Meanjin "#MeToo" Winter Edition – The Turning Point
This edition's feature essay ‘The Turning Point: One man's downfall, #METoo and the rising up’ is written by Clementine Ford.
Bestselling author Clementine Ford wonders whether the #MeToo movement represents a turning point for women, and if so, what comes next. As she writes, ‘#MeToo has blasted its way through our global society, and it’s left a bloody mess in its wake.’
‘It isn’t the job of women to clean that mess up, to figure out once again how our various traumas must be best folded up and put away out of sight, the house in which we all live clean once more,’ writes Ford. ‘Women do not need men to protect us; we need men to stop protecting each other.’
While Clementine Ford wonders whether the #MeToo movement represents a turning point for women, Anna Spargo-Ryan thinks not: 'In the wake of #MeToo, when women said ‘this time it will be different’, it wasn’t.' Spargo-Ryan looks at the institutional, cultural and habitual barriers to sexual equality.
Joumanah El Matrah picks over the idea of religious freedom, and in the aftermath of the same-sex marriage vote wonders whether, ‘What is seeking protection here is not God, but an unethical construction of him, not religion, but an unconscionable interpretation of it'.
Liz Conor recalls the section 18C case against cartoonist Bill Leak, a culture war kerfuffle that had remarkable parallels to an earlier race controversy over the work of Eric Jolliffe. Everything old, she concludes, is new again.
Clare Payne argues that women are entering a new age of empowerment, a generational shift in wealth that will shift the balance of economic power. Timmah Ball brings an Indigenous perspective to the home ownership debate. Colin Bisset composes an ode to bleak building materials, and finds sunshine in concrete. Hugh Mackay offers calm reflections on the madness of Year 12. Katharine Murphy salutes a lost friend and mentor in Michael Gordon.
Carmel Bird ponders her many connections to Nobel prize contender Gerald Murnane. Alice Bishop writes on the heartbreak of fire, destruction and regrowth. And Harry Saddler listens to the world with the ears of a dog.
There’s new fiction from Randa Abdel-Fattah, Beejay Silcox, Laura Elvery and 2018 Vogel Prize winner Emily O’Grady. The edition's poets include Fiona Wright, John Kinsella, Kevin Brophy, Kate Middleton and Hazel Smith.
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