Linda Peach

Speech given to the VIEW Clubs ND International Women’s Day Luncheon, 9th March 2018

A couple of weeks ago, I was at Circular Quay, waiting for a ferry.  It was not particularly late – about 8.00 on a Thursday night.  I had been to a show at the Opera House with a friend and we were both catching ferries home.  The wharf was crowded.  I looked around and said to my friend, “Nowhere to sit”.  A man – middle aged, plump, for some bizarre reason wearing a hat at night – was sitting on the seat in front of where we were standing.  He looked up at me and said “You can sit on my lap if you like luv”.

It took a moment for the reality to sink in of what this complete stranger had just said to me, and in that moment, my ingrained politeness took control and I said, “No, thank you very much.”  My brain caught up in that split second, and I followed it with “Why on earth would I want to do that?”

I’m in my sixth decade and in the eyes of most of the stylised heterosexual world, I’m pretty much washed up as an object of sexual desire, and I’m fairly sure this man’s comment had nothing to do with any actual desire or expectation on his part that I would sit on his lap.  So what did he actually want?

Of course I can’t possibly know exactly what was going through his mind at the time.  Perhaps he genuinely did think to himself, “Oh, there’s a hot looking older babe.  I’ll ask her to sit on my lap and I know she’ll be delighted and happy and we’ll have fantastic sex and maybe fall in love and get married and then she can look after me.”  Or maybe the limit of his thinking was “Woman. She should be paying attention to me.”

Fundamentally, in some basic and unacknowledged way, he wanted my attention.  More than that, he felt entitled to my attention and he wanted me to know that he was entitled to it.  He wanted me to feel all the things I did feel – surprised, disgusted, annoyed, sick.  He wanted me to know that all he had to do was say something like this in order to gain a measure of control in my space.

And it worked.  Because here I am, using it as an example at the beginning of my talk here today.

This tactic where men control women’s spaces plays out very successfully, in myriad forms, countless numbers of times every second of every day here on planet earth, and it has done since records began.  As women, we are constantly aware of the male presence.  Whether it is walking home at night, internal radar on overdrive, keys in one hand, mobile in the other, walking faster than we normally would, sticking to the middle of the road, avoiding dark shadows and bushes…. Or on public transport, wishing the man next to you would close his legs so your knee didn’t have to be in contact with his; squashing yourself into the corner to try and avoid this unwanted contact.  Or at work, wondering if that casual male hand that just drifted across your buttocks was intentional, or wishing that the male client would talk to your face and not somewhere between your shoulders and your hips.

With all of this going on, it is hardly surprising that a fundamentally pointless comment from a stranger on a ferry wharf can put us on instant alert.  Is this person a threat or just an idiot?  Is he getting the same ferry?  Is there somewhere I can sit so he can’t see me?  What do I do if he gets off at the same stop and follows me to my car, parked in a dark street near a park because that’s the only place to park?

The bottom line is that it is exhausting being a woman in this world.  The sense of safety and unconcern that most men seem to carry around with them has never, ever been mine.  And I’m pretty sure it’s never been any of yours either.

Do any of you sometimes think about what it might be like to go for a walk around your neighbourhood at night, on your own, when it’s cool and quiet, for the simple enjoyment of walking?  I do.  When I watch movies where the male protagonist goes off to a cabin in the woods to have some “me time” and stays there, unconcerned for his safety, for several days, I wonder what that must be like.  I would never do either of these things, because the training of my entire life – to never put myself in a vulnerable situation in case some man takes advantage of my vulnerability – would make it an unpleasant experience of watchfulness and fear.

As it happened, the man at the ferry wharf was just a silly person making a pointless comment.  He and his female companion – yes, he said what he said in full view and hearing of her – caught a different ferry and I did not feel threatened.  But the line between that and how it could have played out is a very thin one indeed.

So here we are, International Women’s Day 2018 and the theme for this year is “Press for Progress”.  I’m probably not supposed to say this, but I confess this theme made me sigh and mutter, “What, again?  Why hasn’t gender inequality been relegated to the history books already?”

