MY RESPONSE TO BOB ELLIS:

Oh I get it now, it seems that because popular culture portrays women as being sexually exploited that means that it’s acceptable. For the latter they deserve to be publically vilified, peeked at in the shower, sexually harassed and abused for speaking out on the matter. Oh and broadcast unknowingly on Skype while having sex. As is tradition.

How do these sentences, these statements, these propositions, cohere? They don’t.

But that is how Bob Ellis sees it, in his piece published on The Drum, titled “Why are heads rolling at the ADFA?”.

Ellis appears to argue that because women have been always been portrayed as objects to be leered at by men, then surely men doing just that is acceptable. He gives the example of Hot Lips Houlihan in the movie M.A.S.H. being oggled at when her shower is unwittingly lifted by a crane. Of which, Elllis writes:

“Are these uniformed men thereafter court-martialled, their commanding general sacked, and Congress made to interrogate all participants? No. Extremely hard to see why. They are guilty, surely, as charged.”

Leaving aside the fact that we’re talking about a movie, Ellis claims this behaviour and what happened at the Australian Defence Force Academy, when a cadet was broadcast having sex via Skype, is acceptable. You know, in the traditional way.

Incidentally, in the movie M.A.S.H, Houlihan and Burns unwittingly broadcast an encounter between them over the PA system. Burns eventually cannot stand being teased about the encounter and is sedated, restrained, and leaves.

Ellis doesn’t go there and realistically Burns probably got over it after he sobbed on the phone to his mother. That is after all, what Ellis suggests might have happened to this cadet had the incident not become a national debate.

But M.A.S.H. is only one film and Ellis has TV examples too!

The Simpsons. Seinfeld, Cheers, Frazier, The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy all show “bungled copulation” and as audiences we judge them as “good sports”. And then there’s his historical evidence, with similar incidents in Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Suetonius and Bible (rather notably, Ellis adds.) Men and women copulate, we all get that. Some of this is fodder for sitcoms, some of this is fodder for poetry, but as soon as you introduce any notion that a sexual act is taking place without consent it is not funny or romantic, more importantly it shouldn’t be normalized. I can’t think of any times that any of these sitcoms, or the Bible for that matter, sought to do this.

Ellis goes even further, by suggesting that this young ADFA cadet was just having his “bedroom technique” observed, “in an almost traditional way, by his flatmates.” I’m not sure what Ellis and his mates got up to in their youth, but I’m guessing there’s a sigh of relief among some of his “conquests” that Skype did not exist at the time.

He is of course right that popular culture continues to objectify women. Yes, a lot of man/woman/sex humour can be funny, but perhaps this complacency has normalized something far more serious for far too long. That a woman could be filmed covertly while having sex with her partner and have it broadcast to his mates is just plain wrong. There are no variations on that fact. That we live in a culture that sends out the message that it could in fact be funny, traditional or normal – Ellis has the evidence (or more correctly, Ellis is the evidence) – perhaps highlights the need for a much broader inquiry.

In an age of apparent gender equality, when I have as many supposed rights as any man in Australian society, when wolf-whistling a woman on the street is frowned upon, how is it that women continued to be objectified by popular culture?

This week a Brisbane Catholic school launched an inquiry into students who were rating female teachers on their physical attributes. A few years ago, members of a Sydney boy’s college started a “pro-rape” facebook page.

Do we all, as Ellis does, shrug our shoulders and say boys will be boys?

If this is the only option, then let me be the first to say, let the wowser-fest begin.