Destroying The Joint

by Jane Caro (Editor)

Overview

Early in September 2012, commentator Alan Jones, responding to a comment by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, said: ‘She [Gillard] said that we know societies only reach their full potential if women are politically participating. Women are destroying the joint – Christine Nixon in Melbourne, Clover Moore here. Honestly.’ The twitterverse exploded with passionate, disbelieving and hilarious responses, and here in Destroying the Joint women reply to this comment and the broader issues of sexism and misogyny in our culture. With Jane Caro editing, this entertaining and thought-provoking collection consists of essays, analysis, memoir, fiction and more, from a variety of Australian women writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780702251788
Publisher:	University of Queensland Press
Publication date:	05/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jane Caro runs her own communications consultancy and lectures in Advertising Creative at The School of Communication Arts—UWS. She has co-authored two books: The Stupid Country: How Australia is dismantling public education (with Chris Bonnor) and The F Word: How we learned to swear by feminism (with Catherine Fox). She is sought after as a speaker, MC, and workshop facilitator, in both the public and private sectors. She has also appeared on several Australian television and radio talk shows.

Read an Excerpt

Destroying the Joint

Why Women Have to Change the World

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By Jane Caro

University of Queensland Press

Copyright © 2013 University of Queensland Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5178-8

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CHAPTER 1

A Complex Problem

Monica Dux

So I was driving to the zoo with my two-year-old daughter one morning in September 2012, listening to the local ABC radio. Jon Faine was discussing the whole 'destroy the joint' thing with one of the chief destroyers, Christine Nixon.

Naturally, Nixon and Faine weren't too sympathetic to the gentleman who'd started it all. 'One of the great privileges of living in Melbourne is that you don't have to listen to Alan Jones,' said Nixon, and I chuckled along, a contented member of the choir she was preaching to.

There was another reason that I was enjoying this discussion, other than the pleasure of having my politics affirmed. When we left home, my daughter Mila had made a huge stink about the fact that I hadn't put her Play School CD on, most particularly 'The Rainbow Song', a sweet ditty that I had heard approximately 34 000 times. Baulking at the 34 001st rendition, I turned the radio on instead. 'Mummy's going to listen to this today, darling,' I explained firmly, while she convulsed in her baby seat, literally turning crimson with rage. Yet as I gripped the steering wheel and cranked the radio up, Mila slowly calmed down, eventually falling uncharacteristically quiet.

Mummy: 1; Two-year-old: Nil.

Of course, I knew that she was probably busy cooking up plan B, likely involving her screaming 'I NEED TO DO POO!' just when I was trapped in some really heavy traffic. But I decided to enjoy the peace while it lasted, focusing on the radio, not on the poo forecast. It never occurred to me that my daughter might be quiet because she was doing the very same thing.

When we got to the zoo, Mila failed to spark up, remaining morose as I pushed her around to visit the equally sad animals. Then, as I struggled to induce a red-spotted jezebel to land on my finger, in direct contravention of the Butterfly House do-not-touch-the-butterflies rule, Mila suddenly spat it out.

'Mummy,' she asked, her little face filled with worry, 'why women on radio wreck? Why women wreck the joint?'

Like most small children, my daughter is fascinated by gender difference. Mila had recently worked out that Mummy is a 'woman', and that she would one day join me in that club. To Mila, the only qualification for membership is having boobies and a 'fluffy' vagina, both attributes she eagerly desired. Yet now, looking at her troubled face, it suddenly occurred to me that while I'd been enjoying an intelligent, nuanced, occasionally ironic discussion of the broader social issues surrounding Alan Jones's misogynist outburst, Mila had homed in on the one phrase that had been repeated again and again, and she had taken it quite literally. The busty, fluffy team are just a bunch of no-good wreckers!

I was about to launch into an elaborate explanation of what Faine and Nixon had actually meant when I remembered my friend Annie, whose son Charlie had expressed a fear of death. Annie had attempted to remove the sting by explaining that, while death is final and absolute, it is also quite beautiful, because you rot into the ground and become food for all the worms and bugs, thereby closing the great circle of life. Following this account, Charlie screamed himself to sleep for a week, proving that, when it comes to small children, honest explanations of complex concepts are not always in order. Instead of attempting one with Mila, I just gushed, 'Oh no, no, no, darling, women don't wreck, those people on the radio were just joking!' Then I cranked 'The Rainbow Song' up loud as we drove home. Mila was more than satisfied, and it seemed that the incident was forgotten.

