Show notes
KEY TOPICS AND TIME STAMPS
Zero: How to start an online hit in a bar
—Sharon introduces Jane, who tells how she and a couple of mates started The King’s Tribune “over a few beers” as a newsletter in 2006. “I still have the first one, a double side A4 page we photocopied at Officeworks. It’s so full of typos and really bad writing, but I keep it because it’s a reminder … it started with an idea I couldn’t let go of and led to where I am now.”
—Sharon and Jane discuss what it takes “to climb the mountain” in terms of launching projects and writing books.
—Sharon: “Today’s learning is preparing us for what’s coming tomorrow, and if we don’t or aren’t willing to have today’s mistakes … we won’t see that as an opportunity but something to be feared.”
—Jane admits she and her Tribune team “made so many mistakes” and “in the end the reason it didn’t work is because I’m rubbish at sales. I took enough away that I was able to continue my career as a writer.
—Sharon: “You’re what I would call a card carrying feminist vs my amateur status, so I’m in awe of you and a little intimidated, and I imagine I’m going to blunder into territory.”
—Jane: “To me, that’s just bollocks. Nobody springs fully formed from the brain of Roxane Gay so to say I am now the perfect feminist and I never get anything wrong and understand all of it, such bollocks. There’s still things I don’t understand and still things I haven’t decided how to think about it. I still internalise stuff—it runs so deep, all those lessons we learn since we were babies, and I still make mistakes. My daughter turns around and says, “Why am I doing the dishes and Luke is taking out the rubbish?’ and I’m like, good question, why are you? It took her to put it out so this idea that you’re a good feminist or an amateur feminist is bullshit.”
—Jane says feminism is about a perspective and willingness to learn and understand from other people’s perspective.
—Sharon: “I don’t mind asking bad questions in the pursuit of getting wise about something. Where I stop is when I get judged on my bad questions. I don’t even know the lines, so it’s helping have a discussion looking at blurred lines, and how you can be safe in a conversation with blurred lines.”
6.57: How Fixed It evolved
—Sharon asks if she’s right thinking the book began as a deep dive into violence and the representation of women in the media but grew into something else involving challenges men and politics and institutions are facing.
—Jane “definitely” agrees: “I started understanding things halfway through the project that I had no idea about at the beginning. Where you think the book will go at the start to the book you end up writing is actually very very different.”
—Is now planning her second book and is planning it less. “I have a very good agent and would say to anybody who wants to write a book, get a good agent. They are invaluable.”
9.17: The F Word
—Sharon asks Jane, “How would you describe feminism today? What is it to you?”
—Jane: “The word I use is liberation. Liberation from those ideas about gender that keep us locked into tiny little squares, so small that to be a good woman you have to be pretty and slim and white an attractive and not too opinionated and not too annoying and keep yourself small, physically small and emotionally small and intellectually small. At the same time men are also really limited in what they can do, they have to be strong and stoic and powerful and in control and in charge and never vulnerable or emotional. They’re allowed to have rage and lust and that’s about it. Of course they have the full range of complex competing emotions that all humans do but to express it diminishes them as a man.”
—Jane says we would all be released from “pain” if men weren’t told “where’s your ambition?” if they want to stay home with the children and be nurturers and carers.
—Sharon notes “toxicity is in the rigidity, and the moment we become rigid about something, anywhere on the spectrum from progressive through to conservative, and the moment we get rigid we’re leaving out all the grey scale, the nuance, the subtlety.”
—Jane agrees it’s “almost never true” that everything is black and white. While “of course” she believes women subjected to violence should receive help to escape, “I think the conversation needs to be about the perpertrator firstly. We need to stop thinking about them as either evil monsters or a good guy that made a mistake. Those things are not true.”
—She says the key point to go back to with men who are violent is why: “If we see those men as complex real people who have friends and family who love them and who might even have genuinely good qualities, there is something you can do to help them.”
16.06: The cycle of violence
—Sharon: “There is no point in victim blaming or perpetuating the good guy who snapped myth, looking at what is not available to men … until we address that this is the way we’re going to live, we’re not looking at the reality.”
—Jane: “The other thing that doesn’t get talked about enough is that most men, particularly when you talk about violence against partners, that’s not what they want to be doing.”
