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In the U.S., anxiety disorders affect about one-third of the population. So it's no surprise that a good number of artists and writers also suffer from anxiety and depression.

But whereas some critics see Vincent Van Gogh's striking paintings and Sylvia Plath's confessional poetry as the direct result of their psychosis and depression, I tend to be less romantic about this subject. I see their brilliant output as having happened in spite of - rather than because of - their mental anguish.

In my new book, " Afraid," I explore the interaction between fear, anxiety and creative work.

They're more intertwined than you might think: Depending on the situation, fear and anxiety can either inspire or impede. But when anxiety becomes overwhelming, creative work often stalls.

Anxiety as a roadblock

The most basic way anxiety can hinder creative work is by shifting attention away from that work and toward fears and worries.

If a writer is worried about losing her day job, it's harder for her to focus on her writing. Excessive anxiety bypasses all nonthreat-related tasks, and people regress to basic survival mode. Most attention, thinking and emotions will be focused on dealing with the source of the danger, whether it's real or imagined. And creative minds are especially adept at the latter.

Because fears center on survival, people become less flexible and more wary when they're scared and anxious. At that point, going down a known path is far more appealing than taking risks and venturing into the unknown. Suffice to say, an aversion to the unknown won't often lead to creative breakthroughs.

Another way fear can hinder creativity has to do with fear of rejection.

Friends, family, colleagues and critics often resist unusual ideas or those that stray from established artistic norms. Aside from arising out of envy and competition, these reflexive reactions also make sense from an evolutionary perspective: Norms and agreed-upon ways of thinking cultivate group harmony. History is filled with the rejection, mockery and oppression of novel ideas and styles deemed too "out there" - painters Claude Monet and Frida Kahlo and author Herman Melville were all harshly criticized, dismissed or persecuted by their contemporaries.

To create something truly original, an artist must often break from the status quo.

So it's only natural that any creative endeavor will lead to fear of criticism, rejection or failure. The road less traveled might be more dangerous. It might even be fruitless. And sometimes the cost is one's life: Socrates was executed on charges that his probing questions were corrupting young people, while Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned to death, in part, for his heretical claims that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

When anxiety inspires

This is not to say that being cool as a cucumber is a requisite for great art. Some level of anxiety can serve a purpose.

While being truly terrified can paralyze you, being bored and feeling languid can grind your motivation to a halt.

There's a sweet spot of anxiety that actually harnesses motivation and cognition and directs all attention to the task at hand.

With the deadline for "Afraid" fast approaching, I felt a pang of anxiety that propelled me to the finish line: I decided to tuck myself away in a resort next to the mountains in Tucson for two weeks and work 12-hour days to wrap up the book. The anxiety of not meeting the deadline was enough to inspire me to buckle down and get the job done.

Then there's the specter of death.

No one is spared. Yet, even as geniuses like Michelangelo and Charles Dickens met the same fate as their peers, their brushstrokes and words became eternal.

Creative work is a way to achieve a certain level of immortality - art and books and articles that live on past your expiration date.

American anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that fear of death motivated humans to compose stories, myth and legends about the afterlife and immortality, and it inspired great works of architecture like the Egyptian pyramids.

This existential dread has also motivated authors and artists to seek a form of immortality through their work. I find it somewhat comforting that after I am dead, some of my scientific discoveries and writings might continue to live through others.

In fact, you might be reading this piece long after I am gone.

What you can and can't control

Creative work entails traversing a mental landscape that can be treacherous, whether you're mining your imagination, plotting your next steps or plumbing your memories. Failure always looms.

This uncertainty can elicit fear and doubt.

Interestingly, fear is solely focused on survival, while creativity operates at its best when basic survival needs are met. Furthermore, fear is a primitive emotion, whereas art, science and culture are among humankind's most evolved abilities.

But fear and creativity are also similar in that both possess automatic and intuitive processes. The best works of art are not the sole result of logical thinking. Like a fetus, art grows inside the artist autonomously while the artist keeps feeding it; when the time comes, delivery happens. Fear is also mostly autonomous: When you notice a car barreling toward you, you leap out of the road before thinking about the driver's intentions.

In that sense, people don't fully control their fear and creativity. For both to work productively, a balanced harmony needs to exist between the unconscious and the conscious mind.

Cultivating your creativity

Still, there are elements of your consciousness that you can influence.

If you want to create something but feel inhibited by writer's block, hesitancy or insecurity, think about which kind of fear might be holding you back.

Is it fear of failure or judgment? Fear of your own inner critic? Or is there a different day-to-day challenge or responsibility that's soaking up most of your attention?

Once you've identified the source of the anxiety, see if you can reframe the fear in an objective way that liberates you from its shackles. Maybe you can recognize failure as a possibility but ultimately something that won't kill you: You can always just try again.

Another option is to engage your brain's reward circuitry - say, thinking of the possible positive outcomes of your work, including immortality. Or you could use the fear network to your advantage, remembering a deadline, a promotion that might hinge on the work or the crummy feeling of not completing a task. Breaking the work into pieces will also make it seem more doable and less scary.

Sometimes, shaking things up with a change of scenery can help. When I went away to finish "Afraid," I chose the desert not only because I find the landscape inspiring. There's also something about the starkly different and empty geography that clears my head from all of the clutter of daily life back in Michigan.

Just as there are many paths to take as you pursue a creative endeavor, there are a range of strategies to combat or use all of the little fears that crop up along the way.

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Anxiety can often be a drag on creativity, upending the trope of the tortured artist

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A psychiatrist explains the many ways anxiety can hinder, color or compel creativity.

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Screenshot of the fake news. abcnews.com.co

The rise of fake news, once only the preserve of certain types of tabloids has now become a dominant feature of social media and a subject of major concern for mainstream media.

CNN has even started the process of educating its readers on how to spot fake news. Ironically, however, the article sits above a strip of "paid content" which are clickbait advertorials provided by an Israeli organisation Outbrain. The pictures and titles in a large number of cases completely misrepresent what the advertising is actually about.

Given that the main role of fake news is to drive advertising revenue, the difference between using Outbrain advertising and presenting outright fake news to drive traffic may be just a matter of degree.

It turns out that a great deal of the recent fake news targeted at Trump supporters appears to be originating in Macedonian town of Veles. An industry has developed there of creating sites with names like DonaldTrumpNews.co and USADailyPolitics.com that feeds pro-Trump fake news which in turn generates large revenues from traffic generated in large part through Facebook shares.

Although Google, Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter, are enabling fake news to spread also providing the incentives through advertising revenues, it is in their financial interests to turn a blind eye to the practice. After all, it is algorithms making the decisions of what shows up in news feeds and they can always claim they are working on "tweaks" of their decision making software to prevent fake news from trending.

Fake news however is not just coming from humans. Researchers Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara published from the University of Southern California looked at tweets hash-tagged about Clinton and Trump over a recent period of 4 weeks. They found that out of 20.7 million tweets, 20% of them were generated by artificial bots. Bots represented 15% of the 2.8 million distinct users involved in sending the tweets.

It is hard to tell whether fake news and its promotion on social media really impacts people's opinions other than simply confirming opinions of groups that have already decided on their respective in-groups. It is not certain that fake news and social media created these divisions in the first place or simply created the demand.

Fake news, especially those surfaced in tweets have even been accepted by mainstream media. Fox News reported the story that Michelle Obama had deleted supportive tweets when she heard that Clinton was being investigated by the FBI. Although presenter Sean Hannity later retracted the allegation, its untruth was downplayed.

Whilst the financial motivations for news is to drive website traffic and advertising, it is unlikely that there will be any turning back from stories that have to compete with fiction. Again, Google and Facebook's algorithms created the " filter bubble " where users are only shown news that they agree with and will want to read. The fact that this behaviour has been exploited by people concocting news is just how advertising drives behaviours.

Although it may be tempting to think that news from reputable media organisations is more reliable, they are still influenced by partisan opinion and the pressures to advertise and generate traffic and sales. Looking at the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Fox News clearly highlighted the political preferences of the organisations and the particular perspectives taken by reporters and opinion writers.

Ultimately, there is no protection from fake news other than to adopt a skeptical view of all news and take the truth of it on balance of likelihood and confirmation from multiple reputable sources.

This situation is not of itself new. French philosopher Michel de Montaigne commented about the turmoil and divisions of France in the 16th Century saying:

"Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions?"

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Advertising is driving social media-fuelled fake news and it is here to stay

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The rise of fake news, once only the preserve of certain types of tabloids has now become a dominant feature of social media and a subject of major concern for mainstream media. CNN has even started the...

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Why Everyone and Everything on Social Media Is Fake

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Social media platforms, and the way we use them, aren’t designed for showing our authentic selves.

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Recently a new show appeared on my Netflix recommendations and drew my attention. Dark Tourist sells itself as a provocative and quirky documentary series, in which New Zealand journalist David Farrier visits sites associated with death, disaster and atrocity. He seeks the "mad, the macabre, the morbid".

From meeting one of Pablo Escobar's henchmen in Colombia to participating in funeral rituals in Indonesia, each episode spends a few minutes at a site, before swiftly moving to the next. Its jaunty theme tune and Itchy and Scratchy style title credits set the tone.

Based on my research in Cambodia, I argue that Dark Tourist pursues a reality TV aesthetic for entertainment but achieves little to further understanding of past and present atrocities, or why people visit such sites.

Strange people, strange places

Focusing on extreme tourist destinations in places determined to be off the beaten track, the series is riddled with words like bizarre, wacky, bloody and macabre. In an interview about the series, Farrier sells the show as being about "all these strange people in all these strange places doing strange things".

Read more: From trauma to tourism and back again: Port Arthur's history of 'dark tourism'

By situating it as such, the destinations are presented as peculiar places, the people who run them somewhat abnormal and those who visit as slightly deranged. Glorifying the danger of the locales, and highlighting the "bizarre" nature of the encounters, Farrier is portrayed as some kind of rational, moral explorer hero visiting little known people and places and exposing the realities of each site.

By centring the series on the idea of abnormality, the show fails to try to understand the wider socio-cultural and historical context of why people do these things, or visit these places. This is a new version of the freak shows of earlier years, but here the freaks are those who see economic potential in commodifying sites of violence or death and those who want to visit them. The trend is posited as particular to our age - a morbid aspect of 21st-century global tourism.

Historical dark tourism

Dark tourism is not a new phenomenon, nor is the use of artefacts of violence in pursuit of economic or political capital. People have always been fascinated with sites of death and disaster, and others have always exploited that.

In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church encouraged contemplation of death and dying through viewing memento mori - often displays of skeletal remains. During the Napoleonic wars, British tourists visited the battlefields to watch the fighting. Teeth, bullets and other material artefacts were collected and sold afterwards.

The Egyptian pyramids (most of which are tombs) have been a tourist destination for decades, and mummies have been displayed in museums around the world for more than two centuries. Some 20,000 people reportedly watched the last public hanging in the US.

Contemporary dark tourism

As part of my research in Cambodia, I consider dark tourism, particularly in relation to Khmer Rouge sites, but also in the wider tourist circuit of Cambodia. Part of this research examines why people participate in the commodification of their own, often harrowing, histories. I also explore the attraction to tourists of such sites.

Dark Tourist does little to examine the motivations behind such commodification. Instead, the show positions it as either cynically economic, political, or just plain absurd.

There is truth in the idea that in order to attract visitors, sites have to conform to an international tourist aesthetic. They also have to present a particularly salient political narrative, which obscures alternative understandings, and may bear little resonance with local ways of dealing with violent histories. However, as my research shows, this is in no way weird or unreasonable.

Many of my research participants saw tourism as a means of connecting Cambodia to the wider global community, and so ensuring its position in networks of support for the future. Others considered it an important means of education, both for the tourists and for their own communities. All were aware of the political motivations for certain commodifications and the simplification of stories presented by others. But they considered this less important than the imagined positive results of tourism, directed towards a more stable future.

Read more: Dark tourism, Aboriginal imprisonment and the 'prison tree' that wasn't

Tourist motivations

Tourists also came with a plethora of motivations. While this series suggests voyeurism or thrill-seeking is the norm, this is actually the minority. The main attraction of dark tourism sites is their material and emotive connection to particular histories or violent events, particularly where they are within living memory and have impacted globally and locally.

My research shows, for example, how the display of human remains and exposed grave pits at Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, colloquially known as the Killing Fields, offers an affective connection to the Khmer Rouge. It collapses time by re-imagining the horrors in the present through the tourist encounter. For those visiting funeral rituals or other contemporary treatments related to the dead, it is about experiencing alternative understandings in the present.

The increase in dark tourism does not, I think, reflect a growing morbidity or fetishism of death and atrocity. What it does reflect is a liberalising, globalised economic system where tourism is increasingly a major economic sector for many countries.

It is also, I believe, a reaction to the increasingly precarious and seemingly insecure world we live in. Of course some people visit such sites as ways of increasing their social capital: providing a means of presenting themselves as adventurous and brave. Hence an increasing number of sites appeal to extreme pursuits, such as the shooting range the series visits in Cambodia.

But for many, visiting sites of atrocity or disaster provides a connection to events they have learned about but not experienced.

Ethics of reality TV

The sensationalisation of Dark Tourist conforms to a reality TV aesthetic where ever more extreme experiences are pursued in the name of entertainment (think Survivor). This positioning does nothing for helping understand the context and impact of these tourist sites, nor the people who live and work in these realities.

While Farrier is stepping out into the no-go area of Fukushima (and putting his tour guide's job in jeopardy), or investigating the "lawlessness" of Alexandra, South Africa, in the name of impactful television, there are people for who this is their everyday life.

Although Farrier is worried about his few minutes of exposure to radiation, his tour guide Yo and a guard about whom he remarks "if job satisfaction comes from getting rid of people like us, he should be a happy man", are exposed to this everyday. The people of Alexandra are living with the ongoing legacy of apartheid and ongoing tensions in South Africa.

Reclaiming their future through participating in the commodification of dark tourist sites is a means to make a living, and perhaps reassert some control. It is neither weird, nor extreme, to attempt to understand a violent past better through material connection.

