Monkeys should monkey, humans should human

When I was all but 7, my parents took my siblings and I on a holiday to Bali where in true Australian-middle-class fashion, we all got sunburnt, got our hair braided so tight that it began to snap at the roots and I got a particularly repulsive strain of the notorious “Bali Belly”. The sort of holiday that was great at the time – but in retrospect is reminiscent of an early 2000s Australiana that borrowed far too many themes from The Castle. We’ve all grown a lot since. I swear.

One of the things about this trip that comes to my mind almost immediately (second to vomiting out my nose into a drop toilet), is a young man we met while hopping between tourism hotspots.

Any details about this man have escaped me. What was so memorable about him is that walking beside him on all fours was a Macaque monkey. Dressed in tiny handmade clothes. On a leash. It’s perfect monkey hands looked more like my own hands than the man’s did.

I felt my tiny not-even-a-decade-old heart break. I felt sad. Confused. Sickened. It unsettled me to see this wild thing being made to perform for its master. It unsettled me that there was a master, visible in such a point blank, starkly obvious way. There appeared to be no shame about the animal abuse that was so clear to me, a child.

We apply human characteristics to animals because it makes life simpler for us. We are a very clever species, but we are a self-centred one and we are only capable of seeing the world through our own lens, polished by our life experiences and our personal consciousness. The danger with anthropomorphising animals is that while it makes life neater for us, it also makes wild animals become responsible for their actions. They become worthy of reward or culpable for punishment (Nauert). This holds animals to a standard that they simply don’t qualify for. That they cannot fulfil because they shouldn’t even be in the competition. Is a dog deserving of a smack because it didn’t understand your command? Of course not. It may not even understand the difference between behaviour and misbehaviour. It may not understand anything in the same way that humans do.

A continual argument for anthropomorphising animals is that doing so helps humans feel empathy towards wild animals, and in turn, treat them better. Protect the reef. Stop the Yulin Dog Meat Festival. Preserve our natural wildlife.

But if we all had baby pandas in our homes to dress in children’s wear and spoon feed, would we care more about the destruction of natural bamboo forests? Maybe we would. But maybe we would not.

This concept was drawn upon in the case of Zoos Victoria’s Lunar, the anthropomorphised figurehead of Leadbeater Possums. Research revealed that visitors of the zoo were able to apply human characteristics to mascot Lunar, which were then translated to live Leadbeater possums. This demonstrated a relationship between anthropomorphism, emotional connection and attitudes of conservation (Skibins, Smith & O’Brien).

However, it’s important to note that Lunar is not a living Leadbeater possum, but a fictional character. This is vastly different from humanising a wild animal for our own relatability, which we often seem to do, see: monkeys riding bikes in South East Asia, dancing bears in Russia, the online art trade that profits from elephant-made artworks.

The question to raise here – and interestingly, I have found this particular question occur in each blog thus far – is does the ends qualify the means?

Is humanising, making us lose our humanity?

References:

Nauert, R. 2015, ‘Why Do We Anthropomorphize?’, Psych Central, retrieved on March 30, 2017 <https://psychcentral.com/news/2010/03/01/why-do-we-anthropomorphize/11766.html&gt;

Skibins, J, Smith, A & O’Brien, J 2015 ‘Can Anthropomorphism Help Save the Leadbeater’s Possum’, IZE Journal, vol. 51, pp. 22-25.

Framing Poverty

Part 1.

I have been one of the lucky ones. I came from a family that valued education. For the majority of my life there were two substantial and consistent incomes feeding through our house. When things were hard, my siblings and I were none the wiser. It’s only years later my mother has divulged details of once having only $25 to feed our family for the week. She was nervous. That nervousness multiplied when I came down with a sickness that required antibiotics for the price of $13. That left us with $12 to keep 5 bellies from grumbling. We ate a lot of rice and canned beans. While sometimes things were tough for us on Crittenden Road, we were never truly in the throes of poorness. We were always looking in from the outside.

The cycle of poverty is a vicious one. A lack of critical resources like education, government services and financial support is engulfing generations of Australia’s poorest with the feeling that they just can’t seem to get ahead. Like cancer, generational poverty can seem nearly impossible to escape from. And just like cancer, poverty’s impacts are wide-reaching, devastating and multi-dimensional.

It does seem bizarre to compare poverty to cancer – but what I’m trying to do is draw attention to the fact that both of these issues are killing Australians, but the framing differs vastly.

