StarCat/CatStar

woman who has no place for feminism to the same position, they are too
busy watching the football to take notice. They happen because the
appalling statistics cited above go unreported by the mainstream
media. But they also happen because of a wilful ignorance. One does not
have to look far on the internet to find out the truth. The verbal violence
against Julia Gillard was plain for all to see, and instead of being drowned
out by a chorus of public indignation, it filtered down to the point where
school-children were throwing eggs at her.
The irony of this situation is that I am quite convinced there is a
majority of the Australian public which is appalled by all of this. The
problem is that it is a more-or-less silent majority: silent on the issue of
misogyny as it is on other deeply urgent issues, such as the current
government’s wholesale assault on the environment. We are in desperate
need of individuals who will not sit silently, but who will go on the attack
against a lying mass-media, who will refuse to tolerate the promulgation of
misogyny by public figures, who will have the moral courage to denounce
the perpetrators of domestic violence at the grass-roots level, and perhaps
most importantly, who will work ceaselessly to undermine the roots of the
cancer of misogyny, victim-blaming and violence-excusing in our
culture. We need a vast alliance of conscientious individuals who are
prepared to rewind and reconstruct a whole set of cultural assumptions,
and these individuals need to play an active, not a passive role in this
process. Only then will Australia become the place I hoped it would become
twenty years ago. Only then will the openly murderous rantings of the
Alan Joneses, and the daily sufferings of women I know, become a thing of
the past.