allybuzz

THE other day I learned what the word misogyny meant. Embarrassing I know, because as a wordsmith by trade I should know what big words like that mean. But if you don’t know either misogyny means hatred of women. The reason it was being pandied about was because Alan Jones decided to refer to all the women, i.e. Julia Gillard, as “ruining the joint”.

It has felt to me lately that misogyny has become rife in society. Apparently it’s okay to refer to women as anything and everything from “the ball and chain” to “gashes”. Women are becoming increasingly objectified both at their own hand and the hand of men.  Women are getting breast implants, dying their hair blonde, getting spray tans and acting dumb, or being dumb, all in the name of getting ahead. And succeeding. Reality TV is case in point. Some are just realists and accept the superficial nature of society and do what they have to survive. Others don’t seem to know better or just want male attention. This objectification seems to lead popular culture down an alley where it is increasingly accepted to make fun of women.

But where I start to get confused is show’s like Mrs Brown’s Boys. Why do men find it so funny to dress up like women? Think The Footy Show, sketch comedy in general and Priscilla. You hardly ever see women dressing up as men, unless pant suits count. Is it a case of imitation is the highest form of flattery? In that case does that mean men like us or want to be us? Or are they just trying to show us our foibles through satire.

I know women can make fun of men too. We joke about man-flu and we all love the MereMale-type stories that form the fodder of conversations over coffee. But , from my perspective at least, it is all light-hearted. But I don’t know, from men, the rhetoric seems so vitriolic. It makes me wonder what did we do to make them hate us so much. Do they resent the sexual power we have over them? In the modern era they have to get permission to have sex with us and maybe it’s all too much hard work. Do they resent our place in the workplace? We seized the opportunity history has afforded us and men, who take their place for granted and achieve mere mediocrity, feel emasculated in comparison to our own success. Maybe being a nice guy in modern Australian is just considered “gay”, to put it in their words.

I was recently given some relationship advice from a friend. She said “never be too competent”. What she meant was don’t be too on top of everything in a relationship. Leave some things for the man to do so he feels needed and useful.

What?

Why should I be punished with the loss of a partner because I am competent and organised.  And seriously, what do the logistics of life in a relationship matter. So I can cook and clean and still hold down a job, and ring a plumber to fix the toilet if needed.(For the record I have never  been particularly at any of those things). What has that got to do with the actual relationship? People say you should ask yourself what you bring to a relationship and what you get out of it. It shouldn’t matter whether you are capable of hanging a picture frame or not. What should matter are shared interests, mutual respect, the same values and supporting each other through life.

Which brings me back to misogyny. What hope does any relationship in this country have when we continue to engage in a dialogue that breeds mutual disrespect, even hatred, for the people in our lives we are supposed to love the most.

THERE are some clothes in my wardrobe that I swear have been woven with some secret kind of magnet. I have come to the belief that the world’s clothing magnates covertly decided on a global conspiracy in which they would embed magnetic properties into all sorts of clothing items. These magnets would attract all kinds of mishaps and misadventures to these clothes rendering them useless and forcing consumers to do one thing, buy more clothes.

The first kind of magnet is the tomato sauce magnet. Apparel embedded with this magnet are almost always white or cream and the minute a person bites into a pie, sausage roll or steak sandwich it immediately attracts the tomato sauce in a drip-like pattern down the front and centre of the garment. The magnet is especially strong in the first half of the day to ensure wearers spend the second half of the day with an orange streak running down the centre of their clothes.

The next kind of magnet is the beetroot magnet. It knows whenever I have gained enough confidence to jab my dinner fork into a piece of sliced beetroot that has moved just past the point of being appropriately-sized for my fork. In the five seconds it takes to go from my fork to my mouth the beetroot will start shaking like a wobble board under the force of the magnet. Just as I open my mouth the attraction will be at its greatest and the beetroot will land right in the middle of my chest on the brand new item of clothing, leaving a perfectly round-shaped purple patch.

