No, “Woke” Gender Ideology Did Not Cause NSW’s Surge In Violence Against Women

In the last few months, NSW has endured a deeply tragic slew of violent acts committed against women and girls. 

Some of the alleged harms include the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by three Scotts College boys, the sexual assault of three women in a Melbourne Hotel involving multiple Sydney Swans players, and the death of a 16-year-old girl on Sydney’s Northern Beaches via consensual sexual strangulation by a male partner. 

There is no national issue more egregious, or more worthy of our respect, quiet contemplation, and aggressive activism, than this epidemic of misogynistic violence. And the best of us are doing just that. 

Aussie Women Move To Combat Misogynistic Violence In NSW

Teach Us Content founder Chanel Contos is lobbying for an opt-out feature for social media algorithms, so men and young boys aren’t so easily swallowed up by the cavernous “manosphere” echo-chambers that aggressively promote the subjugation of women. 

Minister for Social Services Tanya Plibersek has made a public statement urging parents to have open discussions with their children about the dangers of sexual strangulation.

A growing wave of activists, including Cheek Media’s Hannah Ferguson, has followed Plibersek in calling the Australian Government to criminalise pornography depicting sexual strangulation.

And yet, while some are making a serious effort to dismantle misogynistic violence at its core, others are using these recent tragedies as a vehicle to advance their most tired, inert, and queerphobic talking points.

Family First Party’s NSW Candidate Is Blaming “Gender Ideology”

Among these conservatives is Lyle Shelton, the Family First Party’s NSW Legislative Council candidate, who has decided the real issue is gender diversity.

“How can a program teach young men to respect women when our political and educational establishment struggles to even define what a woman is?” Mr Shelton said, arguing that “gender ideology” has rendered our state’s consent programs ineffective. 

Reading this statement, I find two interesting things on my tongue. The first is bile, and the second is a question: why is knowing what a woman is — i.e. what she looks like, what genitalia she has, and how she ought to behave — a prerequisite for respecting her? If all human beings are equal and deserving of bodily autonomy and dignity — regardless of sex, gender, or social role—why should the definition of “woman” have any bearing on a boy’s decision to respect anyone, much less on their broader understanding of consent?

Obviously, to say a boy must know what a woman is to respect her is a non sequitur. That boy need only know that all human life is innately deserving of respect to know that sexually assaulting a classmate, no matter the length of her hair or her pronouns, is wrong.

But According To Patriarchy, A Woman’s Value Isn’t Innate

But for a certain kind of man, the definition of a woman is a prerequisite for respecting her. Because her dignity and value is not innate, but determined by how well she conforms to the definition of womanhood imposed upon her.

Which is perhaps why, in Mr Shelton’s subsequent examples, the solution is not to model respect for all people, or even for all women. It is to model respect for ‘good’ women (the bile returns), ‘definitionally sound’ women, or, in other words, mothers.

“Ideally, [respect for women] is learned first in the home, where a boy sees his father love, honour and respect his mother.

“We need fathers modelling respect for mothers. We need public policy that recognises marriage and stable families as a social good.”

I’ll ignore the fact that grammatically speaking, Mr Shelton has in both cases rendered the “mother” the passive object of the sentence, existing only to graciously receive a father’s respect in front of her sons. What I won’t ignore is Mr Shelton’s exclusion of all other permutations of women from his examples of respect.

What about teaching boys to respect their bratty sisters and classmates? 

What about teaching boys to respect trans women, lesbians, sex workers, bisexual women, and polyamorous women?

What about teaching boys their respect for women is never conditional on her behaviour, occupation, marital status, stage of undress, or how well she is conforming to a fucking definition?

NSW’s Epidemic Of Violence Won’t Be Solved By A Dictionary

Respecting women is not a definitional issue. Those AFL players didn’t lie the sex workers down next to an Oxford Dictionary entry of “women” or get in a heated semantic debate about gender before (allegedly) assaulting them. 

And if it were a definitional issue, could it not have been that their definition wasn’t inclusive enough? That they too had been raised on Mr Shelton’s very conservative, Christian definition of what makes a respectable woman, and had already decided those sex workers weren’t it?

And don’t get me started on the ‘degradation of the nuclear family’ debate. Even ‘good’ women, married women, and mothers, are impacted by misogynistic violence. 1 in 4 women in Australia have experienced violence at the hand of an intimate partner or family member, a figure well-nourished by ‘loving husbands’.

There is a misogyny problem in Australia. Men and boys are being taught violence is okay, and somewhere along the way, we are failing to instill in them the immutable dignity and right to self-determination that belongs to every single human being.

Yes, there is a misogyny problem in Australia, and it’s one we need to discuss with our children, with our policymakers, and with ourselves. But to anyone who thinks that that discussion starts with scapegoating trans women, sex workers, or any other permutation of woman or family you don’t find acceptable, I have only one thing to say to you.

How Dare You

How dare you look at the women and girls being subject to such disgusting treatment, and have the gall to blame “gender ideology”.

How dare you look from afar at the assault of a 14-year-old, and waste clean air blaming “prostitution culture” (which, thanks to wordcount restrictions, will remain a term of Mr Shelton’s I’ll address with internalised fury rather than words).

How dare you sell marriage, the very institution that has rendered women domestic and sexual objects for centuries, as the natural solution. 

No, Mr Shelton. Unfortunately we will not be using these recent tragedies in NSW as an excuse to tighten the definition of a “real woman”, the very box men have been using to oppress both ‘madonna’ and ‘whore’ for centuries.

Rather, instead of gambling our children’s sexual health and bodily autonomy on their classmates’ understanding of womanhood, or on how many times they saw their father being nice to their mother, we’re going to have a more productive discussion.

One about where exactly boys and men are learning consent doesn’t matter, and how we can fix it.