Yet there was something about the whole business that still bothered me. That night, with baths and bedtime stories behind us, I told my husband about the Butterfly House outburst. Not only was my normally neurotic spouse unconcerned, he found it quite funny. 'It was one silly phrase that stuck in her head!' he said as he scrubbed at the dishes. 'How is that going to do any harm?'

I thought for a moment, still uncertain about why it bothered me. Then, watching him scrape at some baked-on grease, it came to me. 'I guess I'm worried that it might give her a complex.'

It's a strange thing when you open your mouth and hear your mother's voice come out. My husband was just as surprised.

'God, I haven't heard that expression in years,' he said.

Neither had I, I admitted. So why had it popped into my head now?

As a child there were many things I feared. Forgetting to do my homework, turning up to school without any underwear, and not graduating from pencil to pen were all terrors that loomed real and large in my pre-adolescent world. I didn't become any less anxious as I grew older, but my fears did become more lurid. Inadvertently deflowering myself while riding a horse was high on my teenage list, as was being visited by a divine harbinger bearing the news that I'd been chosen by God to birth the Second Coming. No surprises here, just the usual worries of a well-adjusted Catholic girl. But perhaps greater than either of these terrors, and certainly more enduring, was my fear of growing up and discovering that I had a 'complex'.

My mum and my aunties talked a lot about complexes, and about the unfortunate women who had them. Cousin Sarah dressed badly and never got married because of hers. Mrs Bernstein who lived up the road was a nasty piece of work because her lazy-good-for-nothing husband had given her one.

These were damaged women whose lives had been poisoned, but complexes could also be more specific and focused, impacting on one aspect of your psyche while leaving the rest intact. Aunt Edna, for example, developed a driving-related complex after my Uncle Bert criticised her skills at the wheel. Aunt Vera insisted on wearing a wig for 50 years, because of a complex of uncertain origin that made her think her hair was unfashionable.

Given this extensive list of casualties, a sensitive lass like myself could be forgiven for concluding that we were in the midst of a complex epidemic. Even my own mum had one, acquired in her youth, she said, when she was engaged to the semi-legendary cad Jimmy O'Leary.

But what were these malevolent things that stalked the good women of East Ryde and surrounds? My childish understanding of the matter was that a complex was a chronic mental condition that you caught when people or events undermined your confidence. Once the seed of self-doubt was planted it would spread in your mind like cancer, mutating normal healthy thoughts into twisted, misguided ones until, before you knew it, you were wearing a bad wig, rejecting all offers of marriage, and taking a bus to bingo. This could happen without you even knowing it, and once you caught a complex they were almost impossible to shake off.

Women seemed far more likely to suffer with them than men, and when blokes did get them they manifested quite differently. Women usually put up with theirs in noble silence, as they might a case of urinary incontinence, while a man with a complex was to be feared, and definitely never dated. Because a man with a complex could be a source of complex contagion.

Jimmy O'Leary was a case in point. Jimmy had spent a few years training to be a priest back in the 1950s, but had jumped ship in order to pursue his true calling, which turned out to beseducing good Catholic girls. Looking at the current state of the priesthood you'd expect that Catholic seminaries in the 1950s and '60s would have been complex hotbeds, but Mum always insisted that it was the men who didn't finish their priestly training that you really needed to look out for. Such men, Mum warned me, were all 'mixed up', and should be avoided as suitors. And, presumably, prime ministers.

My mother's generation was the last to talk so enthusiastically and earnestly about complexes, although the term has lingered in common parlance. We still occasionally hear about Napoleon complexes, Cinderella complexes and god complexes, although the most common varieties are the 'inferiority complex', essentially meaning that a person has low self-esteem, and its mirror image, the 'superiority complex'. Yet there was a time when the idea of the complex was not mere pop psychology, but an important part of serious, mainstream science.

The concept was invented and elaborated by the heavyweight fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. Jung was perhaps the foremost champion of the complex (or at least a close second after my mum), but it was Freud who first postulated the Oedipus complex, still the most famous complex of them all.

