SEX IS FOR JOY, NOT JUDGEMENT

Emily Maguire, the author of Princesses & Pornstars, talks to Ruth Pollard in the Sydney Morning Herald about the sisterhood and being labelled a slut.

That Kevin Rudd put only one woman on his 2020 Summit steering committee would have come as no surprise to the 51 per cent of the country who are female. In the past two weeks, Australia's dark underbelly of sexism has revealed itself as alive and well in four of the pillars of our society - politics, employment, sport and religion.

One of country's largest football codes - Australian rules - felt the need to issue a DVD that asks players to consider whether it is OK to watch their mate have sex with his girlfriend, or to have sex with a woman who has had too much to drink or, in an improbable case of mistaken identity, have sex with another player's girlfriend.

Meanwhile, the Pope urged men to respect women's mysterious "feminine genius", and the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed - again - that, at $1009, women's average weekly earnings are still significantly less than the average man's $1247 pay packet.
But it is our Prime Minister's extraordinary lapse in judgment in not recognising that symbolically, and practically, it is important to have equal representation of men and women on committees that best illustrates the state of play.

That such things are still happening in 2008 does not shock Emily Maguire. The 31-year-old author and commentator - who admits to believing, once upon a time, that women could do anything - has issued a call to arms to her peers, men and women, to get informed, get organised and get equal.
"There is a widespread belief that the sexual revolution and the women's rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s freed women from the tired old virgin/whore and spinster aunt/glowing housewife archetypes into which we used to be placed according to our sexual behaviour and marital status," Maguire writes in her new book, Princesses & Pornstars, out on Monday.
"If only this were true. While the professional and legal position of women has improved enormously in the last half-century, socially and domestically we have barely progressed at all. We are still judged by how we conform to gendered norms that were already looking tattered in the 1950s."

Talk to Maguire, or read her impressive body of work, which includes two novels, Taming The Beast and The Gospel According To Luke, and you realise this is a young woman with strong opinions, many of them about sex. In Princesses & Pornstars - a mix of intensely personal stories, interviews and commentary - Maguire is deeply critical of the idea women should be defined by their gender or their sexuality and is scathing of the relentless public shaming of women who enjoy sex.
The rest of this interesting piece....... from Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald.