It’s been an interesting week in the whirligig of fun that constitutes my understanding of feminism.

Tony Abbott came out in favour of paid maternity leave!

I get that he’s chasing the vagina vote, and we should expect all kinds of ridiculousness from politicians in an election year, but could he seriously think that this ill-conceived (yuk yuk) plan is really going to work?

Even us poor women understand that a government needs to be able to sensibly manage an economy. Abbott apparantly can’t manage a sensible walk in the bush.

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I just discovered what vajazzling is. I thought it was yet another euphemism for vagina.

Its not.

It’s decoration. For your mons and labia. Rhinstones and the like.  I thought the pink dye for pink bits was my Now I’ve Seen It All moment. But no, the internet proved me wrong again.

It’s not really surprising that women hate the looks of their vaginas so much that they need to put colour and sparkle all over it.

I watched the vagina story on Hungry Beast the other night (Firstdogonmoon tweet: “Oh my goodness! Vaginas on telly! And I mean, really on telly. Really. Vaginas. On telly. #abchasvaginasonit”) and, while I don’t usually have much patience with Hungry Beast, it was a hell of a story.

For those of you who missed it, apparantly the Australian Classifications Board will not permit men’s mags to publish “genitally explicit” photos of naked women. Sounds fine, until you realise that this means that every photo of a naked woman can ONLY show a neat little slit and nothing else. Graphic designers photoshop everything else out.

And if you’re wondering why I care what’s in the page 3 photos of men’s magazines I never read? Well, because women are having surgery on their labia so they will look “normal”. What the hell is a "normal" looking vagina? I don't think anyone knows, but I can definitely tell you what it isn't: an adult woman photoshopped-to-fuck so that she looks like a prepubescent girl. If people really feel the need to look at naked girly pictures, then let's not FORCE the purveyors of these pictures to distort the female body, they have enough hand-jerk reactions with the photoshop tools as it is.

Check out the Hungry Beast story, it’s well worth 10 minutes out of your day, but be warned, very much NSFW http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/labiaplasty

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Someone sent me this:

I think there might be something wrong with the girl in the white dress, she appears to have had all her internal organs and half her rib cage removed.

I shall now go and buy a Mimco handbag because that will help me to look like I’ve just been disembowelled. Hooray!

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Also, last week, the Lara Bingle thing happened. I’m fairly certain I shouldn’t care whether a couple of dozy bogans photograph each other in the shower, so I was pleased to discover that I don’t.

I did have a slight gut churning over furore about Woman’s Day publishing the photo though. This is what they think the housewives of Australia are interested in? I don’t know what’s more horrifying: that they think that, or the possibility that they could be right….

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The Monthly paid a man, with no real expertise in the area, to do a hatchet job on Germaine Greer in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the release of The Female Eunuch, which he did by traducing her looks and sneering at her age (about 10 years older than him).

I checked. It wasn’t satire.

In the next issue of The Monthly Barnaby Joyce, Andrew Bolt and Pauline Hanson are going to reflect on Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream Speech – with an accompanying photo of all three of them in full blackface.

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I’m not really sure what the point of all this is, but I think it might be that the feminist revolution worked.

The journalists on the Hungry Beast story were young women and they showed full female genitalia, without prurience, on Australia’s government funded public broadcaster.

Nowra is a pratt, but Greer had full right of reply, which she did, and did it as befits one of the worlds most educated women.

Women all over the world violently, vehemently, vitriolicly disagreed with Nowra – and they were published in the main stream media here and here and here to name a few (some of us even published ourselves).

The paint and glitter for “making your lady bits attractive” and the insanity of photoshopping models into aliens seems to be doing more to create a backlash against this kind of falsifying of the female body than anything else.

Good.

However, should a woman choose to remove her pubic hair, surround her lady bits with rhinestones, photograph the result and put it up on the internet, well, no-one will say her nay.

Also good.

So, to sum up, I proudly drop my pants and wave my white, wobbly nearly 40 year arse at Louis Nowra. Then I go back to work.

Long live the sisterhood!

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