In a small act of rebellion, I devised my own hashtag for IWD this year – hashtag-why-aren’t-we-there-yet – because I think this is a far more important question that everyone needs to be focusing on for IWD now.  We talk fairly constantly about how women are constrained from reaching a variety of goals that men seem to achieve as a matter of course.  We all know that gender inequality is real – well, there are a fair number of both overt and covert Men’s Rights Activists who would dispute that statement, but as they tend to be hostile towards women generally, I habitually discount their points of view – we all know that gender inequality is real.

We know that the world is shaped around masculine privilege and that as women, we have basically had to fit in with it for a very long time indeed.  Masculine privilege pervades almost every aspect of our lives and because we grow up with it being normalised, we often don’t begin to even see it until something happens that crystallises our awareness.  And once we do become aware, it is impossible to stop being aware.

Let’s think for a moment about women’s toilets.  Ladies’ loos are an oblique form of masculine privilege – there are never enough of them, they tend to be small and awkward, and because going to the loo for a woman is usually a two-handed job, there’s never anywhere to put your handbag and coat so that they aren’t draping in something unmentionable or getting wet next to the hand basins.  Men get to wander in, do their business and wander out again in fairly short order, women invariably have to queue.  We know this is how it happens – we’ve lived with the queues for the ladies’ loos every day of our lives.  I reckon that the day somebody builds a public venue with enough women’s toilets so that there is never a queue for them will be the day that we know we have real equality.

Masculine privilege pervades every aspect of our lives, and in some very dark and unpleasant ways.  The recent #MeToo movement has brought into public consciousness the dark side of entitlement, but as our Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, said, it’s nothing new.  What’s new about it is that now we talk about it.  Back in the day, we didn’t talk about it.  Like the queues for the toilets, we just accepted that this was a normal part of our existence as women and did our best to manage it.

In my first job as a receptionist in a car repair outfit in Brisbane, there was an old guy who all the girls knew to steer clear of.  He would always stand just a little too close, position himself near your desk so he could see down the front of your top, be the first one to open a door for the ‘ladies’, and then stand in the doorway so we had to squeeze past him (impossible to do without some part of your body coming into contact with his).  He was the epitome of the “dirty old man”. Nobody censured him or took him to task over his behaviour.  Instead, all the girls took responsibility for avoiding him whenever possible, giggling politely at his antics because if we displayed irritation or distaste, that was an invitation to tell us we shouldn’t be so sensitive.

In my next job as a secretary in a multinational, we girls used to serve catered food to the all-male boozy boardroom lunches our bosses regularly held with clients, and clear up afterwards.  No woman ever got to sit at the table, of course, other than to take the minutes.  After one of these events, I was cornered in the kitchen by a male client who put his hands where they shouldn’t have been and tried to kiss me.  I pushed him away and said a few choice words.  When I raised it with my male bosses, they told me not to take things so seriously, and that the client had complained about how I behaved towards him.  And a career opportunity in that organisation was suddenly no longer available to me.

Fast forward ten years and I was living overseas.  I had been working as an office manager and my boss and I had a flirty thing going on.  I was most definitely a willing participant in this.  But when it came to the crunch, good sense prevailed, I drew away and said yeah, probably not a good idea.  He agreed and the flirty thing was over.  A little while later, I started dating another man and lo and behold, while I was on holidays in Australia, I got a phone call from the boss to tell me my services were no longer required.

Ten years later, I was a full-time university student in Australia, finishing my Honours year and preparing to start my PhD which – through a few twists and turns – eventually became about gender inequality and feminism and sexism and how it just never seems to really change.  I was at a Christmas barbecue with all the neighbours in the street in 2006 ish.  It was late, most people had staggered home and I was helping the hostess clear up the empties.  One male neighbour was still there and as I bent down to pick up an empty bottle, he grabbed my hips and did something sexually suggestive to me.  I was shocked and horrified and disgusted and I dropped everything and went home, feeling angry, frightened and tearful.  This was only – what? – maybe 12 years ago?  And even then, his behaviour, while disgusting and degrading and all those things, was seen as “just a joke” by everyone except me.  The man in question seemed to think I should have been flattered.