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Dark tourism: why atrocity tourism is neither new nor weird

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A new Netflix series focusing on tourism to sites of historic disasters or atrocities delivers no more than a contemporary version of a freak show.

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Can artificial intelligence help end fake news?

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Want to make yourself sound like Obama? In the past, that might have required physically imitating his voice, party-trick style. And even if you were very good at it, it almost certainly wouldn’t present a danger to our democracy. But technology has changed that. You can now easily and accurately ma…

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The brumby debate will never be settled until we face the role horses played in colonisation

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Too often our discussions of brumbies don’t consider the darker aspects of the horse’s role in Australian history.

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Filmmaker Justine Bateman doesn't think there is a thriving future for actors in filmed entertainment as we know it. She believes that artificial intelligence will ultimately suck the creative marrow out of Hollywood.

"AI can create a convincing simulation of a human actor, and the tech is improving at an alarming rate," says Bateman, the former "Family Ties" star who has a degree in computer science and digital media management from UCLA. In a few short years, she asks, why would anyone need to pay real actors?

"I stress that this is an existential threat," continues Bateman, who is an adviser to SAG-AFTRA on AI issues. "And if they can do this with actors, they can do it with writers, directors, cinematographers - everyone. We'll be replaced with Frankenstein spoonfuls of our own work."

When it comes to Hollywood, the sudden rise of AI-enabled content-creation platforms has only widened the already enormous divide between entertainment unions and the industry's largest employers. Generative AI - advanced computing platforms that can create new text and imagery based on reams of existing reference material - has become a veritable villain in the current labor standoff. Signs on the unions' picket lines this summer have been emblazoned with anti-AI slogans like "AI is not ART," "Wrote ChatGPT This" and "AI's not taking your dumb notes."

What it comes down to is the WGA and SAG-AFTRA want ironclad guarantees from studios and streamers that robots won't become replacements for performers and scribes.

"Everyone understands that AI is a tidal wave that is coming for us one way or the other," says Sarah Moses, entertainment litigation partner at law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. "But it's hard to negotiate right now because there are so many unknowns."

Let's start with this one: Is the hand-wringing over generative AI overblown?

VIP+ Survey: Industry Sentiments on Gen AI Use

There's a general consensus that AI can't produce original TV shows and movies that are anything close to what audiences expect - and that it may never be a satisfying substitute for the real human deal.

"It's fun to imagine a generative AI scriptwriter, but there is absolutely no interest in that. Because it's lousy," says Monica Landers, founder and CEO of StoryFit, an Austin-based company that uses AI to analyze screenplays. "It can't hold on to the pacing to reveal the plot. It's not made for character growth. It's so empty right now."

James Cameron, the filmmaker behind AI thriller "The Terminator" and blockbusters like "Avatar" and "Titanic," has no plans to use artificial intelligence to write a script. "I just don't believe that a disembodied mind that's just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said will ever have something that's going to move an audience," Cameron recently told CTV News. He added, "Let's wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for best screenplay, I think we've got to take them seriously."

Generative AI is transforming everything about computing, and it represents an advance on par with the introduction of the PC or the smartphone. In the right hands, it will yield a class of powerful new creative tools.

"We should look at AI as 'augmented intelligence,' rather than 'artificial intelligence,'" says Sunny Dhillon, managing partner at venture-capital firm Kyber Knight Capital. "This will let filmmakers work faster and cheaper and make movies that are more compelling."

The reason that AI is changing the way the world works is that now anyone can harness the power of generative AI tools simply by using plain-language instructions, says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, the chipmaker that has emerged as a powerhouse in the AI space. All of a sudden, you don't need specialized training in, say, coding to create something incredible.

"We've democratized computer science," Huang told a rapturous crowd at the Siggraph 2023 computer-graphics confab in L.A. last week. "Generative AI is the new killer app."

The suits in Hollywood are clearly intrigued by AI, as are executives in every industry. About 96% of AI decision-makers at media and entertainment companies said they plan to increase their spending on generative AI technology in the next 12 months, according to a survey of 6,000 employees by enterprise search-engine vendor Lucidworks conducted between May and July. They add that they're not looking to use it to eliminate workers; just 4% of those surveyed said they expect AI adoption to result in "job displacement."

VIP+ Analysis: Four Ways Hollywood Should Use AI

Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company is starting to use AI to operate more efficiently. "Overall, I'm bullish about the prospects because I think they'll create efficiencies and ways for us to basically provide better services to customers," he told Wall Street analysts in May.

At Amazon, every one of the tech giant's teams - including in its entertainment business - has multiple generative AI technology projects in the works, according to CEO Andy Jassy, speaking on Amazon's Aug. 3 earnings call. He was light on specifics but said generative AI "is going to be at the heart of what we do" as Amazon looks to use it to reduce costs and "reinvent" cus-tomer experiences.

A recent Netflix job listing for a product manager in the company's machine-learning group listed a salary range of between $300,000 and $900,000. That triggered ire among the Hollywood unions' rank and file. "Talk about tone-deafness, FFS!" tweeted WGA member Christopher Derrick, whose writing credits include "Star Trek: Picard" and "The Equalizer." Never mind that the Netflix job in question centers on AI developments for content personalization and optimizing payment-processing systems. With the unions coalesced around fighting the encroachment of all things AI, Netflix's listing is now a boogeyman.

Forms of artificial intelligence, of course, have existed for decades (think spell-check programs or digital thermostats). What's new - and, to Bateman and others, extremely alarming - is how rapidly gen AI has advanced to be able to create snippets of film or television that, if you squint, can look like actual humans in scenes produced by human directors. An AI-generated script can read like something written by a professional writer. A tipping point came in November 2022 when software firm OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that can spit out fully formed essays on a range of different topics.

"For years, everyone has known AI was coming," says Jason Vredenburg, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology who teaches American film history. "But when ChatGPT came out, everyone was shocked. They realized it was coming faster than anyone thought."

That's why in the current entertainment industry labor disputes, AI has become a flashpoint. The WGA wants its members to be able to use AI tools but is asking for assurances that using those tools won't count against them in determining credit and pay. The AMPTP has offered to spell out explicitly that a "writer" must be a human, but also says further discussion is needed in the area.

Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA has alleged that studios "want to scan a background performer's image, pay them for a half a day's labor and then use an individual's likeness for any purpose forever without their consent." The AMPTP has emphatically denied this.

But background actors have become deeply worried about their employment prospects in an AI world. "We don't know what all our scans are being used for," says Prince Royal, an actor who says that when he worked as an extra on "The Flash" he was required to submit to a 360-degree image scan - or go home without pay. AMPTP says under its proposal, producers must obtain background actors' full consent and separately bargain for payment for each use of a digital replica.

Per the AMPTP, what is needed is "a balanced approach based on careful use, not prohibition."

Multiple legal issues with generative AI have yet to be fully ironed out. One gray area - the subject of several lawsuits - has to do with the source material used to "train" generative AI models.

Last month, a lawsuit on behalf of Sarah Silverman and other authors accused Meta and OpenAI of illegally using copyrighted works - including Silverman's 2010 bestselling memoir "The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee" - to train their AI systems. (Meta declined to comment. Silverman also declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.)

VIP+ Analysis: AI Copyright Cases Under Cloud of Uncertainty

Some experts say there's nothing in the law that prevents AI systems from using any kind of source material for training. U.S. laws stipulate that you can't copy a specific copyrighted work or performance, says Yale Law School professor Robert Post. But actors, he says, study all kinds of performances to inform their own. "Everyone has a right to study them," including someone who is using AI to do so, says Post. He adds, "It's not copyright infringement to read a lot of books."

Other commentators have argued that the U.S. needs a federal law protecting name, image and likeness that supersedes today's state-by-state regulations.

Hilary Krane, chief legal officer at CAA, believes generative AI issues pertaining to intellectual property, as well as name, image and likeness rights, are solvable and addressable concerns. "We want to make sure the rules of the road are clear," she says. "Uncertainty always breeds fear."

The music industry has been the canary in the coal mine for many technologies, including piracy, and has been among the first in the entertainment field to have to grapple with generative AI that mimics specific artists' styles and voices. Earlier this year, Universal Music Group filed copyright-infringement claims to remove an AI-generated song called "Heart on My Sleeve" that sounded very much like a collab between Drake and the Weeknd, neither of whom was involved with the song.

What the industry might need is some kind of truth-in-labeling regulations for generative AI, similar to the way the FDA requires standardized food labeling, says Michael Huppe, CEO of SoundExchange, a nonprofit rights management organization for digital sound recordings. "Maybe you'll end up paying more for a 'human-only' streaming service," he says.

To date, generative AI has made the biggest inroads in VFX for tasks like de-aging actors and dubbing scenes into other languages. But given the antagonism from some on the picket lines toward all things AI, it's a weird time to be selling AI-enabled products to Hollywood.

StoryFit, for example, works with studios and networks to break down a script and identify whether elements and characters in a story resonate with audiences. Monica Landers compares it to an audience preview but using an AI-modeled audience to react to a project when it's at the script stage.

"We don't want to be the bad guy," says Landers. "But we do find ourselves in the middle of it. I often find myself responding defensively: 'We are not generative AI; we are using AI to help creativity.'"

Some years ago, professional language translators were very worried about AI eliminating their jobs when tools like Google Translate became more proficient. What actually happened, according to Landers, was that the AI tools took on a lot of the "boring scutwork" of translators, but they have not been able to replicate mood or convey idioms in the way human translators can. In the context of the Hollywood strikes, Landers says, "My hope is we can figure out a way that writers and actors are protected enough so that they can be part of creating in whatever this new world is going to be."

Scott Mann, co-CEO of Flawless, which specializes in gen-AI filmmaking tools, and a director and producer whose films include "Fall" and "Heist," says the recent uproar over AI in creative industries has highlighted "the responsibility factor" - that is, producers must obtain permission from actors and compensate them for anything based on their likeness.

"The truth is, there are huge misunderstandings around gen AI," says Mann. "I don't see any point in time where you take humans out of the equation. Fundamentally, films are created from human feelings and emotions."

On AI issues, the path of least resistance for the unions and the AMPTP may be to agree to certain "broad strokes" and to table the more nitty-gritty points of contention until the next round of negotiations, says Moses. "The parties might be best served kicking the can down the road."

But that road may be coming up fast. Joe Russo, co-director of Marvel movies including "Avengers: Endgame" and "Avengers: Infinity War," has predicted that generative AI may be able to create feature-length movies within two years - and that the technology could put you, the viewer, into an AI-generated movie.

"At some point, perhaps, you could tell a video-streaming service, 'Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photo-real avatar,'" Russo said in an April interview with Collider. "It renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice. ... And suddenly now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long. So you can curate your story specifically to you."

Echoing Russo's thought experiment, Bateman predicts that rights holders will sooner or later let consumers insert themselves into classic movies - imagine yourself starring in "Citizen Kane." Or maybe AI generates some kind of derivative work cobbled together from an AI database trained on existing stories and characters trending in your feeds. Either way, in Bateman's doomsday outlook, the market for human-created entertainment will wither away, replaced by synthetic fare produced at a fraction of the cost.

"There's no scenario I can think of where this doesn't happen," Bateman says. "Generative AI can't make great films. But it can create a high volume of content and regurgitate sequels."

But others say that instead of fighting the future, the more productive strategy is to figure out where AI technology is most useful, while working to ensure copyright protections for individual creators as well as name, image and likeness rights for performers.

The real question the industry faces is how people can get past their fear about AI and start to unlock its potential, says CJ Bangah, who leads PwC's entertainment and media practice.

"Some of the most impactful artisans in the future will find ways to use AI in ways we are just beginning to understand," Bangah says, adding, "'Hand-crafted' doesn't mean not using technology."

Gene Maddaus contributed to this story.

See Variety Intelligence Platform's AI assessments:

* Union contract just one step to actors' AI protections

* What writers and studios must iron out on AI

* How AI will augment human creativity in filmmaking

* How AI will revolutionize streaming

* Studio transparency key to quelling WGA's AI battle

Plus, dive into VIP+'s expansive special report ...

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'This Is an Existential Threat': Will AI Really Eliminate Actors and Ruin Hollywood? Insiders Sound Off

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In Hollywood, the sudden rise of AI-enabled content-creation platforms has widened the divide between entertainment unions and employers.

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Children living in Gaza have never known anything but overcrowding, shortages, conflict and danger.

It's been 18 years since the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, moved all Israel's settlers and military personnel out of the Gaza Strip. The country's official narrative then became that they were no longer an occupying force.

But two years later, following the election of Hamas, the Israeli government imposed a blockade on the entire Gaza Strip. So today's 18-year-olds have suffered in a state of privation for pretty much their whole lives.

Relocation of settlers and soldiers and the imposition of the blockade did not release Israel from its responsibility under international law towards the civilian population in Gaza. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Israel is still "bound by certain obligations under the law of occupation". As detailed in article 55 of the fourth Geneva convention, this includes ensuring that the population of Gaza receives food, medicines and other basic goods.

But over recent days the Israeli government has tightened the blockade so that even commodities essential for survival are denied to the civilian population. As researchers on the protection of children in Gaza, we - the authors of this article - are receiving messages from families that they are surviving on bread and contaminated water.

The world is learning, almost in real time, about the impact on the children of Gaza of the latest siege-like conditions imposed by Israel in the wake of Hamas' attacks. The lack of water and food is inevitably affecting the young more immediately and more severely than adults.

Those children who fall sick or are injured seek treatment in a collapsing health system, with multiple facilities attacked. Those still functioning must manage an impossible level of demand along with a drastic shortage of medicine. In such circumstances many children are vulnerable to severe harm and death.

The toll of war

But it would be a mistake to assume that even prior to the current tightening of the blockade, children in Gaza enjoyed healthy lives. Within the densely populated Gaza Strip, the health needs of children have grown exponentially due to the conditions of the Israeli blockade.

