this is ladies night: blokes

12.25.2008

blokes

having just moved to australia, i don't want to give it a bad name because it is awesome (enough to motivate me to move here!) but the men in brisbane, unlike what I found in sydney and melbourne, do.not.stop!!! you cannot walk past a busy street corner or a pub in the brisbane suburbs without a slew of whistles, gross up-and-downs, "hey babys," and "what the hell is your problem?!" which is particularly off-putting and usually comes after one ignores the earlier calls. its not just toward me--many many many women. more than what i experienced in washington, too!

i asked my aussie touchstone ollie what he thought about it, who explained "thats a country thing, a very blokey thing. if you walked by a man's pub in the country, they would be all over you with whistles and call-outs." ah, my favorite articulation of machismo masculinity: the aussie bloke. a man's man who plays rugby and footie and drinks grog and eats like a horse and has the upper hand on his mrs. and hates the fags and the abos (aboriginals). this seems like an over-exaggeration and in many ways this characterization is the extreme form of the case, but aspects of the "bloke" are present and reasserted everywhere, by men and women, and in cases like what i've experienced in the West End of brisbane.

and lets bust the race discussion found earlier on the blog wide open and say these are all white middle class men doing the hollering in the aussie countryside...its not a racialized phenomenon like in washington. i can assure you it is still just as off-putting.

not that it stops me! having lived in costa rica as well, a central american country so heavily immersed in machismo that the strict gender roles it entails are all but unbreakable, a place in which women come to look for and purposely elicit cat-calls and hollering, ive come to have thick enough skin to just keep on going about my day. as in washington and brisbane, you put on your sunnies and ipod to give you a feigned sense of anonymity, and keep walking...

should that have to be it?

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You CAN handle the truth:

"Violence is but one means by which men as a class enforce conformity of women as a class. Moreover, it is not necessary for all men to engage in violence against women, since the very threat of violent censure is constantly with women. Violence against women, then, is indeed a "classic" form of hate crime, since it too terrorizes the collective by victimizing the individual. In so doing, hate crime against women reaffirms the priviledge and superiority of the male perpetrator with respect to the female victim" (Perry "In the Name of Hate," 2001:83).

"Harassment becomes a frequent response to women's invasion of male bastions. It is a means to simultaneously create a particular masculinity and enforce a particular exclusive femininity...Men often perceived sexual harassment of women as a well-deserved response to their economic and professional advances. Their encroachment into male realms interferes with, indeed calls into question, men's ability to prove themselves to be men" (Perry "In the Name of Hate," 2001:91).

"Sexual Harassment allows for the reassertion of masculinity and femininity, and especially the 'natural' differences between the two...it reassures men that they are at once heterosexual and empowered, and [reminds] the women that they are sexual objects." Many women do not report harassment and simply stay away from the harasser/place of harassment instead of seeking out justice (Perry "In the Name of Hate," 2001:91).

"'Prejudice' is a hostile attitude directed specifically toward the members of an outgroup" (Jack Levin, "The Violence of Hate," Page 1)

"Gender-motivated violence is a mechanism that perpetuates the marginalization of women, gay men and lesbians. Moreover, gender motivated hate crime also provides a very useful resource for doing gender, especially for accomplishing hegemonic masculinity." (Barbara Perry, "In the Name of Hate," Page 5)

A bit radical but still resonates truth: "From prehistoric times to the present...rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." (Brownmiller 1975:14-15 in McPhail, B. (2002) in Perry, "Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader," Page 267)

"Although not all women are raped, most women fear rape. (Gordon & Riger, 1989). Women alter their daily lives in numerous ways to avoid the violent behavior of men. Choundas (1995) noted, 'While potential victims of racial, ethnic, or religious violence might attempt to avoid certain neighborhoods in which prejudice might run particularly rampant, women remain safe from street harassment and violent assault only by straying out of those areas known as public' (pp1090-1091). And yet, even in "private," women are not safe from the hands of intimate partners. Again, this intimate relationship often cloaks the reality of the violence" (McPhail, B. (2002) in Perry, "Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader," p271).