So where did the rape culture at St Paul’s come from?

Some current and former inmates residents of St Pauls College at the University of Sydney set up a pro-rape Facebook group, saying they were “anti-consent.” There seems to be a culture of rape at St Pauls, and at other colleges at the Sydney University. It’s not just the Facebook group – there seems to be a whole lot of other “recreational” and social behaviour based around the denigration, and rape of women at Sydney University’s colleges [link]. FuckPoliteness has an excellent rant about it, Hoyden Mary analyses college rape culture based on her own experiences of living in a college a few years ago, Kayloulee (in comments at HaT) describes her experience of living in a Sydney University college right now, Penguin Unearthed worries about nurturing misogyist culture, newswithnipples notices that news.com.au has rewritten the story to downplay the issue of consent, and Jezebel points out Facebook’s appalling standards – it let the pro-rape group stay up for months, but removes pictures of breastfeeding mothers. Gentle readers, welcome to rape culture. You’re soaking in it.

As Mary says at Hoyden about Town, the rebuttal stories, the counterpoint stories, the ones that point out that there are lots and lots of good things about colleges and it’s all overblown and it’s just a few bad boys and the rest are really all decent chaps, and no matter what, IT”S NOT THE COLLEGE’S FAULT, will start to appear tomorrow. But in the meantime, Dr Ivan Head, the Warden of St Paul’s College, has sent off a very prompt response to the Sydney Morning Herald. (Funny how they never respond to rape allegations quite so quickly.)

Apparently…

The College holds all forms of sexual assault, rape or any proven incitement to rape to be abhorrent and we hold in varying degrees of condemnation anything that detracts from the freedom and dignity of women on campus and within our grounds. We at times work night and day on behalf of the women and men on campus to sustain a 24/7 environment in which learning is enhanced and enriched and in which we aim consistently at good, better and best outcomes.

You can go read the rest of the Warden’s response, and you will see that it does indeed hit all the high points. But what gets me is this. Where the hell does the Warden think the rape culture among residents of his college comes from? Does he really think that it just sprang full grown from the brow dick of Zeus? Or just maybe, is there something poisonous about the college, which turns otherwise decent young men (of course they are decent young men – they come from the best schools and the wealthiest families in Sydney) into misogynist groups who think it’s funny to say things like, “They can’t say no with a c–k in their mouth.” And it’s quite clear that it’s not just talk; women at the colleges report having been raped, living in fear of rape, not feeling safe even in their own rooms. There is something deeply wrong about the social structures that are nurtured within the walls of St Pauls.

But to top it off, this comment that shows that the Warden just doesn’t even understand how far off the planet he is.

St Paul’s College in the University is … one of those rare places in which the radical possibilities of life in a modern ‘secular monastery’ can be explored by an increasingly diverse group of very able students.

He is so deadened to the rape culture within the walls of the college that he oversees that he regards it as a ’secular monastery’. Trying to cover up rape and rape culture by cloaking it in holiness, is he? Which reminds me, most of those colleges seem to be run by various Christian denominations. The churches who lend their names to these colleges should be feeling deeply ashamed. Do you think they will do anything about it?

No sex please – we’re Catholic

Apparently there’s going to be a new Health and Physical Education National Curriculum, which is going to include sex education. I say apparently, because google as I might, and search through ministers’ and departments websites, the only reference I could find to it was in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald: Row over sex education.

Dr Dan White, the CEO of CEO Sydney (that would be the Catholic Education Office, in charge of all the Catholic Schools in Sydney, and their CEO is referred to as the Executive Director, but I couldn’t resist writing about the CEO of the CEO) is upset that the proposed sex education will include information about, oh noes, abortion and contraception, and even how to access them. He wants parents to be able to withdraw their children from classes (because, after all, ignorance is the best policy /sarc), so he doesn’t want any compulsion about sex education classes.

On the surface, what he’s saying is quite reasonable.

Our students need to be aware of abortion and contraception in sex education classes in Sydney Catholic schools,” he said.

”We would not be happy, however, if these were the preferred methods advocated. We clearly explain to our students about the Catholic Church’s strong moral stance and the right to life of the unborn child.[link]

For starters, unless he’s got prior access to the proposed curriculum, we don’t even know what’s going to be taught. Even then, really, surely, isn’t contraception preferred! We all know that people have sex, we know that kids have sex, we know that no amount of telling them that they ought not have sex outside a stable secure married relationship per the Catholic church’s morality, is going to stop them. Just maybe, it might be best to help kids to be safer in their sexual relationships, rather than preaching that contraception is immoral.