Poverty impacts impoverished people. So does cancer; the difference is that cancer impacts rich people too. For this reason, fundraisers for cancer research are seemingly taking place almost every weekend. The nation’s empathy for those effected by cancer can be illustrated with the $15 million that was raised for cancer research in 2015 (Cancer Council 2016).

We recognise that people don’t choose cancer. But so many of us are unable to apply the same logic to generational poverty. Why not? 13.3% of Australia’s population is living below the poverty line (Australian Council of Social Services 2016). I find it hard to imagine any of these almost 3 million people actively choose to suffer. To wonder how food is going to end up on the table. To internalise their ostracism from the better-off.

Watching the cringe-worthy and sadistic SBS’s Struggle Street, you can almost hear the groans of “get off drugs”, “eat better food”, “get a job.”

Struggle Street isn’t a program shedding light on the sick and needy. It’s poverty porn. It is framed in a way that permeates classism. The outro music plays and we recline on our sofas and exhale the deep breath of people who didn’t have to trade salvaged copper for coinage. “What sad people” we think to ourselves. The irony is palpable.

Part 2.

 

We need to feel that an issue is relatable to feel compelled towards making a difference. There is so much suffering in the world. And so many attempts to lessen that suffering. There’s Kick-starters for cost-efficient water-purifying systems in Rwanda, there’s Facebook call-outs inviting each person to donate $2 to the local women’s shelter, there’s the same man selling The Big Issue outside Redfern Station every single morning. There’s an inundation of problems that require attention and funding, and a slew of campaigns to help. To fight hunger. To kill poverty. To fix.

Because of this inundation of “donate now” buttons and “change a life” banners, us privileged, White-Wings-instead-of-Homebrand types are finding it harder to decipher which account numbers to dial in. A first world non-problem, but a non-problem that not-for-profit organisations are all too aware of.

So sometimes, they get dirty. They risk devaluing their organisation to bring in extra funds. It is exemplified in Jack Black’s feature for Red Nose Day.

Let’s talk about the painfully repugnant, “what if this was your son/cousin/nephew?” trope.

The subject depicted is certainly someone’s son. He’s someone’s child. Maybe someone’s brother. He might be someone’s nephew. That’s not why we should care about him. We should care about him because he is a person. Because he matters and his life is valuable.

These campaigns are invariably aimed at the white and privileged, and clearly play on the idea that these people like to think they care about the less fortunate. But in truth, they are only able to bring themselves to care when it is framed in a way that involves them. This doesn’t encourage an attitude of true compassion, it frames a legitimate issue in a way that fosters egocentric ideologies and elitism.

References:

Australian Council of Social Service 2016, Poverty in Australia Report, ACOSS, viewed 27 March 2016, < http://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Poverty-in-Australia-2016.pdf&gt;

Cancer Council 2016, Research Highlights 2016/15, Cancer Council NSW, viewed 22 March 2016, < https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Cancer-Council-NSW_Research-Annual-Report-2015-16.pdf&gt;

Selfies & Female Empowerment

The projector buzzed into action and the notorious Kim Kardashian nude bathroom selfie settled into the light. Our class, staring at Kim’s plummeting curves, and Kim, the Venus, staring at her reflection through her iPhone. A matrix of gazes.

Another student queried as to, “why couldn’t she just put a sports bra on?”
She could do that, she chose not to.

Lindsay Kite, an American academic in the field of body image and media contends that “you don’t have to show your body to prove that you value your body… we don’t ask men to prove their confidence by sharing their bodies online” (Murphy 2016).

This double standard can be visualised in a study on undergraduate male and female students and their relationships with objectified body consciousness, physical self-conceptions and self-reported physical activity. It is unsurprising that women reported significantly higher levels of body shame and body surveillance than their male counterparts (John & Ebbeck 2008). Male empowerment is not often connected to physical appearance because males haven’t been systematically conditioned that way, as women have.

I can see the argument against nude selfies. As feminists, we want equal footing. We want women to feel that they are not to be reduced to only their physical appearance, their sexuality, and the services they can offer men. Following this train of thought, taking and sharing revealing photos that show the body may be viewed as working in opposition to these aspirations. In short: showing women in little or no clothing could be just another way to objectify them, to tell them that their primary worth rests in their appearance.

While this view makes sense in a lot of ways, I don’t believe that it is so cut-and-dry – this interpretation feels eerily simple, and vastly incomplete.
As I mentioned earlier, women have been told for centuries that their bodies are the business of everyone. That they ought to look a certain way. Act a certain way. Be a certain way.

