Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  Men account for approximately 80 percent of US Congress. These hyper masculine environments allow for rampant sexism to be absorbed into corporate and political cultures and executed as standard practice, and the motivation for it goes right back to cultural anxiety about women getting the vote. These are deeply held belief systems, and they are insidiously upheld and reasserted by men banding together across political divides to protect what they perceive to be their rightful territory. Depressingly, Richards’ Let Her Finish found that drastically uneven gender splits were still currently the best-case scenario for the treatment of women operating in these spaces—because the more even the gender ratio became, the more likely men were to try to reassert their dominance and, as Richards put it, ‘re-masculinise the environment’.

  The question often asked, then, is what can women do to change this situation? How can we modify our behaviour in order to deflect the territorialism of men more comfortable with negotiating leadership from people who look like them? But why must we be the ones to navigate a solution to discrimination enacted not by us but against us? Other research shows that women who speak up more assertively are considered less likeable. We are conditioned instead to become what former Australian news anchor Tracey Spicer calls ‘the glue in men’s conversations’ rather than equal participants in our own right.

  Some women take to this role with gusto. In America, the stable of young, blonde, white Stepford wives who are trotted out on Fox News demonstrate just how toxic (and intoxicating) this is. They know which side their bread is buttered on, and they’ll do everything they can to stop it from suddenly flipping over and landing smack-bang on the floor. Public figures like Christina Hoff Sommers, Ann Coulter and Candace Owens simper and suck up to men everywhere, determined to assure them that they’re ‘not like other girls’. ‘Official Women’ like this are frequently used as a counterpoint to the claim of persistent bias and sexism in public life. Ugly, brutish misogynists who loathe opinionated women convince themselves they’re the least sexist people they know, because they just love reading ‘sensible’, ‘smart’ and ‘respectable’ women like Hoff Sommers. But it’s easy to support the ‘other’ when these women are eagerly reinforcing everything you believe about your own superiority.

  None of this is new. We shouldn’t be shocked when accomplished women like Ocasio-Cortez, Abrams and Harris are treated as either less capable of assuming knowledge or more in need of being put in their place. Women are often told that we need to ‘work harder’ if we want to ascend career ladders (usually by men who’ve had to do significantly less to make it a lot farther). But that’s because it’s easy to keep making it a problem of our lack of adaptability or dynamism. How can we expect to challenge systems when we’re being sabotaged and condescended to at every turn?

  Our voices are not annoying and unwelcome and, despite popular opinion, we don’t actually ‘talk too much’. It is the system, not the women, that needs to be interrupted.

  Manhood is never seen as an identity marker, particularly when it comes to leadership. Instead, masculinity is treated like a feature of leadership rather than a complex system in which certain people operate and are given benefit within. Conversely, womanhood is seen as a barrier to overcome, if not distance yourself from entirely. If you’re a woman and you’re seen to support fellow women, you’re accused of participating in some kind of gender-based conspiracy, witches gathering under the full moon to hex all of mankind and take over the world. But because hypocrisy and shifting goalposts are so effective in keeping marginalised groups in line, it’s also true that if you speak out against a (conservative) woman you’ll be roasted for ‘betraying the sisterhood’. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

  Think about the pearl clutching that happened after American comedian Michelle Wolf delivered a blistering set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018. Wolf eviscerated members of the Trump administration, some of whom were sitting mere feet away from her. Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump didn’t show up for the second year running, because there aren’t enough Twitter rants in the world to help the leader of the free world come to terms with people making jokes about him. Or, as Wolf put it, ‘I would drag him here myself, but it turns out that the President of the United States is the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab.’ Savage, but also true.

  This was just the first in a long line of brazen jokes at the expense of those complicit in the trash fire that is America’s political governance right now. At thirty-two years old, Wolf observed, she was officially ‘ten years too young to host this event, and twenty years too old for Roy Moore’. She went right to the very edge with a joke about abortion, and then gloated: ‘It’s 2018 and I’m a woman, so you cannot shut me up—unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000.’ She criticised Ivanka Trump for being ‘as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons’ and she just straight up called Kellyanne Conway a liar.

  But, strangely, the most controversial joke of the night seems to have been one about Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ ‘perfect smoky eye’. Wolf set it up brilliantly, telling Sanders (who remained sitting next to her at the head table for the duration), ‘I loved you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale. Mike Pence, if you haven’t seen it, you would love it.’ She then quipped, ‘I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.’

  The fallout was incredible, and only further confirms how people exploit the notion of ‘sisterhood’ to justify their own sexist critiques of women. MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski tweeted, ‘Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable.’ Maggie Haberman from the New York Times tweeted: ‘That [Sanders] sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.’

  This revisionism is extremely frustrating. Wolf didn’t comment negatively on Sanders’ looks at that dinner. That’s a fact. The reference to The Handmaid’s Tale had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with how the terrifying Aunt Lydia represents the female enforcers of male rule in order to carve out some small corner of power within it. (Also, Ann Dowd—the actor who portrays Aunt Lydia in the TV series—isn’t ugly. She’s over sixty though, and conservatives often confuse those two attributes.)

