This is the day for asking questions…I’ll start with…why have teabags and tea leaves lost their ability to produce good strong tea? If I buy teabags it takes two to get the kind of tea I used to get with one teabag, if I make the tea in a pot with a teaspoon of leaves, ditto. I can put maybe a little loss of taste down to old age, which is what I’m generally told when I complain about anything (eg ‘You’re 91, what do you expect?’). Well, I expected a good cup of tea for a start. Mate.
Another thing (seeing I’m in a questioning kind of mood), why are the Olympics going ahead? We are dealing with a pandemic, eg a worldwide epidemic, people in Tokyo have made it plain they don’t want the games, its their government who wants them to go ahead, yet here we are sending athletes off to Tokyo? I heard one athlete this morning thrilled and excited to be going. The Wellington area has been in Level 2 because of a traveller, vaccinated but still being able to carry and pass on (who knew?), being criticised by some, (in between blaming the government of course), and yet we’re sending athletes to Tokyo? Hello? Does it strike anyone but me that this is, to say the least, odd? How would I get on if I said I wanted to go to Tokyo for a walk? (yes okay, I’m, 91, what do I expect…).
The big question though is around the survey of 6th form girls at Christchurch Girls’ High. Results show a lot of unwanted groping, sexual predation and rape. What I want to know is why the 6th form boys at Christchurch Boys High were not asked to fill in a questionnaire too? Why is it always only girls who are asked? Why aren’t the perpetrators asked why they do it? Who was it who gave them the idea they have such rights? For example, one question could be, ‘Who told you that when a girl says no she means yes?’
And don’t excuse behaviour because some boys are sexually attacked as well. Like its okay because it happens to boys too?
Or its because they watch pornography and don’t know the difference?
This predatory behaviour is nothing new, it was going on in the 1940s when I was young and had been going on for centuries before then. All that has ever been done about it is the tut tut kind of talk (like its a surprise) in between telling girls they should be more careful where they go and the way they dress because if they wear a short skirt, its all their fault.
Why, in 1983, did I write a revue called Asking For It, the term that was/still is used as an excuse for unwanted sexual advances and rape? She was asking for it. I didn’t write that revue, and it wasn’t so well attended by women of all ages all around this country, because that term had suddenly surfaced. Women clapped because what was being satirised on stage was taking that subject out of the dark hypocrisy of their past and bringing it into the light. Robyn Archer, that talented Aussie singer and comedian wrote That good old double standard, raise it high, raise it high…and Broadsheet, ever the leader in writing about the reality of women’s lives, showed us we were not alone, that what happened was not because we asked for it but because it was taken without our consent.
And yet, here we are, 2021, and its still happening.
‘You’re 91, what do you expect?’
Well, Darlings, I expected a hell of a lot better. And I still do. So next time they do a questionnaire hand it to the boys.
Renée
