My questions to Q&A for tonight

I've sent these questions in for tonight's show. I'll let you know if they're shortlisted.

Melinda Tankard Reist

You lobby for respectful images of women in the media. In spite of decades of talking about gender issues, and women’s rights, women and girls are disrespected by images on billboards, and now also on t shirts. A few years ago the NSW Police Commissioner said that women are fundamentally disrespected in our society. What is it going to take to change our culture so that women are fundamentally respected?

Melinda Tankard Reist

At the end of each year we read stories about dance concerts where scantily clad little girls are bumping and grinding. My family was asked to leave our dance school when I suggested that having children dance to songs about sex when they don’t know it is about sex is exploitation. How do we educate dance schools to be more aware of their gendered messages, and to have more respect for children?

Prof Greer

You once said that mothers need a union. Given the aims of the women's movement have not been met - we still don't value care work, we don't equally share domestic work and women are not fairly represented in positions of power - how can we activate mothers for social change?


There is a limit of 80 words for the questions, so you have to keep it snappy. You can submit your questions here:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/ask-question.htm

Send a question to Q&A

Next Monday night both Germaine Greer and Melinda Tankard Reist are on the panel for Q&A. That's exciting. I've been in the audience when Germaine Greer has appeared on the show before. The producers liked a question I submitted and paid for my cab fare so I could attend. I didn't get to ask my question in the end, but I really enjoyed being there.

With two active feminists on the show, this is a good opportunity to submit a question. Send a question you really want to know the answer to, or send a question to draw attention to your burning issue. A good opportunity to talk about mothering and feminism, protecting children, social policy or work/life balance.

You might want to ask something about the issues Melinda Tankard Reist works with on Collective Shout.

http://collectiveshout.org/


The link to the ABC website is here:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/


I'll see what I can come up with and submit a few questions. I'm looking forward to watching next week's show.

Honoured feminists disassociate themselves from the f word

In SMH today - a piece by Nina Funnell.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/leading-women-lay-off-the-fword-but-are-we-better-served-without-it-20110209-1amy3.html?comments=19#comments

This year, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, the Australian Postal Corporation printed four stamps commemorating the contributions of four feminist "trailblazers", Germaine Greer, Anne Summers, Eva Cox and Elizabeth Evatt.


Only here is the peculiar thing. During the lunch to launch the stamp, the word feminism was not uttered once. Zero. Zip. Niente....

Afterwards I spoke to Greer to get her thoughts on it all. "Feminism?" she queried. "Oh it's such an old fashioned word anyway." Cox and Summers went one step further, describing the word as both traditionalist and conservative.

"To be honest, I am not - and never have been - hung up on the word 'feminism','' says Summers. ''I never used it when I was young because feminism was seen as very conservative and backward-looking then. Today's young women have a similarly disdainful attitude. They see feminism as old-fashioned - just as we did when we were the same age. To me, what matters is that women (and men) support women's equality and all that is needed to achieve that. It's what we think and how we act that really matters."

Cox adds that feminism was an extremely conservative term and so "was not the term preferred by many '70s activists who used the term women's liberation [which was considered far more radical]".

Um, I'm sure I've seen and heard these women at feminist conferences. I'm sure I've heard them use the word amongst other feminists. What is going on here?

While I do understand that walking the walk is more important than talking the talk, and that the word has negative connotations that cause young women to not identify a feminist, I also don't understand why these older, active women want to distance themselves from the word. Did they have a meeting and agree on this?