  What really grates here is the abject hypocrisy shown when people (but especially women) behave in ways that conservatives reserve as only acceptable for them. As New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum tweeted, ‘The more I think about it, the more impressed I am that Michelle Wolf did such a harsh act WITHOUT insulting any woman’s looks. She aimed straight at the white female enforcers & never once suggested that anyone was a bimbo or a dog—like the man they work for surely would have.’

  It’s enraging to see the same people who otherwise gleefully reduce women to their looks, or who have even cheered on as Trump and his ilk routinely degrade and sexualise women, suddenly pretend that they find such things deplorable. Men like Rush Limbaugh and Piers Morgan lead a stable of similarly privileged bigots who are empowered to spew whatever abusive rhetoric they feel like against women and minorities, with nothing even remotely resembling penance or accountability broached by their employers. Only when it suits them do they pretend to take an interest in women and our rights to be treated like human beings.

  The news cycle, particularly the one fed and fostered by social media, works so rapidly that today’s furious tweets are tomorrow’s distant ephemera. It’s what allows the industry to keep men who offend, men who belittle, men who bully and gnash and snarl in their comfortable seats behind their powerful microphones and wide-reaching camera lenses. As management turns a blind eye, offering rudimentary apologies and tepid slaps on wrists, these men continue to cash enormous pay cheques and revel in their own self-importance and invincibility. Their bland apologies
, usually offered petulantly and with the standard ‘if I’ve caused you offence’ proviso, are meant to be enough; any further demands for accountability are the actions of barking fringe activists trying to destroy free speech. ‘Can we just get on with it?’ they seem to splutter, as if the public fixation on their inability to do their jobs without breaking formal codes of conduct or defamation laws or defying common sense and decency is unreasonable and distracting.

  Much of this spawns from the hyper-patriarchal nature of our country. The Sisterhood is ultimately viewed with suspicion, but being a Man’s Man (particularly in Australia) is considered a pretty excellent thing. Man’s Men slam back beers, never wear pink and are only allowed to cry when their football team either wins or loses. Whether or not these men exist en masse in reality or just mythology is irrelevant—the stereotype is heralded in the folksy colloquialisms favoured by the likes of Tony Abbott, with his ‘good blokes’ and ‘fair dinkum Aussie’ vernacular. Indeed, it was the Howard government, under which Abbott and his conservative policies flourished, that tried unsuccessfully to have ‘mateship’ included in the preamble of the Australian constitution. Even the preamble’s author, Les Murray, didn’t agree, arguing that it was ‘blokish’ and ‘not a real word’. When Todd Russell and Brant Webb were rescued from the collapsed Beaconsfield Mine in 2006, then Prime Minister Howard praised the rescue effort as a ‘colossal achievement of Australian mateship that has brought from the bowels of the earth two of our countrymen’.

  The vision of ‘Australian mateship’ has always felt distinctly male to me, and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to fit into it. Perhaps, as with most elements of Australian public life—dominated as it is by white men—I’m expected to just stand at the edge and offer my devotion and approval. Is this how women engage in ‘mateship’? By cheering it on, even as it so roundly excludes us? It would appear so, which explains why we’re also supposed to appear grateful whenever they throw us a bone.

  Make no mistake, this bait-and-switch behaviour is part of a coordinated attack on women that finds leaders and media outlets emboldening the behaviour of people who might otherwise just be shouting into the void. For years News Ltd has run a sustained campaign in Australia with the sole objective of rallying public hatred of feminists and activists of colour, even as they continue to support ‘controversial’ figures like Milo Yiannopoulos while publishing headlines blaming women for the murderous actions of men. When women (and especially women of colour—remember Tarneen Onus-Williams, the Aboriginal activist who punctuated a blazing speech on Australia’s racism at a rally on Invasion Day in 2018 with the battle cry, ‘Burn [it] to the ground!’ and was harassed by powerful media outlets afterwards calling for her to lose her job) challenge the status quo, the public is unrelenting in their quest to destroy their livelihood, not to mention bombard them with thousands of personally abusive comments and threats.

  On Anzac Day in April 2017, activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied was subjected to the most despicable and violent of cultural attacks after she posted a simple seven-word status on Facebook about the tragedy of war: ‘Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine.)’

  Unfortunately for Abdel-Magied, others don’t consider Anzac Day (that special day on the Australian calendar when our citizens manage to combine the solemn observance of a nation’s sacrifice with getting rat-arsed at the pub, pissing in doorways and abusing brown people on the train) to be an appropriate time to ‘get political’ and discuss the conflicts continuing today that have killed or displaced millions of people.

