The Sydney Feminists

If you've spent enough time in feminist circles and enough time engaging with allies, you are practically guaranteed to have heard the term "not all men!" If you had an automatic eye-roll reaction, I'll understand, and if not I'll explain. It's the sentiment consistently expressed by men in the face of stories about problematic male behaviour. Not all men, they will say. Not all men are rapists. Not all men are misogynists. Not all men are violent. All of these sentiments are true. But the expression itself is toxic - and I for one will no longer engage with anyone who employs this diversionary tactic any longer. The reason is simple: it's not rhetoric that signals someone is a legitimate ally, it's a logical fallacy designed to derail an important conversation back to a topic they feel is more deserving - namely, men's problems. You might remember something similar in the #alllivesmatter response to the Black Lives Matter movement. There it was ...

It feels like a lifetime ago that I was supporting my best friend in leaving an abusive relationship.   It had honestly never occurred to me that the battle would begin after she had moved out. I should clarify, though, that she was the abuser, and he was the abused. Prior to that point, my feminism had already been waning. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I had been misinformed in my feminism from the start, to the point where my beliefs and actions had begun to feel quite extremist. There was another part, though, that was rooted in the fact that my male friends had started to consider me a sort of safe space, and an overwhelming number of them had been approaching me to describe relationship situations that were causing them significant harm. With these revelations, I became more and more disillusioned with what it meant to be a feminist. I started to notice the way domestic violence helplines were gendered, so that the only helplines targeted to men had already ...

Andrew Nolch is the man arrested for defacing Eurydice Dixon’s memorial. This caused a lot of pain, and a lot of anger. And Nolch has told The Age  that he defaced the memorial as a sort of protest, in his words: “I was upset, and I want to make this clear, this was not a personal attack at all...this was purely an attack on feminism, on mainstream media for hijacking a vaccine-causing issue and turning it into a men are bad, women’s rights issue” As the autism vaccine “theory” has been debunked so many times it’s been turned into a meme, I’m just going to focus on Notch’s anti-feminist angle, and the idea that he was angry about how men are being portrayed in the media. His statement made me wonder which type of feminism Nolch was attacking. Was it liberal feminism? Eco-feminism? Radical feminism? I mean, these can have differing aims, sometimes at odds with one another (see: the feminist discourse around porn) so I wonder which he was protesting?  Ok, I know I’...