My friend Professor Nick Haslam, an academic psychologist at Melbourne University, explained to me that Freud and friends understood complexes as 'amalgams of thoughts, emotions and desires', which could form symbolic clots or fault lines in a person's unconscious. A complex could be seeded in a variety of ways, often quite subtle, and because they were submerged in the unconscious mind the victim might suffer from one without even realising it. Yet its impact on his or her behaviour could be far-reaching and profound.

It may seem silly, but back in the day it never occurred to me that the complexes my mum spoke about were the same sorts of thing that Oedipus had lent his name to. Suddenly seeing Mum's psychiatric diagnoses in an entirely fresh light, I phoned her up to see what she would make of the Butterfly House Incident. 'It's all Alan Jones's fault,' she said, without hesitation. 'He's another one, you know, just like Jimmy O'Leary. Thinks he's the greatest. Your father can't stand him either.'

I was stunned. So, Alan Jones and the Notorious O'Leary were of an ilk? Who'd have thought it!

'No, no,' said Mum, frustrated with her slow-witted daughter. 'What I mean is, they've both got superiority complexes. And the way they make themselves feel big is by making other people feel small. That's why they're so dangerous.'

When I was in high school in the 1980s, feelings of superiority and inferiority were also widely discussed but the language had changed since my mum's day, so that now we spoke of self-esteem, or a lack thereof. To help fend off this threat, my classmates and I were encouraged to love ourselves, and to affirm this love regularly. To this end we were given classes in 'Health', a coy name for a very Catholic subject that covered everything from menstruation (use pads, never tampons, as they will deflower you) to drugs (just say no) to sex (say no, or you'll go to hell). These classes were conducted by Sister Bernadette, a well-meaning little nun with remarkable calf muscles. According to Bernadette, there were all sorts of ways a girl might affirm herself, but the very best way was to do it in song. Judging by Bernadette's enraptured expression whenever we listened to her records, I suspect that she had a passionate crush on the Catholic folk superstar Sister Janet Mead, yet Bernadette's very favourite song of affirmation was Whitney Houston's 'The Greatest Love of All'.

Almost every week we were invited to listen and reflect upon this song, as Whitney crooned what was to become the central message of my years in Health – that loving yourself was not only the greatest thing you could do, but that it was 'easy to achieve'. Hardly a subtle lyric, yet still I found it rather confusing, not least because we'd always been taught that it was Our Lord Jesus Christ whom we must place first on our love list. But even putting this theological conundrum aside, 'The Greatest Love of All' never sat easily with me. Because if the greatest love you can have is for yourself then, by implication, the greatest failure is not mastering self-love. And if it's so easy to achieve self-love, then those of us who don't manage it have only got ourselves to blame.

Yet as my high school years progressed, Whitney's warblings proved to be a perfect reflection of the times. With the rise of neo-liberalism 'personal responsibility' became a virtual catch-cry, in economics, politics and, eventually, in the wider social world. If you were poor, we were told, it was probably because you didn't work hard enough. If your dreams remain unfulfilled, it was likely due to you not wanting them enough. If you suffered from low self-esteem, it was surely because you didn't say your affirmations with sufficient gusto. Of course, it wasn't just Whitney delivering this message. In the USA there was Reagan, in the UK there was Thatcher, and on the TV there was the most powerful and influential one of them all, Oprah. And from time to time, of course, there was also our Alan.

Ideological fashions have changed, but this way of thinking has never really gone away. Today it impacts particularly on women, as even our personal lives are subjected to the nasty finger pointing. If you have no partner, it's sure to be because you were too fussy. If you have no children, it's because you were too focused on your career. And if you don't love your body, then maybe you should just stop hoeing down all those carbs, fatso.

To someone who believes all this garbage, the idea of a complex really must seem very old-fashioned and quaint. Yet I feel a warm wash of nostalgia for my mum's way of talking. Because I think she was essentially right about the women who populated my childhood. Over the course of a long lifetime, many of them had been more or less crushed by the profoundly sexist world they lived in, and this was in no sense their own fault. There was not a thing they could have done about it.