  Abdel-Magied very quickly edited out the second part of her post and offered a genuine apology for causing offence. Despite this, a shit storm of abuse was hurled at her in the following days and weeks. She was hounded by the public, thousands of whom still subject her to vicious insults and threats more than a year later. Conservative politicians sought to make an example of her—presumably because there’s no better way to shore up support for your party than by reassuring Australia’s most virulent racists that you’re on their side when it comes to the migrants. All over Abdel-Magied’s public Facebook page and the rest of the internet, you can still read comments telling her she ought to be stoned in the street, that she should be deported, that she is an ‘Islamic piece of shit’ who should be ‘beaten and sodomized’, that she should jump off a bridge, that she should kill herself, that she is an ‘ugly dog’ who should ‘get ready to be unemployed’, that she is an ‘Islamic extremist’, that she supports the mutilation of little girls and that, above all, if she doesn’t like it here in the land of freedom then she can fuck off.

  All that, for a seven-word Facebook reflection that acknowledged the ongoing impact of war on a national day of remembrance. But, then, Abdel-Magied is a woman of colour and a Muslim, and there’s perhaps nothing more Astrayan than coming together as a community to unleash racism against both.

  The comedian Catherine Deveny (who is white) fared a little better when she shared her criticism of Anzac Day in 2018, though she still received thousands of death and rape threats. After her address was posted online, white nationalists turned up at her house with the intention of harassing her on film. Their supporters jeered: ‘It’s not illegal to knock on someone’s door!’ When they discovered she was in the process of reporting the harassment to police, they called her a ‘typical feminazi’ and a ‘pussy’—because apparently women are supposed to just take it when strange men turn up to their house with the intention of abusing them.

  Can you imagine the reaction if I were to turn up to some bloke’s house armed with a camera, harass his teenage child and release his address to the public just because he said something I didn’t like online? Christ, I’m called a bully when I just post screenshots of the shit men say to me.

  When men and their female foot soldiers use misogyny to enforce the status quo, it’s all Voltaire this and Voltaire that and, ‘They have a right to speak their opinion!’ and, ‘Stop playing the gender card!’

  But hell, that’s probably just my tits talking.

  The potential for abuse and harm by powerful men closing ranks around one another goes well beyond how women are treated in parliament. The sinews of patriarchy often bind tighter than those of political allegiance or loyalty. Some men simply do not want women working alongside them or above them; it makes them feel like their naturally ordained spaces are being invaded by people whom, outside of being mothers and wives, they don’t really understand the point of. And so they make jibes and jeer, the bravado and entitlement growing alongside the gang of merry men willing to join them. They say that women have ‘blood coming out of their eyes, blood coming out of their wherever’. They use words like ‘shrill’, ‘shriek’, ‘hysterical’ and ‘banshee’. They talk about how a woman looks old and haggard, or how she’s ugly, or the way she looks in her clothes. They compare her unfavourably with women who keep to their place, praising the latter for ‘knowing how to act like a woman’ and being ‘refreshing’. They gather together to laugh at those women who dare to try to storm their play-forts, codifying their male supremacy and reinforcing who’s really in charge. Those with the most power assemble to swing their dicks around (because there will always, always be cis men who care about such things). If it’s a social occasion, they’ll surround themselves with beautiful young women who are paid (not much) to be there, but whom they can pretend are there because they want to be.

  In January 2018, an exposé was published into London’s Presidents Club charity dinner, an annual fundraiser that for thirty-three years has brought together some of the city’s richest and most powerful men to raise money for causes such as the Great Ormond Street Hospital. As per reporter Madison Marriage’s article in the Financial Times, ‘It is for men only. A black tie evening. Thursday’s event was attended by 360 figures from British business, politics and finance and the entertainment included 130 specially hired hostesses.’

  The hostesses in question were required to be ‘tall, thin a
nd pretty’. They were told their phones would be locked away for the evening, and warned they may have to put up with ‘annoying men’. Marriage wrote: ‘The hostess brief was simple: keep this mix of British and foreign businessmen, the odd lord, politicians, oligarchs, property tycoons, film producers, financiers, and chief executives happy—and fetch drinks when required.’ In a brochure provided to guests, there was a full-page warning that ‘no attendees or staff should be sexually harassed’. Still, multiple hostesses reported having been groped, with one woman saying a guest had exposed his penis to her and another saying a guest asked if she was a ‘prostitute’.

  ‘By midnight,’ Marriage wrote, ‘one society figure who the [Financial Times] has not yet been able to contact was confronting at least one hostess directly. “You look far too sober,” he told her. Filling her glass with champagne, he grabbed her by the waist, pulled her in against his stomach and declared: “I want you to down that glass, rip off your knickers and dance on that table.”’

  To be clear, these weren’t lads out on the town. These were powerful men who operate at the most elite levels of society. Of course, none of those whose names were publicised in connection with the event can remember seeing a thing. It’s just amazing how many of them ‘left early’.

  The sense of being connected to something larger and purposeful—in this case, raising significant amounts of money for genuinely worthy causes—is what enables men in positions of power to claim rewards for their ‘good deeds’. If you’re donating $400,000 to a children’s hospital, don’t you deserve to have scantily clad women who are half your age and being paid a pittance drape themselves over you and flatter your ego? Don’t you deserve to have other men see how powerful you are?