Regular exposure to direct military attacks affects both the physical and mental health of the young. Older children will have experienced six wars including the current one in their brief lifetimes (2008-9, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022 and 2023).

Since Israel imposed its blockade in 2007 up until the current war, Defense for Children International - Palestine (DCIP), a Palestinian human rights organisation specifically focused on child rights, has counted 1,189 Palestinian children killed in Gaza by Israeli military attacks. These wars have also created long-term threats to children's survival and wellbeing. In the aftermath of each war, Israel has tightened access to Gaza via the main commercial crossing for construction materials, generators and water.

Without these materials, it has been impossible to clear the debris fully, and to rebuild homes, schools, hospitals and public spaces. The lack of reconstruction poses severe risks to children playing outside.

A report conducted by the UN Environment Programme following the 2008-9 war highlighted the serious health issues due to the debris that would particularly affect children. Polluted water supplies, contaminated soil, extensive rubble, including exposed metal rods, have all created grave risk for the young.

Crumbling infrastructure

Blockade has also made it impossible to develop vitally needed infrastructure. The provision of clean water and adequate sewage and waste disposal requires massive investment to meet the needs of the population. Meanwhile, the electricity shortages and shortage of sanitation structures mean that the sea in Gaza is highly contaminated by sewage and poorly treated wastewater.

With very few safe public play spaces for children, the beach is one place that many have turned to for relief. According to a 2018 report by the RAND Corporation, however, water-related diseases are a primary cause of child and infant mortality in Gaza.

Some children require complex medical care that is not available in Gaza. Under international law, children's access to adequate medical care is the responsibility of Israel. According to human rights organisations, requests for medical permits for children to access necessary care in Israel are routinely denied.

The need for rehabilitative support for disabled children grew in 2018 and 2019 when thousands of children and youth participated in demonstrations during the " great march of return". Israeli forces responded with live and rubber bullets, killing 46 and injuring nearly 8,800 children. Many children who sustained life-altering injuries, including loss of limbs, were not granted permits to leave Gaza to receive the rehabilitative care they required.

Palestinian doctors, nurses, other medical practitioners, social workers and civil society organisations have spent 16 years doing their utmost to provide for the health and wellbeing of Palestinian children in Gaza under blockade.

Despite multiple evacuation orders from the Israeli military in the past week, hospital staff continue to work around the clock to save lives. Yet health workers and facilities are under attack. Meanwhile DCIP is reporting that in the past week more than 1,000 Palestinian children have been killed.

It must be understood that Israel's actions in the last week -- termed as "ethnic cleansing" by UN human rights officials -- are an extension of 16 years of killing both children's bodies and their hopes through its blockade.

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Gaza conflict: how children's lives are affected on every level

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Children living in Gaza have never known anything but deprivation and danger.

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Hamas and Hezbollah: how they are different and why they might cooperate against Israel

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Hezbollah’s full involvement in the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict would likely open up a regional war.

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In the Netflix documentary Beckham, the footballer is asked how he coped with the abuse of his entire country after the 1998 men's football World Cup. David Beckham responds:

I was able to handle being abused by the fans [...] because of the way my dad had been to me.

A poignant scene shows Beckham's mother Sandra struggling with how hard his father Ted was on their son. Ted's shouting often brought David to tears. When asked if he was too tough on David, Ted says:

No [...] if I told him how good he was, then he's got nothing to work at.

Throughout the documentary, Ted's behaviour is rationalised by Ted and even Beckham himself as necessary to support David's sporting trajectory. But David also said he was scared of his father's feedback and felt compelled to practise for hours every day.

Other athletes with similar stories include Tiger Woods, Andre Agassi and Australian Jelena Dokic.

Too often, controlling behaviour by parents is portrayed as necessary for success as an athlete. But the evidence shows this idea is false. In fact, such an approach can be detrimental to both a child's chances of sporting success and their wellbeing.

And it's not just a problem with elite sport; our research shows it's also occurring with community sport.

Read more: Winning at all costs - how abuse in sport has become normalised

What we found

Our research found about one in three people we surveyed said they'd experienced abuse by a parent during their time in Australian community sport.

Psychological abuse by parents was reported by just under a third of our respondents, and included behaviours such as:

The controlling and abusive behaviours described above have been consistently normalised by parents, coaches and sporting organisations as being necessary to create "mentally tough" athletes ready for high-level competition.

Read more: Why taking a trauma- and violence-informed approach can make sport safer and more equitable

However, there is no evidence abusive and controlling behaviours have a positive impact on performance.

Instead, there is ample evidence to indicate it:

Research shows when adults in community sport use what's known as an "autonomy-supportive approach" - in which young people are empowered to make their own decisions and have their feelings validated - children can be more self-motivated.

An experiment at the 2012 Olympic Games found coaches with a more supportive approach achieved higher medal tallies than those who did not.

Most of this evidence has focused on coaching, but given many parents act as coaches for their children, these findings remain relevant.

Putting children's experiences first

There is no evidence that controlling or abusive practices improve children's performance in sport. But even if there was, sport performance should not be valued above a child's health and wellbeing.

These behaviours would not be tolerated in different environments, such as workplaces or schools.

It's time to move on from this debate in sport. So where to from here?

The sport system is complex, and while it's easy to think it's just a few problematic people, the reality is these practices have been normalised for generations.

Parents are repeating patterns from their own experiences and mirroring practices they see as normal in elite sport. There is no quick fix.

But we can all play a part by reflecting on our own behaviours and considering how we can prioritise children's experiences and wellbeing.

Parents should focus on fun, learning new skills, enjoying the moment, and being part of a team so their kids can get the most out of the games they love.

Despite Beckham himself suggesting it was all worth it, the evidence suggests he was successful in spite of the high-pressure home environment, not because of it.

Read more: In sport, abuse is often dismissed as 'good coaching'

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What the David Beckham documentary tells us - and what it doesn't - about controlling parents in sport

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David Beckham says he felt prepared for the nation's wrath because of how he says he was treated by his father. It's a familiar story in sport, but evidence shows controlling behaviour doesn't work.

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‘Embrace it or risk obsolescence’: how will AI jobs affect Hollywood?

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As dual Hollywood strikes rage on, studios and streamers such as Netflix and Disney are on a hiring spree within the world of artificial intelligence

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Hollywood writers scored a major victory this week in the battle over artificial intelligence with a new contract featuring strong guardrails in how the technology can be used in film and television projects.

One of the longest labor strikes in Hollywood historycame to an end on Tuesday after the Writers Guild of America (WGA) approved an agreement made with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Writers and actors had been picketing for months as part of a historic "double strike" that brought the industry to a standstill.

One of the most closely watched aspects of negotiations was the use of artificial intelligence, amid concerns from both writers and actors that unchecked AI could dramatically reshape Hollywood and undermine their roles, pitting artists against robots in a battle over human creativity.

With terms of AI use finally agreed, some writers are breathing easier - for now - and experts say the guidelines could offer a model for workers in Hollywood and other industries. The writers' contract does not outlaw the use of AI tools in the writing process, but it sets up guardrails to make sure the new technology stays in the control of workers, rather than being used by their bosses to replace them.

The new rules guard against several scenarios that writers had feared, comedian Adam Conover, a member of the WGA negotiating committee, told the Guardian. One such scenario was studios being allowed to generate a full script using AI tools, and then demanding that human writer complete the writing process.

Under the new terms, studios "cannot use AI to write scripts or to edit scripts that have already been written by a writer", Conover says. The contract also prevents studios from treating AI-generated content as "source material", like a novel or a stage play, that screenwriters could be assigned to adapt for a lower fee and less credit than a fully original script.

For instance, if the studios were allowed to use chatGPT to generate a 100,000-word novel and then ask writers to adapt it, "That would be an easy loophole for them to reduce the wages of screenwriters," Conover said. "We're not allowing that." If writers adapt output from large language models, it will still be considered an original screenplay, he said.

Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT who studies technological transformation, called the new terms a "fantastic win for writers", and said that it would likely result in "better quality work and a stronger industry for longer".

"I'm hoping it will be a model for the rest of the economy," Johnson said.

Members of the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild walk a picket line outside of Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles over the summer. Photograph: Valérie Macon/AFP/Getty Images

While the new union contract allows writers to use tools like ChatGPT if they want to, and if the companies agree, writers cannot be forced to use AI technology, and companies have to disclose whenever they give writers material to work with that has been generated by AI tools.

The writers' contract terms are "very smart", because they allow writers to choose to use AI as a research tool, without undermining the credit or compensation they receive, Johnson said.

"AI is under control of the writers, not under control of the studios," Johnson said. "It's not to be used as an automation technology. It's complementary to humans."

The new contract is a model that workers in other industries should emulate when it comes to addressing AI, Johnson said, though he cautioned that it's not clear if every union will have the power to win the kinds of protections Hollywood writers have done.

The union win on AI is also not a loss for the studios, Johnson noted, since they "will get a better product from this arrangement" than they might have otherwise.

A model for labor fights to come

Hollywood writers aren't the first workers to fight for protection from AI, and they will not be the last. Experts warn the deal likely offers a preview of labor battles to come in other industries.

"This is the first step on a long process of negotiating and working through what generative AI means for the creative industry - not just writers but visual artists, actors, you name it," says David Gunkel, a professor of media studies at Northern Illinois University and author of Person, Thing, Robot.

The protections are the first AI rules included in a WGA contract and come as entertainment companies are on a hiring spree for jobs related to research, development and management AI.

"All of the studios see the opportunity," Dawn Chmielewski, the co-author of Binge Times, a book on Hollywood's streaming wars, told the Guardian last month.

Meanwhile, the actors strike continues, with the studios and the actors' union, Sag-Aftra, set to resume their contract negotiations next week. . The writers' deal, which addresses similar concerns to those of Sag-Aftra, could provide a path forward.

Like writers, actors in Hollywood are fearing the threats that artificial intelligence poses to their profession. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

The use of AI in the acting world has been a lightning rod issue, with growing concern about the use of digital likenesses - in essence, an AI double that productions could hire instead of a real actor. Earlier this year, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the guild's chief negotiator, said studios had proposed paying background actors for a day's work to use their images in perpetuity.

Efforts to adopt AI "as a normal operating procedure" are "literally dehumanizing the workforce", the actor Bryan Cranston said recently on a picket line.

Conover, the WGA negotiating committee member, noted that the kinds of technology threatening the acting industry are very different from the large language model tools that writers were confronting, meaning that Sag-Aftra is negotiating over a substantially different set of problems.

One of the strengths of the WGA's negotiating strategy on AI, he said, was that it cut through the marketing hype and fear mongering around what AI tools could possibly do in the future, and keep a focus on how studio executives might abuse the emerging technology in the present.

"We didn't get bogged down in the science-fiction version," Conover said. "We didn't protect ourselves against the technology, we protected ourselves against the humans on the other side of the table who are trying to screw us every day."
The Associated Press contributed reporting

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How Hollywood writers triumphed over AI - and why it matters

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Observers hail a 'smart' deal that allows for artificial intelligence as a tool, not a replacement - and could be a model for other industries

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Climate change will affect solar power and grid stability across Australia – here’s how

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Solar power generation varies greatly depending on the weather. A new study suggests in some parts of Australia, solar has a bright future.

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In China, LGBTQ+ activists and groups are consistently targeted by authorities and tech platforms. This is done digitally through computer algorithms, and physically by law enforcement and state security personnel trying to constrain their work.

For these people, living under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government means being severely limited in any activities their organisations undertake.

For our latest research, we spoke with 26 LGBTQ+ activists from 12 different provinces in China, to investigate what life is like on the ground for them.

The Chinese government claims LGBTQ+ people do not face discrimination in their country - but our research shows this isn't true.

The realities of Chinese LGBTQ+ activism

China's LGBTQ+ communities are still awaiting legal recognition of their relationships in the form of marriage or de facto relationships. And as in many countries, trans people are the most marginalised on the rainbow spectrum.

The level of social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is discouraging. One 2015 survey of 28,454 people, conducted by the United Nations Development Fund, found only 5% of LGBTQ+ people in China chose to disclose their sexual and/or gender identity at school, in the workplace or in religious communities.

The evidence suggests LGBTQ+ activists in China have had a particularly tough time since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013. The effects of targeting have spiralled in the past few years, reflected in the abrupt closure of the Shanghai Pride in 2020, and the 2021 shutdown of LGBT Rights Advocacy China - an organisation that held law-based campaigns.

However, arguably the toughest blow was delivered this year when the Beijing LGBT Center closed its doors after 15 years of service.

About half of the organisations we talked to for our research have since been closed.

The line between legal and acceptable

For our research, we used encrypted communication platforms to interview activists from 12 different provinces, various types of organisations, and all parts of the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

Our findings reveal these activists have long had to negotiate an invisible line between what is legal and what is acceptable.

For one thing, Chinese social media is tightly controlled. Social media companies are mandated to proactively support online censorship. WeChat, the most popular social media app in China, also actively engages in censorship.

Using the app is a double-edged sword for activists. They have to play around with words and content in a bid to dodge censorship, playing the cat-and-mouse game. In some cases, even using LGBTQ+ "double-speak", or code words well known within the community, isn't enough for content to be published (or remain published).

In July 2021, a number of LGBTQ+ activist groups woke up to find their WeChat social media accounts deactivated. Although they hadn't breached any laws with their content, the date was very close to a key political event, which likely invoked pre-emptive repression.

Waves of censorship tied to key political events are known as the " dissident calendar ". These repression strategies most often coincide with the five-year anniversaries of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the founding of the People's Republic of China, and high-level government meetings.

One queer woman activist spoke to us about the incident:

I tried to find some people [working for WeChat] to ask what exactly happened. It's very difficult to find any proof [...] after some investigation, our conclusion was that it might have been the company's action based on their own fear of getting into trouble. They wanted to prove to the authorities that they were loyal.

Other Chinese-owned social media apps such as Weibo and Douban must monitor "sensitive terms" and cooperate with government authorities. This can lead to account "bombing", where access to an account is frozen or blocked by the government - and shadow banning, where the content is only visible to the person who posted it.