It all points to some screwed up thinking by the Catholic Education Office. There’s the standard stuff-up, of course – arguing against contraception even though it presumably decreases the likelihood of the greater evil of abortion, but that’s not what I’m particularly concerned about right now. It’s more the tacit admission by the CEO that its teaching on abortion and contraception isn’t all that effective. If the CEO thinks that its immoral teaching on abortion and contraception and abortion is sound, then it won’t need to worry about young Catholic women and young Catholic men having access to information about them. They will believe in the church’s teaching in any case, so they will happily note the information, and then simply not use it. Either that, or the CEO realises that it needs to restrict information and brainwash young people in order to get anyone to adhere to its medieval morality. It always looks very suspicious to me when a religious group, which claims to know the truth, thinks it has to withhold information in order to get people to follow its rules.

I’m not sure that this is a kerfuffle, or in the SMH’s words, a “row” in any case. It looks to me as if a reporter has found out that there is going to be a new curriculum, that it’s going to contain sex ed, and that the sex ed will include genuinely helpful information about access to abortion and contraception, and then raced off to a handful of the usual suspects to get some rent-a-quotes. The newspaper article has a quote from a spokesman for the responsible minister, Julia Gillard, but there’s no press release. And the spokesman points out that there’s a consultative process to go through yet, so there will be plenty of time for the Catholic church to insert its immoral message against abortion and contraception into the conversation.

Update: Jo Tamar has got an excellent post about this too – How immoral to acknowledge to kids that yes, sex happens

18th DUFC

Jo Tamar has the 18th Down Under Feminists Carnival up at her place, Wallaby. She opens with a group of posts about caring, because Australian Carers’ Week was in the middle of the month.

There’s lots of great posts, as usual. Make yourself a cup of coffee, and settle in for an extended mid-morning break while you read them.

Lessons in language

I work on a casual basis at a couple of the local universities (all going well, by the end of the first semester next year, I will have worked at all three major universities in town – nothing like spreading myself around / too thin). In the semester just ended, I taught a course in professional ethics for students working in disability. My expertise is on the ethics side of that course, and I have been very, very grateful for the knowledge I’ve picked up around about the place from people writing specifically about living with disability.

I ran into problems in the last couple of lectures, with defining autonomy. It’s a critical value in Western liberal democracies, and highly relevant to people working in disability. It can be a yardstick, a constant question that can guide practice – does my action enhance or compromise the autonomy of the person I am working with?

But the students in this course are completely new to ethical analysis, and often they aren’t even sure what autonomy is. So I needed to come up with definitions for them, and given that they are normally very applied workers and thinkers (c/f the philosophy and political theory students I normally work with), the definitions need to be structured in a way that helps the students to connect with them. This is a common issue in professional and business ethics courses; it’s usually the first time many of the students have engaged with any formal study of ethics. Often it’s simply a matter of providing words and a conceptual structure so the students can articulate knowledge they already have intuitively, but in order to do that, I find it easiest to flesh out the very conceptual definitions of autonomy with more applied definitions.

And that’s where I suddenly realised that all the imagery I customarily used when talking about autonomy was just … wrong.

Very formally, and in very bare bones fashion, autonomy is the capacity for self-government. It’s the freedom to make and to act on choices.

Whatever. Often the bare bones definition doesn’t give students a sense of why autonomy is important. So from there, I talk about the idea of people being autonomous adults, of being independent and recognised as independent operators, of having a sense of themselves as being independent and worthy of respect, of being equals who are able to stand tall and look the other in the eye.

Ouch. As I opened my mouth to utter this phrase, one that I’ve used for many years, I suddenly realised that it was just wrong, not only for that class in particular, but for use in general. I stood there gaping like a goldfish, and eventually told the students that I was lost for words, and explained why.

I’m not likely to be teaching that particular course again: I was filling in for a semester while the person who usually teaches the course was on study leave. But given my areas of study, I’m highly likely to be lecturing on the value of autonomy again. So right now I’m working hard on coming up with something better to say. Any suggestions will be gratefully received, and carefully considered.