So… I finished my PhD 5 years ago and started working in the field of gender equality and diversity and inclusion, and while I acknowledge that we have come quite a long way, still I find myself asking that question every day:  “Why aren’t we there yet?”

There’s no question that progress has been made.  Women do now sit in some boardrooms and occupy positions of power and influence.  Education for women to the highest levels is now pretty normal in our society and the idea of married women and mothers being in paid employment is no longer shocking or illegal.  Women have easier access to birth control and are less at the mercy of their reproductive organs than at any time in history.  Women’s voices are raised and given airtime, albeit in some cases selectively and often with a substantial backlash from the Men’s Rights Activists and other online trolls.

Did you know that on Wednesday this week, in protest at International Women’s Day, Men’s Rights Activists wore face masks – you know, those blue face masks that surgeons wear in all the best TV medical dramas – with anti-women slogans on them?  One said “Never support women”.  Never support women.  That man clearly felt he had to make that statement in public.  The wonderful thing about social media is that his face with its abhorrent mask is now plastered across every corner of the internet.  Face mask or not, someone will recognise him….

So yes, there has been progress and there continues to be progress.  Since the last International Women’s Day we have seen some amazing movements.  We have seen #MeToo start and build up a good head of steam, and then #TimesUp joined it, along with #MenToo.  The Everyday Sexism movement has highlighted the kind of nonsensical comment that the ferry wharf guy made to me, and the foundational disrespect for women that such comments illustrate.  The Pussy Hat movement, derivative of the wonderful women’s marches spurred by the election of Donald Trump, has given a symbol to the modern face of feminism.

But feminism itself is struggling to progress.  The ‘third wave’ as it is known, or as I prefer to think of it – “Me” feminism – is becoming entrenched.  Women are being told repeatedly that our experiences of inequality are, in fact, because we don’t know how to ask for what we want, we let other people take the lead and for some reason lack confidence to go after our goals.  Neoliberal feminists such as Sheryl Sandberg write best-selling books on the topic, choosing to ignore the inherent position of privilege from which she writes.  The rather myopic idea that an individual’s experience is representative of all women is a persistent barrier to gender equality and to embracing diversity of all kinds.

What we appear to be seeing is a new backlash, and one which is even more dangerous than earlier backlashes against women’s rights, because this one primarily comes from women, and particularly young women.  Young women have been rejecting feminism and feminist thought in droves for the past couple of decades.  Some say feminism is an out-of-date, old-fashioned term with unfortunate connotations of hairy legs and burnt bras and they don’t want to be associated with it.  They say they believe in all the things feminism is about but don’t want to identify themselves as ‘feminist’; that they don’t want to adopt a label.

But as Nakkiah Lui – an icon of young feminist women – said in an All About Women panel last Sunday, young women need to use the feminist label because the more people who use the label, the harder it is to ignore what the label represents.  Male privilege, or the patriarchy, is the system that is designed to maintain the status quo.  Sexism is the mechanism used to ensure that women are kept within the boundaries of the system.  Feminism is the resistance.

The interesting thing is that back in the days of burning bras, this movement that wanted to gain rights for women wasn’t widely known as ‘feminism’, it was known as Women’s Liberation.  Back then – and I remember this clearly from my years of growing up in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland – women marched, frequently and loudly.  They clashed with police and got arrested and thrown in prison and made a lot of noise about how they felt about the male privilege dominating their world.

The 70s and 80s saw some real progress – it was no longer illegal for married women to work; rape within marriage was criminalised; women could apply for loans as individuals without needing a husband to guarantee their repayments.  Sex Discrimination legislation was introduced.  A swathe of changes were made that enabled women to interact with the world of work and money in ways that had previously not been available to them.