Read more: What is shadowbanning? How do I know if it has happened to me, and what can I do about it?

Using the law as a weapon

We also found an onslaught of regulatory practices (such as laws and policies) constraining most activities in which LGBTQ+ groups and organisations would typically engage, whether that be fundraising and partnering with donor organisations, or raising social awareness.

For example, the 2017 Charity Law allows registered charitable organisations to fundraise. However, it requires social groups and social service organisations to obtain registration certificates issued by the local civil affairs department.

As our interviewees noted, registering an LGBTQ+ organisation is extremely difficult as most activists are bluntly rejected. In other words, the law indirectly outlaws fundraising for LGBTQ+ activities. Authorities can use the law to validate an existing governance agenda in which they consistently monitor and even harass LGBTQ+ activists.

One genderqueer activist shared their experience with us:

The police called our landlord, telling them that we were an illegal organisation and [...] not to rent the place to us anymore. [...] The police called the owner of the property [...], then our organisation closed down and ceased all activities.

The current state of birthrates in China hasn't helped. Birthrates continue to fall, despite the relaxation of the one-child policy in 2015, which then became a two-child policy, and then a three-child policy in 2021.

One queer woman activist commented on the secondary pressure coming from declining birthrates:

China right now is going insane [...] they are trying to put women back in [the] home, so that they produce more babies for the GDP. Some of my friends who are Party members are getting calls from the Communist Party saying, ' are you having plans to have kids? Don't make up excuses to not have kids '.

While regular police strategies include monitoring and intimidation, some use more extreme measures. In one case, an activist found their passport banned from overseas travel after arriving at the airport in preparation to fly internationally.

Survival as resistance

Queer activists in China have actively challenged the conditions of control and repression imposed upon them.

They told us their first priority was ensuring the longevity of their organisations. They did this by deprioritising outward-facing activities such as social awareness campaigns, and directing that focus to community activities.

Many still maintain social media accounts, but must increasingly put in effort to dodge shadow bans and avoid having their posts taken down.

Chinese authorities have weaponised regulatory practices against LGBTQ+ communities and activists, while maintaining decorum on the political world stage. We should expose these forms of oppression to help ensure they don't become permanent fixtures in Chinese society.

Read more: There are 60,000 Chinese-made surveillance systems in Australia - how concerned should we be?

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The Chinese government claims LGBTQ+ people are protected from discrimination. Our interviews with 26 activists tell another story

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A survey of 28,454 people found only 5% of LGBTQ+ people in China chose to disclose their sexual and/or gender identity in public settings.

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Measuring Culture Research Highlight

Research using employee data reveals the top five predictors of attrition and four actions managers can take in the short term to reduce attrition.

More than 40% of all employees were thinking about leaving their jobs at the beginning of 2021, and as the year went on, workers quit in unprecedented numbers. 1 Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, an all-time record. 2 As the Great Resignation rolls on, business leaders are struggling to make sense of the factors driving the mass exodus. More importantly, they are looking for ways to hold on to valued employees.

To better understand the sources of the Great Resignation and help leaders respond effectively, we analyzed 34 million online employee profiles to identify U.S. workers who left their employer for any reason (including quitting, retiring, or being laid off) between April and September 2021. 3 The data, from Revelio Labs, where one of us (Ben) is the CEO, enabled us to estimate company-level attrition rates for the Culture 500, a sample of large, mainly for-profit companies that together employ nearly one-quarter of the private-sector workforce in the United States. 4

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While resignation rates are high on average, they are not uniform across companies. Attrition rates for the six months we studied ranged from less than 2% to more than 30% across companies. Industry explains part of this variation. The graph below shows the estimated attrition rate for 38 industries from April through September, and the spread across industries is striking. (See "Industry Average Attrition Rate in the Great Resignation.") Apparel retailers, on average, lost employees at three times the rate of airlines, medical device makers, and health insurers.

The Great Resignation is affecting blue-collar and white-collar sectors with equal force. Some of the hardest hit industries - apparel retail, fast food, and specialty retail - employ the highest percentage of blue-collar workers among all industries we studied. Management consulting, in contrast, had the second-highest attrition rate but also employs the largest percentage of white-collar professionals of any Culture 500 industry. Enterprise software, which also suffered high churn, employs the highest percentage of engineering and technical employees.

Industry explains some of the variation in attrition rates across companies but not all of it. Even within the same industry, we observed significant differences in attrition rates. The figure below compares competitors with high and low attrition rates within their industries. (See "How Culture 500 Company Attrition Rates Compare Within Industries.") Workers are 3.8 times more likely to leave Tesla than Ford, for example, and more than twice as likely to quit JetBlue than Southwest Airlines.

Not surprisingly, companies with a reputation for a healthy culture, including Southwest Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and LinkedIn, experienced lower-than-average turnover during the first six months of the Great Resignation.

Although the sample is small, these pairs hint at another, more intriguing pattern. More-innovative companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, Nvidia, and Netflix, are experiencing higher attrition rates than their more staid competitors. The pattern is not limited to technology-intensive industries, since innovative companies like Goldman Sachs and Red Bull have suffered higher turnover as well.

To dig deeper into the drivers of intra-industry turnover, we calculated how each Culture 500 company's attrition rate compared with the average of its industry as a whole. This measure, which we call industry-adjusted attrition, translates each company's attrition rate into standard deviations above or below the average for its industry. 5

We also analyzed the free text of more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, using the Natural Employee Language Understanding platform developed by CultureX, a company two of us (Donald and Charles) cofounded. For each Culture 500 company, we measured how frequently employees mentioned 172 topics and how positively they talked about each topic. We then analyzed which topics best predicted a company's industry-adjusted attrition rate.

Top Predictors of Employee Turnover During the Great Resignation

Much of the media discussion about the Great Resignation has focused on employee dissatisfaction with wages. How frequently and positively employees mentioned compensation, however, ranks 16th among all topics in terms of predicting employee turnover. This result is consistent with a large body of evidence that pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover. 6 (Compensation can, however, be an important predictor of attrition in certain settings, such as nurses in large health care systems).

In general, corporate culture is a much more reliable predictor of industry-adjusted attrition than how employees assess their compensation. The figure below displays the five predictors of relative attrition. (See "Top Predictors of Attrition During Great Resignation.") To give a sense of their relative importance, we've benchmarked each element relative to the predictive power of compensation. 7 A toxic corporate culture, for example, is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate compared with its industry.

Let's take a closer look at each of the top five predictors of employee turnover.

Toxic corporate culture. A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior. In an upcoming article, we will dive deeper into each of these factors and examine different ways managers and employees can spot signals of toxic culture. 8 For now, the important point is that a toxic culture is the biggest factor pushing employees out the door during the Great Resignation.

Job insecurity and reorganization. In a previous article, we reported that job insecurity and reorganizations are important predictors of how employees rate a company's overall culture. So it's not surprising that employment instability and restructurings influence employee turnover. 9 Managers frequently resort to layoffs and reorganizations when their company's prospects are bleak. Previous research has found that employees' negative assessments of their company's future outlook is a strong predictor of attrition. 10 When a company is struggling, employees are more likely to jump ship in search of more job security and professional opportunities. Past layoffs, moreover, typically leave surviving employees with heavier workloads, which may increase their odds of leaving.

Another reason job insecurity could predict turnover is related to our measure of employee attrition, which incorporates job changes for all causes - including layoffs and involuntary terminations. We would expect frequent mentions of reorganizations and layoffs to predict involuntary turnover. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, involuntary separations have accounted for less than one-quarter of all employee exits among large companies during the Great Resignation. 11 So it's likely that poor career prospects and job insecurity contributed significantly to employees leaving on their own accord as well.

High levels of innovation. It's not surprising that workers leave companies with toxic cultures or frequent layoffs. But it is surprising that employees are more likely to exit from innovative companies. In the Culture 500 sample, we found that the more positively employees talked about innovation at their company, the more likely they were to quit. The attrition rates of the three most innovative Culture 500 companies - Nvidia, Tesla, and SpaceX - are three standard deviations higher than those in their respective industries.

Staying at the bleeding edge of innovation typically requires employees to put in longer hours, work at a faster pace, and endure more stress than they would in a slower-moving company. The work may be exciting and satisfying but also difficult to sustain in the long term. When employees rate their company's innovation positively, they are more likely to speak negatively about work-life balance and a manageable workload. During the Great Resignation, employees may be reconsidering the personal toll that relentless innovation takes.

Failure to recognize performance. Employees are more likely to leave companies that fail to distinguish between high performers and laggards when it comes to recognition and rewards. Companies that fail to recognize and reward strong performers have higher rates of attrition, and the same is true for employers that tolerate underperformance. The issue is not compensation below market rates, but rather recognition - both informal and financial - that is not linked to effort and results. High-performing employees are the most likely to resent a lack of recognition for their results, which means that companies may be losing some of their most productive workers during the Great Resignation.

Poor response to COVID-19. Employees who mentioned COVID-19 more frequently in their reviews or talked about their company's response to the pandemic in negative terms were more likely to quit. The same pattern holds true when employees talk more generally about their company's policies for protecting their health and well-being.

Short-Term Actions to Boost Retention

The powerful predictors of attrition listed above are not easy to change. A weak future outlook that spurs restructuring and layoffs may be difficult to reverse; it is too late to fix a poor response to the pandemic; and a toxic corporate culture cannot be improved overnight. Relentless innovation provides companies like Tesla or Nvidia with a competitive advantage, so they must find ways to retain employees without sacrificing their innovation edge.

Our analysis identified four actions that managers can take in the short term to reduce attrition. (See "Short-Term Steps for Companies to Increase Retention.") As in the graph above, each bar represents the topic's predictive power relative to compensation. This time, the topics predict a company's ability to retain employees compared with industry peers. Providing employees with lateral career opportunities, for example, is 2.5 times more powerful as a predictor of a company's relative retention rate compared with compensation.

Provide opportunities for lateral job moves. Not all employees want to climb the corporate ladder or take on additional work or responsibilities. Many workers simply want a change of pace or the opportunity to try something new. When employees talk positively about lateral opportunities - new jobs offering fresh challenges without a promotion - they are less likely to quit. Lateral career opportunities are 12 times more predictive of employee retention than promotions. We observed the same pattern in multinationals: The more frequently employees discussed the possibility of international postings, the more likely they were to stick with their current employer.

Sponsor corporate social events. Company-organized social events, including happy hours, team-building excursions, potluck dinners, and other activities outside the workplace are a key element of a healthy corporate culture, so it's no surprise that they are also associated with higher rates of retention. 12 Organizing fun social events is a low-cost way to reinforce corporate culture as employees return to the office, and it strengthens employees' personal connections to their team members.

Offer remote work options. Much of the media coverage of the Great Resignation has focused on the importance of remote work in retaining employees. Unsurprisingly, when employees discussed remote work options in more positive terms, they were less likely to quit. What you might not have expected is the relatively modest impact of remote work on retention - just a bit more powerful than compensation in predicting lower attrition. Remote work options may have a modest effect on employee turnover because most companies in an industry converge on similar policies. If companies cannot differentiate themselves based on remote work options, they may need to look elsewhere - providing lateral job opportunities, for instance, or making schedules more predictable - to retain employees.

Make schedules more predictable for front-line employees. When blue-collar employees describe their schedules as predictable, they are less likely to quit. Having a predictable schedule is six times more powerful in predicting front-line employee retention than having a flexible schedule. (A predictable schedule has no predictive power for white-collar employees.)

This finding is consistent with a study of 28 Gap stores, in which employees at randomly-assigned locations received their work schedules two weeks in advance, and their managers were barred from canceling their shifts at the last minute. Employees in the control stores were subject to the usual scheduling practices. 13 The stores with predictable schedules increased retention among their most experienced associates. Compared with the workers at the control stores, the employees with fixed schedules had a 7% improvement in their quality of sleep. The benefits were especially pronounced for workers with children, who reported a 15% reduction in stress.

Much of the media coverage of the Great Resignation focuses on high turnover among burned-out knowledge workers who are dissatisfied with their stagnant wages. Our findings are broadly consistent with this narrative. Industries that employ large numbers of professional and technical employees, like management consulting and enterprise software, have experienced high turnover. We found indirect evidence that burnout may contribute to higher levels of attrition among companies that excel at innovation. It's worth noting, however, that our direct measures of burnout, workload, and work-life balance do not emerge as key predictors of industry-adjusted turnover.

The simplistic narrative of white-collar burnout misses other critical realities of the Great Resignation. Our findings reinforce recent government statistics showing that blue-collar intensive industries like retail and fast food are experiencing unprecedented levels of attrition. 14

More fundamentally, we found that corporate culture is more important than burnout or compensation in predicting which companies lost employees at a higher rate than their industries as a whole. A toxic corporate culture is the single best predictor of which companies suffered from high attrition in the first six months of the Great Resignation. The failure to appreciate high performers, through formal and informal recognition, is another element of culture that predicts attrition. A failure to recognize performance is likely to drive out a company's most productive employees. This is not to argue that compensation and burnout don't influence attrition - of course they do. The important point is that other aspects of culture appear to matter even more.

Our research identified four steps - offering lateral career opportunities, remote work, social events, and more predictable schedules - that may boost retention in the short term. Leaders who are serious about winning the war for talent during the Great Resignation and beyond, however, must do more. They should understand and address the elements of their culture that are causing employees to disengage and leave. And above all else, they must root out issues that contribute to a toxic culture. Our next article will explore, empirically, what constitutes a toxic culture and how organizations can address this challenge.

About the Authors

Donald Sull (@culturexinsight) is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a cofounder of CultureX. Charles Sull is a cofounder of CultureX. Ben Zweig is the CEO of Revelio Labs and an adjunct professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business.

References

1. Microsoft sponsored a survey of over 30,000 employees across 31 markets in January 2021 for its Work Trend Index. See " The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work - Are We Ready? " Microsoft, March 22, 2021, www.microsoft.com.

2. " Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey," U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed Dec. 6, 2021, www.bls.gov. The data represents seasonally adjusted quits for total nonfarm employers in the U.S. from April through September 2021.

3. To test the accuracy of our estimates of employee attrition, we compared them with the November U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for total separations (including employee resignations, layoffs, and other sources of job separations) for private companies with more than 5,000 employees. The BLS total separation rate was 10.8% for April through September 2021, and our estimates were 10.1% for the same period.

4. To estimate turnover at the company level, we identified all job transitions where a user left their current employer for any reason, including quitting, retiring, or being laid off, and divided these by corporate head count. Job transitions were measured for April through September 2021 for 538 Culture 500 companies. The attrition rates are adjusted for sampling bias related to who has an online profile and for lags in when users reported transitions on their profiles. To test the robustness of our estimates of attrition, we separately estimated the hiring rate for each company for the same period. Hiring rate is defined as employees who joined the company divided by corporate head count. We would expect hiring and attrition rates to be correlated, as companies replace employees who leave. The Spearman correlation coefficient was 0.81 between the hiring and attrition rates.

5. We assigned each Culture 500 company to a primary industry and calculated how many standard deviations the focal company's attrition rate was above or below the industry mean. We used the resulting industry-normalized attrition rate as the dependent variable in our subsequent models. To identify which factors were most important in predicting each company's normalized attrition rate, we used an XGBoost model and calculated the SHAP (Shapley additive explanations) value for 172 topics measured by the CultureX Natural Employee Language Understanding platform. The SHAP value approach analyzes all possible combinations of features in a predictive model to estimate the marginal impact that each feature has on the outcome - in our case, which cultural elements have the biggest impact in predicting a company's industry-normalized attrition rate. For an overview of SHAP models, see S.M. Lundberg, G. Erion, H. Chen, et al., " From Local Explanations to Global Understanding With Explainable AI for Trees," Nature Machine Intelligence 2, no. 1 (January 2020): 56-67.

6. A.L. Rubenstein, M.B. Eberly, T.W. Lee, et al., "Surveying the Forest: A Meta-Analysis, Moderator Investigation, and Future-Oriented Discussion of the Antecedents of Voluntary Employee Turnover," Personnel Psychology 71, no. 1 (spring 2018): 23-65; and D.G. Allen, P.C. Bryant, and J.M. Vardaman, "Retaining Talent: Replacing Misconceptions With Evidence-Based Strategies," Academy of Management Perspectives 24, no. 2 (May 2010): 48-64.

7. Relative importance is calculated by dividing each topic's SHAP value by the SHAP value for the compensation topic. When highly predictive features are closely related (such as job insecurity and restructuring), we report their combined predictive impact.

8. Jason Sockin finds that "respect/abuse," a topic that overlaps with our definition of toxic culture, is the single best predictor of employee satisfaction. See J. Sockin, " Show Me the Amenity: Are Higher-Paying Firms Better All Around? " SSRN, Nov. 18, 2021, https://papers.ssrn.com.

9. D. Sull and C. Sull, " 10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right," MIT Sloan Management Review, Sept. 16, 2021, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

10. B. Zweig and D. Zhao, "Looking for Greener Pastures: What Workplace Factors Drive Attrition?" PDF file (Mill Valley, California: Glassdoor, 2021), www.glassdoor.com. A recent meta-analysis also found that job insecurity was a strong predictor of voluntary employee turnover. See A.L. Rubenstein et al., "Surveying the Forest," 23-65.

11. In the November BLS JOLTS, seasonally adjusted layoffs and discharges for all private companies with more than 5,000 employees represented 24% of total separations for April through September 2021.

12. D. Sull and C. Sull, "10 Things."

13. J.C. Williams, S.J. Lambert, S. Kesavan, et al., " Stable Scheduling Increases Productivity and Sales: The Stable Scheduling Study," PDF file (San Francisco: Center for WorkLife Law, 2018), https://worklifelaw.org.

14. " Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary," U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dec. 8, 2021, www.bls.gov.

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Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation

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Data analysis reveals the top reasons behind the Great Resignation and actions managers can take to reduce attrition.

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Voice referendum results point to shifting faultlines in Australian politics

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The vote demonstrated that the project of progressive politics in Australia remains brittle.

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On October 16 1923, brothers Walt and Roy set up a modest cartoon studio. Their goal was to produce short animated films. They created a new character: a mouse, with large ears.

Named " Mickey ", he soon became one of the world's most recognisable images.

Walt Disney was an innovator in terms of space, colour and movement. He had an uncanny ability to provide pleasure for millions of viewers struggling through the Great Depression.

A century later, Disney is one of the world's largest entertainment conglomerates.

Disney has influenced countless other animation studios and artists. It has received Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature for the likes of The Incredibles, Up and Frozen. Walt himself holds the record for most nominations (59) and Oscar wins (22 competitive awards, plus four honorary awards) for a single individual.

Just how did Disney manage to do it?

Steamboat Willie and technological wonders

Based in Los Angeles, Disney set about innovating. He created The Alice Comedies, a series of short films featuring a live-action child actress in a cartoon world. Then came Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a precursor to Mickey Mouse.

Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, was the world's first fully synchronised sound cartoon. His pioneering use of sound quickly became an industry norm.

A simple story featuring Mickey as a steamboat captain trying to navigate the boat while dealing with various comical situations, Steamboat Willie was universally praised. After a short theatrical run in New York, the film was exhibited nationwide and set Disney on its way.

The clip of Mickey holding the ship's wheel and whistling became the company's logo in 2007, reminding audiences of Steamboat's enduring importance.

New characters emerged post-Steamboat, such as Donald Duck and Mickey's love interest, Minnie, which still endure today.

Flowers and Trees, made in 1932, was the first animated short film to win an Academy Award - it was also Disney's (and the industry's) first full-colour three-strip Technicolor film.

By the end of the 1930s, Disney had pivoted to feature-length animated films, releasing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.

Read more: Happy birthday Mickey Mouse - animation's greatest showman is 90

The golden age and feature films

What followed Snow White is often referred to as Disney's "golden age", with the release of Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).

Those early films still dazzle today - think of the Sorcerers' Apprentice scene in Fantasia (1940) or the Pink Elephants hallucinogenic number in Dumbo. And is there any scene, in any film, more heart-wrenching than the death of Bambi's mother?

But the golden age never really stopped. The hits just kept on coming - Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Mary Poppins (1964) remain enduring classics. In the 1990s, a new generation fell in love with Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994) - and these films were then remade as live-action versions in the 2010s.

Even a minor Disney film like Zootopia (2016) could make a billion dollars at the box-office.

Disneyland and diversification

In 1955, Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. He wanted to build an inclusive theme park where all the family could have fun.

It set the standard for theme park design and showed the way forward for the company: diversification.

After Disneyland came Disney World in Florida in 1971, then versions of Disneyland in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

A famous diagram, sketched by Walt himself in 1957, foreshadowed the direction Disney would ultimately take: a huge business empire of synergies, merchandising and cross-promotion.

Buyouts and a cultural behemoth

In 2006 Disney bought Pixar, in 2009 it bought Marvel and in 2012 it bought LucasFilm. These acquisitions solidified Disney's position as the brand leader in the entertainment industry.

Pixar was known for films like Toy Story (1995) and Finding Nemo (2003) and the purchase would lead to multiple collaborations between the two.

Most recently, in 2019, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox for a staggering US$71 billion. The deal gave them instant access to Fox's vast back catalogues.

The deal made some industry insiders uneasy: Disney had become a cultural behemoth, strangling competition, homogenising content and swallowing up entire franchises.

Read more: As Disney turns 100, the brand's real legacy is its business acumen

Not all plain sailing

Disney films proudly prioritise family values, stress teamwork and empathy and promote gender equality. Yet until relatively recently, its heroes and heroines were very visibly white, and the studio was criticised for invoking messages of privilege, racial hierarchy and standards of beauty.

Its 1946 film Song of the South has long been criticised for its racist portrayal of African Americans and its romanticisation of the plantation era. Since 1986, Disney have tried to keep it out of circulation, although clips can be found online.

Many old films streaming on Disney+ now feature a disclaimer telling viewers some scenes will include "negative depictions" and "mistreatment of people or cultures".

LGBTQ+ representation has become more visible since LeFou became Disney's first openly gay character in its 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast. But the backlash was troubling, and Disney also ran into trouble with conservative critics with its same-sex kiss in Lightyear (2022), and would later be mocked as " woke Disney " by conservative politicians and media personalities.

CEO Bob Iger - who stepped down in 2021 but was then brought back in 2022 on a huge salary - has not fared well during the recent SAG-AFTRA disputes, with comments deemed out of touch and tone-deaf by many.

Still, despite these tricky issues, Disney's corporate stranglehold shows no sign of abating. Its reach is gigantic. From cartoons to comics to CGI, Disney controls much of our popular culture.

"If you can dream it, you can do it," Walt once said. As Disney turns 100, with a market capitalisation today of more than US$150 billion, that's some dream come true.

Read more: Disney hasn't found itself in this much trouble since 1941

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100 years of Disney: from a cartoon mouse to a global giant, how Walt Disney conquered the world

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A hundred years ago, a small animation studio was born. Today, its cultural reach is enormous.

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Critically endangered scalloped hammerheads gather in seas off Perth. They need protection

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Scalloped hammerheads pose no risk to us – but we pose enormous risk to them. Our discovery of a large new aggregation gives us an opportunity to protect these animals.

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Wes Anderson's latest work involves four short films based on Roald Dahl stories: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is the longest, with a runtime of 39 minutes (from an 82-page story), following the altruistic journey of the eponymous character, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. A wealthy dandy transforms into a benevolent figure, giving away his gambling fortune to children's hospitals and orphanages.

While the others may seem like lesser works, shorter in length (from shorter stories) and less ambitious in set design and locations, Anderson begins to survey more complicated aspects of Dahl rarely explored in the abundant screen adaptations.

A complicated figure

Netflix acquired the rights to Dahl's entire catalogue in 2021 for £370 million. The first production was Matthew Marchus's Matilda the Musical (2022) - more accurately a screen version of Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly's award-winning stage musical adaptation.

Several more Netflix productions are slated. The Twits, an animation film written and directed by Phil Johnston, is set for a 2025 release. This will be followed by Taika Waititi writing and directing two live-action features: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its literary sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

Dahl remains a difficult figure in history. There is Dahl the beloved author of some of the most influential and popular works ever written for children. Meanwhile, there is the complicated persona who repeatedly made unwavering racist remarks and further reduced his characters to discriminatory and sexist stereotypes.

Despite Dahl insisting to his publishers to "not so much as change a single comma in one of my books", in February this year Puffin Books announced it would be creatively editing portions of many of his children's novels to "ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today".

This included removing or replacing words describing the appearance of characters ("old hags" become "old crows" in The Witches) and adding gender-neutral language ("Cloud-men" have become "Cloud-People" in James and the Giant Peach). Contemporary writers, such as Salman Rushdie, decried such liberties as a form of literary vandalism and blatant censorship.

Read more: Roald Dahl rewrites: rather than bowdlerising books on moral grounds we should help children to navigate history

Nastiness, weirdness and racism

Anderson's Dahl shorts explore some grittier works from the author's oeuvre without any creative rewriting. These are some of the most literal and faithful Dahl adaptations ever put on screen.

First and foremost, Dahl (played by Ralph Fiennes) becomes an onscreen character and narrator. The sight of Dahl talking directly to camera in his famous writing chair is somewhat uneasy. Which Dahl will we see? The bigot? Beloved children's author?

In truth, we see neither in the character - but rather manifestations of both in the films themselves.

Anderson doesn't suppress aspects of nastiness, weirdness and racism from the adapted stories underlined by darker themes and a darker tone.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is the most joyous in both style and story, and a natural follow-on from Anderson's earlier stop-motion Dahl feature adaptation, The Fantastic Mr Fox (2009).

From the altruistic Henry Sugar, things significantly go darker both tonally and thematically. The Swan is about a boy victimised to merciless bullying; The Rat Catcher involves a man (played also by Fiennes) with disgustingly filthy nails resembling claws who kills a rat with his teeth.

These characters are not punished, exposed and exiled. They are revealed for their true selves - as ugly and uncomfortable as that may be to watch.

Read more: The man behind Matilda - what Roald Dahl was really like

Dahl and his cultural legacy

A point of interest is the order these shorts are curated on Netflix. Each was dropped on the platform within a few days of each other, and this order remains when the films are grouped together as the Dahl adaptation package.

The final, and most confronting, of these shorts is Poison. The story is of Englishman Harry Pope (Benedict Cumberbatch) in British-ruled India, who believes he has a poisonous krait snake asleep with him in his bed. When this is proven incorrect, Dr Ganderbai (Ben Kingsley) is subjected to Harry's racial slurs.

It is an ugly and unexpected moment that provokes the doctor to leave in stunned silence.

This adaptation has been previously adapted several times on television: in 1958 into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; in 1980 it was adapted as the fifth episode of the second series of Tales of the Unexpected.

These TV adaptations turn Harry into an alcoholic whose mind cannot be trusted. Here, Anderson is more faithful to Dahl's story, presenting Harry as a lucid and ungrateful bigot to the doctor's attempts to rescue him.

It is with this reprehensible and unapologetic racist attack that Anderson's shorts conclude.

From the first film, with its vivid colours and altruistic themes, to the bleak finale of Poison, it feels as if Anderson is making a statement about the difficulties in which to regard Dahl and his cultural legacy.

In the process, he has produced some of his most challenging, complex and intriguing films to date.

Read more: Wes Anderson has an obsessive, systematic repetition of stylistic choices. He's perfect for this TikTok meme

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Roald Dahl was a bigot and beloved children's author. Wes Anderson shows both sides of this complicated persona

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These are some of the most literal and faithful Roald Dahl adaptations ever put on screen.

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The popularity of the Korean _oegugin_ (foreign) influencer is on the rise. But there is a dark side to this pop-nationalism

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Korea is an attractive destination for aspiring influencers, and the government supports these budding stars.

