After reading this piece by Jacqueline Maley titled “The Barnaby Joyce affair: when men make abysmal choices women pay the price,” I’m more than a little exercised.

Yes, it is true that Joyce’s lover, Vikki Campion, may well find herself unemployable whilst Joyce seems (at this moment, who knows about the next) relatively secure in his employment.

Yes, it is true that Natalie Joyce gave up her own ambitions to support her husband and raise their children, only to be catastrophically derailed when Joyce met someone else.

But for the love of the goddess, neither woman was forced at gun point to make the choices she made. We are not helpless. We are not fucking helpless. There are millions of women who refuse the traditional heteronormative couple experience and the price it can extract from us, and do something different.

When I was very young, I married a man who was an executive in an oil company. My life was that of a company wife. It was the most utterly abysmal period of my adult life, and after thirteen years and two children I said, fuck this for a lark, and ended it.

My standard of living plunged. My children hated me. But I felt, for the first time in a long time, that I was living an honest life, a life on my terms.

A woman decides that what she most wants is to attach herself to a man whose ambitions and self-realisation will always matter more than hers. Why do so many of us choose that self-abnegation? And isn’t it about time we took responsibility for that choice?

And before you tell me that we are indoctrinated, let me tell you that if anyone could be considered indoctrinated it’s me. I survived years of childhood sexual abuse that taught me, amongst many other things, that girls and women are chattels. That girls and women must do what men want when they want it. That girls and women exist to give men what they say they want and need, and that our own lives are as nothing in comparison. This is what I learned.

But at some point, a woman has to rise up and say, fuck that for a lark. At some point, every woman has to rise up and take responsibility for her one life on earth. And were I to say anything to Ms Campion and Mrs Joyce, it would be, rise up and take responsibility for your one life on earth, because that is your most vital duty, to yourself and to your children.

Yes, it is true that when men make abysmal choices women pay the price. And yes, it is true that the only people who can change this are women, because there is no incentive at all for men to interfere with the status quo.

This article was originally published on No Place For Sheep.

In this discussion between journalists Malcolm Farr, Alice Workman, Caroline Overington and Fran Kelly yesterday, Farr and Workman take a swipe at those of us who have suggested that there has been collusion between the press gallery and the government to keep the Barnaby Joyce affair under wraps.

(Interesting times, Overington, a Murdoch employee, attacks her colleagues for not reporting on the Joyce affair).

In fact, there’s nothing like suggesting collusion to invoke scorn and contempt from press gallery and MSM journalists, who seem to assume that what one actually means by that term is an overt decision, taken in the middle of the night on burner phones by senior public servants, government MPs and senior media management to not publish or to delay publication of material that could in some way affect their mutual interests.

Such a scenario might well play out from time to time, I have no idea, however, what I mean when I use the term “collusion” is something far more subtle.

Every workplace, every family, every institution, every social media platform, indeed every human interaction is governed by overt rules, agreed upon by the culture and known to everyone. Far more elusive, however, are the unspoken rules, the implicit codes, the behavioural nuances deemed appropriate and inappropriate that you won’t find in policies and procedures guidelines. These are part of the culture of every institution, and all individual interactions. These tacit assumptions exercise an unspoken and unacknowledged control, constrain behaviour, and are arguably are more influential in determining behaviour than are the overt rules.

The press gallery, MSM journalists, government employees and MPs are as enslaved by these unspoken cultural requirements as is any other human being. When Guardian journalist Katharine Murphy tweeted about the “convention” in the press gallery that MPs’ private lives are a no go area, she was referring to these unspoken rules.

1. There's something of a convention in Aus politics: unless there's criminality, coercion or abuse involved, private lives are private.

— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) October 21, 2017

It is to these undocumented conventions that I refer when suggesting collusion or conspiracy between the press gallery and the government.

It probably won’t take you very long to identify the unspoken rules in your family that governed your behaviour, and the effects they’ve had on your life for better or for worse. Or in social media interactions, in the workplace, where nobody tells you about these cultural conventions, you have to pick them up, and you can be mightily ostracised if you unknowingly transgress. It isn’t difficult to image the powerful hold unverbalised conventions have over the culture that is parliament and the press gallery. Murphy names but one.

