Dave Pellowe
goodsauce.news
I have to admit I’ve probably lost my balance on this whole “March 4 Justice” movement.
Because it is being politically exploited by professional enemies of the Morrison government and conservatives in general; because it is being cynically manipulated to advance Marxist narratives about the struggles between classes (the “patriarchy” and “minorities”), I’ve actually fallen into the trap of reactive commentary.
Yeh, I hate “feminism” and “social justice”. I hate them because they serve agendas to divide us, to see us as captives to identities defined by immutable traits such as race and gender.
The genius of cultural Marxism is that it takes kernels of real injustice and vastly overstates them, blames the “other” (which is always the perceived “powerful” class), and then misdiagnoses the solution of total destruction of everything established and proven.
“Burn the place down.”
A reflexive response has the danger then of dismissing the real injustice along with the toxic anarchists.
But there is a real problem, and although it’s “not all men”, it is all of our modern, pornified culture.
While the Labor Party and their activist comrades cry crocodile tears about the “rape culture” in Parliament and sexual harassment in Australian workplaces, they’re deafeningly silent about the pervasive objectification of women in culture.
This is what retailer Honey Birdette promoted and aggressively defended in public spaces around Australia in 2017 as their “Office Party” line of products:
Women barely dressed in obviously sexually-provocative lingerie, parade like prostitutes in front of their professional colleagues, their peers, their equals: leering men, fully clothed in formal suits, pouring champagne over them. Our culture, including so called advertising “standards”, says this kind of public message is okay.
This behaviour didn’t start in Parliament. Politics has always been downstream of culture.
Christian doctrine informs anyone who went to Sunday School that humans are tri-part beings: we are eternal spirits made in the Image of God, full of dignity and worth and purpose. We have a soul: our mind, intellect, emotions. We live in our body.
The pre-Christian generation that has never darkened the doors of a church has not just permitted, but actively indoctrinated boys and men to see women in particular as little more than flesh to be sexually consumed. While obviously not all men rape or sexually assault women, the vast majority raised since the “sexual revolution” 60s have approached women with the “try before you buy” attitude. That bad idea places more initial value on a woman’s immediate ability to satisfy a man’s appetites than the now novel concepts of mutually sacrificial, unconditional commitment.
Where gentlemen should be chivalrously honouring & deferentially regarding ladies before our own convenience and appetites; women have instead been dehumanised and devalued by the gratuitous sexualisation of women which saturates Western culture.
From store fronts in shopping malls where young children are regularly exposed to 3 metre, explicit images of women dressed to seduce, to the completely unregulated online world of explicit pornography available with your first access to the internet, our culture unremittingly indoctrinates us to not respect women for the whole person they are.
Melinda Tankard Reist, an Australian &, really, global thought-leader I agree with most of the time and respect all of the time, had this to say recently in a balanced article on abc.net.au (please read it all):
All the best intentions and efforts cannot compete with the world’s biggest department of education: pornography. If we don’t address pornography’s conditioning of boys, which trains them to accept rape myths — that “no” in fact means “yes” — and which normalises aggression, coercion and domination, these girls and all those that follow don’t stand a chance.
The porn industry is a mammoth dispenser of sexualised violence and misogyny; it is the world’s most powerful sexual groomer. Boys see girls as something to act-out on rather than fully engage with. Of course, we already knew about unhealthy expressions of masculinity, harmful patterns, and too narrow expectations of behaviour. But the porn industry takes pre-existing harmful codes of masculinity and entitlement and turbo-charges them.
…“Porn is every toxic male power fantasy, polished, scripted and in high definition”, Evans warns. “We’re looking at a future of far more widespread abuse against women and girls if we don’t de-radicalise men now.”
Gender quotas, an extra woman in the cabinet and a “Prime Minister for Women” is hollow virtue-signalling which wont change anything, ever.
Toxic feminist reactions, like the Victorian school bullying boys as young as twelve to apologise on behalf of all men to female students, distract us from the endemic injustice deserving our full attention with their own abusive behaviour. Not only does that not solve the cultural indoctrination of our boys with harmful images of girls, it deliberately inculcates them with harmful images of themselves as predators.
The blatantly divisive “March 4 Justice” website claims, “Australia’s dominant patriarchal culture privileges the white, able-bodied, straight and wealthy.” In other words, if you’re male, white, healthy, heterosexual and not suffering extreme poverty you should be apologising for oppressing everyone.
Wendy Francis, the NT & Qld Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, advocated effective solutions for culture too when she blogged yesterday:
This is an important issue and one that needs to be addressed urgently. But the answer will not be found in ‘sexual consent’ education – which is the direction State Governments around the nation are rushing towards.
Consent is said to be a decision to agree to sexual activity that is made with adequate knowledge and understanding of the physical, emotional, spiritual, and social risks of engaging in that sexual activity. Can a 12 year old, 14 year old, 16 year old child be expected to have that deep knowledge and understanding?
…There are many other questions we should consider in this ongoing discussion. For instance, if we teach the concept of consent for children from 12 years old, are we also condoning consensual sexting, pornography and even prostitution?
Sadly, the biggest teacher of sexuality today could be pornography. With the rise of the mobile phone, the average age of first exposure to pornography is around 11. Any teaching on sexual consent will surely fail when the diet of pornography teaches that females enjoy degradation and even violence.
Is it any wonder that child on child abuse is rising significantly?
If we are serious about teaching respect, we must teach children about the harms of pornography. In early 2020, the Federal Parliament released a report, ‘Protecting the Age of Innocence’, highlighting the harms of pornography. The report’s recommendations have not been implemented and yet another inquiry has commenced.
We’ve had enough reports to know the problem. For the sake of our children, we need to see action!
I’m re-calibrating my balance.
The enemies of Scott Morrison and his government, and the “March 4 Justice” organisers appear to just be cynical political opportunists exploiting real injustice for personal gain. However, if they want to be taken seriously, they need to diagnose a whole-of-culture toxicity arising from the public objectification of women, and demand full and rapid implementation of the report on protecting our children’s innocence which is currently gathering dust. That is infinitely more effective than so-called “consent education”, itself a transactional commodification of women.
We all need to refuse to allow ourselves to be distracted by divisive grievance activists targeting a single gender as the source of all violence and abuse while conveniently demanding more taxpayer money for feminists. We must refocus our MPs and media on the real problem — the ubiquity of exploiting female sexuality; with real solutions — exclusively G-rated ads in public spaces, and age-appropriate regulated porn access (as per the average gambling website).
The problem isn’t “consent”, it’s our whole culture.
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