These gains were made by collective action of like-minded women who took the very clear view that the personal is political and who repeatedly challenged the institutions of the day to implement real change.

The current generation of young women has been raised in the age of neoliberalism where the individual is held responsible for everything that happens to her.  If you want equality, neoliberalism whispers, you need to go out and take it.  Only you can make it happen for you.  If it doesn’t happen for you, well, you just didn’t try hard enough.

It’s a very neat and incredibly successful way to hamstring feminism.  It also meshes well with modern sexist behaviours, or benevolent sexism as Professors Peter Glick and Susan Fiske theorised.

Glick and Fiske developed their theory of Ambivalent Sexism on the basis that sexism is a mechanism for maintaining the gendered power imbalance so that men retain the bulk of the power and women don’t get access to much of it.  They suggested (and a great body of research has since supported their ideas) that there are two poles of sexist behaviour – hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.  We are all familiar with hostile sexism – the overt devaluing of women as inferior to men, and expressions of hostility towards all things female.  “What are ya, a big girl’s blouse?”

Benevolent sexism is an altogether more insidious beast.  Benevolently sexist behaviour has the same goal as hostile sexism – to devalue women and femaleness – but it is cloaked in expressions of admiration and even love.  So benevolent sexism might come in the guise of admiration for women’s remarkable mothering skills.  A benevolent sexist might say that women are such gorgeous creatures, they can’t imagine why any of them would want to be in a boardroom instead of gracing the nearest day spa.  Benevolent sexism is also often cloaked in ideas of protection for women – a very common example of this is telling women not to walk alone at night to avoid being attacked.

‘Me’ feminism gives power to benevolent sexism because it makes women responsible for fixing the system which is designed to prevent them from gaining power, and it cloaks itself in empowering rhetoric of self-actualisation, while ignoring the reality that without men moving over to give women space at the table, progress simply cannot be made.

Feminism – the social and political ideology that offers the strongest and most consistent hope for success in building a gender equal world – is being undermined from within and yet, here we are, being tasked with pressing for progress in a system that is designed to make sure progress is limited and patchy and ultimately unsuccessful.

And this is my question to all of you here today – What is modern feminism?  What does it look like?  How does it reverberate for young women?  What will it look like for girls in education in the future?  In terms of what the VIEW Clubs are all about, where does feminism sit?  Does it have a place at all?  And how is feminism responsible for our lack of progress?  What does feminism need to do to help progress the gender equality agenda further?

My mother, a staunch supporter of women’s liberation who had never heard of the gender pay gap and would not have called herself a feminist, died before I got myself organised, dropped out of the mainstream of my life and became a mature age full time university student.  I think she would have been very surprised but quite chuffed to see me being awarded my PhD in 2012.  I think she would have been delighted to see me standing here and talking to all of you today about this particular topic, from a place of knowledge and understanding.  So, as this is International Women’s Day, I’d like to finish my talk today by taking a moment to celebrate and say thanks to a woman who, certainly different, gave me the fire and understanding that took me on this journey, all the way to right here, right now.  Here’s to you, mum.

Speech given by Dr Linda Peach at the Northside Forum (Home safe? Domestic violence – a shameful cost to society) on Saturday 7th May 2016.  [I present this work as an individual and not as a representative of my employer.]

[Photo from Sydney Morning Herald article published 30 April 2016]

On the 24th April 2016, the body of a woman was found in Snapper Point Blowhole and was later identified as Mengmei Leng, a 25-year-old international student living in Sydney.  A male relative has been charged with her murder.  Mengmei Leng was the 28th woman to lose her life to violence in Australia since 1 January 2016.

On April 26th, Violet Tamvakis was found stabbed to death in her home in Victoria.  Her son has been charged with her murder.  Violet was number 29.

On May 1st, Karen Belej was found shot dead at her home.  Her male partner has been charged with her murder.  Karen was the 30th woman who died violently in Australia since January 1 this year.  This makes the current average 1.8 women killed by violence each week of 2016.  Last year, the average was 1.5 per week and in 2014 it was 1.6.

