On Monday night, 300 women assembled at NSW Parliament House to announce the Ernie Awards. In other words, they booed lustily at the mention of public figures who’ve expressed misogynist sentiments over the past year. Then the organisers shared the results with the media and went home feeling awesome.
Of course, the award “winners” didn’t give a rat’s, and institutionalised misogyny continues unabated.
The Ernie Awards ceremony has its origins in a party that female unionists threw in 1993 to celebrate Ernie Ecob’s resignation as president of the NSW Labor Council. Ecob, then the secretary of the Australian Workers Union, notoriously claimed that women only wanted to be shearers “for the sex”.
“It was small, intimate and raucous as we loudly competed for the honour of taking home the sheep trophy on behalf of our male comrades who had lived up to Ernie’s bad example,” recalled unionist Alison Peters, now director of NSW’s Council of Social Services, in 2001.
“We had a great time as we used fun to make the point that we still had a long way to go in the union movement. In fact it was so much fun we decided to do it again!”
But if Peters was worried 10 years ago that the Ernies had lost their bite, they’re completely toothless by now. Does it surprise anyone to learn that News Ltd trollumnist Andrew Bolt made a sexist remark? Or that Tony Abbott happily allowed his supporters to crudely denigrate his political opponent? Or that another noted conservative, Pru Goward, doesn’t really agree with a union campaign for equal pay?
“We’re never going to change them so we’re just waiting for them all to die off,” Ernies founder and spokeswoman Meredith Burgmann told The Observer in 2007. But waiting is not very helpful when future generations are already internalising misogyny.
I’ll admit that shifting this culture is a tough ask, given that a recently released report revealed s-xism isn’t always expressed in a handy sound bite you can boo and hiss at; more often it’s subliminal, intangible — and deniable.
So I have some sympathy for responses of knee-jerk outrage when an anti-woman sentiment is expressed openly. However, it’s dangerously easy for a succession of really quite similar mini-controversies to limit the depth of public feminist debate. Look at that s-xist stock photo! That newspaper is peddling an outdated stereotype! That percentage of women in a given field is not nearly large enough! That well-known conservative demagogue said something insulting about women!
Undeniably, these small injustices rankle afresh every time, and there’s definitely value in pointing out just how commonplace they are. But a satirical award? That’s pretty much just a snarky consolation for jaded observers.
Whether it’s film buffs snorting at the Razzies, lawyers eye-rolling at frivolous litigants in the Stella Awards or booksellers snickering at silly book titles in the Diagram Prize, people laugh in frustration that these “winners” are really only the most notable examples of a general trend we observe with depressing regularity. The film industry puts bankability ahead of craft! We live in an absurdly litigious world! And nutty books find publishers!
Celebrating this stuff in a backhanded way is not especially satirical, and the tired sarcasm evident in many satirical awards means that activism becomes apathy, inspiring only nods and sighs of recognition. By contrast, Charlie Brooker’s audacious commitment to his deeply stupid “David Cameron is a lizard” gag (“At least here you get the truth. Which is that he is a lizard. And by “he”, I mean Cameron. David Cameron. Who is a lizard. David Cameron is a lizard”) actually provokes debate about political name calling.
Collectively, the Ernie Award winners do provoke — they offer a startling survey of misogynist themes in Australian culture. Burgmann co-authored a 2007 compilation entitled One Thousand Terrible Things Australian Men Have Said About Women, which is much more galvanising than any bogus “award” conferred on an individual.
As Sophie Cunningham and Tara Moss have separately shown in relation to women in publishing, an issue takes on urgency when people refuse to let it become a passing diversion. And idiots are less able to dismiss feminist critiques as overreactions or trivialities when instances of misogyny are systematically accumulated and analysed than when each episode is just held up and booed.
Pick me! Pick me! I love Misogyny!
Wow. 2011 and still hung up about men’s perceptions.
Truth is that most confident, ambitious & capable women have moved on and are more than capable of making their way through a successful life without being constantly reminded by the feminist ‘dregs & losers’ how hard it is for a woman to make good in a “man’s world”.
The simple truth is that a lazy useless woman is as useless as a lazy useless man.
Here’s hoping that the screened tv news excerpts of women at the awards were not representative of the event overall. It all looked rather school-yard to me.
@MIKEB
And it is so embarrassingly demeaning to women. The morons present are the true misogynists.
Um, lawyers aren’t eye-rolling at “frivolous litigants” in the Stella Awards. They’re eye-rolling at the Stella Awards themselves.
They’re a bloody front for “tort reform” parasites like the insurance industry trying to convince people that the law is CRAZY and OUT OF CONTROL and someone’s going to come up and bankrupt you with a LUDICROUS CLAIM FOR COMPENSATION any minute. It’s bullsh*t and most lawyers hate them for the damage they – and outrageous lies forwarded around on email – do.
As for the case itself, for which they’re named – the McDonald’s coffee-cup case – the entire substance of it is quite different from how it’s usually reported. You can read the case itself or just the Wikipedia summary if you’re short on time:
“On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered a 49-cent cup of coffee from the drive-through window of a local McDonald’s restaurant. Liebeck was in the passenger’s seat of her Ford Probe, and her grandson Chris parked the car so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. Liebeck placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.[10] Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin, scalding her thighs, buttocks, and groin.[11] Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[12] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9 kg, nearly 20% of her body weight), reducing her down to 83 pounds (38 kg).[13] Two years of medical treatment followed…
The trial took place from August 8–17, 1994, before Judge Robert H. Scott.[15] During the case, Liebeck’s attorneys discovered that McDonald’s required franchisees to serve coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds. Stella Liebeck’s attorney argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald’s. Liebeck’s lawyers presented the jury with evidence that 180 °F (82 °C) coffee like that McDonald’s served may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about 12 to 15 seconds. Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. (A British court later rejected this argument as scientifically false finding that 149 °F (65 °C) liquid could cause deep tissue damage in only two seconds.[16]) Liebeck’s attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns. McDonald’s claimed that the reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that those who purchased the coffee typically were commuters who wanted to drive a distance with the coffee; the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip.[5] McDonalds research showed customers intend to consume the coffee while driving to their destination.[17]
Other documents obtained from McDonald’s showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald’s coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.[5] McDonald’s quality control manager, Christopher Appleton, testified that this number of injuries was insufficient to cause the company to evaluate its practices. He argued that all foods hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constituted a burn hazard, and that restaurants had more pressing dangers to warn about. The plaintiffs argued that Appleton conceded that McDonald’s coffee would burn the mouth and throat if consumed when served.[18]
A twelve-person jury reached its verdict on August 18, 1994.[15] Applying the principles of comparative negligence, the jury found that McDonald’s was 80% responsible for the incident and Liebeck was 20% at fault. Though there was a warning on the coffee cup, the jury decided that the warning was neither large enough nor sufficient. They awarded Liebeck US$200,000 in compensatory damages, which was then reduced by 20% to $160,000. In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jurors apparently arrived at this figure from Morgan’s suggestion to penalize McDonald’s for one or two days’ worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day.[5] The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald’s and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount less than $600,000.”
McDonald’s sold deliberately scalding coffee in inadequate packaging that caused someone a serious injury. Hardly the summary you read in those emails, is it?
A FAQ on the case and a documentary on how corporate America used it to promote “tort reform” (code for taking away your right to sue someone who injures you).