The Sydney Feminists

Image description: Photo of a man against a blurred background of water. He is sitting with his elbows propped up on his knees and his hands clasped over his head. He is looking at the ground in a dejected manner. He is wearing dark wash blue jeans, a blue and brown plaid button-up and a black watch, as well as a wedding ring.  Feminism and women’s rights are just as much a priority for Australian women today as they have ever been. Recently, the media has bombarded us with statistics about domestic violence being the most common cause of injury and death of Australian women under the age of 45. At the time of writing this article, 39 women have been confirmed killed by domestic violence in 2019. ABS statistics from 2016 state one in four women will experience violence by an intimate partner compared to one in 13 men.  In comparison, men are more likely to suffer violence at the hands of another man and more than one in four men suffer violence at the hands of a stranger...

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 ...

Another vibrant, talented young woman died recently at the hands of young men.  Laa Chol was at a party with friends, like many young people over the weekend.  Her life ended as she attempted to diffuse a situation where uninvited, or unwanted, guests had overstayed their welcome.  But this is a situation that happens all the time – all of us can remember our teenage years and being at parties where ‘gate-crashers’ had to be asked to leave.  Some of us may have witnessed fights and police involvement but very few of us will have been at a female-only party where the gate-crashers were young men and it resulted in the stabbing death of a woman. From what I can glean from media reports, the group of people who were supposed to be at the party were women and the gate-crashers were men.  So I was confused as to why the media’s reporting of this focused more of the race of persons involved over another, at least to me, salient fact: why a group of teenage boys and...

I’m writing this for Eurydice Dixon, who was raped and murdered by a man as she walked home from a comedy gig, but I’m also writing this for all of us.  Eurydice Dixon struck a chord with us, especially women I think, because she could have been any of us. We can all relate to her. Even though she is, devastatingly, the thirtieth Australian woman murdered this year according to Destroy the Joint , Eurydice’s story is absolutely universal. We’ve all had to get home alone, maybe not from a gig, but from a bar or friend’s house or even just from work, at some point. And if not all of us, then the vast majority, have felt the powerlessness of being harassed or intimidated by a man. Most of us can recall feeling scared the harassment we’ve endured might’ve escalated. I have a six-minute walk from my closest train station to my door, and I have been harassed on the way home. In the space of six minutes. Multiple times. I think we relate to Eurydice so strongly, because most, if not al...