In a room full of feminists, there was hardly a sympathetic word in the room for prime minister Julia Gillard on Tuesday night. Earlier that day, the prime minister had launched Women for Gillard with…
Iceland has taken a critical step to ban online pornography – and if successful it will be the first Western industrial nation to do so. According to Icelandic interior minister Ogmundur Jonasson, the…
Without really knowing what he was saying, Alan Jones was right – we are “destroying the joint”. Any dispassionate assessment of the state of “the joint”, both the corner we occupy and the planet as a…
Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade (410 U.S. 113 (1973)), which found that Texas State law prohibiting abortion was unconstitutional. The landmark decision…
It would be truly wonderful to live in the world inhabited solely by proponents of porn. In this apparently post-capitalist world, where sexual freedoms abound, there is no need to worry about violence…
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard spoke out against sexism and misogyny in the parliament last month, her words had resonance far beyond the political context of the moment. It was a reminder that women…
As an academic, I often become obsessed with the meaning of words. They lure me in with their conceptual promise, and then I get hooked and tangled on distinctions and disciplinary nuance. Perhaps unsurprisingly…
Peter Slipper has resigned. The sexist text messages mentioning female genitalia published as part of a civil court case were suddenly the bridge too far for Her Majesty’s Opposition. But the Opposition…
The Labor government appears to have a spring in its step. After months of poor polls and difficulty passing legislation, things now seem to be going Labor’s way. In recent weeks, the government has been…
The opening round of respectful tributes have been flowing through the media after the death of Helen Gurley Brown. The original Sex and the City girl died in New York on Monday, aged 90. Long-reigning…
This trend will continue into the 2014 Winter Olympics with women permitted for the first time to compete in ski jumping. Since their inclusion in the modern Olympics in Paris in 1900, female participation…
Vibrators have been causing a buzz for as long as they’ve existed: sometimes this happens behind closed doors, and sometimes in the public sphere. But as the new film Hysteria shows, there’s still fascination…
Who said we could have it all, anyway? This notion is a media myth that somehow translated the idea that women should not be excluded from any sphere on the basis of sex into the sexy but fallacious view…
When one reads an opinion piece littered with references to “liberal elites”, it is usually a safe bet that one is reading an inherently conservative point of view dressed up to look progressive. So it…
I’m a fan of the retention of pubic hair. I don’t much like the idea of breast implants. Thoughts of vaginoplasty coax me into an involuntary Kegel exercise. I’ve no idea why any woman would bleach her…
The front page of Saturday’s edition of the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend was dominated by a story about the actor Rachel Griffiths and her husband, artist Andrew Taylor “playing swapsies” with…
Equal pay was, and still is, one of the key demands of feminists. Basic to any idea of gender equity should be that paid work is fairly rewarded, whether it’s undertaken by a male or female. In early Australian…
It is time we recognised pornography as part of popular culture. Millions of people watch the content the porn industry produces. And make no mistake, it produces a lot of content. According to prominent…
The poster for Secretary is up on my wall at work. I actually paid to see A Dangerous Method purely for Jung’s novel approach to therapy (and God do I hate period films.) While I probably won’t read all…
It seems Australians aren’t ready for a real debate on porn and sex. Yet. The Australian reported last month that Telstra was offering “soft-core pornography” with titles like “Dirty Housewife and Hot…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne