I’ve heard two different versions of “all the girls to the front” stories.
The more well-known one is about Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of 90s punk band Bikini Kill. After watching too many female fans pushed to the back at their concerts, she insisted the men in the audience move back and let all the girls come to the front.
“All the girls to the front, I’m not kidding. Boys, be cool, for once in your lives go back.”
The mosh pits at punk gigs were violent, physical spaces, women who wanted to be part of the punk scene were forced out of a place men decided belonged only to them. Hanna turned that around and insisted that men give up their space to the women, that for once they should let women have their place and experience what it was like to be sent to the back.
The pushback was frightening, men were furious about having to give up what they saw as their rightful place at the front and outraged by the idea that they should cede that ground to women, who, in their view, hadn’t earned it through sheer physical force. Bikini Kill were feminist activists as well as musicians, trying to create a space for women and even then men were enraged by the idea that they had to step back and allow women to have that space.
I heard the other “all the girls to the front” story at a Twitter event last week. Lisa Annese, CEO, Diversity Council Australia spoke about how it used to happen during the Vietnam war protests. When camera crews turned up to film the protests, the organisers would start yelling for all the girls to go to the front of the crowd, because the presence of particularly young and pretty women would get them more media attention and give the impression that women were leading the peace movement. Annese described this as the female veneer, bring all the women forward to disguise the fact that men are dominating a space in which women have very little representation. She reminded us that the mere presence of a woman doesn’t negate gender inequality or lack of representation.
This is the dichotomy of female experience.
Men will have to give up space to allow women in. All those positions of power – in parliament, on boards, in sport, in popular culture, in the media, on a rich list – achieving gender equality means some of the men dominating those spaces are going to have to give up their place to women. And they will be, they are, furious about it. Men have those places because they’ve have always had them, they think of them as their rightful place, something they worked for and earned. That women have been denied access to the opportunities men take for granted isn’t something, on an individual level, many men are willing to address. They’re not going to “be cool” and voluntarily move to the back of the crowd just so women can go to the front, not just because someone told them to.
And it’s not enough to just point to the few women who’ve made traditionally male space their own and say “look, there’s all the girls at the front, no more needs to be done”.
Women need to keep pushing, we need more women like Kathleen Hanna demanding that boys go back, that girls come forward. We need to encourage women to go to the front, push forward through that crowd and bring other women with them. We do need to celebrate the women who have made it to the front, but not let their presence be the veneer over the top of the crowd of men around them, still refusing to let women through.
Women are strong, capable, intelligent and able to be an equal part of the world, they don’t need space gifted to them, but they do need men to recognise that they are going to have to give some ground.
Women in Australia are:
- 24% of the Federal Cabinet
- 31% of the Federal Parliament
- 21% of public service boards
- 10% of billionaires
- 25% of key management positions
- 22% of media boards
- 17% of executive teams in media companies
- 9% of sports coverage
- 12% of directors, 11% of writers, 19% of producers, 28% of character of 2014’s top 100 movies
- 13% of international award winning books, where the book was written by women about women
- 35% of Commonwealth justices and judges
- 23% of all State Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges