TMTH

Joyce came home today from Aitape. She's been away since the first season of MacLeod's Daughters and knows nothing about the OC. So much to see, so little time. But first, we broke out the red lipstick just to see how fabulous Madonna might look, and took the chance to chase Leonard around with our lips puckered. Let's not kid ourselves, he's 12 and loved every minute of it. Tomorrow is international women's day, and we are a female dominated house (at least this week). Baby Nancy arrives home from Sepik tomorrow, to complete the draft. It is a matrilineal matriarch of moi, where the kandare, my Manus brother, still refuses to hang ladies knickers on the line. Its a kastom thing, he says, throwing up his hands. I get alittle ticked and yell, I can feed you, house you, and buy AAA batteries for your MP player, but you can't hang my bras on the line??? Alittle like Archbishop of Canterbury on Sharia law: feminist men always come down on the 'custom' line if it suits them. The Archbishops says, in all earnestness, that sharia law is currently being practiced in the UK so we really must acknowledge this and work towards a plural state. Hello? Alittle like saying, Here's comes a tsunami, maybe we should think about becoming a marine park. In that precarious 21st century battle betwen kastom and gender, which so often separates the anthropologists from the humanitarians (I agree), it's now most timely to come down on cultural pluralism in a global age side. What happened to us women---aren't we 51% pf the global population? How did we trumped by a hackneyed ill-defined concept of 'traditionalism' when most of the last 5 decades have been spent describing cultural syncretism and arguing that we can pick and chose the elements of modernity? Reminds me of the arguments for Islam in the highlands, where men say the gender hierarchy is so much more appropriate than Christianity's notions of parity (i.e. after fifty years of Christianity's gender divisions working their subtle magic in kastom, we're now ready for Islam). Ive been a guest on 100 FM twice this week for Renagi Taukarai's women's hour ---she's had some brilliant guests, not the least Brother Michael today who, like me, got the giggles when some of the deadpan speak got too plodding, especially about pornography, high class hooking and ladies charging more (or less, we couldnt figure out) for bigger male appendages. (Yet more evidence to be used against me in the hell-purgatory trials ahead). But today our earnest lead guest was a well meaning Simbuman who works with sex workers and children at risk, but who, during our tribute hour to international womens day, couldnt stop talking about the new forms of steam men are drinking, the new forms of pornography being produced, and how the little love gifts of buai, chicken and chips, a hotel weekend, school fees and ever increasingy expensive returns for sex are the new and most insidious form of prostitution. Eventually Renagi asked me what possible solution there might be to this terrible trend, and I butted in to say if women across PNG no longer had to pay the exorbitant school fees they still need to (after three deacdes of political promises to make education free) we wouldnt be talking about prostitution. The highlands guy knotted his brow like the concept didnt figger. Neither did he buy my brief description of Holly Wardlow's work in the SHP, 'Wayward Women,' describing sex work as a means of reclaiming control over one's sexuality. Then I talked about how men have such a free pass in PG for rape and other violent acts because they're considered not responsible for their behavior if a substance or nonmaterial force has taken control of them. I was sorcelled, I had to....She was too beautiful...I drank too much and needed to rape (verbatim repeat of what he called a 'justifcation' for rape in his 'studies' of bad behavior). When I went on about highlands gender ideas, in particular, and even legitimized my own perspective as a woman who had been raped, he could be seen, visibly, to take offense. I had to sep back and stroke him to continue the discussion. Much like the Chinese restaurant dinner I had during the gun summit in Goroka two years ago, when a very visibly PC politician, someone considered a progressive MP, took offense because I didnt want to sit next to him at dinner (didnt even know the man), and, to the stunned silence of the table, ordered me back to the hotel rather than allow me to sit anywhere. Women's Day? Yea, let's celebrate this by asking men whether we're allowed to speak about it.