Friday Feminist – Sandra Lee Bartky (2)

But it is perhaps in their more restricted motility and comportment that the inferiorization of women’s bodies is most evident: Women’s typical body language, a language of relative tension and constriction, is understood to be a language of subordination when it is enacted by men in male status hierarchies. In groups of men, those with higher status typically assume looser and more relaxed postures: The boss lounges comfortably behind the desk while the applicant sits tense and rigid on the edge of his seat. Higher-status individuals may touch their subordinates more than they themselves get touched; they initiate more eye contact and are smiled at by their inferiors more than they are observed to smile in return. What is announced in the comportment of superiors is confidence and ease, especially ease of access to the Other. Female constraint in posture and movement is no doubt overdetermined: The fact that women tend to sit and stand with legs, feed, and knees close or touching may well be a coded declaration of sexual circumspection in a society that still maintains a double standard, or an effort, albeit unconscious, to guard the genital area. In the latter case, a woman’s tight and constricted posture must be seen as the expression of her need to ward off real or symbolic sexual attack. Whatever proportions must be assigned in the final display to fear or deference, one thing is clear: Woman’s body language speaks eloquently, though silently, of her subordinate status in a hierarchy of gender.

Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Irene Diamond and Lee Quimby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, 1988

Feck!

I joined Twitter.

It’s Jolisa’s fault.

For Australians (and other non-Kiwis) who click through to read Jolisa’s story, the case of plagiarism she is talking about concerns Witi “Whale Rider” Ihimaera.

I’m not sure that I’ll be using Twitter all that much, but those could be famous last words… My account there is BeeFaerie, which is derived from my given names.

And so it begins…

Miss Eight the Elder, in the back seat:

Mum, you’re driving over the edge of the lane.

Sigh. Indeed I was, but it was a narrow street, and you need to drive over the mid point of the road, and to pull over to the kerb if another car is coming the other way. (If you can detect defensive overtones in this, you’d be right.)

But was it worse or better than Miss Eleven’s helpful comment? A few weeks ago I took her out of school for the day so she could come to my lecture on Mary Wollstonecraft. She loved it, and as we left, chattered away to me about it, coming up with some very good insights. But then….

Not to be rude or anything, and your lecture was really good, but there’s just a couple of things you could do a bit better.

Apparently I say “um” too much, and sometimes I talk too fast.

Sigh (again).

The younger Miss Eight has yet to offer me any helpful hints about things that I could do better, but I’m thinking that it’s only a matter of time.

Flights

Via Dr Isis, a fascinating look at global flight patterns over 24 hours. It really is worth 72 seconds of your life to watch this.

I’m fascinated by the patterns – the explosion of lights as the day advances over North America and Europe, and the waves of busy-ness back and forth across the Tasman. You can see all those wretched pre-dawn departures from and late night arrivals into New Zealand, so scheduled to enable airlines to cram four flights into a “day.”

It also put me in mind of the Astronomy Picture of the Day showing Earth at night. (Click here to get the best version of the picture.)

Image source: WikiCommons

It’s not so much the presence as the absence of light that is interesting; in Africa, you can see the development along the Nile, and then the great blank across most of the continent. Global flight patterns show many of the same gaps.

Mary Wollstonecraft wept

Mary Wollstonecraft was a wonderful woman, radical in her thinking, and in the way she lived. In her great book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, she argued that women should have the right to an education and to a political voice. When I talk about her to my students, I often say that were she somehow to see me lecturing, and the number of women students in the lecture theatre (usually around half), she would be thrilled and delighted, and she would feel that her ambitions for women had been achieved.

But then perhaps she would read about women’s fashion, and I think she would weep. Today is Melbourne Cup day, and the newspapers are full of it, including fashion tips and tricks. The latest one? In order to be able to wear ridiculous, foot-and-body-damaging 10cm high stiletto heels, women are getting their feet injected with “filler” and botox.

Botox and filler injections for the feet are the latest crazes in cosmetic surgery to make their way to Flemington – and the solution, according those with cash to splash, to the old racing conundrum of how to wear those towering pumps and not end up carrying them home after the final race has been run.

For about $1500, some doctors, such as Bondi-based cosmetic surgeon Michael Zacharia, will inject hyaluronic acid into the balls of the feet.

The fluid, commonly injected into joints to treat osteoarthritis, numbs the parts of the foot that become strained by wearing sky-high heels. [link]

Apparently it provides internal padding for your feet, so you can totter about in comfort. But it hurts, and all it really does is mask the pain, and possibly mask more serious problems.

Australasian College of Podiatric Surgeons president Mark Gilheany said while women might think the procedures were magic solutions to stiletto-fatigue, foot fillers could be masking symptoms of more serious problems.