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A product of the pandemic: The evolution of work culture and its transformation

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A product of the pandemic: The evolution of work culture and its transformation

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Digital nomads who work as they travel are often attracted by a life of freedom far removed from the daily office grind. Many head to cities that have become known hotspots for remote workers. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we find out what impact digital nomads have on these cities and the people who live there, and how governments are responding to the phenomenon.

The La Roma and La Condesa districts of Mexico City have become some of the Mexican capital's favourite destinations for visitors in recent years. There are long boulevards and the streets are lined with leafy trees and dotted with picturesque parks and fountains. Wander into the right coffee shops and here you'll find some of the city's digital nomads, logging on to remote jobs elsewhere.

Speaking to The Conversation Weekly, Erica from Finland tells us she was already working remotely before the pandemic. "Mexico is cheaper, it's great weather," she says. "So I figured I might as well move here."

"The pandemic and the normalisation of remote work has certainly given the digital nomad lifestyle some legitimacy," says Dave Cook, an anthropologist at University College London in the UK. He's been chronicling digital nomads and their motivations for the past seven years, interviewing people about their motivations.

The pandemic also made governments take notice of digital nomads as an economic benefit to cash-strapped economies, says Fabiola Mancinelli, an anthropologist at the University of Barcelona in Spain who also studies digital nomads. "That's why many countries started to create special visa programmes to attract this niche of travellers," she explains. Countries don't expect digital nomads to participate in local life, says Mancinelli, but rather to consume locally using the higher purchasing power they get from earning in stronger currencies.

In Mexico City, however, the arrival of digital nomads is angering some local residents who are worried about changes to their neighbourhoods and rising rents. Adrián Hernández Cordero, a sociologist at Metropolitan Autonomous University who studies gentrification, distinguishes between tourists and digital nomads. "They seem to me to be in an intermediate position because they don't come just for a week - they stay for a few months," he says.

In Mexico City, Cordero says digital nomads are drawn to areas such as La Roma and La Condesa where it's easy to get around on foot or by public transport, and where there is a proliferation of restaurants and bars. He says that while these areas were already fairly well-off, the middle classes who live there are witnessing a form of "super-gentrification".

Listen to the full episode to find out more about the different strategies countries are using to attract digital nomads, and what this means for local residents.

This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Voiceover by Alberto Rodríguez Alvarado. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also sign up to The Conversation's free daily email here. A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed, or find out how else to listen here.
Adrián Hernández Cordero is part of the National System of Researchers of the National Council for Science and Technology of the Government of Mexico. Dave Cook and Fabiola Mancinelli do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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When digital nomads come to town: governments want their cash but locals are being left behind - podcast

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Digital nomads who work as they travel are often attracted by a life of freedom far removed from the daily office grind. Many head to cities that have become known hotspots for remote workers. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we find out what impact digital nomads have on these cities and the people who live there, and how governments are responding to the phenomenon.

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Lottery of Life: Millennials vs. The Boomers

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Lottery of Life: Millennials vs. The Boomers

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Australian census data confirms everything millennials suspected about boomers and the lottery of life

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The Spice Girls generation may be better educated, but it hasn’t helped them gain economic security

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The Evolution of Pop Culture: A Comparative Study Across Two Generations of Australian Teen Film and TV.

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The Evolution of Pop Culture: A Comparative Study Across Two Generations of Australian Teen Film and TV.

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Few settings invite drama, messy emotions and chaos like a high school.

The original 1990s Heartbreak High ran for seven seasons and was broadcast in over 70 countries including the UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, India and Indonesia. The show followed a cast of students at a multicultural Sydney high school and became an icon of Aussie TV. It stood out as an honest and gritty depiction of teen life, especially compared against the " squeaky clean " visions in other dramas of the time.

Now, a new reboot under showrunner Hannah Carroll Chapman revisits the fictional Hartley High in 2022, dealing with issues and themes relevant to a contemporary audience.

Heartbreak High will find its place alongside series like Netflix's Sex Education and HBO's Euphoria exploring the often grimy realities of modern adolescence with style and humour.

But here we have a uniquely Australian take on the current wave of teen dramas.

A new class

Amerie (Ayesha Madon) and Harper (Asher Yasbincek) have been ride-or-die best friends since childhood. Their greatest project is a map of all the hook-ups and romantic entanglements at Hartley High, drawn in a secret, out-of-bounds stairwell.

When the map is discovered, Amerie gets blamed, and an unlikely group of students find themselves stuck together in "Sexual Literacy Tutorials".

As if that wasn't bad enough, Harper turns up to school with a shaved head and a mysterious vendetta against Amerie.

With her social life turned upside down, Amerie falls in with class misfits Darren (James Majoos) and Quinni (Chloe Hayden). From here, she must repair her reputation, figure out what's wrong with Harper, and navigate the rocky terrain of romance, sexuality and heartbreak.

The series is an echo of contemporary teen culture. Pop culture references and slang like " unalive" and " flop era " will date the episodes, but for now Heartbreak High is an effective mirror of modern life.

Much like the original series gave us a diverse set of characters, this series refreshingly reflects the diversity of today's high schools.

Our heroine Amerie and her two love interests, long-time crush Dusty (Josh Heuston) and sweet new boy in town Malakai (Thomas Weatherall), are all characters of colour.

Darren is non-binary, out and proud but dealing with parents who complain Darren's gender identity and singular they/them pronouns are "too confusing".

Quinni is queer and autistic, with one episode sympathetically exploring her difficulties with dating and trying to mask and appear "normal".

These teenagers all face their own unique issues, but also find themselves dealing with universal ups and downs every viewer will be able to relate to.

Read more: Nathan Fielder's new comedy The Rehearsal will be familiar to anyone with autism

Let's talk about sex

As the Hartley High hook-up map would imply, teen sexuality is at the core of the story.

Heartbreak High uses this plot device not just for love triangles and drama, but as a chance to interrogate how we talk to teenagers about sex.

The Sexual Literacy Tutorials - or "SLTs", which the students point out ironically sounds like "sluts" - provide some wonderfully awkward scenes.

The school's sex education curriculum is full of outdated language and knowledge gaps, leaving the staff woefully (but amusingly) unprepared for nuanced discussions about sex with their students.

Long-suffering teacher Jojo (Chika Ikogwe) tries to mix up the curriculum by injecting some sex positivity, inclusive language and nuanced discussion of consent - to mixed results.

As the bright pink dildo stuck to the school's basketball court proves, sex is very much present and unavoidable in the high school environment, whether the scandalised school board likes it or not.

The question is how to broach the topic in a nuanced way that keeps those vulnerable students safe.

Heartbreak High's writing follows from Jojo's example. When sex is depicted between the characters, the dialogue emphasises the importance (and joy) of consent. The framing makes the scenes intimate without sexualising the teenagers themselves.

The frank depiction of female sexuality and queer sexuality is also refreshing, whether it's comedic scenes of Amerie being too horny to concentrate, or a matter-of-fact discussion of the average labia size.

Read more: Netflix's Sex Education is doing sex education better than most schools

Complicated, messy lives

This reboot is a bright new piece of Australian television, running on an engaging blend of comedy and drama.

It doesn't shy away from serious topics such as drug use, youth crime or discrimination. But it also provides plenty of moments of levity, letting its characters joke around about everything from astrology, to erections, to bad haircuts.

Heartbreak High avoids cliche and shows its teen heroes as complicated, messy people the audience can root for - even when they make mistakes.
Heartbreak High is streaming on Netflix from September 14.

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Teenage misfits, messy emotions and joyous discussions on consent: Heartbreak High is a bright new piece of television

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Few settings invite drama, messy emotions and chaos like a high school. The original 1990s Heartbreak High ran for seven seasons and was broadcast in over 70 countries including the UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, India and Indonesia. The show followed a cast of students at a multicultural Sydney high school and became an icon of Aussie TV.

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Doomsday Preppers (Social Noncomformity): An examination into the impact of extreme wealth on  'end of the world' ideology.

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Doomsday Preppers (Social Noncomformity): An examination into the impact of extreme wealth on  'end of the world' ideology.

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Douglas Rushkoff's newest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, grew out of a brilliant 2018 Medium article of the same name, which went viral and had people (aka his US editor) clamouring for a full-length treatment.
Review: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires - Douglas Rushkoff (Scribe Publications)
In both pieces, Rushkoff recounts being invited to speak about "the future of technology", only to find himself at a luxury desert resort in an undisclosed location, speaking to a select audience of five unnamed hedge fund billionaires. Within minutes, the conversation takes on a distinctly prepper-ish tone. One of the CEOs tells Rushkoff about his newly completed underground shelter, then asks, "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?"

Rushkoff is bemused, but also grimly amused by it all. "Here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers," he writes. "That's when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology."

Read more: With threats of nuclear war and climate disaster growing, America's 'bunker fantasy' is woefully inadequate

The Mindset

So far, so head-spinningly good. Unfortunately, however, Rushkoff moves away from the billionaires and their intriguingly delusional self-preservation tactics, into a realm of high ideas.

Over the next 12 and a half chapters, Rushkoff offers a Grand Unified Theory of tech billionaire ideology. Inspired by a 1995 article, " The Californian Ideology ", he chooses to call this "The Mindset" - a frustratingly vague term that doesn't really clarify things.

At times, "The Mindset" is roughly synonymous with the ideology of libertarianism; at others, it is much more amorphous - referring to everything from growth-based capitalism, to colonialism, to narcissism. And as Hugo Rifkind notes in The Times, "while the Mindset is interesting, it's not nearly as interesting as the bonkers escape plans to which it leads".

If you're after a primer on the various ills of late capitalism, then strap yourself in and enjoy this wide-ranging, freewheeling romp by one of the US's most entertaining digital culture raconteurs.

His subjects include - but not are not limited to - monopolies, financialisation, behavioural science, "scientism" ( Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker et al.) and the sex crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. There's the 1980s business savvy of General Electric CEO Jack Welch and "the Western, linear drive towards progress". Our estrangement from nature. The persistence of Aristotelian plot structures. And even "Western language systems, which tend to be more noun-based than many of their counterparts".

Relentless and breathless

Rushkoff is an accessible, pithy writer, with no shortage of examples, analogies and anecdotes to string together. That said, his relentless synthesising and breathless proclamations also make the book feel a bit shambolic, a bit over-reachy. (For instance, "The Mindset prefers straight lines, linear progress and infinite expansion over the ebbs and flows in the real world.")

This is especially so if you're searching for the what-it-says-on-the-label bits - the tech bros and their bizarre survival plans.

Case in point: Rushkoff tells a quite-long story about arguing with Richard Dawkins about morality at a Manhattan dinner party in the 1990s. Great. He then claims that Stephen Pinker and Daniel Dennett believe "the brain is mere hardware" and "humans are just robots running programs". Sure. Next, he points out that Dawkins, Pinker and Dennett were all photographed on Jeffrey Epstein's private jet on their way to a TED talk. Guilt by association fallacy, but okay. As a finale, Epstein is described as "truly the model, self-sovereign, transhumanist billionaire prepper".

Here's the problem: while Jeffrey Epstein was a lot of terrible things, he wasn't a prepper, in the proper sense of that word. There's no record of him saying he thought society was about to collapse, or that he was making any just-in-case plans. More generally, none of the aforementioned four are Silicon Valley titans, or billionaires - they're three scientists and one multimillionaire Wall Street financier/paedophile. And they're only tangentially relevant to the matter at hand.

Read more: How to survive a tactical nuclear bomb? Defence experts explain

Libertarian tech bros

Also, given how much other ground is covered, it is a little surprising that Rushkoff doesn't name check that ur-text of cyber libertarianism, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State (1997), by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg.

Davidson and Rees-Mogg dream of a time when individuals will be freed from the shackles of government, fiat currency (government-issued paper money, not backed by a commodity such as gold) and law in general. (William Rees-Mogg's son, UK politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, was one of the most vocal cheerleaders for Brexit.)

In this thrilling new age, a "cognitive elite" will be able to rule - or ignore - the rest of the world, as they see fit. The Sovereign Individual is a hugely influential text in the start-up world; early Facebook backer, Paypal co-founder and conservative libertarian Peter Thiel, who is infamous in New Zealand for buying his citizenship and attempting to build luxury bunkers in the wilderness wrote the foreword to the 2020 reprint.

Survival of the Richest contains an excellent anecdote about Rushkoff being in a Zoom meeting with some tech developers on 6 January 2021, which is derailed by the breaking news of an attempted coup at the Capitol building (if you think that's bad, wait till you hear how the programmers react!).

There's this jaw-dropping factoid:

Jeff Bezos has a yacht with a helipad that serves as a companion yacht to his main yacht, which has large sails that would get in the way of his helicopter during takeoff and landing.

There are some extremely sharp reflections on artificial intelligence:

Whether AI will develop human and superhuman abilities in the next decade, century, millennium, if ever, may matter less right now than AI's grip over the tech elite, and what this obsession tells us about The Mindset.

Regarding the prospect of artificial intelligence putting millions of people out of work in the near future, entrepreneurs such as Reid Hoffmann (LinkedIn CEO) and Mark Cuban (startup dude, billionaire) are worried that unemployed humans might coalesce into vengeful, billionaire-resenting mobs and attack them. Though they're not worried about ruining all those people's lives in the first place.

But - and this is a little ironic - there's precious little biographical detail about Mark Cuban, or Reid Hoffmann, or any of the other bros in the book. Their function is purely as symbols of rapacious greed: embodiments of The Mindset. They are not examined as deeply flawed, but nonetheless complex human beings.

Read more: What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

Dismissive rather than curious

In some ways, this is a question of method, and access. While Rushkoff mixes in some pretty wild company on his global speaking gigs, and has serendipitous encounters with some outlandish figures, he's not doing any journalistic or enthnographic legwork here.

In short: he hasn't interviewed any of tech billionaires he writes about. He doesn't really know what motivates them - or at least, not all of it. When it comes to these wealthy, selfish people's strategies to survive "the event", Rushkoff is dismissive rather than curious. He is adamant that a billionaire's prepper scheme - any scheme - just won't work.

