About Anita

A Wellington feminist wondering how to make politics something real people can do.

When kindness is retold unkindly

Posted on September 19, 2010 by Anita

A few years ago I had a staff member who was working long hours and many days away from home. His job required a lot of travel, and a lot of time away from his partner, friends and family. At one point his partner’s son was undergoing treatment for cancer and he was working away and couldn’t be there to support his partner. One of the staff in the office arranged for flowers to be sent to his partner â€“ a small token of caring at a hard time.

Looks fine to me, I’ve authorised flowers, movie tickets, and more for family members whose lives have been disrupted by work I’ve given my staff. I was once given plane tickets to spend time with my family after work kept me tied up through Christmas and New Year.

But time passed, and my staff member made some enemies, and that purchase of flowers was used to humiliate him and damage his career.

This makes me wonder a couple of things:

1) Was the decision to buy flowers a bad one?

2) Was the use of the purchase of flowers by his enemies, repeatedly retold by the media, fair?

3) Is my gut feeling right that this particular purchase was used by his enemies to remind us all that this partner is male, and imply that there is something distasteful about that fact?

I’m not for a moment suggesting that spending on and by employees should be uncontrolled, unmanaged or concealed; just wondering where to draw the line between transparency and self-serving malicious prurience.

John 8:7-11 (a.k.a. I don’t care about Shane Jones’ movie viewing)

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Anita

To all the people to whom I have said today “Yes, I am a feminist, but I really don’t care” I would like to offer this longer explanation…

I care a great deal about how politicians behave in the roles, and how they spend public money â€“ what they do with their credit cards and their appropriations. I also care a great deal about the exploitation of women, men and children. But I don’t care that Shane Jones watched porn, I really don’t.

There are many terrible things about so much of the porn industry, about the ways it exploits the women and men on film, the way it perpetuates damaging stereotypes about sex and gender.

Before you judge Shane Jones for viewing the products of that exploitation, however, look down at yourself for a moment â€“ where were those clothes made? Any sweatshop labour in there? Any women, men and children exploited for your convenience?

The media and commentator focus on the porn films are because it’s “naughty” or “dirty”; after all it’s about sex and that is something we must never admit wanting or enjoying, and that we must never ever talk about.

And you know what? That there, that exact taboo â€“ strengthened today in all the prurient chatter â€“ does far more damage to New Zealand women than all the porn watching put together. That taboo is responsible for many teen pregnancies, for much sexual abuse being hidden, and for a lot of STD transmission. It also results in (and this matters too) many people having a far less joy from sex than they could.

So, when you express outrage about Shane Jones watching porn and expect me to back you up because I’m a feminist you can expect me to check your clothing labels, and make sure that you know it’s ok to talk about sex, and even to want and enjoy it.

Name suppression: protecting victims’ rights

Posted on December 13, 2009 by Anita

There is a woman, a victim of rape, who knows that every time any acquaintance Â looks at her they know what her husband did to her. When she walks through the supermarket every shopper may be looking at her and thinking about her terror, fear and shame.

In a healthy society she would have no reason to feel ashamed, but ours is not a healthy society: most victims of rape do feel shame, embarrassment and humiliation.

When a blogger decided to court fame and media attention by making a political point about name suppression he not only outed the man whose name was suppressed, he also revealed the victim’s identity â€“ he revictimised a woman who has already suffered enough.

[The blogger’s name has been removed as suggested in a comment as the name of the blogger, in turn, leads toward the woman’s identity]

Getting what you voted for

Posted on August 30, 2009 by Anita

It’s nearly 10 months since the election and the parties have just about found their feet. Bloggers on the left are delighting in saying to National, Act and MÄori Party voters “look at what they’re doing, you didn’t vote for that!” which makes me curious, how many of us got what we voted for?

ACT

If you voted for hard-on-crime you’re probably feeling ok right now, it might not be as hard or as fast as you like, but the art of vengeance is definitely on its way back. If you voted for Rodney Hide, hurrah you have Rodney Hide. If you’re a small business owner frustrated with regulation, again you’re probably feeling pretty good at the signs of what’s coming. The neoliberals might not think things are happening fast enough, but they’re sure happening. It’s only the old ACT libertarian core who must be feeling cheated by the concessions to the crime-and-punishment lobby, and who else could you have voted for anyway?

Greens

I voted Green looking for a genuinely left wing party, and I’m feeling a bit let down: the MOU and the lack of visibility over the pain National’s policies are causing the poor and the vulnerable. That said, I also know that the Greens don’t have any parliamentary power so I expect some compromise. If you voted for the environment it’s probably feeling pretty good, while we lost the election the Greens are being effective at raising the issues and progressing a handful of them â€“ about as good as you could hope for in the current political climate.

Labour

You lost, that’s all bad, but how’re you feeling about this incarnation of Labour-in-opposition? Labour’s actually doing ok I reckon for the centrist middle class left voters, and for the co-opted unions â€“ they’re making the right noises about National policy, they’re sounding union and struggling middle-class friendly. People on the left of the party, however, are perhaps less happy: the current strategy appears to be a fight for the centre rather than a return to Labour’s working class roots.

MÄori Party

Possibly it’s enough to be part of government, but at some point doesn’t the lack of policy wins start to hurt?