The next magnet is much more subversive than the first two. It waits until the garment in question has been washed and is mid-washing cycle, waiting to be ironed. When the ironer is about half-way through the washing basket the ironer will reach the garment that contains this magnet. The ironer will make no adjustments to the iron but just as they ironer places the iron on the particularly expensive garment the magnet will activate. It will attract all the rusty water from within the iron onto the front lapel. These magnets are always on the front side of the garment to ensure total destruction, every time.

Corporate function venues also seem to be plagued with magnetic carpet. This carpet seems to be unmistakably drawn to the cutlery of the venue. It ensures that just as I am about to dive into a chocolate praline dessert the table spoon is immediately drawn to the floor rendering it useless. (It would be a social sin to pick it up off the floor and use it). The carpet also seems to know when the opportunity of getting a replacement spoon is at its lowest. The only option is to then stare dumbly at the delectable dessert placed in front of me.

Sometimes my clothes magnets seem to work in harmony with the floor magnets. Working together they ensure that when a gravy-laden knife is summoned to the floor that it backflips between my shirt and skirt on its way there.

These seem to be the same magnets that make toast always land buttered-side down, pegs fall out of my hand, knives slip and attract my head to walls and doorways.

Now some people might say that the theory presented here has nothing to do with magnetic forces. Rather it’s related to ridiculous concepts like gravity, fine motor skills, focus and cutting up my dinner properly. But I dispute all of that. It’s the magnets, I swear.

THE first time I ever heard someone use the term “future-proof” it was in a television show mocking corporate speak. It was the ABC’s Hollowmen and Rob Stitch and co. were spoofing governments and spin. So it’s a great source of amusement to me to see how much the term has entered everyday discourse. Just this afternoon I saw the phrase as part of a catchline in a superannuation commercial. The idea that it’s possible to “future-proof” your life I find amusing both literally and figuratively.

If you were to literally “future-proof” your life you would be proofing against having a future. That is, trying not to have one. To literally future-proof, a person would technically commit suicide (and I do not recommend that).

Figuratively it’s also just as difficult to future proof. Anyone who has ever lost someone in an expected or unexplained tragedy and asked the question “why” knows that often in life there are things that simply cannot be predicted. You cannot insure yourself against pain in life no matter how many precautions you take, how many people you try to keep out of your heart or how many partners you ask not to hurt you.

You cannot future proof against corporate redundancies, car accidents and breast cancer. I’m sure no one ever considered the Pacific Highway at Somersby might simply give way in floods or that a coal ship might wash up on Nobbys Beach. Even the Newcastle Earthquake was a surprise. Nuclear energy was going to save the world before Chernobyl happened.

I recently interviewed a former chair of GPT, Boral and Centennial Coal. He told me that as part of corporate boards they often run “worst-case” scenarios for potential financial investments. He said even they, the top boards in Australia, were unable to predict the extent and reach of the global financial crisis. In essence, even they didn’t see it coming.

And if they didn’t see it coming then little old me who put an extra $20 a week into superannuation for my super co-contribution was definitely shocked when all that extra work turned to dust. The little nest-egg I had for “future Alison” halved when the global financial crisis hit.

So a television advertisement for a no-name superannuation company promising to be able to “future-proof” the retirement savings of people makes me laugh. But I don’t know who to laugh at more: the company making the promise or the retirees, now aged over 65, who still haven’t realised that there is not future-proofing against life.

What would you like to future-proof against?

MY mate Ben declared at the weekend that he wants to write a book about living life like a dog. A dog, he says, lives life in the moment and is always happy. A quick Google search shows he’s not alone in this belief.

http://www.beliefnet.com/Love-Family/Pets/2009/03/Life-Lessons-from-My-Dog.aspx

Ben is right there is a lot to be learned from living life like a dog. First thing in the morning a dog doesn’t struggle to get out of bed. There’s no laying around and deciding what to do, whether to phone in sick for work or in the case of a dog, their game of fetch. It’s straight up and out the door for a walk. Their morning walk is also a great rountine and health advocates will tell you it gets the endorphins flowing for the day and is far lower intensity than a run.