In Chapter One, he contends that "the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim", because "the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle". If your underground hydroponic garden is overrun by mould or bacteria, there's no "do-over"; you'll just die.

Similarly,

small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples [...] the billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilization.

Seasteading - the libertarian idea of building autonomous, floating mini-states, which operate outside of state control - is mentioned, but not discussed in any detail. And the modest proposals of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos et al. to commercialise space travel and colonise Mars are rejected with the observation "only trillionaires will actually make it to space to terraform planets, anyway".

This might be true enough - but it's also the ostensible subject of the book, and as such, perhaps worth spending a bit more time on.

Billionaire bunkers as metaphors

For Rushkoff, then, "the billionaire bunker strategy is less a viable strategy for apocalypse than a metaphor for this disconnected way of life" - a canny insight, to be sure. But those bunkers aren't only metaphorical; they're also very real, and large, and expensive, and fascinating in their logistic intricacies and (im)possibilities.

If Survival of the Richest had told us more about this insane infrastructure, and about the people who dreamed it up, we might be able to better understand the unmistakably phallic spaceships as symbols, too.

Readers with specific interest in doomsday bunkers, and what they might represent in ideological terms, should seek out Bradley Garrett's Bunker: Building for the End Times (2020). Mark O'Connell writes insightfully about Peter Thiel's New Zealand boltholes as a symptom of extreme libertarian misanthropy in Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (2020).

Those wishing to learn more personal details about the computer nerds and venture captial bros who hold such outsized sway in contemporary life should read Max Chafkin's 2021 biography The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, or Ashlee Vance's 2015 book Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future, as well as David Runciman and John Lanchester's incisive essays about Thiel and Musk respectively in the London Review of Books.

Or, what the hell, rewatch The Social Network.

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Doomsday bunkers, Mars and 'The Mindset': the tech bros trying to outsmart the end of the world

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Douglas Rushkoff's newest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, grew out of a brilliant 2018 Medium article of the same name, which went viral and had people (aka his US editor) clamouring for a full-length treatment.

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A League of Their Own: Femininity and Queerness in Women's Sport

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A League of Their Own: Femininity and Queerness in Women's Sport

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Amazon Prime Video's recent release A League Of Their Own has been making headlines with its frank portrayal of queer women, with the show presenting a diverse range of queer bodies and expressions. The cast features women presenting queerness from high femme to more masculinised, and each representing different ways of being queer.

The TV series is an update on the 1992 Penny Marshall film starring Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. The story follows the journey of the newly formed baseball team, the Rockford Peaches during their first season.

Set in 1943, many women's husbands were soldiers in the second world war. Due to the men being off at war, many male teams were left without enough players and this was fundamental in the formation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball Leage (AAGPBL) which filled the gap left by men's baseball. The show gives a fictionalised account of the real-life formation of the AAGPBL.

Women's sports and stereotypes

On the surface, A League Of Their Own is a show about women's baseball - but it also delves deep into the stereotypes that surround women in sports.

The show teases out a tension between femininity and queerness. In the show, the people running the AAGPBL see the two as mutually exclusive. They demand the women conform to certain expressions of femininity because they expect it will hide any queerness.

This isn't unique to the show: as early as 1934, people thought sport would masculinise its female players. Masculinity in a woman was feared to impact their marriageability, and was thought to suggest queerness. We now see this as misguided, but it is the reason the AAGPBL put its teams through charm school, both in real life and in the show. To play, the women must look and act in certain ways. At charm school, players learn the correct way to conduct themselves both on and off the pitch.

Fears around the masculinisation of women is central to A League Of Their Own. Failure at charm school, we see, means getting kicked off the team. A woman not wearing makeup is immediately dismissed from the Peaches. A second teammate is saved from the same fate only when her new colleagues claim that she was helping them with their own makeup.

Gender ideals and consequences

For 1940s women's baseball leagues, these gender ideals were thought to hide queerness in their players. By presenting the women as feminine, audiences would not suspect non-heterosexual preferences.

A League Of Their Own shows that the consequences for refusing to conform are real. Careers are on the line. To stay on the team, female players must appear to be available and heterosexual to keep attracting audiences to baseball games. The real AAGPBL claimed "the natural appeal of women in every walk of life will be brought out in this venture", which heavily implies a marketing strategy centring on women's objectification. The fictional AAGPBL similarly pushes this agenda of the heterosexual availability of its players.

The show is explicit in highlighting the connection between the feminine ideal and queerness. Rockford Peach, Greta Gill, explains to her teammate Carson that the beauty lessons and the AAGPBL rules are "to make sure that we don't look like a bunch of queers".

But queerness is not so easily eliminated. Wearing a skirt doesn't make a person less of a lesbian. Gender and sexuality are not so easily aligned.

The show emphasises the safety precautions players must take to "pass" as straight. Greta, a queer player who appears very feminine, makes sure that she is seen "on the arm of a man" before she pursues a female love interest. She lives by a set of rules designed to keep her safe. The rules are the result of her negative past experiences.

Meanwhile, Greta's best friend, Jo de Luca, is under suspicion of being queer by her teammates, and it is because she appears more masculine. Coach and team leader, Carson, lies to protect Jo by inventing an affair with a prominent male baseball figure.

Read more: For Women's Euro 2022 to have a meaningful legacy, football must do more to tackle racism and sexism

Sometimes women in sport are gay

Part of what the AAGPBL aims for in enforcing femininity holds weight. Greta doesn't have to lie. No one suspects she's queer, because of her feminine appearance. In contrast, more masculine players are always suspect. What the AAGPBL expects from its players is only part of what queer players do to keep their sexualities hidden and themselves safe.

Of course, we know that people have always been queer, baseball players included. Maybelle Blair, who played as part of the original AAGPBL, recently came out as gay, at the age of 95. Stereotypes about gay female sports players hold impact because players are indeed sometimes gay.

But, as A League Of Their Own shows us, hiding queerness behind a veneer of femininity doesn't erase it. People will always find ways to be true to their authentic selves.

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In the new A League Of Their Own series, tensions between femininity and queerness are explored in women's sports

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Amazon Prime Video's recent release A League Of Their Own has been making headlines with its frank portrayal of queer women, with the show presenting a diverse range of queer bodies and expressions. The cast features women presenting queerness from high femme to more masculinised, and each representing different ways of being queer.

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The Rise Of Veganism In Western Cultures: Unpacking the Stereotypes 

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The Rise Of Veganism In Western Cultures: Unpacking the Stereotypes 

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Between the rise of plant-based sausages and veggie burgers that "bleed", vegan protesters at supermarkets, and Disney adding hundreds of vegan items to its theme park menus, veganism is in the news. Not to mention the woman trying to sue her neighbours for their meat-grilling ways. For a group once perceived as placid and potentially anaemic, vegans have sure been making a lot of noise.

Who are the "new vegans" and what is behind their rise in prominence?

Read more: What's made of legumes but sizzles on the barbie like beef? Australia's new high-tech meat alternative

Origin story

The term "vegan" was coined in 1944 by a group of people in the UK to describe a diet excluding meat, fish, dairy, and eggs. In 1988, the UK Vegan Society settled on a definition of veganism that described it as:

"... a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose".

For many years, veganism had relatively few adherents, and was largely dismissed as a fringe movement, if not met with outright hostility.

In his 2000 book, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain, didn't mince his words:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

Bourdain was by no means alone in his view of vegans. An analysis of stories run in UK national newspapers in 2007 that used the words "vegan", "vegans", or "veganism" found that 74% of articles portrayed veganism negatively - describing vegans as hostile, oversensitive, or ridiculous.

Despite an initial bad rap, interest in veganism has been growing, particularly in the past decade. Data from Google Trends indicates that the relative frequency of Google searches for "vegan" has approximately quadrupled since 2012.

A number of prominent public figures, such as Moby, Angela Davis, Bill Clinton, and Ellen Degeneres, have drawn attention to veganism. At the same time, numerous studies and reports have discussed links between meat consumption and health and environmental outcomes.

Media outlets such as The Guardian, NBC, and The New York Times have run stories on the mistreatment of animals on factory farms. Furthermore, popular movies such as Okja, about a young girl and her pig-like best friend, have been credited with turning people toward plant-based diets.

Challenging stereotypes

As veganism becomes more prominent, a number of people are challenging conventional beliefs, particularly the idea that one needs to eat animal products to be strong and healthy.

Touring at film festivals in 2018, and reaching mainstream Australian cinemas in August, The Game Changers draws on a mixture of dramatic footage, scientific studies, and celebrity glamour.

Executive produced by a team including James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, Lewis Hamilton, Novak Djokovic, and Chris Paul, The Game Changers bills itself as "a revolutionary new documentary about meat, protein, and strength", and challenges the old stereotype of vegans as weak.

The film follows combat instructor and UFC fighter James Wilks as he travels around the world meeting people like world surfing champion Tia Blanco, eight-time US national cycling champion Dotsie Bausch, and strongman Patrick Baboumian. Sitting down with the chair of nutrition at Harvard University, Dr Walter Willett, Wilks discusses the benefits of plant-based diets.

Motivation and location

Although vegans are often motivated by some combination of concern for animal welfare, animal rights, health, and environmental sustainability, individuals often emphasise particular motivations more strongly than others.

Chef and activist Bryant Terry has written and spoken extensively on the health and food justice aspects of veganism. Youth climate activist Greta Thunberg adopted a vegan diet for environmental reasons. The Forest Green Rovers Football Club transitioned the food in their stadium to be 100% vegan in 2015, out of concern for animal welfare and environmental sustainability.

Other common motivations are religious and spiritual beliefs, adherence to social norms, a preference for the taste, smell, and texture of plant foods, and an explicit rejection of mainstream industries that treat animals like commodities.

Andreu Dalmau/AAP

East meets West

Although veganism is often discussed through a Western cultural lens, several Eastern philosophies - such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Taoism - favour plant-based diets. Hinduism, practiced by the majority of India's population, has a history of plant-based diets extending across thousands of years.

While in many Western countries, vegans may be negatively stereotyped or face social alienation, responses to those following plant-based diets in other cultures differ markedly.

In India, for example, the present day food hierarchy places a plant-based diet at the top as it is associated with a higher status. The slaughter of animals and meat-eating is associated with a certain baseness and physical and spiritual pollution.

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Similarly, many people in China regard plant-based eating as central to physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. In 2016, the Chinese government released updated dietary guidelines encouraging their population of more than 1.3 billion to reduce their meat consumption by 50% between now and 2030 for primarily health-related reasons.

Reaction to veganism in other cultures is not always positive though. Japanese media has expressed concern about how vegan tourists and locals can maintain their diet in a nation " hooked on meat ".

Is the future plant-based?

Today, countries with traditionally meat-based diets - such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and South Africa - are among the world's top ten when it comes to the global share of vegan product launches.

The adoption of plant-based diets and lifestyles is projected to keep rising. For example, the percentage of Italians who identified as vegan nearly doubled from 2016 to 2018, and the number of vegans in the UK quadrupled between 2014 and 2018.

In 2017, the global plant protein market was valued at US$10.5 billion (A$15.65 billion) and this number is predicted to increase to USD $16.3 billion (A$24.3 billion) by 2025.

In the future we can expect to see and hear more from those who choose not to consume animal products.

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The vegans are coming! What's fuelling the interest in plant-based eating?

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Between the rise of plant-based sausages and veggie burgers that "bleed", vegan protesters at supermarkets, and Disney adding hundreds of vegan items to its theme park menus, veganism is in the news. Not to mention the woman trying to sue her neighbours for their meat-grilling ways.

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Sexualisation of the Female Archetype in Anime and Manga

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Sexualisation of the Female Archetype in Anime and Manga

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Does anime and or manga hate women? Oversexualization, demeaning of the female character and perpetuating stereotypes of dependence.
(depicted in the image below is the main harem of Infinite Stratos)

It may be more accurate to say that anime treats female characters with neglect rather than outright hatred. If you get past the overall oversexualization of female characters in anime the main argument for anime's "hatred of women" is the staggering lack of character development arcs.

Even for stories with girls as the primary characters, the characters often do not experience development and are acted upon instead of acting. The classic male main character will often if not always be the "blank slate", but there is a lot more nuance and development given to a male best friend or male cast member and their emotions, than the average female cast. On the opposite side of the spectrum these female characters are instead burdened with tropes in anime/manga such as your classic (tsun, kuu, dan, etc) and the majority of the writing will only reflect that type-casted character tope. All personality is derived from that alone (i.e. almost every high school RomCom ever).

Th oversexualization aspect comes into play as a problem when it's not mirrored for the male characters (i.e. one sided-fanservice) and is done in the context of assuming the audience of the work is all males. The only anime/manga that comes to mind here is Shokugeki no Soma where at least when people's clothes magically explode, it happens to everyone, including the male characters (see image below). The absolute worst form of sexualization of female characters comes when it is happening to a character who is doing nothing at all to present themselves that way, but has it forced on them by the camera. This reduces the female character, most often unnamed or barely focused on story-wise, to a literal sex-object or fetishizes them to the male-audience.

Even for anime most would consider the best of all time, most would have a hard time naming more than two female characters who have received proper character development outside of being a love-interest or an "evil for the sake of evil" villain.

While this may be the case I will say anime or manga in general isn't the problem. By far it is the highly popular and profitable genre of shounen anime and manga that is guilty of the aforementioned problems. The genre may literally mean "boy" and is geared towards male audiences of 12-18 but girls consume this media too and lacking well-developed female characters gives girls no good character traits or role models to become attached to. Worse than that it gives boys terrible ideas about women, and adds towards shaping their perception of women to see them only as 2D sexualized objects. But it doesn't have to be this way.

For example Kill La Kill is an anime that is easily known for its sexualized main heroine but the argument can be made that the main character is very three-dimensional and the women in that show are all very well developed. We see Ryuko's backstory and motivations, we see her change her perspective on multiple occasions, reason with adversaries and grow as a person. Some older anime like Ghost in the Shell, Nana, and Skip Beat are all also anime with great and well developed female characters.

