We’ll take the first two weeks of January off, we at Women’s Agenda said.
Nothing happens in January, we said.
Surely even sexism takes a holiday, we said.
Well, we sure got that one wrong didn’t we? Because BAM, Dutton, Briggs, Gayle and Joyce clubbed together to make sure women know sexism never takes a holiday.
And a thousand social media arguments about whether women can take a joke or a compliment or robust language ensued.
I’m almost glad we missed it, because the point of all those arguments was that they are utterly pointless. Of course women can take jokes and compliments, of course we can deal with robust language without our delicate little lady ears falling on to a fainting couch.
What we won’t take is being demeaned, diminished and dismissed by men who think women are objects to which they are entitled, or lesser beings sitting somehow on the edges of real power and conversations. And that point was hammered home pretty damn well over the last two weeks of white men making fools of themselves, and then doubling down by claiming the fools were actually the women who laughed at them and stood up fearlessly to tell them they were wrong.
But under the idiocy of men whipping off their wafer thin veil of civilisation and doing the dance of white male entitlement was the undulating underbelly the power and how it still directs public debate.
Dutton calling Sam Maiden a “mad fucking witch” was not particularly surprising, it’s not like everyone was shocked at such out-of-character antics, but one puerile text message is not grounds to call for the sacking of a cabinet minister.
For mine, the fact that FOI documents showed Dutton lied about the asylum seeker woman Abyan refusing an abortion when she was in Australia, and his department authorised her removal without recourse to the law is something that demands far more outrage than a single insult to a powerful woman well able to defend herself from the likes of Peter Dutton.
Dutton’s department has overseen and ignored countless claims of sexual abuse, physical violence and brutal treatment to the world’s most vulnerable people. The thousands of helpless men, women and children suffering, ignored and forcibly silenced by his department should forever disqualify him from public office.
Like immigration ministers before him (waves to Scott Morrison) Dutton will discover that those people will not be forgotten, no matter how much buffoonery distraction he tries to put in our way.
Briggs’s actions were certainly more than idiocy, particularly for the woman who made the complaint about him. I can’t imagine what effect making that complaint and having her photo texted all over Canberra will have on her career, but I have no difficulty imagining what it will do to the next woman who has cause to make such a complaint.
The wider implications for the government were summed up perfectly by The Australian.
Although Mr Briggs this week accepted his behaviour did not meet ministerial standards, several sources have told The Weekend Australian his forced resignation has left several government ministers concerned that the bar for acceptable conduct has been raised impossibly high.
Several government ministers?
Acceptable conduct?
Impossibly high?
If The Australian is correct in this assertion, then several government ministers shouldn’t have been allowed to progress past kindergarten and a stern instruction to just sit there and think about what you’ve done.
And all you men who took to your keyboards in such rage over Cologne, we know who you are too, you’re the ones mostly likely to be bleating about #notallmen when white men assault women. Because it might not be all men, but it is all men of colour, isn’t it?
You’re not fooling anyone, next time a football player or a politician is accused of sexual aggression towards a woman we know where your rage will be directed then. And next time a woman of colour is killed or abused, we know where your lack of rage will be too.
But that’s ok, we don’t need you, women have got this.
All the events of the last two weeks have been a timely reminder that no matter how much progress women have made, there’s still more work to be done, and women are unflinchingly picking up that work.
All the men on social media (and in real life) nearing apoplexy as they try to maintain their conviction that sexist malfeasance is nothing but the diseased imaginings of ugly, humourless feminists are in for a shock. Women are not stupid, we have all seen sexism in some form, we know what it is and we are not helpless in the face of it. We are, quite simply, just not putting up with it any more. Not in our government, or our workplaces, or our homes, our media, our entertainment or our streets. We understand that it will continue to happen and we understand even more clearly that our role is to say, firmly and with the utmost conviction, that we see it for what it is, we are disgusted and fed up by it, and we will not tolerate it.
The story of 2016 is not the men fighting a losing battle to hold on to entitlement, it is the story of all the women striding past them, ignoring them as they bluster and bloviate, and unequivocally demanding change.
It’s going to be a good year.