Like poking a wound

I’m a glutton for punishment. Not only did I read the Sam de Brito column on Sunday, and Brian Holden’s anti-women rant yesterday, but today I read Miranda Devine’s piece in the SMH: Nobody died, so why is she demanding a king’s ransom? I know, I must be nuts.

The start is actually quite funny, with gems such as:

Now Abbott is no better than a rapist. What an insult to a family man who is anything but anti-women.

That’s right, Devine thinks Abbott is anything but anti-women. Oh, how I chortled.

It is just this kind of hysterical overreach that is behind the $37 million sexual harassment lawsuit launched against David Jones by its former publicist, Kristy Fraser-Kirk, 27. By claiming that absurd amount, she has lost credibility. The sympathy and respect she earned from her initial dignified and private handling of the case flew out the window. She is no longer seen as a victim but as another litigious, gold-digging, high umbrage woman egged on by lawyers using feminism to advance a personal cause.

Devine is conveniently ignoring the fact she also uses feminism to advance her personal anti-feminist cause. And is “high umbrage woman” another way of saying “high maintenance and without a sense of humour”?

But this is what it boils down to:

Playing up your victimhood rather than getting on with life invariably makes for an unhappy life.

I’m sure women who have been raped, assaulted and harassed will suddenly slap their foreheads and say, ‘of course, if I’d just gotten on with my life instead of reporting the crime, then I wouldn’t be unhappy about the illegal thing that happened to me’.

That is not to say that Mark McInnes, 45, wasn’t a sleaze who got away with much more than he should have in the way of predatory, overbearing behaviour towards female underlings. And that’s not to say the David Jones’ board should not have known of the CEO’s proclivities, even if it didn’t know of specific sexual harassment, as it has said. If even half of what is in Fraser-Kirk’s statement of claim is true, McInnes deserves everything he got.

How very generous of you, Miranda, after that nice spot of victim blaming.

The worst Fraser-Kirk alleges of McInnes would have distressed most women but it should not ruin her life – unless she dwells on it.

Oh, no, back to the victim blaming.

In any case, comments by the designer, Alannah Hill, making light of Fraser-Kirk’s lawsuit, tell you how complicated sexual politics can be today, with some women evidently welcoming McInnes’s passes.

No, it’s not complicated at all. If someone says they’re not interested, then don’t grope them. And don’t keep asking them for sex. How complicated is that? Suggesting that because some women welcomed his advances so therefore he couldn’t sexually harass anyone is like saying that just because someone has had sex once, then they can’t be raped.

[Hill] has since apologised but her remarks demonstrate the divide between the women of Fraser-Kirk’s generation Y who refuse to accept disrespectful behaviour from men and the more laissez-faire attitude of older women.

Hysterical legal hyperbole does not help women of any age. Greedy lawsuits only damage women in the workplace by making male colleagues resentful and wary. In the real world, this is a severe handicap for women making their way on their own merits.

And here we are, back at blaming women for everything.

Yes, $37 million is a fucking shitload of money. But since laws against sexual harassment in the workplace clearly don’t work, and many people in management still don’t take the issue seriously, why not go for the colossal kick in the financial nuts? It might finally work.

Miranda’s offally funny

I don’t normally read Miranda Devine’s opinion pieces because frankly, I couldn’t give two hoots what she thinks. And she’ll only make me angry. But her first sentence in today’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald – Bottoms up in simply offal world – had me laughing so much I had to read on:

Here’s another thing to blame on greenies: the revolting trend of nose-to-tail eating.

Apparently the greenies, who can’t even get politicians in Australia to agree to decent cuts to emissions, have managed to convince cultures all around the world to eat parts of animals that make Miranda a bit squeamy. Cultures that have been eating offal for longer than the environmental movement has existed. Hang about, let me finish laughing so I can write something scathing.

You can’t go into a restaurant these days without finding some gruesome item on the menu, like sweetbreads – see the euphemisms offal-eaters must employ to justify their perverted indulgences. As if frogs legs and snails weren’t bad enough. Now we have to contend with rolled pig’s spleen and roast bone marrow. Gulp.

Really Miranda? People eating things you don’t like is the biggest worry you have this week? Aren’t there asylum seekers or Nobel Peace Prize recipients or feminists you could be railing against?

Visiting another sister in Tokyo last year, my family dined at a shabu shabu restaurant with no English menu or English-speaking waiters. We pointed at the fragrant bubbling pot on the table next door and in broken Japanese explained that was what we wanted to eat. The waiters seemed surprised and tried to dissuade us. No, that was what we wanted. And that was what we got.

The bunsen burner arrived with the pot of broth and a side dish of herbage. So far so good. On the boil we plunged in the veggies and ladled ourselves out the delicious smelling concoction. Mmmmm … until the faces around the table changed slowly, from contentment to wonder, to abject disgust.

In our mouths was a meat of indeterminate origin. Meat was too fine a description, really. It was morsels of gristle, slightly spongy, tasteless, but with a faint je ne sais quoi that made the tongue recoil in horror.

Oh, the horror.

Personally, I’m not a fan of offal – I can’t quite get there yet after 14 years of vegetarianism – but I do admire people who eat everything. It’s very Anglo to only eat meat that doesn’t look like it came from an animal, wrapped in plastic at the supermarket. But for Miranda Devine to spend 894 words having a whinge about what some people eat, and blaming it on the green movement, is the funniest thing I’ve read all week.

Where did feminism get Miranda?

I almost stayed away from it it all day. Almost. But Miranda Devine is up to her usual feminist-bashing, blaming all the evils of the world on feminism.

Apparently it’s feminism’s fault that rugby league players like a gang bang, and the whole Matthew Johns story is about the media’s war on masculinity. Because – as we all know – the media is notoriously run by feminists, what with the long line of male editors at the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Age, and The Daily Telegraph.

According to Ms Devine – and she can thank feminism for allowing her to keep her maiden name and be Ms Devine – this feminist-controlled media has been blaming war and domestic violence on rugby league. Riiiiight. And how she goes from the feminist mainstream media hellbent on destroying masculinity to teens having clinical sex, devoid of emotions, is impressive. She writes there’s also chaos in the mating world and feminism is to blame. Take that, feminism! But Miranda, without feminism, would you be writing in the Sydney Morning Herald?

Annabel vs Miranda

Annabel Crabb in the Sydney Morning Herald writes: “Why would a group of blokes come together, as if drawn by some invisible gravitation force, and gather in a room to masturbate with each other? What do we ordinarily call that behaviour? Let’s say it out loud: it’s the gayest thing ever”. You should check out the whole piece, it’s great.

Compare that to Miranda Devine’s opinion piece – and I so dearly want to stay I don’t take the bait, but sometimes you just have to. Miranda, dear Miranda, thinks the issue is about group sex – which clearly offends her. Apparently, anyone who gets up to anything other than missionary with the lights out must be damaged in some way. But this is the really disgusting bit: “Young women are told they can act and dress any way they please, and it is men, alone, with their supposedly filthy, uncontrollable sexual desires, who must restrain themselves.”

Yawn. One more time for the slow kids up the back. Rape – and I’m not saying the Matthew Johns group sex consent scandal is about rape – but rape happens when a man decides to rape a woman. It doesn’t matter what that woman is wearing. Burka-clad women in Afghanistan get raped, so it’s got nothing to do with mini skirts. She then says modern society is like the Twilight series for teen girls, in which women have “natural modesty and intense romantic longings” and men are tortured by their superhuman restraint in not raping everything with a heartbeat.