Contre le sexisme!

Well, I read the news today and oh boy – I heard that Jean Baudrillard had died, and I thought, yeah, I should write a blog post about him, and about how his ideas of the simulacra and the evil demon of images were burnt onto the back of my eyelids as a student back in the early 1990s, and how great it was to be a student then, and how things are so much different for today’s students, and oh how the world has changed and isn’t it great to be alive … but then K came into the kitchen as I was cooking a cheese omelette and said “Hey, it’s International Womens Day today!” and I said “Yay!” and really, that’s what I’d like to say today. Surely today, just like every other day, there will be more than enough time and space devoted to the concerns of men and their take on the world (and yes, I do include myself here), so this post is my attempt to make up, ever so slightly, for the imbalances we all know still exist in this world. I’d also like to say hey, it’s Blog Against Sexism Day today too – hence the cool image above! All over the world today, bloggers will be writing against sexism and against gender inequality. I can guarantee that most of them will be far more eloquent than me. Nevertheless, this is my statement of support for gender liberation and for women’s (and wimmin’s) liberation. Why? because while it’s nice and comforting for me to think that we’re all equal and that we are the world, the fact is that this is simply not true. As the old political slogan goes: “Bad for all; worse for women”. I sing the great women poets of Australia and the world, the quiet women and the loud ones too. Super props to all the women still fighting for change and improvement in the conditions for women everywhere when everyone around them has given up. I salute the billions of women in the world who are free not to look like Paris Hilton. I even salute Paris Hilton, for it is not so much Paris herself who is the problem with our society (how original: blame it on the woman) but our society’s stereotype of what women should be. These stereotypes enslave us men too, with one slight difference: we’ll never have to be women living in a society that treats us as the B Team. I am not perfect. I have been an arsehole, to both men and women. I’m not pretending to be better than I am. But the world could be so much better. Australia could be so much better. For a start, we could get rid of this moronic government, under whose Workchoices legislation women are even worse off than they were before. That’s a little bit harder than writing a blog post in support of International Womens Day – but also, just maybe, maybe just a little more useful in the long run.