Thank you to the team at Destroy the Joint Counting Dead Women for keeping this grim tally each year since 2012. 

Despite the daily rhetoric abhorring this state of affairs, we don’t appear to be making much progress in bringing these numbers down.

I suppose if we want to feel better about these figures, we could compare ourselves to Mexico, where the most recent estimate is 6 women murdered per day.

The World Health Organisation estimates that one in three women experience physical or sexual violence over their lifetimes, mostly perpetrated by an intimate partner.

The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that 72% of family and domestic violence deaths in Australia are women killed by an intimate partner, and that 79% of physical assaults against women occur in their own homes. Women are also the victims in 100% of attempted murders by an intimate partner and 97% of sexual assaults by an intimate partner.  Men commit 80% of all physical assaults in Australia – 81% of physical assaults against men and 76% of physical assaults against women (ABS 2014-2015).

These statistics give us a fairly clear picture of how violence in our society is perpetrated differently according to the genders of both victims and offenders.

Today I am going to take you on a journey that I hope will lead us all to the same destination – an understanding of why these statistics exist in the first place, and how we, as a society, ensure that they don’t change much.

Why do women get involved with men who treat them badly?  This is the question we often hear when we talk about domestic violence.  I think this is fundamentally the wrong question.  The right question is, “Why do so many men treat so many women so badly?”

Prince Charming

I’d like to start addressing that question by talking about fairy tales.  In any self-respecting fairy tale, there comes a point at which Prince Charming leans down from his white charger, silver plated armour glinting in the sunlight, scoops up the damsel in distress and carries her away to a fortified castle somewhere.  Or he spends every waking moment outside her house, throwing roses, singing ballads, pouring champagne, wooing wooing wooing…. until she gives in, and then he gets to carry her off to his fortified castle.  Everyone says “Aw.  Sweet.  Lucky little lady, that one.”

No one ever asks what happens next.  Or why an adult conversation about their potential future together never seems to take place.

Instead, the man takes charge, the woman gets swept along, apparently perfectly happy to have her life determined by the chap on whose horse she is sitting, and they all allegedly live happily ever.

Our society has been building romantic fantasies and spoon-feeding them to our unsuspecting children for centuries.  Hollywood continues to churn them out for both children and adults.  The problem with these fantasies, of course, is that they almost exclusively ignore women’s wants, needs and desires and in doing that, they make women objects.  Objects to be glammed up by fairy godmothers, to be admired by throngs of men, envied by just as many women (and hated by a few), and completely subject to the hero’s wants, needs and desires.  And it’s all painted in a glorious, rose coloured picture of gentle women who need protection and strong, dominant men who provide that protection.

The problem is that this places women in a position of weakness and men in a position of strength, and that creates the gendered power imbalance from which all forms of gender inequality derive.

Domestic violence is a product of romantic fantasies that can never, ever, survive in the real world.

Domestic violence is an outcome of one gender having more power than the other. 

Domestic violence is an outcome of the belief that women need men’s protection and that men need to be dominant and strong. 

Domestic violence is an outcome of the belief that providing protection confers ownership:   Because I provide for you, I have rights over you and you are here to please me.

Women need protecting, right?

The idea that women need to be cared for and protected is not new.  For many centuries, women had no choice but to be under the protection of men because they had no rights to be financially independent.  If they wanted food, shelter and clothing, then their primary option was to become attached to a man who could provide it.

Being able to attract a man was therefore essential and women’s value became inextricably embedded in their physical attractiveness to men, and in their abilities to bear and rear children.  Once married, a woman had virtually no rights – no option to leave, no option to earn her own income, no option to own property independent of her husband.  The husband became her master in every way.  And yet, without women, men could not have offspring to carry on the family line.

This, according to Professors Peter Glick and Susan Fiske, is the source of ongoing tension between the sexes – the dominant group of men has power over the subordinate group of women, but is also dependent on the subordinate group for child bearing.  This is one of the underpinnings of Glick and Fiske’s Ambivalent Sexism Theory (1997, 2001).

