Today in rape culture
There was a horrific rape in Hamilton. The two men have been sentenced to 16 and 15 years in jail. They seem to be completely unremorseful. They tried to claim that it was consensual sex, but given that they first abducted the girl that they assaulted, it seems a completely unrealistic claim. Fortunately, the jury wasn’t convinced at all.
The details of the crime are horrid – all reported in the paper.
And courtesy of Stuff, there’s a massive serving of victim blaming at the end of the article.
TIPS ON STAYING SAFE
Travel in pairs
Make sure people know where you are, and when they are next likely to hear from you
Be aware of your environment
Do not travel with strangers
Here’s a screen grab of the helpful hints.
And here’s a link to the article, for the record. Don’t don’t don’t read the article – it’s full of details about the crime. Rapist pair show no remorse
I find this astounding, that at the end of an article describing the brutal treatment of a young woman, a news site could include these “safety” tips, implying that somehow, it was the young woman’s fault that she was raped. This is rape culture in action – blaming the victim, and making it very clear that if only she had done something different, none of this would have happened.
I don’t have access to a physical copy of the Waikato Times, where the story was originally published. To the credit of the Waikato Times, the helpful hints don’t appear on their website. They’re only on the aggregated Stuff website.
There’s someone for everyone
NZ Truth is due to publish its first edition under its new editor, Cameron Slater, tomorrow. (For my friends and readers in NZ, “Truth” is exactly the kind of newspaper you would expect with a name like that.) Being a social media type, Slater has set up a Facebook page for Truth.
And Truth NZ has a friend!
Truth’s Facebook page, with one friend. Screen capture taken at 9pm on Wednesday 7 November.
This friend.
DPF on Truth. “1 Friend likes Truth”
And really, all this shows is that just one of my friends likes Truth….
By way of disclosure, DPF is indeed my friend, on-line and in real life, and has been ever since we were students at the University of Otago together. I always enjoy seeing him, even if our political views are, well, somewhat opposed.
Look who’s talking
Via Blue Milk, the astonishing statistic that even on issues relating to women, such as abortion, and contraception, men are quoted around five times more than women.
Among 35 major national print publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, men had 81 percent of the quotes in stories about abortion, the research group said Thursday, while women had 12 percent, and organizations had 7 percent.
In stories about birth control, men scored 75 percent of the quotes, with women getting 19 percent and organizations getting 6 percent. Stories about Planned Parenthood had a similar ratio, with men getting 67 percent, women getting 26 percent, and organizations getting 7 percent.
Women fared a bit better in stories about women’s rights, getting 31 percent of the quotes compared with 52 percent for men and 17 percent for organizations.
I’ve been thinking about issues of representation, and voice, and presence, and diversity, of late, mostly in a recent op-ed I wrote for the Dom Post, but also in just an idling sort of way, thinking about who gets to write columns for our major newspapers. I tend to read The Dominion Post and the New Zealand Herald. In the Dom Post, I can think of two women who have regular opinion columns there: Tracey Watkins and Rosemary McLeod. Watkins is a political reporter, and Rosemary McLeod is a feminist writer in the same sense that Chris Trotter is a left wing writer (see The Dim-Post for an explication of this). The New Zealand Herald lists four women among its eleven opinion writers: Dita di Boni (parenting, politics of parenting, parenting while female), Audrey Young (politics), Fran O’Sullivan (business and politics), Kerre Woodham (life, parenting, stuff). Plus there’s Claire Trevett (politics), and Shelley Bridgeman (if you can think of a category for her let me know), though their Sunday line-up is fairly XY oriented, especially with the recent replacement of Deborah Coddington by Rodney Hide. Even so, overall, there are noticeably more men than women, especially so in the Dom Post.
Way way back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I first became aware of feminism, and first started seeking out feminist voices, I would never have dreamed that we would still be fighting to get an equal share of the national discourse.
Welcome to readers from Women’s Web
Hello to readers from Women’s Web. I was honoured to be asked to write about my blogging and feminism for Women’s Web. I think it’s a fantastic project, and I check in and read articles there every couple of weeks.
For my friends and readers in New Zealand and Australia and elsewhere, Women’s Web is a webzine written by women in India. It was set up by a collective of women, including Apu, of Apu’s World. I have read Apu’s blog for a few years now, and when she shifted her focus to Women’s Web, I kept on reading her material there. Women’s Web is running a series on women writing about women’s rights, and they asked me to participate in it. My interview is here: Women on Women’s Rights: With Deborah Russell.
Thank you so much for the invitation, Women’s Web.
If you are interested, here’s a selection of posts from my blog and its predecessor.
10 feminist motherhood questions from Blue Milk
Everyday feminism and knitting
And what is my favourite post ever, for reasons:
Straight white men have lost power – rightly so
“Straight white men have lost power – rightly so”
That’s the subbing on a column I have in the dead tree edition of The Dominion Post this morning. The on-line subbing is not quite so… forthright.
Parliament needs diversity to rule fairly
They are right. Life is getting harder for straight white men. Instead of automatically being regarded as the right people to hold power, they have to make room for people who have traditionally been disregarded and excluded. Because the number of seats in Parliament is limited, if more of those seats are held by women and Maori, and people from other minority groups, then fewer are held by straight white men. Now they know they will only hold 60 per cent or so of the seats. They really have lost power.