Since it’s conception, the media, marketing and advertising has been telling its audience that women are always being watched by men. A study conducted in 2000 on the analysis of gender relations and patriarchal constructs in tourism images recognised that the language and imagery in tourism promotion privileges the male heterosexual gaze (Pritchard & Morgan 2000). Pritchard & Morgan continue to suggest that this reflects society and the media’s values, rather than an anti-feminist agenda from the tourism industry itself.

Our society has been landscaped in a way to appeal to the male gaze. It’s a patriarchal one. One that favours the white male’s way of viewing the world. In a society built by the white cis-gendered man, as women we often only see ourselves how we ought to be seen – through the eyes of a man. We forget how to conceive ourselves through our own lens.

This is why reclaiming our bodies from these oppressive ideologies is just so important. To snatch them away from the male gaze and represent them how we, the women in these bodies want them to be represented.

Our female bodies (and I don’t mean anatomically female, I mean any person who identifies as female) are evidence that the male gaze represents a warped, unrealistic view of the world. Our bodies are our own, stretch marks, scars, lots of cellulite or none, dark complexions or fair ones, size 18 or size 6: they are ours. Taking selfies is a way for women to control how they are seen – to reinstate our sense of self. An important point to note here is also that having a body that does align with intrinsically feminine traits is not a crime either. Big breasts are not anti-feminist, but demonising other women due to their cup size, is.

This is an excerpt I always return to, because too often ‘vanity’ is misplaced into this conversation: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure” – John Berger.

Our female bodies are not for the consumption of men. They are for us. They are strong, complex, imperfect, worthy subjects, and our patriarchal society has tried so hard to tell us otherwise, but I’m trying not to listen. Maybe I’ll just start taking my selfies with headphones in.

 

References:

John, D & Ebbeck V 2008, Gender-Differentiated Associations among Objectified Boy Consciousness, Self-Conceptions and Physical Activity, Sex Roles, vol. 58, no. 9-10, pp. 623-632.

Murphy, M 2016, INTERVIEW: Lindsay Kite on empowerment, body positivity, objectification, and the Internet, Feminist Current, weblog post, 29 March, viewed 9 March 2017, <http://www.feministcurrent.com/2016/03/29/interview-lindsay-kite-on-empowerment-body-positivity-and-selfies&gt;

Pritchard, A & Morgan, NJ 2000, Privileging the male gaze: Gendered tourism landscapes, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 884-904.

Research Proposal: It’s not just up to NASA to study space

The man that raised me was a journalist. More importantly, he was a writer. A book lover. A man whose voice never dominates but will always cut through the noise. A man who had the capacity to not decorate, but to create spaces with words. As a child, I would watch him tie himself in knots over stories he was writing. He would lean over the computer and agonise over each keystroke. He was a perfectionist. But some of his most influential work came off-the-cuff.

He would recall stories to me of his time in the Courier Mail newsroom. A boozy, romantic time when the inked word still reigned supreme and the building was a hotbed for creatives, eccentrics and 80s perms.

He would describe details that no one else would think to notice. The tone a co-worker

Celebrating my Dad’s birthday earlier this month.

took when she would request her coffee to be “strong and milky” (what?), the shapes the cigarette smoke took as it shimmied to the ceiling, how each colleague sat, the yells across the office, the scent of Mount Gay. I wasn’t there – I wasn’t even alive, yet this space to me is textured, the details so clear – that I feel like I could have been. My Dad saw spaces through a lens of enquiry. He viewed what some would see as the mundane, in technicolour.

This pronounced storytelling has influenced me to look at spaces with further depth. To strive to understand each individual space in a social, cultural and political context. This is not assigning meaning where it is absent, but understanding that meaning is omnipresent and shapes our everyday lives.

In this project, I will attempt to understand the modes of meaning that operate in a contemporary university lecture hall, I will ask the question, “what shape does an Australian lecture hall take in 2017?”. This means understanding institutional values, modes of authority and social practice amongst lecturers and students alike. I will start large and as my research progresses, I envision my questioning to narrow, become more specific and more defined.

I will focus on both the physical and virtual spaces of lecture theatres through coupling both ethnographic research made possible through a series of one-on-one interviews and statistical data through surveys.

Ethnography as a means of data collection is so important because our lives aren’t just a combination of 1s and 0s. They are rich and complicated, and to represent others respectfully, it is imperative to understand that. Just like my Dad did.

– A m e l i a