Even today, women are subjected to all sorts of shit that men never get. Throughout our lives we are told that we're ugly, fat, hysterical and irrational, that we can't drive or read maps, that we don't deserve promotions because we're more interested in making babies and that our worth can be measured by the dimensions of our bodies. In the modern world, most of these messages are subtle and coded; occasionally, as with Alan Jones's rantings, they are still overt. But either way, they are constant, and they do wheedle their poison into our psyches, eventually mixing up the way we see ourselves, and our place in the world. If you doubt this just listen critically to the way women talk about themselves: teenage girls talking about their bodies, new mothers about their guilt, or successful professional women apologising for their achievements. In their words you'll hear the blockages and the fault lines, created over the years by the constant drip of sexist poison.

Alan Jones's Destroy the Joint rant was not unusual in its content, only in its honesty. Instead of encoding his message, disguising it or wrapping it up in pleasantries, his words were basic and crude and unashamed.

And maybe that's why the whole thing with Mila bothered me so much, because it was the first time that she's actually noticed a negative message about women. It triggered a realisation in me that my smart, powerful little daughter was going to spend her whole life getting hit with the sort of rubbish that Jones was peddling, only most of the time it was going to be too subtle to notice, sneaking into her unconscious without me or anyone else even realising it.

A week later I found myself driving Mila to the zoo again, and on the way I asked her if she remembered what we'd heard on the radio last time, about women wrecking the joint. She said yes, she did remember. So I explained to her that the man they'd been talking about that day, he has what's called a complex. 'And Mila,' I told her, 'best keep away from men with complexes. They really do wreck the joint.'

CHAPTER 2

Destroying the Joint Is About More Than Being a Woman in Power

Senator Christine Milne

What did Alan Jones mean when he said 'women are destroying the joint'? Was it, as some have characterised it, nothing more nor less than a howl against the rise of women into positions of power and influence? Was it purely and simply an angry man's general tirade, steeped in misogyny? Or was it a deeper fight back against the slow but sure progress towards a fairer, more compassionate, more forward-thinking society?

Pondering that raises a perhaps more important question: What do we mean when we talk about 'destroying the joint'? Are we happy simply to see women occupying powerful and influential positions in increasing numbers? Or do we need to go further? Is it not enough unless we use those positions to drive deeper change?

For me, destroying the joint means challenging the power structures that say that might is right and that today is more important than tomorrow. Destroying the joint means building a new system in which it's not OK to allow people to be marginalised, exploited and discriminated against; it's not OK to ignore the needs of future generations; it's not OK to wreck this extraordinary, beautiful, fragile planetary environment that sustains us – our Mother Earth.

We don't want power and influence just because it's time for men to share. We want power with a purpose.

All my life I have been challenging the status quo. I can't help myself – if something seems really unfair to me, then I just have to become involved in trying to fix it. I've often wondered why some people feel that need and others don't. To what extent is it innate and how much are we the product of our upbringing?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Destroying the Joint by Jane Caro. Copyright © 2013 University of Queensland Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: Sometimes You Just Have to Laugh Jane Caro,
A Complex Problem Monica Dux,
Destroying the Joint Is About More Than Being a Woman in Power Senator Christine Milne,
A Fairer Country Michelle Law,
Destroying the Joint Starts at Home Leslie Cannold,
Girl Talk Lily Edelstein,
Women Destroy the Joint Tara Moss,
History's Footnote, or, a Wolvi Incident Melissa Lucashenko,
We Are Destroying the Joint Carmen Lawrence,
Global Destroyers Emily Maguire,
Birth of a Movement Destroy the Joint Administrators,
Spanners and Mirages Jennifer Mills,
Love Tweets Yvette Vignando,
The Writing on the Walls Jenna Price,
We Appointed a Woman Executive Once ... It Didn't Work Out Catherine Fox,
Destroying the Joint in Twelve Easy Lessons Catherine Deveny,
Women Talk Back Wendy Harmer,
Speaking Truth to Power: Sexism, Outrage and the Public Consciousness Paula McDonald and Abby Cathcart,
There's Nothing Funny About Misogyny Clementine Ford,
A Letter to Feminists from a Man Who Knows Better Corinne Grant,
Outside Manners Susan Johnson,
Joint Destroyer, Born and Raised Steph Bowe,
Beyond Jeering: An Unapologetic Love Letter to Teen Girls Dannielle Miller,
Leaky Ladies and Their Worrisome Wombs Nina Funnell,
The Politics of Exclusion Stella Young,
Markers of Change Senator Penny Wong,
The University and the Beast: A Fairy Tale Krissy Kneen,
Contributors,
Notes,
Acknowledgements,