But there’s also plenty of ways though that I wouldn’t like my life to be like a dog. Public urination is one. I really wouldn’t like to be on my morning walk and then squat down next to the nearest telegraph pole. The public defacation is the other side of that coin I could definitely live without. I really can’t imagine walking along one morning, have the urge to take a dump then squat down on the median strip and do my business then and there. And not wipe. Then my friend who came along with me would have to pick it up and put it in a baggy.

At social occassions if we reacted the way a dog would when visitors arrived for a dinner party, wine bottle in hand, the host would run to the door in anticipation the minute the car pulled into the drive. They would pant at the door until their guests came to the door. Once inside the host would jump on the guest, pin them to the wall and lick their cheek up and down. The host would also have to sit under the table in  hopeful anticipation of left overs.

If we interacted like dogs then every time we met someone new the first communication we would have would be to smell each other’s crotch. The second would be to smell the other person’s bum, which they would not have wiped due to the aforementioned morning walk.

The issue of bathing might also stand in the way of me getting closer to my canine roots. While I love a good bath I’m pretty sure I would like to do them more regularly than once and week a I prefer a nice scented bath oil than flea wash. Plus I get way too dizzy to turn around three times before lying down.

The diet might also be a sticking point. Kangaroo might be a delicacy  in Australia but it’s also a staple of pet food. Ever wondered why dogs’ farts smell so bad? Well it’s because their diet consists almost entirely of meat. When meat breaks down in the gut the sulphur in meat leads to hydrogen sulphides and the end result is smelly farts. Given the amount of public transport I catch I am sure my fellow commuters would appreciate it if I kept a bit of balance in my diet. Although perhaps if I did a few stinky farts I might get a seat to myself more often.

If living life like a dog is so great why are there so many sayings that indicate the opposite. It’s not a good thing if your desk looks like a “dog’s breakfast”. At the end of the day no one wants to be “dog tired” or a “dead dog”. No builder wants something to be “crooked as a dog’s hind leg”, you can be “barking up the wrong tree” and it’s always better to “let sleeping dogs lie”.

When I searched the internet to find a few more of these gems I stumbled across this quote. If you can look at a dog and not feel vicarious excitement and affection, you must be a cat. 

So maybe Ben does have a point.

WHEN I started my first job I had no idea what a trade union was. At 18 I walked into the retail position armed with only my tax file number and little understanding of the commercial world. When my first shift ended at 4pm I walked out the door. The next day I was reprimanded by my boss for not staying to tidy the shop floor and waiting until the senior staff had counted the tills. ‘‘We all leave together,’’ she chided.

This practice added about 20 minutes to each shift and with an average three shifts a week that was an extra hour a week that I was not paid.  Times that by four years and the company got a fair share of unpaid labour out of me (although I probably paid some back in general pfaffing-about while I was there).

Being just 18 I did not object to my boss’s edict, nor did I question that my boss might be wrong, nor did I look up my rights. I have since learned that this practice goes on a lot, in retail in particular, and feel so cranky that I never even checked what the rule was. But then I didn’t know what a union was, that I might have a union representative or that I even had legal rights in this field.

After all you don’t know what you don’t know.

It wasn’t until years later as a reporter that I learned about the union movement, worker’s rights and the fact that some employers will knowingly, or unknowingly, take advantage of workers. In retrospect I felt angry that no one ever sat me down before I left school and said here’s some of that stuff that might go down once you leave.

Fast forward some years and I recently had to the opportunity to attend a pre-marriage course. I’m going somewhere with this, I swear. It was unbelievably informative about what makes a good relationship, what relationships work and why, conflict resolution, and what to look for in a partner and a relationship. My first reaction when I left was: ‘‘why didn’t someone tell me this at school’’. I should have known all this stuff before I started looking for a potential life partner, not after.
Instead I remember at school being told a great deal that merit awards look good on resumes, when three jobs and three job interviews later I’m yet to have an employer look at my damn portfolio.

During a conversation with a friend recently she succinctly summed up the issue.
‘‘We teach students maths, english, science, art,’’ she said. ‘‘And then we send them out into the world with no knowledge about what the world is really like.’’

