Presumably, you’ll be too busy today helping out at the local women’s shelter, fighting for abortion rights, joining up to Amnesty International and helping with their campaign against violence against women etc to compose another rant today.

I happen to be a member of the masses, and you don’t speak for me or Ms Bone or any other woman for that matter. Don’t ruin a respectful thread (and don’t be disrespectful towards what this post is about because I ain’t in any mood to be disrespected).

‘Young women are daring to wear jeans, soldiers listen to pop music on their mobile phones and bands are performing at wedding parties again.’

http://www.lastsuperpower.net/newsitems/iraqnewsah2

Pamela had no real change of heart even if she had a change of mind. Pamela was no phony pacifist but rather she supported the LIBERATION of the Iraqi people and wished things had gone better. My point was that people need to put in a lot of effort to research in detail and at depth in order to expose the good news about Iraq, and so nothing much can or ought to be made from the fact that in the final months she was taken with other more relevant pursuits and reached the conclusion that things were going badly there. The war being fought by the Iraqi government against Baathists; al Qaeda; and Shia death squad types, is now going very well.

Repulsive of me to say so? If you wish. But not as repulsive as a feminism that abandons the masses and hangs the poorest of the poor out to dry. Progressive women of Basra are now smiling because the reactionary men in black have been chased off their streets and they can now begin the struggle for female liberation (dress how they please etc) from a far stronger position protected by the growing strength of their Iraqi army.

Sadr is on the run and that is the way I like it, and so would Pamela Bone; and as things unfold in the coming months we could have again seen her revise her thoughts about the Iraq war. Sadly she has not lived to see the bright future emerge – but at the same time her family has no reason to be ashamed of her initial stance and nor do the mother’s of the Australian personnel who are there risking their lives to improve the position of others. They are armed forces involved in a war of liberation and they will win. Just as they will continue the fight that many at this site support in Afghanistan.

Take your culture war politics elsewhere. That is, take them somewhere other than a thread about a woman’s death and the fighting spirit that saw her transcend her difficult start in life. Also, I’ve read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book and have admiration for her, but, again, wrong time, wrong place.

I find the suggestion that her ill health somehow devalued or invalidated her change of heart and mind on the question of the Iraq War rather repulsive, though, I must say, informally yours.

As you can see people are not falling over themselves to direct you where to find the threads you refer to. If you go to the archive section and search a Bone to pick it will bring up a blog roll and then scroll down to the Bone to pick thread; also A Bone to pick 2; more bones to pick; and there are a couple of others around the time that are germane to the questions of the silence of western feminism on the treatment of Islamic women. (see Germaine Greer’s cultural relativism in the face of Pamela Bone’s questions)

Since participating in those discussions and largely defending Pamela Bone’s position on those threads I’ve boned up my reading and understanding of Islam and have now read Ayaan Hirsi Ali and feel it was definitely correct to defend her right to speak out internationally as an ex Muslim woman and her courage deserves our solidarity and not condemnation – regardless of whether we do or do not agree with what she says about immigration or at all. There are many worthwhile interviews with Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the net they tell a fascinating story of a female political figure who has had an interesting ride to ‘power’ and beyond.

I’ve never met Pamela Bone but i salute her trail-blazing courage and honesty – i have written b4 that it was Pamela Bone’s liberalism that let her down as it did not allow her to really extend her analysis confidently and so among other things we can consequently find in her final months the almost qualified about face in her views as to her support for the Iraq war. Not much other than she was struggling too hard to make it through the day to see the good news that is coming out of Iraq and that part of the world, and you know what? – she is not the only one!

Pamela’s children can be justifiably proud of their mother’s achievements and will no doubt sorely miss her love, humour and commentary in their lives, as will many other women in Australia and world-wide be the poorer for her passing.

Thanks for that, Paul (or “Kev”). Marilyn Lake is very interesting, so that would be good to have a look at. I’ll check my local library.

“You should be in the Age, Darlene! Except what you write is too intelligent. Oh well.”

Yes, I should, Kim, yes I should. Of course, who would want to get paid to write when one can blog away for nothing.

OK, I obviously live in an unreal utopia.

Paul, unless I am hallucinating, your comment @48 showed on my screen as having been written by Kevin Andrews. Hence the sentence beginning, “Kev …”

You still voted Labor

No, I voted Green. I know you’re going to make a point about preferences, but what else would you expect? We don’t have a democratic process in this country enabling us to have any input into who the Labor Party puts up as its leader.

Wary and critical you may have been, but so what? You still voted Labor; you hoped that Labor would win the election; you were devastated by the result.

In other words, at the time, you desperately wanted Mark Latham to become PM.

Kev, we’ll never know how Latham would have turned out as PM. All the indicators are that he would have been terrible, but the responsibilities of the job might have tamed his personality flaws.