National

Wellâ€¦ if you voted for that nice John Key you’re probably happy with the smiley vacuous man who gets to go on Letterman. If you voted against Labour you were once happy with the lack of Helen Clark, but National’s starting to look a bit nanny state-ish. If you voted for the agriculture sector you’re probably adequately pleased by the reversals on the ETS and RMA, big business should be similarly happy. So the ideological backers are probably happy, but the soft centre?

Progressives & United Future

You got Jim Anderton and Peter Dunne, you must be rapt! :)

Valuing women’s votes and money

Posted on August 26, 2009 by Anita

There is a political party which has made a choice to keep someone with a recent history of domestic violence in a highly visible position[1].

So they’ve made a political calculation:

((loss of support) + (loss of money)) < ((loss of face of firing him) + (loss of skills that he has))

Which makes me wonder about several things. Firstly, they are counting on the suppression order holding for the wider public, but not for insiders, so they must think the money from insiders is secure â€“ do they have no funders who care about domestic violence? Are they counting on people keeping on funding them, through all the little social touches that parties do to big donors, even when many people wouldn’t be comfortable having dinner with him right now? What does this say about their assumptions about their donors?

Secondly, liberal women was a key area of contention at the last election, this is one of the little things that eat away at their credibility in that space. Again, I guess they’re counting on the suppression order and two years, but it’s still going to cut away at their credibility with women. Do they just not realise that for many women domestic violence is more important than party politics? Do they have another plan to retain women voters? Have they already given up liberal women as lost?

Finally, and more for the curious than the ethical, this provides a huge opening for internal politicking and intrigue and factionalising. If that’s the down side, what’s the up side?

P.S. Remember the suppression order, amongst other things comments must not name his victim, him, or his party.

[1] Yes, there is a political party which has made a choice to promote someone with an older history of domestic violence into a highly visible position too, but that is a story for another day.

Preventing the success that we celebrate

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Anita

On the 1st of April this year I got a nice cheery tax cut because, according to our National ACT government, people like me on the top tax bracket are the hardest working and most deserving. As a private sector worker earning a good wage, paying my mortgage with some to spare, and barely noticing the recession I suspect they’d say I was exactly what success looks like to them.

Oddly, though, under the current policies of this government I’d probably still be on the sickness benefit able to work only 5-10 hours in a good week.

Not so long ago, due to health and crime circumstances beyond my control, that’s exactly where I was. Getting me back on my, “successful”, feet was a combined effort of systems, organisations and people; a genuine welfare system. I was fortunate to receive good welfare support from the benefit system, counselling through ACC’s sensitive claims, awesome care from the public health system, support from a state sector with a commitment to equity and workplace reintegration for people with chronic illness and disability, an open accessible education system, and a first class public transport system. Not to mention the variety of public servants in a wide range of organisations with the time and mandate to help me through.

How many of those systems will survive the current policies? How many face cuts that make the services useless or impractical? How many of those good people have been made redundant by the state sector cuts? Or overloaded by work from their departed colleagues? Or operating under new “guidelines”?

National and ACT may laud people like me who succeed in their eyes, but they’re taking away the small pieces ofÂ support that make our success possible.

So the next time you see the politics of envy rhetoric, think of me: given a tax cut I didn’t need and wishing that every cent had been put into the services that we all rely on when things go wrong.

Voting for participation

Posted on August 19, 2009 by Anita

It is rare in NZ that we get a chance to participate simply because people campaigned for that chance, and this referendum is one of those chances. 300,000 people signed a petition and hundreds of people carried those petitions around, arranged for people to sign them, and for them to be returned, counted and presented to Parliament.

I don’t agree with their opinion about smacking, but I agree with their attitude to democracy and participation.

So this is your chance. If you haven’t voted in the referendum yet, do it now! VotesÂ posted on Thursday (early enough for collection) will be counted.

Suppressing resident participation

Posted on August 15, 2009 by Anita

Auckland

The National-Act government are going against the Royal Commission’s recommendations in an attempt to weaken resident participation, consultation and influence.

Wellington

The National-aligned mayor, Kerry Prendergast, and centre-right Council are trying to remove the public’s right to be consulted on buildings on our beautiful public waterfront.

Christchurch

Labour MP, Clayton Cosgrove, is trying to remove residents’ right to be heard using the Resource Management Act in an attempt to give the airport carte blanche to create as much noise whenever and however they like.

Some of my best friends are menâ€¦

Posted on August 13, 2009 by Anita

Most of the talk about the trial of Clayton Weatherston and the killings by George Sodini has focussed on the anti-women sentiment and sexism woven into the discourse and society. But isn’t there anti-men sentiment in equal measure? Both are rooted in the idea that men cannot control themselves â€“ when it comes to issues of sex and love men have no self control. The story it tells is that for men rejection becomes a killing rage without the chance of self-restraint.

In fact it’s rooted not only in the idea that men can’t control their rage, but in the idea that rage is their autonomic response to anything that goes wrong.

The prevalence of those myths and the unthinking acceptance of them doesn’t just lead to the deaths and beatings and rapes of hundreds of women a year, it also leads to the discounting and devaluing of masculinity.

I know so many good men: men who love, men who care, men with self control, men who do not have barely suppressed rage burning in their souls 24×7. Men who are diminished by every retelling of those myths of the generic caveman response.

When we finally repeal the provocation partial defence from the Crimes Act it will be a step forward not only for the women and gay men whose killings are trivialised by the defence, but also for every strong capable man whose masculinity is devalued by the idea that the measure of a man is his capacity to lapse into an uncontrollable killing rage.

Kiwipolitico

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