I remember at school getting a visit from the Tax Office when we all got tax file numbers (they like to get in young), a visit from the Tampax lady (they also like to get in young) and the local health service who urged us to brush our teeth regularly. And floss. No amount of careers or commerce classes prepared me for doing my own tax return, buying a house, dealing with office politics, cancer prevention, that olive oil easily catches on fire or even how to best handle the irritating plover outside my house. But on the last point I suspect the only solution might be a team of Shooters Party members.

With the federal government penning a new national curriculum maybe it’s time there was a general re-think about the subjects on the curriculum. Teachers everywhere will sigh here and bemoan the fact there is already too much ‘‘curriculum loading’’. They want to stick to basics like literacy and numeracy, quite rightly, and really don’t think it’s their job to teach students about topics like weed management and pool safety. I agree it’s not their job, but there’s plenty of well-meaning groups out there trying to get their message out and pretty regularly cry ‘‘it’s all about education’’.

So why not rethink the entire school day? Could we give our hard working teachers a little more relief time and allow these groups in to spread their particular word, albeit appropriately vetted. Or do we extend the school day so that instead of spending afternoons improving their Xbox skills our young people spend a bit more time getting a few more life skills.

* What do you wish they had taught you at school?

DO you and your partner have a ‘‘how we met’’ story? We do. If I tell it correctly it goes something along the lines of we met through a series of happenchances through friends, I dumped him twice but he kept persisting. I thought ‘this guy must really like me’, gave him a chance and we fell in love. ‘‘Third time lucky!’’ I always say to finish the story. After eight years I’ve perfected its telling.

The truth is, it really didn’t happen like that. I’ve ironed out a lot of inconvenient details and shortened and sharpened the telling over time. The reality is there was a lot of awkwardness, some embarrassing bits, four months, some really humiliating bits and me getting told off by a mutual friend of ours in there as well. But no one wants to hear that. Well, maybe they do but I don’t want to tell them.

It seems like every couple is supposed to have some great story about how they met. When they first get together, or meet new people, or get engaged or go to school reunions they are obliged to fill in the curious in on the tale. The couple perfect the telling of this story over time and pretty soon they can perform their parts like a well-rehearsed play.

The problem with this tradition, especially in the era of internet dating, is not everyone has a really good story. You can see them at social events. When asked they just shrug their shoulders, look embarrassed and say ‘‘through mutual friends’’. Or worse they cast their eyes down and say ‘‘just at a pub/club’’ (read: we hooked up for drunken sex one night and one of us just never left the other person’s flat). People who met on the internet always seem to blush, look very sheepish and occasionally admit it was over the internet. The funny thing about this is I now know three married couples who met on the internet and even more people still in a relationship. It is really common now to not only meet people online, but meet people and have solid lasting relationships, but still the stigma remains.

The good ‘‘how you met story’’ seems to be very important to women. We have to have a good story to make our friends jealous. It has to be so good friends will despair at their own romantic drought. People who once hooked up at a disco in high school become ‘‘high school sweethearts’’, people who met at work had ‘‘office romances’’ even though neither ever did it on a photocopier or in a storeroom and people who hated each other with more venom than a death adder say it was a case of ‘‘opposites attract’’. Quite a few who did not actually have a good ‘‘how you met story’’ (I know, because I was there) have this habit of filling in the details later. By the time you get to their wedding they are waxing lyrical about being soul mates, meant for each other, destiny and how it was meant to be.

There seems to be an inference that if you don’t have a good story about how you met, it can’t have been destiny, right? Couples both men and women seem to feel this need to turn their major relationship into the work of the gods. That fate brought them together and isn’t this a coincidence and shouldn’t that be a sign. There’s talk of ‘‘just knowing’’ and ‘‘like magic’’.

 I think these people are just full of crap.