In this theory, the dominant group needs to ensure that the subordinate group never truly understands or wields its independent power.  So women who are perceived to be sexually attractive to men are accorded higher status than women who are perceived to be unattractive to men.  Women who defer to men’s wishes or who accept a lesser role in life receive greater rewards than women who refuse to conform or who seek independence. These seem like medieval ideas, yet they still apply today, seen particularly in the treatment of women who attain powerful positions that have previously been held by men.

This system of rewards for being good girls and punishment for being bad girls maintains the status quo very effectively.

Women as objects

When women are objectified as having value only in their attractiveness to men or their abilities to bear children, their own needs and wants are overridden by the needs and wants of men.  This creates a culture of entitlement among men – that is, entitlement to women’s bodies.  To look at, to touch, to be physically intimate with.

The recent University of Melbourne scandal where photographs of female students were posted online and rated by male students as to their sexual attractiveness is a very good example of the sense of entitlement that can grow out of seeing women’s needs as irrelevant.

Consider also the recent furore at the University of Queensland when some enterprising feminist students wanted to sell cupcakes that were priced according to the gender pay gap.  So women paid, on average, 17% less than men for a cupcake.  The response was jaw-droppingly severe.  The people running the stall were publicly vilified and threatened with violence, including rape and death.  Over cupcakes.  How much distance is there between that and abusing a woman for not getting the dinner ready on time?

Why is there still such a strong negative reaction to anyone who stands up for the rights of women to be treated as equals of men?

Domestic violence is a product of the belief that women’s needs and desires are unimportant.

Domestic violence is a product of the belief that women exist to please men.

Research from the University of North Dakota published in the journal, Violence and Gender, in 2014 reported that 30% of a sample of college men said they would force a woman to have sex “…if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences.”  One in three.  The sample size was admittedly small (73) and the study needs to be repeated on a much larger scale to be confirmed, but even with a small sample, this is a chilling result.

Rape in itself is another form of power and control, and the threat of being raped is used consistently to maintain control over women’s movements. At the same time, women are held to account for men’s behaviour towards women.  Girls are told from an early age that they need to cover up, be modest, not put themselves in situations where a man or men might be unable to control their desires for sexual gratification.  Girls and women are taught that they must not do anything to encourage men to take advantage of them and they must be protected from the possibility that a man will rape, assault or otherwise harm them.

I often hear parents worrying about how much anxiety they have about their daughters.  They – naturally – want their daughters to be safe.  So they warn them about where they go and who they go with, about what they wear and about how much they drink.  They tell them not to walk alone at night, not to go into isolated places on their own, not to take unregulated taxis, not to catch public transport after a certain time, not to go into car parks on their own at night…. The list of restrictions that women live with every day is a very very long one.

What I have never so far heard is any parent say that they worry that their sons might be tempted to rape girls.  I never hear parents suggest that their sons should not go near any girls who are drunk in case they decide to rape them.  Sons are not told not to walk in parks late at night in case there is a lone woman who they decide to rape.  Nor are they told to avoid public transport or not go into car parks late at night in case they are there at the same time as a woman they might rape.

But 1 in 3 college men said they would force a woman to have sex if nobody would ever know and there would be no consequences.

So if we aren’t teaching our boys to avoid being alone with women in case they decide to rape them, what are we teaching our boys about respect and consent?

Steve Biddulph in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote:

From casual sexism, through to the recent scandal over Facebook pages where women at Melbourne University were sexually evaluated, through to the frankly rape-based corners of the internet, to the astonishing survival, so far, of Wicked Campers with their deeply offensive slogans – rape culture is clearly something we need to address. … There is a war we need to fight to change the mindsets of boys, young men, and wider masculinity, to end the awful history of sexual violence against women and girls.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of Steve Biddulph’s argument because he suggests that rape culture derives from the teenage boy’s psyche and is a product of his fear of rejection.  I believe this to be wrong.

Rape culture derives from long-standing and deeply embedded social norms about women’s lack of power in our society.