—Jane outlines the cycle of violence from where it starts, through the apology phase, honeymoon phase and slow ramp up again. “The reason that apology phase is so effective is because they mean it. They genuinely are remorseful, they genuinely don’t want to do it again, but then something starts it again.”
—She says we need to look at why it happens and what could be done to intervene to help them become the person they want to be: “This is not imposing on men, ‘You have to be what feminists want you to be’ but you can be what you actually want to be with some help.”
—Sharon notes, “It’s about how do you have a functional relationship with yourself. Nobody is taught to do e. Where do they learn it? Men are suddenly expected to get in touch with their feelings and managing their anger in a functional way. How?”
—Jane says Jess Hill writes “beautifully” about shame in her book Look What You Made Me Do.”The thing she talks about is because men are told that being a man is so important, the shame they should feel if they fail at that, this all gets tied into being able to go and find help. If they’re already in a swing of feeling ashamed and weak, to then admit to more failure—a loss of control—is incredibly difficult.”
—Sharon says there are men she coaches who are “bottling everything down and are replacing it with anger, and that’s where this power conversation comes in. When we feel out of control with ourselves, we’re going to try to control our environment and are going to strike out at those who aren’t helping us feel we’re in control.”
—It’s shame but until they are prepared to identify it as that to get help, nothing changes.
—Jane says often men who have been forced to get help or sought it out talk about feeling threatened and afraid by their own situation. One man she spoke with for her book who was “really quite horrible” to his wife and children, got help is now on good terms with his family: “It took years of therapy for him to be able to admit he was afraid, then find out what to do about it.
23.00: “It wasn’t that bad”
—Jane recounts lies people tell themselves to justify their violence: ‘I’m one of the good guys, she just made me so mad and I’d had a few drinks and I snapped and it won’t happen again, she’s exaggerating to make me feel bad, it wasn’t that bad.’
—Sharon notes the cognitive dissonance the men must face, which make them cling tighter to the things they tell themselves to make that gap okay.
—The pair talk laws around the marriage bar, rape within marriage, the equal pay act and abortion—and their mutual love of Downton Abbey.
—Jane: “I’ve talked to women who were trying to leave violent husbands in the ‘90s and couldn’t because they couldn’t get a car loan or lease.”
—One woman whose story was included in Jane’s book has an ex husband in prison for trying to kill her: “The thing that struck me was how organised he was. A lot of these men are very manipulative and very clever, [they do] thinks like turning up to a school friend’s place and saying, ‘Where’s Maria today? Is she at work?’ Then all of a sudden someone is handing over an address.”
—Description of the death cheat sheet of information the woman hands to the vet, the hairdresser, to make sure they know not to give out her details.
—The woman’s husband tried to kill her while their son hid under the bed, calling police. “This little boy, he heard it and thought his mother was going to die. The only reason she’s not dead is the little boy called the police. Otherwise she would be dead and he would have heard it. She still has to have copies of the convictions, the AVOs, to hand over to people who say, ‘Poor him, he just wants to see son.’”
33.48: Queen for a Day
—Sharon says if she was Queen for a Day, she would reform the prison system because “punishment is not proving to prevent recidivism. I would reform it so it became education about emotionality, about healthy boundaries, about how to restore fragile non existent self esteem, recognise and identify our emotions, then educate them on a skill they can take to the community.”
—Jane says reforms are politically difficult to sell: “If you say to people who are afraid of crime, way we fix crime—this is not some airy fairy leftie academic bullshit thing, it’s proven. If you educate people … they don’t commit crimes again.”
—Sharon references PBS 2019 four-part documentary series College Behind Bars which reveals the transformative power of higher education through the experiences of men and women in prison: “The recurrence of crime plummets.”
—Jane refers to a similar production about addiction, where a program asked addicts in small groups over 12 weeks what led to them taking drugs, what it was that made them so attractive. The success rates were considerable, and “that was just based on, ‘Why are you taking drugs, what pain are you feeling that you’re medicating and what would be some other ways to deal with that?’
—While she’s Queen for a Day, Sharon is also reforming the educational system so emotional intelligence teaching is mandatory.
—Jane: “It needs to start in kindergarten. These are basic life skills: read, write, arithmetic and you need to be able to recognise your emotions and have some idea how to manage them.”
