I thought people said things would get better under Rudd.

Where’s the evidence? This certainly isn’t it!

The State Government faced a public backlash yesterday after the Herald revealed laws had been quietly introduced to prevent people “causing annoyance” to participants in the huge Catholic event which will climax with the Pope’s arrival in Sydney in two weeks.

During a meeting with two leading victims groups yesterday, senior police said protesters would also have to include details of their planned messages.

Protesting without police clearance could result in demonstrators being charged under extraordinary new powers which came into effect yesterday.

The sweeping nature of the regulations is threatening to create a legal and political minefield with protesters apparently willing to test both the scope of the laws and the willingness of the authorities to uphold them.

I am pretty heavily involved in the local battle for same-sex marrriage, with the past five months being dedicated to the battle for Civil Unions with Ceremonies. Last night a much watered down version of the Civil Partnerships Bill we’ve been fighting for was passed. A bill that doesn’t include ceremonies.

My housemate and I headed out to the legislative assembly at about 8.30pm and ran into a couple of local Queers. We spent the next 5 hours popping in and out of the assembly, chatting to MLA’s, drinking beer, and waiting. At about 1am the debate on the Civil Partnerships Bill started. I am, in spite of my recent involvement in Politics, very new at this, and so didn’t know any of the speakers other than Deb Fosky (Greens), Andrew Barr (Labor) and Simon Corbell (the Attorney General, Labor), and I only knew them because of their involvement in the protest movement. I spent most of the night not knowing the rules, and didn’t even bow the first couple of times we went in and out of the Assembly.

I was pleased to see that the members were eager to put their opinions of the Federal Governments push to have the bill watered down on the record. The bill doesn’t allow for legal ceremonies for same-sex marriage and requires that one member of the couple be resident in the ACT (ie you move across the state border to Queanbeyan, and your Civil Partnership isn’t valid anymore). Those are the two amendments we were most opposed to, however there were 15 homophobic amendments forced upon us by the Federal Government all together.

Some of my colleagues and friends from the CCU are extremely disappointed in the results from last night. However, I think that even if the bill is not the bill we hoped for, we should keep in mind the position that places the Tasmanian and Victorian lobby groups in to fight for inclusion of various rights we were granted, that they still do not have. We can fight for amendments, the battle is not over, neither here in the ACT or around the country in other states and territories.

I fought hard for this bill, and it is a step in the right direction. I was one of the queers in the gallery that stood and clapped when the bill was passed. I do not agree that the Bill is a ‘skull fucked corpse‘ of its former self, and find that phrasing deliberately inflammatory. Yes, the territory could, and SHOULD have done things better. Yes, its not the bill we hoped for. Yes, its been amended into a registration scheme by another name. However, it is still a step in the direction of legal equality for LGBT people in the ACT, and around the country.

So, last time the civil unions campaign was all Fluffy Bunnies, Rainbows, and Hugs all round! (Even from the media!)

This time… things are getting… nasty. The Federal Government is being a bunch of homophobic bastards, and our local state government is looking for a way to back down without losing the queer vote come the October elections.
Good Process, formerly *the* Queer Lobby Group seems to be oscillating between offering us good advice, and sending out carefully push polled surveys.

I am ANGRY. Very very ANGRY.

My personal opinion is that marriage is a patriarchal and capitalist institution designed to part people from their money, and subjugate women. I think that is ALL THE MORE REASON for queers to be able to get married. First of all, some want to, and second of all, it fucks with the paradigm.

The rhetoric surrounding the whole thing is just fucked up. The government doesn’t want same-sex couples ‘mimicking heterosexual marriage’, for the all the world like they are talking about children, or monkeys, playing a game they don’t understand.
They want us to content ourselves with a relationship registry… so our intimate lovers can have the same legal rights as the carer of a non-related dependent. The ‘Dog Registration Scheme’ its been called.

Really, WHAT THE FUCK?

So anyway, Becca at Burning Words has a couple of good posts up about the Civil Unions.
In particular, check out her guide to ways to help the ACT Civil Unions Campaign.
She also has a more coherent rant about Good Process, which is worth a read.

Its not all angst, and hostility though. The Australian version of LOTL interviewed Becca for their ‘Lesbians on the Loose’ feature, regarding this Civil Unions thing. We were really excited about that.

This article will be published in the next edition of the Green Left Weekly. They are an actual PAPER SOLID STATE HARD COPY type publication. This is the first time I have ever been published, other than self-publication.

Playing P!NK makes my indie-snob friends roll their eyes at me. “Her music is so… POP” they comment, with snorts of derision. My reply is always “Oh, you haven’t watched her video’s have you?”

P!NK is clever. P!NK is controversial. P!NK is filling a niche that most of us ignore.

P!NK understands teenagers. She says: “I don’t buy that shit – [airy fairy] ‘oh, 16 year olds don’t know what the hell’s going on.’ Please: 16 year olds are reading the newspaper, they’re politicised.”

P!NK’s music may sound like your every day pop, but its far from the kind of poisonous misogynistic drivel that most pop diva’s feed our young women. So many people heard P!NK’s first album, ‘Can’t Take Me Home’, and wrote her off, as just another Pop Princess. After that album, P!NK took herself to a new producer and demanded more control over the production process. Her second album ‘Mizzunderstood’ clearly shows the difference, one of the songs says: “LA told me; ‘You’ll be a pop star, all you have to do, is change everything you are’”.

Now though, P!NK is not compromising one bit, as she is her own independent musical force. Her latest album, ‘I’m Not Dead’ is the most political yet.

Under their glittery pop-music beat, her songs deal with hard issues. “A Long Way to Happy” is written about P!NK’s own experience with sexual abuse. “Family Portrait” is about her parents divorce, “I have seen the Rain” is about soldiers suffering PTSD. “Who Knew” isn’t a regular song about a break up, its about losing a lover to a drug overdose.

P!NK’s just warming up though; her claws come out when she takes a shot at popular culture and its treatment of women. “Stupid Girls” with its hilarious video parodying hollywood socialites, and empowering message for girls, was downloaded 8.6 MILLION times before the single was even released. “U + UR Hand” with its sexy, but subversive video, goes on to celebrate female independence, and tells girls that its ok to say NO to a guy, even if he bought that drink for you.

The most exciting song though, is ‘Dear Mr President’, which spent months at the top of the charts in 2007, until even *I* got sick of seeing the video on MTV. This song is heavily political, and asks the questions P!NK would ask if she could go for a walk with President Bush. The Chorus is:

Let me tell you ’bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way
Let me tell you ’bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away
Let me tell you ’bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box
Let me tell you ’bout hard work
Hard work
Hard work
You don’t know nothing ’bout hard work
Hard work
Hard work
Oh

She also asks “what kind of father would hate his own daughter if she were gay” and taunts the president saying that he has “come a long way from whiskey and cocaine”.

P!NK is an important cultural phenomenon. She’s a pop artist, there is no doubt about that, but if you look closer, you can see how she is bringing satire, politics, independent thought, and questions about society to a generation that is being raised trapped by a new kind of feminine subservience.

She is a role model, with more than twenty tattoo’s, a foul mouth, and loud political opinions. Her physique is muscular, she swings from trapezes, and dances with blow up dolls at her concerts. She declares herself President P!NK and makes crude oil free, and same-sex marriage legal when fooling around with her crew backstage in a documentary. She is a woman full of strength, energy and power. She has mass appeal.

If I had a teenage daughter, I would much rather her want to be like P!NK, than any other young female celebrity in the media today.

Hat tip to Samhita at Feministing for this one.

I laughed my arse off watching this. I think that I found it even more amusing, because it kinda reminded me a bit of my current relationship.

EDIT: I fail at posting Video’s… here’s a link to the original, if its not showing up

Yay for the Netherlands supporting LGBT rights!

There is a fabulous post about Feminist Identification over at Feministe from their wonderful guest blogger, La Lubu.

She has a comprehensive list of ways in which she feels a disconnect from the feminist movement, and it got me to thinking about my own identity, and ways in which I overlap with the feminist movement, and other ways in which I feel alienated from mainstream feminism.

I have privileges. I am white, and able-bodied. I conform to a mainstream beauty standard. I am relatively educated, and so have a greater economic and class mobility than average. Parts of the mainstream feminist movement that mean a lot to me include area’s relating to my career in business, reclaiming my sexuality, and fighting against sexual violence. I have the privilege of not needing to worry about various issues, such as the rights of the disabled, the very young, the very old, people of colour, including Indigenous peoples and immigrants, the very poor, the homeless, the ill-educated.

I feel myself growing more aware of the marginilisation of the minorities I belong to as time goes on. I am queer. I am pagan. I have a mental illness.
In turn it makes me eager to address issues that I have the privilege of ignoring, that I can leave invisible if I so desire, in empathy for those times when I wonder “What about lesbians?” in response to a post.

Here are the area’s of feminism that I would like to see more focus on in my blogging, because if I don’t… who will?

Links to blogs that deal with these issues are more than welcome in the comments, cos I am always after more information!
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but simply three area’s that I am interested in focussing on for the foreseeable future. I will also continue blogging about sexual violence, the representation of women in comics and pop culture media, and other issues that Cheerful Megalomaniac is known for covering, this is just a reminder to me to cover things that are of great interest to me, but that I tend to neglect because information is a little harder to locate… after all, these are issues marginalised by the mainstream feminist community.

This post is also a call out to anyone that feels marginalised or invisible in response to a post. Call me on it. Make me see when I have neglected to address how you may be effected by the issue being discussed.

I just watched the last part of the Debate between Howard and Rudd, and I was very amused. Poor Howie, he simply wasn’t at his best.

I was very very impressed by Kevin Rudd though, and I sincerly hope that he is our next Prime Minister. (Dude is promising fast, cheap broadband… that is a PM I want in power!)

I was quite surprised to hear announced at the end of the ABC broadcast of the debate that backstage John Howard had ordered the cutting of the Opinion Worm transmission that was being streamed to channel 9, and its back up stream. Channel 9 managed to pirate the Worm from another source, and it was broadcast anyway. The Worm did not like Howard at all, it was Rudds pet.

As the channel nine presenter said about it: “So much for freedom of speech.”