This conspiracy of silence on private lives in Australian politics cannot help but position the “ordinary” citizen as an outsider, marginalised in a democratic process to which we are, in theory if increasingly not in practice, essential. Many of us sense this exclusion and privilege, and many of us describe it, quite legitimately, as conspiracy and collusion.

Perhaps nobody actually said, “do not publish anything on the Joyce affair.” But nobody actually needed to spell it out. It would be known, via that mysterious process characterised as a nod and a wink, and in some instances not even that much would be required, what was to be said about Joyce, and when it was to be said, if it was to be said at all, and by whom. This is a process to which the punters cannot possibly have any access, and it is perfectly reasonable for us to experience that as collusion and conspiracy.

We are then gas-lighted by journalists who deny such a process ever takes place, and that we’re crazed conspiracy theorists living with our mothers, writing paranoid blogs in our grubby dressing gowns.

There are, however, instances in which the subtleties are abandoned and more direct orders issued. AFR journo Phil Coorey published this in December 2017:

Queenslander Keith Pitt, who Mr Joyce does not like, was not only overlooked but dumped from his job as parliamentary secretary for trade,” Coorey wrote.

“The two recently had a bitter argument about Mr Joyce’s infidelity and marriage breakup. Mr Joyce blamed Mr Pitt for spreading the rumours, a claim Mr Pitt denies.

Shortly afterwards these paragraphs disappeared from Coorey’s piece, after both Pitt and Joyce contacted him with denials. Fortunately, Twitter had secured a screen shot of Coorey’s original piece.

Interesting removal of key facts from the original article in order to appease the LNP: pic.twitter.com/bKDtuy8tXM

— HairyCoo III (@HairyCooIII) December 19, 2017

This article was originally published on No Place For Sheep.

You may have read the story published recently by Babe, in which an anonymous woman, Grace, tells of an evening she spent with actor and comedian Aziz Ansari.

The evening did not go well, with Grace leaving in tears after what she alleges was sexual assault. I recommend you read the article before proceeding with this post, but briefly, Ansari apparently repeatedly ignored Grace’s requests to “slow down”, “chill” or maybe have sex on the next date, and behaved in ways that sound obnoxious, uncaring, and contemptuous of the concept of consent.

This post is not all about whether or not Grace experienced sexual assault. I am struggling to understand the need some women seem to have to police and control the #MeToo movement, a movement that sprang up as a consequence of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, a movement whose goal is to bring to global attention the extraordinary number of women who have experienced sexual harassment and assault at some point in our lives. I’ve recently written about this, and the disapproval of #MeToo expressed by celebrity women such as Catherine Deneuve and Germaine Greer, at Independent Australia.

This post is about the willingness of women to judge Grace. The overwhelming opinion is that Grace had a bad date with a man who was not very good at sex, that it was in no way comparable to sexual assault, and that her piece for Babe is nothing better than revenge porn. We need to interrogate these opinions, because they are lethal.

Briefly, Ansari is, according to The Atlantic: not just a navigator of the culture of the moment, but also an author of it. He has literally written the book about Modern Romance. He has co-created a Netflix series that is in many ways a sitcomic version of the ideas at play in its pages. He has defined himself, show after show, stand-up special after stand-up special, interview after interview, as a male feminist, as a proud ally—as the kind of person who could both wear the Time’s Up pin and actually explain what it means to wear it. He has adopted the guise of a celebrity who is thoroughly fit for this heady moment, at home in a culture that is ever more feminist, ever more diverse, ever more empathetic.

Grace was excited at being invited out by Ansari, and given his reputation, had no reason to expect the evening would play out as she claims it did.

The Babe piece has provoked angry and/or disappointed commentary claiming that Grace’s story has seriously damaged the validity and authenticity of the #MeToo movement. Some commentators have gone so far as to state unequivocally that Grace’s experience was not sexual assault.

In this excoriating piece in The Atlantic, Grace is judged by an older woman who compares her experiences of “dating” with Grace’s account, and finds Grace seriously wanting.

There have been appeals for a more “nuanced and precise” use of language in the #MeToo movement, so that the difference between “bad sex” and sexual assault, the so-called “grey area,” is clarified. I would have thought that saying I don’t want this, I’m feeling uncomfortable, can we do it next time, and “I don’t want to feel forced because then I’ll hate you, and I’d rather not hate you,” as did Grace, is a pretty clear indicator that a woman is not consenting to sexual acts, is in a state of considerable confusion, and that to persist in your demands in spite of her expressed discomfort is a serious matter, rather than just “bad sex.”