More than two decades ago in Labor Essays, R W Connell described the machismo some blue-collar men practice to compensate for being in thrall to a boss.

Darlene, if I recall correctly there’s also a good discussion of this issue in Marilyn Lake’s chapter “A Question of Time” in Moving Left edited by David McKnight (1986).

And what Kim said. Latham’s combination of macho posturing, poor anger management and specific positions on feminism had not gone unnoticed by a number of people in and around Labor and the broad left.

Mark Latham’s winning of the federal Labor leadership last December can be understood as a twofold commitment to the new. That is, the defeat of Kim Beazley has been read as a break with the old ALP, while the relatively youthful Latham has vowed to become a changed man, at least when it comes to cutting “crudity” from his public routine.

Latham as modern front person rings true in relation to his advocacy of a politics that transcends the left/right binary. There have, however, been times when his working-class persona has left him sounding as anachronistic as Prime Minister John Howard’s version of white-picket fence suburbia.

When Andrew Denton tried to coax the then Shadow Treasurer to sing his former football team’s song on Enough Rope, his hesitation was blamed on the “… matrons at Mosman,” who he assumed would be offended by the ribaldry of the lyrics. Leaving aside Latham’s connection of the feminine with Sydney’s North Shore, there is something quaint, not to mention derogatory, about his view of women of wealth.

So these “ladies” do not, and supposedly never, cuss, curse or enjoy bawdy humour, and was he implying that all working-class women do?

A brief look at the role of women in the Liberal Party reveals that money does not always guarantee an easy ride up the “ladder of opportunity”.

Conversely, Latham has ascribed a profane ruggedness to Sydney’s western suburbs, and consequently to himself. “It’s tough on the streets of Bankstown,” he told Denton in partial defense of the time he crash-tackled an allegedly less-than-professional taxi driver. “[Arse-licker is] a standard working-class term”, he schooled the Parliament, as if no affluent adolescent catching a bus to school ever uttered a rude word.

More than two decades ago in Labor Essays, R W Connell described the machismo some blue-collar men practice to compensate for being in thrall to a boss. Latham has uncritically accepted that identity, even though, or perhaps because, it has been a long time since the economics graduate and former Labor staffer turner politician could truly own it.

As the emergence of post-materialist movements such as environmentalism and queer rights indicates, the centrality of class cleavages to the way we view our political allegiances and ourselves was already diminishing by the time Latham joined the ALP in the 1970s.

Glenn Milne argued in The Australian on 22 December 2003 that “[Latham’s] personal tale is invariably described in the class rhetoric of the 19th century”. This could hardly be assumed to be popular with today’s electorate, and it is not in tune with his post-industrial “Third Way” stance.

This is not to argue that a person’s financial position is not, even today, an indicator of social rank. Young people growing up in families where unemployment is constant and intergenerational have a tough time transcending their circumstances. Often envisioned as the “unworthy poor”, they do not fit into Latham’s “aspirational voters,” those hard-working Australians who, like himself, strive for a better life.

The blokey stereotype Latham uses can act as an impediment as much as a lack of material assets; it renders invisible those who found a working-class upbringing an alienating and sometimes painful experience. Women who have encountered the unfunny side of some “larrikins” have less reason to romanticise a culture than someone who can indulge in it when he wants. Limited self-confidence, which can be a by-product of exclusion and abuse, is a major obstacle to the achievement of upward social mobility.

If Latham has acknowledged women from poorer backgrounds it is to have a go at their work ethic. Helen Masterman-Smith, in her feminist critique of Civilising Global Capital in The Other Sydney: Identities and Inequalities in Western Sydney, was not impressed with Latham’s positioning of working-class women (at least the unmarried ones) as clueless drains on the public purse who need to be guided towards independence.

“The survival strategies and persistent attempts at self and community involvement and empowerment adopted by working-class women fly in the face of Latham’s condescending assumptions,” she said.

Even without the sad, if unnecessary in a privacy sense, revelations of his ex-wife, it is easy to come to the conclusion that Latham is not that fond of females. Women from across the economic spectrum would no doubt find agreement with her opinion that Latham’s gender gave him a preferred position in the family home when he was growing up.

It is hoped that women in the party and community alert him to the fact that he is no more than anyone else is “God’s gift to the universe”.

We regularly read and hear criticisms of the constricting nature of the more extreme manifestations of identity politics. For example, a female member of the Crikey! team recently found it necessary to distance her opposition to sexist advertising from that which emanates from “hairy-legged man-hating” feminists.

A little of this (sometimes-misdirected) energy might also be aimed at the belief that we are still defined by our class. Let us hope that Latham’s makeover goes further than the promise to no longer be vulgar to a reassessment of his attachment to tired constructions of plebeian manhood.