—She adds that we need to start building communities where people don’t get lost, and talks about Men’s Shed helping a man whose brother had died build a Viking ship to send him off in. “If you have men who are lonely and frustrated and isolated as well, it’s a recipe for disaster. But if you take that same man and give him a community of good men …”
46 Making headlines with Fixed It
—Sharon admits to “inappropriate laughter” at how in her book Jane changed media headlines to reflect how newsrooms spun domestic violence into clickbait: “I think you’ve improved things.”
—Reads an example of an original Cairns Post headline (Police charge young male with illicit attack on young mother) to Man charged with attempted rape of woman.
—Jane: “Illicit attack makes it sound like he pulled her pigtails or something. There’s no point yelling at people, it’s about getting people on board rather than blaming or shaming. A friend calls it the difference between calling people out and calling them in.”
—Sharon discussed the Masai tradition of not ostracising people who have done something ‘wrong’ but bringing them into a village circle of support and conversation and restorative justice.
—Jane notes “it’s really important to understand complex problems have complex solutions.”
—The women drill down on kindness. Sharon says she had something “horrible” happen to her (“not rape but violence”) and she did not feel she wanted the person involved punished.
—Jane: “I’ve spent so much time talking to survivors, years sometimes, I’m still in contact with. So to say to a survivor, ‘We’re going to spend all this time and money getting your rapist over his issues’ … the outrage.”
53.46 Kindness
—Sharon talks what she thinks kindness is: “I don’t believe kindness is acquiescence, which I think a lot of women do. Kindness to me is the most appropriate, respectful and caring thing to do in this moment that would allow this, whatever this awful thing was, to have another way of experiencing itself that’s healthier.”
—Jane says it comes back to the idea of being a good woman, being ‘unselfish’.
—Sharon discusses a training at TCI where an “alpha male” in the room was “out of touch with his vulnerability” and she “wouldn’t acquiesce to his control attempts.”
—Asked by Jane how the women in the room felt, Sharon says a lot of women like things to be smoothed over. “I am so not a typical female then ‘cos fuck it man, some waves need to be tipped over and we need to swim in very different waters.”
—Jane says she is occasionally “shocked even now by my friends, women I love and respect, who without knowing it will give into the pressure to placate everybody, to smooth things over.”
—Recounts how she had to tell a male friend who is “really inappropriate to the point of almost assault” that if he continues his behaviour, “I am done”. She was told by friends, “Don’t create trouble. I know you’re a feminist but could you just [still accept him in the group]? The men were more okay with what I did than the women.”
59.52 Social media, sisterhood and the F bomb
—Sharon says she was once accused on social media of “something really horrible I didn’t do” and “all the hate came from women. It was so heartbreaking. I got told, ‘She’s too big for her boots, someone needs to put her in her place.’”
—Jane: “I don’t think there’s a successful woman who hasn’t been told at some stage she’s too big for her boots. I’ve certainly had it. I’m arrogant apparently.”
—Sharon says years ago she did a speech where she used “the F bomb” like men who were presenting. She was told later by a woman in the audience, “You’d come across a lot better if you didn’t say the word fuck.”
Jane: “Did you tell her to fuck off?”
Sharon: “My hazy recollection was, ‘I really appreciate that’s where you’re coming from, here’s the thing, until women have the right to drop the word fuck the same way men do we’re not equal so I’m going to use the word fuck until nobody comments on me using the word fuck.”
—Jane: “Again, it’s that policing other women.”
—Sharon admits sometimes she just wants to do “puddle on the floor” and thinks “I can’t muster the fucks today” and Jane says she sometimes wants to read in bed all day with her dog: “To say every woman has to be strong and opinionated at every single minute of her life is utter bullshit.”
1.06.23 Five year pathway
—Sharon asks Jane what her next five years looks like.
—Jane: “It’s difficult to do. As you’ve probably already worked out, my life seems to be a series of accidents that I just keep running on with.”
—She’s working on her second book because journalism gigs are tough to crack. “The stories I’m hearing from editors are, ‘No, we’ve done domestic violence, we don’t need to write about that anymore.’”
—Sharon: “My dream for the next five years is anybody can walk into a room and be fully them without any of the structures or expectations around gender. That we can express ourselves in a way that full represents who we are without feeling shame or self censorship.”
—Jane says she might need to be Queen for Two Days: “This is not just a thing where we’re saying lives would be better for women. Lives would be better for everyone. Liberation makes it better for everyone. Every single human on the planet. Nobody loses out of this and the benefits are huge.”