The point of the #MeToo movement is that women can reveal on social media, many for the first time, our experiences of sexual harassment and/or assault. This isn’t a legal discourse and it isn’t a literary event: it’s women speaking, frequently from a position of trauma, of our experiences. That anyone should seek to police our language and our tone as we engage with #MeToo seems to me to be an all-too familiar act of patriarchal repression. If you can’t say it “well” you shouldn’t say it at all, is the message.

The call for nuance and precision also alienates women who do not have this skill set, or, in speaking of something so powerfully distressing, are unable to edit their speech to meet these bourgeois requirements. As I said in my earlier piece, #MeToo is basic, in its infancy, and is being used as an alternative to legal systems that consistently and catastrophically fail women when it comes to sexual assault. Yet the minute something gets up that offers all women with access to the internet a platform, somebody is there telling us how we should use it and the manner in which we should speak of our experiences.

Why? Who does this policing benefit?

Many women have disbelieved Grace’s description of her experience as sexual assault. No doubt there are many other #MeToo stories that are disbelieved, however, nobody needs to care whether another woman believes these accounts or not. Another’s disbelief is irrelevant. Women writing opinion pieces based on their disbelief are not police officers recording a report. They are not sitting on a jury. They are not judges and magistrates hearing your case. Their disbelief is their business, it isn’t the business of women who’ve spoken out on #MeToo. The opinionistas were not present. They cannot know the truth of the situation. They cannot contest your subjective truth.

So why, in the name of all the goddesses, do they have such a need to make their belief or disbelief the story?

I see no problem with women writing nuanced and precise deconstructions and interrogations of the #MeToo movement. Language does matter. In fact, it’s important that the movement is theorised and analysed. However, this is a very different matter from demanding that women speaking of traumatic experiences do so in a particular way. This is nothing better than a linguistic colonisation of trauma.

So you may not believe some #MeToo stories. So what? You don’t have the right to decide if Grace or anybody else was sexually assaulted or not. You have the right to your opinion, and that’s all.

Maybe you call it bad sex. Grace doesn’t, and she was there.

By far the best piece I’ve read on the Grace/Ansari evening is this one. The author writes:

If we begin to call all sexual assault what it is, we will have to voluntarily admit more pain into our lives, pain that we have up to this point refused to let in the door. If we call this kind of sexual encounter an assault, then women who have been weathering what they call bad sex will suddenly have justification for the icky feelings and shame that follows them home in the cab.

Could this be why so many women have mocked Grace? Because they’ve called sexual assault “bad sex” and Grace isn’t playing that game?

I don’t know how else to explain it.

This article was originally published on No Place For Sheep.

Of the 400 hundred or so recommendations in the Royal Commission’s final report on institutionalised child sex abuse, two were at the forefront of discussions in the MSM and social media yesterday.

These were the alleged role of celibacy in causing pedophilia, and the call by some churches for women to be given more authoritative roles in their institutions as a means of curbing the sexual perversions of some churchmen.

Both of these arguments, to my mind, minimise the gravity of the crime of sexual assault of children by claiming that making celibacy voluntary and hauling in a few women to clean up the mess, pedophiliacs will be brought under control. This is a ludicrous, and to survivors, an insulting notion.

The argument minimises the sexual assault of children by implying that this crime only occurs because men resort to raping children when they are denied access to adult sexual partners. Give every man a sexual partner and there will be no more pedophilia. This attitude demonstrates a profound ignorance of the psychology of pedophilia. It is not a crime to which men resort because they can’t, for whatever reason, have adult consensual relationships.

A survivor, if she or he can speak of it, will describe to you better than anyone else ever can, the demeanour of the pedophile in the moment. It is very specific. It is pathological. It is entirely predatory. It is secretive and it is threatening. It is everything consensual relationships are not.

The claim that celibacy is an indicator of pedophilia comes about as a result of the Catholic church winning hands down in the numbers of sexual abusers in institutions. People are, quite reasonably, searching for explanations and the most glaring difference between the Catholic church and other institutions is its demand that its priests are celibate. This demand, it is argued, leads to priests sexually abusing children because they have no other outlet for their needs.

