Burning Words

It’s been a good week for getting rid of politicians with a penchant for sexual harassment.

Earlier in the week, Troy Buswell, the Western Australian state Liberal leader, finally stepped down. Buswell had been lambasted for months after various incidents of sexually harassing women, including sniffing the chair and making sexual remarks towards a Liberal staffer, and snapping open the bra of a Labor staffer, and had unbelievably managed to hold on through several leadership challenges. Finally, after the polls showed that his behaviour had gotten so unpopular that the Liberals were going to get absolutely thrashed, he stepped down, and he’s been replaced by former leader Colin Barnett.

It gets better. Len Kiely, the Northern Territory’s boorish Labor Minister for the Environment, has been defeated in the territory election tonight, with a massive swing of more than 18%, double the general election swing - and that against a three-time loser opposition candidate. Kiely had a history of drunken indiscretions until an incident last year where he made disgusting sexual remarks towards a female security guard while trashed at the cricket. He had to step down as Deputy Speaker - only to be brought back into the ministry by Paul Henderson late last year. Karma came back to him this week, however, when the woman he’d harassed letterboxed Kiely’s electorate with a letter about what he’d done.

Good riddance, you bastards.

And on a completely different note, go read the Down Under Feminists Carnivale over at Audrey and the Bad Apples. It’s easy to forget that we’ve got a lot of great bloggers out here, and I’ve got quite a bit of good reading to catch up on.

Tags: assholes, politics, sexual harassment

There’s a second piece of good news that I’ve been meaning to blog about: I got a new job. This one beats my last one in a lot of ways: better pay, better conditions - and considering I’m working under two women, the rather strong likelihood that I get not to be dicked around for being a woman. This makes me happy.

I was browsing Hugo Schwyzer’s a few days ago, and I really couldn’t believe the sorts of crap some of the MRA types who hang around his blog were spouting. There’s quite a few men there who flatly stated that they wouldn’t associate with a woman in the workplace if it could be avoided for fear they’d be the subject of a sexual harassment complaint. And it’s just…I get that these people are misogynist idiots, but to really not view us as human, to be capable of being empathised with…it’s just, jesus. I really feel for the women who have to work with these obnoxious cretins.

See, I’ve never had a good experience with male managers. I’ve had two jobs as an adult, and both men I’ve worked under had issues with women. I noticed over the first few weeks at my first job that if an issue arose with my area (or the women at our other office), my boss would go completely ballistic, whether or not anything was actually our fault, as opposed to the “mate, what’s going on here?” stance he’d take with any of the boys. He’d also repeatedly rant about the perfectly competent women from the other office. I also noticed that I would never, ever get any credit with my work from him (in masked contrast to his attitude to any of my male coworkers), even at times when I’d practically kept the office going when all the boys were taking random days off or such. His attitude became a little clearer when I overheard him on the phone (more than once) making batshit misogynist rants of the fathers’ rights variety. I wasn’t exactly sad to see the back of that place.

I initially thought my second job was going to be better than that, but no such luck. Soon after starting there, I discovered that this boss (a married man in his 60s) was making a habit of addressing me as “baby” and “beautiful”, making regular comments about my physical appearance, had no respect for my personal space, and repeatedly suggested when we were alone that the two of us should go out and get drunk sometime. Creepy much? Then, after making glowing comments about my performance the entire time I’d worked there, I took a day off and was fired by phone (He also had a bastard of a temper - he’d nearly fired another admin girl on a whim the day before). I wasn’t exactly upset about it.

So, this time, it seems I got third time lucky. On my last night at my old job, I went out on the town and ran into a girl I’d been to school with back in my hometown, eight hundred kilometres away. We met up later that week, and it turned out that she’d just graduated and quit her very nice studentish admin job for a real adult job. One week and a really good interview later, I’d gotten her job, and started today. So far, everyone seems fantastic and the work interesting enough. Really, after the past two, just the prospect of both having my work judged on its own merits, and being treated similarly in the workplace, is a real relief.

Tags: misogyny, sexual harassment, work