The Girls Are Coming

Gen Z Activists are go!

American poet Kate Bauer recently posted her poem There Are Days on Instagram.  

There are days I can’t believe we let the boys

with the new blue jeans and slick haircuts

decide the emotions of fourth grade girls.

And how those boys grow into Fall Athletes

and Spring Play Leads, all arms around our

waists and can I call you baby now that we are

thin. And how they follow us to college, haunt

our rooms with little deaths. How they slip

behind a desk to sign our paychecks, become

somebody’s husband. Say: now that I have a

daughter. How they climb and climb and

climb and climb.

Bauer’s words cut sharp and true for me this month as we cope with stories of sexual assault across two different fronts: the sexual violence teenage girls are suffering, and the sexual violence allegedly happening inside our own Parliament. It’s been enraging and exhausting, and the worst part of it all is the picture it paints of an ageless, intractable link between men’s entitlement and women’s suffering, from school to the halls of power, from adolescence to middle age, as long as they both shall live.

Now former-Attorney-General Christian Porter denies the allegation made against him that as a seventeen year old schoolboy attending a debating contest in 1988, he raped a sixteen year old schoolmate. The allegation against him follows the statement from former Liberal staffer Brittany Murphy that she was raped in 2019 in a ministerial office by a colleague, the revelations of secret WhatsApp groups sharing photos of staffers masturbating on the desks of female colleagues, NSW Minister Andrew Laming being accused of harassing two female members of the public, as well as taking an ‘upskirt’ photo of a woman working in a local store, and National MP Michael Johnson resigning over claims he sexually assaulted a female sex worker in the Blue Mountains. (He denies this allegation but does not deny sending the woman a series of texts during Question Time including one that read ‘Fuck, I’m horny.’)

Canberra is reeling.

Meanwhile, 22 year old Sydney activist Chanel Contos has collected more than 4000 first-person testimonies of teenage sexual assault across South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria, Queensland, the ACT and NSW, and published more than 1000 of them on her website so far. Her petition calls for the better, earlier inclusion of ‘consent’ into school sex education.

At a regional art gallery in NSW, I recently examined the work ‘A Seat At The Table’ by Amber Wilson from Kiama High School. She had embroidered the whole of Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’ onto a tea-towel. ‘I will not be lectured by this man’, began the beautiful calligraphy. (‘This man’ was former PM Tony Abbott, who appointed one woman in his nineteen-member cabinet, said that men were ‘by physiology or temperament more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command’, and infamously appointed himself as Minister for Women.) Alongside the tea-set that formed part of the installation were a row of photo-realistic, creepy fingers, pointing at the Mad Monk for all eternity.

In this historic month in Australia, it is impossible to ignore the metaphorical connection between the testimonies of teenage assault collected by Contos and the historical allegation of teenage assault levelled against Christian Porter that set a new era of rage in motion. The pathos bites hard: two bright young brains, one who went on to a glittering political career and the other, who went on to take her own life; their stories placed against the backdrop of Contos’ harrowing tide of teenage testimonies.

How they climb and climb and climb and climb.

The weight of the patriarchy can seem overwhelming, and protest can feel pointless, but these issues are gaining traction in a moment when the vote-harnessing power of social media is changing the paradigm. With her petition, Contos is galvanising a growing number of high school principal and alumni associations along with the Australian Human Rights Commission and Stacey Maloney, the head of the NSW Police Sex Crimes Squad.

Contos worked with Maloney to develop Operation Vest, which gives women an informal platform to share reports of sexual assault with police without launching a criminal investigation.

According to recent figures from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, reported sexual assaults rose by 10 per cent in 2020. 15, 000 women came forward, but only 2 per cent of those complaints led to guilty verdicts in court. Lawyer, activist, and author of ‘Eggshell Skull’ Bri Lee is one of those young women working to try and break down the systemic barriers against women in our legal system.

Meanwhile, lawyer, activist and author of ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ Jess Hill is working to legalise the notion of ‘coercive control’, which codifes the patterns of domestic and family abuse that result in the death of nearly two women every week at the hands of a current or ex-partner. Hill calls it ‘intimate terrorism.’ Earlier this month, Grace Tame, Young Australian Of The Year, called for a greater understanding of ‘grooming’ in child sexual assault during a moving and powerful Press Club address.

In Canberra, five enquiries have now been announced, including one headed by Kate Jenkins, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner.  The federal government has announced an independent and confidential 24/7 telephone service providing information, counselling and referrals to support current and former Commonwealth ministerial, parliamentary and electorate office staff who have experienced sexual voilence, sexual assault or sexual harrassment.

Change is in motion. But it is slow. And it hurts. I feel despair at the scale of the problem, the ugliness of misogyny, the dark shadow of the patriarchy that affects us in small ways and large; but I feel a spark of hope when I think about young women saying ‘no more’, as they bring their wondrous energies to the daunting task of tackling violence against women.

Young brains are glorious. We all know that the abilities for sound decision making, impulse control, judgment and empathy are not complete until the prefrontal cortex is fully developed at about age twenty-five, but our capacity to learn is greatest in adolescence, and the power of a teenage girl in full outrage has the burn of a thousand suns.

Young activists are bringing this hot new energy to their art and their organising. ‘We are on the precipice of a revolution,’ said Grace Tame at her Press Club address. This reckoning is long overdue. The girls are coming. Thank god, I say. And thank you. Because the old birds amongst us are pretty tired.

Emotionally, it’s been a tough few weeks, comrades. I hope you are all trying to prioritise self-care. For me, that includes lots of time in the tub with my new love: Body Shop Egyptian Milk and Honey Bath.

Here are a few uplifting, spirit-filling moments for you:

The Angel City Chorale sings ‘Rain In Africa’:

Dwight learns ‘Active Listening’:

Kristen Wiig Meets Her First Lesbian:

On TV, for calming, restorative self-care viewing I recommend Our Yorkshire Farm on Channel 9 catchup (just lovely!) and Fisk on IView (sweet and hilarious!)

To read, books by two friends: Paris or Die by Jayne Tuttle and Grace Under Pressure by Tori Haschka. I cannot recommend both of these books more highly on my scales of escapism and delight. They are smart, funny and insightful.

Finally, if you like your podcast comedy disgustingly filthy, I highly recommend Joan and Jericha, although more than one friend has dropped it in horror and texted me to say they could not get past 5 minutes! Me, I find these women so funny I could cry. Or maybe I could just cry.

Take care out there my comrades. Get in that bath!

XRach