However. Hundreds of thousands of children are sexually abused in non institutional settings, and by members of their families and family friends. The overwhelming majority of the male abusers in such situations have access to adult sexual partners, and they are not celibate. It is gravely misleading to peddle the suggestion that celibacy is an indicator of or a precursor to the sexual abuse of children.

It occurs to me that blaming Catholic celibacy for the majority of child sexual abuse is yet another means of ignoring the admittedly challenging reality that ordinary men walking amongst us, fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, friends, men you might eat Xmas dinner with, men you might work with, men you might have a drink with at the club, ordinary sexually active men with partners and without, rape and sexually abuse children.

It is also yet another means of ignoring the children and adult survivors who’ve endured the attentions of such men.

In my opinion, the celibate priesthood community does play a role in the Catholic church’s global pedophile ring. It offers protection and support. It feeds, shelters and clothes them. It gives them unlimited access to children. It covers up for them, denies survivors’ experiences, grants them the comfort of the confessional without any fear of being referred to authorities for the crimes they confess. The Catholic church and its celibacy protocols enable pedophiles to enact their fantasies, however, they do not cause pedophilia.

Again, if you consult a survivor on her or his experiences you will unfailingly hear similar accounts of the specificity of the offender’s behaviour, details that bear no relationship to adult consensual sexual encounters, details that indicate a particular and predatory mind-set, peculiar to those who sexually abuse children. That such a mind-set is “caused” by celibacy is not believable, and the experience of hundreds of thousands of survivors of non-celibate offenders is an ongoing challenge to the theory.

Likewise, the notion that more women in positions of authority in churches will somehow prevent child sexual abuse is not borne out by the experience of victims in non institutional and familial settings. There are women aplenty in these settings, mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, friends, grandmothers, the majority of whom are unable or unwilling, for very many complex reasons, to prevent a child being sexually abused. The notion that parachuting women into middle management in the churches will stop any pedophile in his tracks is insultingly ludicrous. It will not.

The other theory raised yesterday is that child sexual abuse is “only psychological, not physiological.” “It has nothing to do with sex.” “It’s not about sex, it’s about power.” As if a power dynamic is absent from consensual sex, which it is not, and only rears its ugly head in child sexual abuse.

The definition of sex is not solely consensual sex. Even when it’s rape driven by the desire for domination and brutality and power over, it’s sex. A criminal sex act is about sex. Sex can be very, very nasty, and it’s still sex.

Child sexual abuse has everything to do with sex. Perpetrators take physical pleasure and gratification from abusing a child. They do this because absolute control and power over a child is a sexual turn-on for them.

The abuse is the expression of their sexuality, a sexuality driven by the need for total control, secrecy, self-gratification, and domination over a defenceless child. It is absolutely misleading to claim the sexual abuse of children has nothing to do with sex. It has nothing to do with consensual adult sex. But to imagine that sexual predators experience no physiological stimulation is entirely wrong-headed.

Again, ask a survivor. If he or she can bear to speak of it, we can describe the physiological reactions of the man who raped us. We can tell you how he sought his pleasure, the quickening of his breath, the demands that we touch him and where and how, and in many cases, his orgasm. It is physiological. It has everything to do with sex. Sex is not simply defined by a consensual experience of it, and it adds to the marginalisation, confusion and suffering of survivors to claim that what we experienced had “nothing to do with sex.” Our bodies know differently. Our minds know differently.

I have no idea what is meant when, from the safety of their armchair, someone assures me that a pedophile’s actions have nothing to do with sex, and that it’s all psychological for him. That is not my experience as a survivor, and my experience trumps your armchair expertise.

In fact, many commentators on this topic would do well to remember that survivors’ lived expertise trumps any of their opinions.

None of us ever forgets the specificity of the demeanour of the perpetrator. It is unlike anything else. It is unforgettable, and most of us have no wish to describe it, for our own sakes and for the sake of others. We know, better than anyone else ever can, what we are dealing with here. We know, better than anyone else can, the depths of depravity a man must inhabit to sexually assault a child, because we have seen it, and felt it. That knowledge haunts us for life.

“Giving women more power in the church and ending celibacy will stop pedophilia” said no survivor ever, and with very good reason.

Thank you for reading this.

This article was originally published on No Place For Sheep.