He warned that for people experiencing a significant amount of pain standing in heels it could be a sign of partially dislocated bones or torn ligaments.

“If you require something of that (surgical) nature then you could have an underlying problem,” he said.

“It’s not something that is routinely done and I haven’t seen any clinical trials to say whether the injection of a biological cushion into the foot is effective.

“If there was anything that really worked I’m sure I would know about it. It seems like a waste of time when you can stick a cushion in your shoes and take some paracetamol.”[link]

Wollstonecraft lamented the extent to which women primped and preened, immersed themselves in finery and outward show, took up any fashion, and distorted their true natures, all in search of finding a husband. She argued that women needed financial independence, and needed to develop their characters, not adorn their bodies and simper and flirt and coquette.

I’m sure that most of the women who will be staggering around Flemington today are quite capable of earning their own incomes, and that they are not wearing silly shoes in order to catch a husband. But oh! The distortions of body, and feet, all in the pursuit of some idea of fashionableness. Stiletto shoes… well, whatever. If you want to wear them on your feet, then you go for it. But if you have to have surgery and injections to enable your otherwise healthy feet to sustain a day in silly shoes, then perhaps that’s just going a step too far.

Updated to say… these are the shoes I’m wearing today.

Updated to add this portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, to which commenter Lucy Sussex has a connection.

Image from Wiki Commons

Tarte Tatin – An interpretation

A friend has been making Tarte Tatin, so I thought I would join the party, and show you my version. It’s not so much the famous version of Tarte Tatin, which is made with apples, as my own ersatz version. But it’s still delicious.

Tarte Tatin is a caramellised apple upside down pie. It’s very, very simple to make, but very, very hard to get right. You need to use a pan which can go from the stovetop and into the oven. Therein lies my first problem. I have no such pan, and as yet, I haven’t found one that is about the right size, and not too expensive. One day… I hope.

So I make do with a saucepan, and a standard quiche dish, and a quick transfer. And I make one other major alteration. I make my Tarte Tatin with pears, not so much for the taste (I like both pears and apples) as for the shape.

First of all, you will need pastry. Most recipes suggest using puff pastry, but I just make ordinary old shortcrust pastry. I make a slightly smaller batch than usual – about 1 and 1/2 cups of flour, and 150 grams of butter. Cut it into a round about 5cm bigger in diameter than the pan or quiche dish you are going to use for the tart, and set it aside.

Next, peel, quarter and core the pears, squeeze a little lemon juice over them, and set them aside. You will need four or five pears. Then, if you are using my ersatz make-do method, grease the quiche dish thoroughly.

You should turn the oven on to heat up about now, to about 200 degrees (celsius).

Then, make a caramel. I do this in a small saucepan. I melt 1/2 cup of caster sugar, and 2 tablespoons of butter, slowly, and then let the mix simmer gently until it turns a rich, nutty brown. When you think the colour is good enough, tip the mix into the middle of the quiche dish, and spread it around a little, ‘though not right to the edges. It will stiffen and set a little, but don’t worry – it will melt again in the oven. I lost courage with this particular caramel; I should have let it get much browner. But it still tasted good!

Now you need to arrange the pears in the quiche dish. As you can see, I put them on their sides, and circle them around the dish, with two or three in the middle. I try to push them in from the edges just a little, to leave space for the pastry.

Drape the pastry round over the top of the pears, and tuck it in down the sides. I tend to fold the edge back a little, to give a stronger crust. I usually put two or three slits in the pastry, to let air out as it cooks, but this probably isn’t necessary, given that the edges of the pastry aren’t sealed.

Into the oven it goes, for about 40 minutes, until the pastry is brown, and the pears soft.

Next comes the very tricky bit. You need to flip the pie. This can result in disaster.

Here’s how I manage it. I put a big plate upside down over the top of the cooked pie. I fold a teatowel into a strip, and lay it over the top of the plate and piedish, and having shooed the children out of the kitchen, because really, you don’t want to be distracted while you’re trying to do this, I flip it over, and ease the teatowel out from underneath. Then I lift the quiche dish off, and with luck, it comes away smoothly, leaving a beautiful pie on the plate. This does take a bit of practice. Do it in private, without guests in attendance.

Serve with pouring cream, and maybe a little drizzle of port. Next morning, make sure you’re the first person up, so you can have leftovers for breakfast. Alas, I was too slow last time I made this pie, and the elder Miss Eight got to it first.