A deeply thoughtful, intricate essay on feminism in Australia today.

I feel it will take a least another reading before I'll come to grips with some of the content and it's implications.

I liked how wide ranging it was. However, I'd have liked the essay to be more linear, or better signposted for the reader and for the conclusions to be more clearly drawn. But perhaps that is the point, it is a complex journey that has not reached its conclusion and is composed of many voices and viewpoints. ( )

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/anna-goldsworthy-and-our-unfinished...

Anna Goldsworthy takes as her starting point Julia Gillard’s now famous misogyny speech and broadens out to a catalogue of sexist horrors. She has plenty of examples to back her argument that there is abroad in our culture a general permission to treat a woman in public life (and by implication elsewhere) as if she has no right to speak simply because of her gender: argument is not met with argument but with gender-based insult and possibly threats of violence. According to Goldsworthy, misogyny comes with a ‘remarkably consistent platform’ repeatedly expressed in online comments sections in its bluntest form: Shut up, you fat c***! That is to say: you have a female body and that’s enough reason for me to demand that you have no voice. Sometimes there is the added explicit threat: or I’ll hurt you.

The essay is very timely. It covers appalling terrain, and singles out some glimmers of hope. It’s beautifully written, judicious, nuanced and passionate. I look forward to the correspondence in Quarterly Essay N° 51, which I hope will include some expansion of her theme to Indigenous and other non-white women, and to examples of sexism that result in so many women living in poverty. ( )