If these people have been blessed with some meant-to-be kind of relationship and had a serendipitous meeting what about all those people who end up with someone who they met on the internet, or at the pub or through friends. Were those people just unlucky not to trip over their soul mate when they walked past one day, or were they not special enough for fate to intervene and hand them their perfect match? If that’s true I really don’t think the gods should be playing favourites. If one person gets a soul mate then everyone should. And everyone should get to meet them in some fantastic way and marry them and spend their lives with them.

If it was fate that both brought them to the bar that night, then fate is not very creative.

And what about people who have a great story but then get divorced?

On this question of soul mates I find it hard in my head to reconcile two flawed individuals somehow forming a perfect union. I don’t buy this nonsense about your flaws complementing each other either. What flaw do I have that complements my partner’s snoring? Or his manky toenails for that matter. I do not cut toenails for a living. Nor can I sleep through this snoring.

As is often the case in life I think the world is more complicated than that. Some people do form deep and sometimes immediate connections, some people forge meaningful relationships over time and some people can have all the magic but none of skills to make a relationship survive. Some people stick it out, others become each other’s family and can’t imagine life without each other. Some do complement each other, to an extent, but not perfectly. Some people fall madly in love with people who will never love them back. And, most people rest comfortably in the middle with a few magic moments along the way.

ABOUT thirty years ago someone, presumably a bloke, decided to stop referring to women birds and replaced it with the word “chick”. Originally I seem to recall the phrase “chikky babe” being pandered about pretty commonly until it was shortened to chick. Pretty soon all the feminists jumped on it as being derogatory. When that didn’t work women embraced it. These days the phrase is ubiquitous and relates to anything predominately female: chick flicks, chick lit(erature) and uses like chick-doctor, chick-surfer or chick-rocker .

The word itself dates back to 1927 when one of the earliest recorded uses of the word came up in a fictional book when a minister didn’t want to marry a “little fluffy chick” because she wouldn’t impress his wealthiest parishoners. There is even a reference to it in a US slang dictionary in 1899. Some suggest the word relates to women being seen as property the same as farm yard animals. Others think that any time someone says “chick-doctor” or “chick-surfer” they are somehow implying they are an inferior version of that profession, or at least a less threatening version.

Why exactly women migrated from being birds to chicks is not clear to me. Did we stop being dainty little things that only nibbled at seed-like food to clucky destroyers who would seemingly devour any food thrust in our direction? Even ourselves? (Chickens famously will eat chicken, if served to them). Did we get bigger in size rendering the need for a nickname upgrade from bird to chook? Was it a reflection of our growing stature in society? Who knows.

Now that women have embraced chick the word seems to have morphed once more into a derogatory term. I was listening to the radio this morning and the announcer warned listeners that the latest Zac Effron movie was a total “chick flick”. I’m not denying that the target audience for the movie was undoubtedly female. It was. But why does that lessen the relevance of the movie as a piece of artistic work? Why does it get automatically dismissed and relegated to the ranks of chick flick because only women will like it. Why? Because it is about romance and love and sex and nice things that make the world a better place.

I notice there is no equivalent term for blokes movies. They have action movies but these kinds of movie can come in all types – war movies, car chase movies, gun heists etc. So many of these movies have violence, promiscuity, nudity, car crashes, death, destruction, natural disaster and profanity. (I can hear men around the country whooping in support) Rarely are these movies dismissed out of hand. And what’s more is there is far more of them and they are full of things that make the world a far worse place to live.

As someone who works in the news I am forever consuming news that covers the worst humanity has to offer, an occasionally reporting on it. Murder, stabbings, child abuse, armed hold ups, redundant workers, corrupt or inept politicians and bureaucrats are staples of my day. So my stomach turns whenever someone in my sphere wants to go and see a fictional movies about these kind of things. Don’t they realise just how awful these things are in real life? How can they possibly find it entertaining? Yet somehow because in my spare time I want to consume some media that is nice, that has a happy ending, I am dismissed by my more cultured acquaintances as being somehow less serious simply for enjoying something that can been seen as frivolous.

But if love and romance and sex and all those things are frivolous why are they something almost every member of the human race continues to participate in day in and day out. Very few people will ever want to, or actually, star in their own version of an action movie.