Rape culture and victim blaming devalue women and teach disrespect of women’s autonomy.

Domestic violence is a product of lack of respect for women.

Teaching boys to be men

What does this lack of respect for women say about men?  Australia, it has been suggested quietly in the background, has a problem with masculinity.  The problem starts with how girls’ behaviour and boys’ behaviour is regulated differently in pre-school, and it grows from there.  Take the Bob Marley meme pictured.  Let’s deconstruct this meme and look at what it is really telling boys and girls, women and men:

“If she’s amazing, she won’t be easy.  If she’s easy, she won’t be amazing.”  So a woman who is straightforward and clear about who she is and what she wants is not amazing.  A woman who is difficult to access and resistant is amazing.

“If she’s worth it, you won’t give up.  If you give up, you’re not worthy….”  So if you come across a woman who is amazing to you, but who is not easy and is resisting your charms, then you should pursue her relentlessly because if you give up, you are not worthy.

Nowhere in this meme does it give any airtime to what this amazing woman-prize wants.  It only suggests that a man can tell an amazing woman-prize from a dud by how easily available she is.

I’ve picked this simple meme because it shows objectification where women’s worth is linked to sexual availability; rape culture where relentless pursuit and eventual domination without regard to the object’s feelings are held up as laudable masculine behaviours; and dominant masculinity where you are only considered worthy as a man if you pursue your object relentlessly.

And this leads me to my final point for today:  men are just as disadvantaged as women by inequality between the sexes, but their disadvantage takes a different shape and form.  Because men have more power, their disadvantage is more about how their own power and access to power dictates their behaviour towards women, and also dictates what women expect of them and how women behave towards them.

The need to maintain power means that boys and men are taught to be invincible.  The more invincible you are, the better man you are.  The stronger you are, the better man you are.  The more dominant you are, the better man you are.  We teach boys not to cry, not to do things that are girly or feminine, not to feel any emotion other than aggression, and not to allow girls (the least respected people) to tell them what to do.  At the same time, we tell boys they must use their strength and their invincibility to protect women and to provide for their families.

Nowhere in this perfect man-being is there room for fallible humanness.  Men spend their lives trying to be impossible super-heroes while women spend their lives trying to be impossible super-models/mothers.

Domestic violence is a product of how boys and men are taught to be men.

Is there any hope for the future?

How do we change this picture?  How do we create a new future so that the coming generations can live without this blight on our society?  We are beginning to see change in the way that children are spoken to about gender and relationships.  We have seen campaigns like “Like A Girl”, “Man Up”, and “He For She”, which challenge the assumptions we make about gender at their very core.  These are good, solid, public information campaigns that do a great job to raise awareness.

To create real change, however, the message needs to be delivered consistently across our education system from pre-schools to universities.  A good current example is a program that the University of Melbourne is running, designed to connect schools with gender respect.

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/schools-connect-with-gender-respect

This programme is about challenging gender norms where they start – in children’s first classrooms.  And the fact that it exists gives me hope that the next generation of young women and men will have greater respect and autonomy and will be less restricted and dictated to by a set of outdated social norms.  Once that happens, we should start to see decreasing numbers of women who die each year as a result of domestic violence.

Conclusion

If we are to create change that will enable the women and men of the future to live in a safe society where relationships are based on mutual respect and equality – a future in which domestic violence is a rarity instead of a norm – then Australia needs to work to change its culture of masculinity and of disrespect for women.  For that safer and more respectful Australia to emerge….

• We need to teach our children about equal, respectful relationships grounded in reality, not fairy tales.
• We need to create a society where both women and men are respected and valued equally.
• We need to give equal value to women’s needs as we do to men’s.
• We need to teach boys that women’s bodies are not their property and we need to teach girls that they – and only they – have the right to decide who can touch them.
• We need to teach girls the difference between being treated as an object and being treated with respect.
• We need to teach and model a different type of masculinity to boys – one which is based on respect and consent, and which is grounded in very real humanness.