . . read more

It turns out that in Australia in the last ten years chlamydia has tripled to levels that should make everybody be itching at their crotch.

We should all be worried, bar all those life threatening STIs, chlaymidia sounds particularly grose, wikipedia tells us:

In women, it may not cause any symptoms in 75% of cases, and can linger for months or years before being discovered. Symptoms that may occur include: unusual vaginal bleeding or discharge, pain in the abdomen, painful sexual intercourse (dyspareunia), fever, painful urination or the urge to urinate more frequently than usual (urinary urgency). 

And then for men....  

Symptoms may occur include: a painful or burning sensation when urinating, an unusual discharge from the penis, swollen or tender testicles, or fever. Discharge, or the purulent exudate, is generally less viscous and lighter in color than for gonorrhea.

It will probably be cringe-worthily ironic to say this, but what the fuck have people been doing?  

  . . read more

Yet, few progressive women would be celebrating Kristina Keneally's recent rise to the NSW Premiership.

Few women would be happy reading through a political career that has reeked of backroom cynacism and transparent grabs for their votes.

Looking back to the beginning, it's been well reported that Keneally's husband had his eye on Labor preselection for the seat of Heffron- only missing out due to affirmative action rules which secured Kristina as the candidate.

Her acceptance of the poison chalice of the Premiership was equally Machiavellian on the part of the backroom boys. Apart from her loyalty to the Labor Right, coming from the fairer sex must also have been seen as a way to attract dispirited voters.

Now not to simplify the issue but Keneally's sudden and dramatic rise does seem suspect, begging someone to ask the question:

Does having internal genitalia dictate a good candidate?

At a State and Federal level the kingpins may not think so, but they know it's a good way to secure votes.

So why aren't women more annoyed?

Yes, all the above mentioned women seem very capable, and they should probably be in the positions they are in, but, with the exception of Anna Bligh in Queensland the real positions of power are still held by men.

And the worst of it is that men in dark rooms believe that women will vote for women- purely on the fact the candidate is female.

So are we going to prove them right? . . read more

So, I read today that the designer of Mattel's Barbie doll was obsessed with sex. Seriously? We need a book-length study to tell us that?

We in the land of feminist academics have been teaching the pernicious sexual politics of Barbie for years. The breasts that defy gravity, the hair, the long, long legs and of course the cruel, nipped in waist. Oh, don't forget the tiny clothes, the f*ck-me pumps, not to mention the well-equipped kitchens in every Barbie Dream House. The message of Barbie seems unambiguous to me.

Still, many students (and not a few colleagues) consistently resist seeing Barbie as a miniature sex toy, claiming instead that the doll was a good role model for little girls. (One could, after all, purchase a Barbie doll dressed as a doctor.) Or claiming, equally untenably, that toys had no impact on their ideas about gender roles or their own sexuality.

These students, mostly women, want to rescue Barbie, to protect their own childhoods from academic interrogations of pop culture and what those interrogations might reveal. That's understandable. Yet, many of these same students sit in my class pouring out of tank tops, squeezed into low-rise jeans, or tugging on mini-skirts so short they are nearly impossible to sit down in. That is, dressed like Barbie.

It's an experience I regularly have as a feminist critic of popular culture: a media event, book or news story demonstrates that I'm not wrong, my ideology is not based in "over analyzing," "hyper sensitivity," or "reading too much into things" (the three most common criticisms feminists tend to encounter). It's disappointing, frankly, to stumble so often upon evidence of society's sexism and to keep having to explain that it's there. Disappointing that Barbie was so obviously a sexed-up, misogynist, bad idea for little girls and to realize how thoroughly our culture embraced the toy anyway.

So, here we are again. Feminists were right: no one but a sex-obsessed man with a perverse idea of female anatomy would create a female toy like Barbie. And, as is too too often the case for feminists, being right isn't something to celebrate.