When the female character is not the protagonist it is noticeably difficult for the creator to flush them out. Try and wrack your brain for anime in the last decade that has 2-3 well-developed female supporting characters. The only one that comes to mind when doing so is One Piece. One Piece has given great development to its female characters and was smart enough to give each one a whole arc after they were already integrated into the story.

Some of the most terrible offenders of the aforementioned are: Shield Hero, Darling in the Franxx, Bunny Girl Senpai, Goblin Slayer, Fire Force, and nearly every isekai ever. And all of these anime mentioned have been some of the most popular airing anime among the Western fandom in recent years.

One might also argue that a lack of female writers is to blame for the degradation of the female character. While that may be partially true, there are still female authors who use these tropes as writing and plot crutches in lieu of actual development. Examples of these authors are, Shinobu Ohtaka the author of Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Jinsei Kataoka who wrote the manga Deadman Wonderland, and Miki Yoshikawa who wrote Yamada-kun and the Seven witches. A manga where the male MC switches bodies with whoever he kisses, most often the female secondary protagonist and it is a classic harem romance high school setting.

So in the end what can I really say about anime hating women? No, anime doesn't really hate women. Rather, but it neglect its female characters by having them serve as little more than eye candy. The animation will often accentuate the worst aspects of the male gaze in storytelling and reduce the female characters on-screen time and dialogue to a mere panty-shot. After that why should or why would a viewer care or think of the female character at all beyond "panty-shot girl".

As I said earlier shounen anime and manga seems to be the biggest contributor to degradation of the female character and does seem to struggle with writing fleshed out female characters in general. So, really my final statement has gotta be:

"Shounen anime kinda does hate female characters, so I'mma go back to reading my shoujo manga now."

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Does anime and or manga hate women? Oversexualization, demeaning of the female character and perpetuating stereotypes of dependence. (depicted in the image below is the main harem of Infinite Stratos) It may be more accurate to say that anime treats female characters with neglect rather than outright hatred.

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The Perpetuation of Hegemonic Masculinity in Reality TV 

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The Perpetuation of Hegemonic Masculinity in Reality TV 

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Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

Introduction

Previous work has outlined the significance of media to understanding the maintenance and dominance of certain groups and structures within society ( Biressi and Nunn, 2005; Hill, 2014). Gramsci (2005) refers to this authority as hegemony, originally developed in relation to class, however subsequently adopted to explore gender relations. Hegemonic masculinity, as outlined by Connell (2005) utilizes Gramscian concepts to understand how men have sustained a leading position in society. Notably, within much of the literature discussing Gramscian perspectives of hegemony, emphasis is placed upon persuasion of dominant cultural ideas through the media, resulting in ideologies being normalized ( Donaldson, 1993; Demetrious, 2001; Thompson, 2002; Connell, 2005). Whilst hegemonic masculinity proves slippery to understand, application to new areas, such as reality TV, produce additional dimensions to existing debates ( Donaldson, 1993; Howson, 2006; Pringle, 2008).

Whilst there has been a growing body of work exploring gender, class and ethnicity more broadly in relation to reality TV, focus on masculinities within this field remains underdeveloped ( Allen, 2011). In terms of gender, previous work has placed emphasis upon exploring femininity and the ways in which reality TV constructs and problematizes femininity ( McRobbie, 2004; Allen, 2011). Elsewhere, existing work on men and reality TV has tended to focus upon examining the intersection between media and sexuality, exploring how reality TV provides a space for more diverse forms of masculinity to become embedded within the public imagination ( Alderson, 2014).

This paper builds on existing work surrounding the construction of identity, utilizing the 2018 and 2017 seasons of Love Island as a case study to explore the way that individuals "do" gender within the villa ( West and Zimmerman, 1987; Jenkins, 2004). Data for the paper comprised viewing and analysis of 90 episodes of Love Island over the 2018-2017 seasons. Visual methods, allowing for exploration of how visual materials indicate underlying social factors, specifically gender and sexuality were implemented ( Alexander, 2011). Analysis comprised of content analysis, enabling the communication and representation of gender and sexuality to be explored ( Alexander, 2011; Babbie, 2013). Content analysis followed two phases: firstly, descriptive analysis of the episodes, summarizing data and identifying main trends ( Sarantakos, 2013). This initial phase also enabled identification of episodes for viewing in phase two. The second phase involved exploratory analysis, whereby episodes were analyzed more closely in relation to the theme of masculinity. Feminist and interactionist approaches to research were adopted, allowing gender to be viewed as a social construction, thus enabling a critique of masculinity ( Hesse-Biber, 2012; Pini and Pease, 2013). As noted above, the producers' agenda and highly edited format of the show arguably limits the ways that contestants are able to "do" gender, however this remains a useful case study to explore intersections and tensions within contemporary theorizing on masculinity.

Masculinity and Performances of Manhood

To understand and explore diversity in masculinity, it is first important to extend the discussion of theorizing on hegemonic masculinity outlined above, as this dominant theorizing underpins much of the scholarship on masculinity (see Connell, 1995, also Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Theorizing on hegemonic masculinity continues to be a prominent paradigm through which gender configurations including masculinity are understood. Additionally, the link between hegemonic masculinity and heterosexual masculine identity is prominent. This is particularly the case when discussing collective male behaviors and so called lad cultures, in which heterosexuality is often performed, expected and celebrated ( Jackson, 2002; Pringle, 2008; Dempster, 2009; Jackson et al., 2014). Whilst the definition of hegemonic masculinity has become contentious, due in part to the wide usage of the term, hegemonic masculinity continues to be widely cited in research on masculinities ( Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Howson, 2006; Magrath, 2017; Roberts, 2018). Consensus remains that the term is understood in relation to Connell's initial theorizing, referring to "the pattern of practice that allowed men's dominance over women to continue" ( Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832). The continued relevance of hegemonic masculinity theorizing has been discussed, with Hearn (2004) acknowledging that it remains a significant tool to adopt in the study of gender, asserting that the idea helps us to understand the ways in which men dominate both women, and other men (see also Moller, 2007; Roberts, 2018).

Hegemonic masculinity is not a fixed formula and is not being advocated as such in this paper, rather it is a configuration of practices which are tied to organization and institutions, including media and reality TV ( Donaldson, 1993; Connell, 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Howson, 2006). Theorizing on hegemonic masculinity can thus be a tool to see and understand the ways that masculinity has become dominant, more specifically, the ways in which particular characteristics have become synonymous with gender ideologies ( Connell, 1995; Thompson, 2002). Reality TV is one such sphere of society where hegemonic masculinity continues to be depicted and reproduced. A clear example of this can be seen in the case of Geordie shore (UK version) and Jersey Shore (US version) in which heterosexual masculinity encompassing characteristics, such as risky behaviors, no emotion, toughness and idealized body types are promoted and normalized. Here audiences are shown ideal types of masculinity, with characteristics, such as heterosexuality, toughness, strength and virility celebrated. This supports existing work which states that all men experience masculinity as part of their everyday lives and are often unaware of it, with implications for other individuals and groups within society ( Messner and Sabo, 1990; Hearn, 2004; Robinson, 2008; Wellard, 2009).

More recently there have been challenges to the concept and structures of hegemonic masculinity, including examination of themes, such as choice, critical consciousness and resistance ( Jewkes et al., 2015; Messerschmidt et al., 2018). This paper will continue to explore some of these themes, utilizing the example of Love Island as a catalyst for new debates on masculinity scholarship.

A further conceptual tool which provides a foundation to begin unraveling masculinity in Love Island, is that of performance. This lens presents an explanatory framework for understanding identity ( Gutterman, 2008). Jeff Hearn acknowledges the relevance of performance in the construction of masculine identities in the following quotation from his work on men and masculinities:

" Masculinities are not fixed formulae, but rather combinations of actions, part powerful, part arbitrary, performed in reaction and relation to complex material relations and emotional demands, and recognised by others as signifying that this is a man" (Hearn, 1994, p. 54).

Building on this, it is argued that becoming a man is a dramaturgical task and that men need to perform manhood acts to prove masculine identity ( Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009). Performance also provides a way of thinking about the social world, evidenced in work which utilizes performative language and frameworks in order to develop arguments around the topic of identity ( Curry, 1991; Cameron, 1992; Gutterman, 2008; Walsh, 2010). Erving Goffman's conceptualization of the dramaturgical theme in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), in which he notes that people consciously present themselves to others through performances, is one of the earliest works on performance and heavily influenced subsequent work on interactions and identity. Thinking specifically about gendered identities, performance is a recurring theme within this literature, though is often underplayed, utilized as a conceptual tool in order to engage with the various ways that gendered identities are formed and negotiated ( Cameron, 1992; Kimmel, 2006; Butler, 2008; Walsh, 2010). The idea of performing masculinity is common within literature, as well as popular media representations, such as Love Island. Within reality TV including Love Island, notions of masculine performances are embedded within discourses, practices and symbols; conveying traits, such as aggression, strength, virility and mental toughness ( Mac an Ghail and Haywood, 2007). Within this paper performance will be connected to hegemonic masculinity in order to provide a framework for critical thinking regarding masculinity in Love Island.

The "Do Bits Society" as Islander Hegemony

Within the 2018 series of Love Island viewers watched as the men established a group which they named the "Do Bits Society" (DBS). This was an exclusive group, comprised of men only, whereby full membership was granted once an intimate sexual act with a female contestant had been undertaken. Further to this, the group established "levels" in order to police entry. This included the creation of a ranking system comprising different intimate interactions, ranking these according to perceived significance, with penetrative sex valued most highly and kissing the least. Entry to the group was celebrated and those who were seen to be taking excessive amounts of time to enter the group, such as Dr. Alex, were routinely ridiculed and placed under pressure to gain entry. The group reflected the underlying emphasis and value placed upon heterosexual success which permeates the show (across both seasons). The form of masculinity associated with the DBS became the dominant masculinity in the villa, in doing so becoming the hegemonic masculinity in the space ( Connell, 2005, Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). This example provides an interesting starting point from which to examine the various performances of masculinity which were present in the villa. More specifically, this case enables an exploration of the choices and agency men displayed when negotiating their masculinities within the everyday of villa life.

This resonates with the work of Schrock and Schwalbe (2009), who assert that in order to be deemed as a "man," men must prove themselves within their everyday lives, undertaking actions which align with expected or hegemonic form of masculinity to do so ( Wellard, 2002, 2009; Connell, 2005; Whitehead and Barrett, 2008). The contestant Wes was the first to gain entry to the society, establishing himself as the founder, after undertaking sexual acts with Laura. He noted " Until one does bits, one can not have the password to the Do Bits Society Club." His success with Laura was applauded by men in the villa, with audiences of the show viewing the men gather away from the women immediately afterwards to discuss the minutiae of the activity. Significantly here, Wes was recognized by his fellow male counterparts as being a "legend" or "hero" and given status based on his performances of manhood acts ( Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009).

Wes's successful performance of masculinity was enabled by the collusion of other men and specifically, the continued recognition and celebration of such masculine performances beyond the first DBS meetings. Whilst not all men were part of the group, membership remained coveted. For example, Jack Fincham was not able to join the group due to the strong views surrounding sexual intimacy in public shared by his partner Dani Dyer, yet he remained associated with the group and celebrated the achievements of other members. The work of Gregson and Rose (2000), viewed alongside Goffman (1981), can be adapted to explain this example, acknowledging that performances are important in the processes of understanding and establishing the everyday rules and routines which compromise the social world. Further to this, performances in everyday lives become so much part of the routine that they are no longer questioned. This work illuminates the importance of the DBS in constructing and reinforcing the dominant masculinity in the villa, as in order for the DBS to operate, it required other men to engage and uphold its values without question. Despite the fact that Jack was not a full member, nor likely to be, he continued to follow the norms established by the DBS. In doing so, he colluded to show support and ensure inclusion within the group.

The importance of the DBS to the construction of the dominant form of masculinity in the villa was exemplified in instances where men failed to become members. The performances of masculinity associated with the DBS echoed what Wellard (2009) refers to as "expected" masculinities, whereby men were anticipated to display particular characteristics aligning with the dominant model of gender relations in the space. According to Wellard (2009), men have to work in order to "fit in" with dominant forms of masculinity. In doing so, there is the implication that this is a conscious decision and that those men therefore have the potential to deviate, or make different choices, with regards to how they situate themselves within the gender order (ideas which will be explored in more detail later in the paper). A clear example of this was in the case of a contestant called Dr. Alex, who outside of the villa was a medical doctor, working in an emergency department. In the 2018 series he was famed for being unlucky with the ladies and as a result of this, was often close to being evicted from the island. To remain in the villa, Dr. Alex formed close friendships with women, utilizing friendship as a form of capital and to ensure popularity. Significantly, Dr. Alex possessed other qualities, or forms of capital which in the outside world would situate him at the top of gender configurations of hierarchies, for example he possessed status and class privilege which contrasted with the working class backgrounds of other contestants ( Hearn, 2004; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). However, within the villa, his inability to translate this capital to success with the women meant that he was perceived to be a failure ( Bourdieu, 1986, 1993; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Howson, 2006).

An interesting point in the villa which demonstrated the proliferation of the DBS occurred toward the end of the series when Dr. Alex "coupled up" with Alexandra. Here we saw the pressure of performing expected masculinity and undertaking actions associated with the DBS clearly displayed ( Wellard, 2009). After a few dates and nights sharing a bed, the men were keen to see whether Dr. Alex would be permitted entry to the DBS. Significantly, Dr. Alex, who up to this point had been framed by women in the villa and viewers as a "nice guy" due in part to his chivalry and respect for women, was seen describing an intimate interaction with Alexandra, which involved him showing her his genitals. Whilst this was judged by his peers as not counting as sufficient interaction to gain full entry to the DBS, the men celebrated this progress. The significance of this case, was that viewers framed this behavior as inappropriate, positioning this in stark opposition to his "true" identity ( Jenkins, 2004). This was due to the fact that Alexandra had been so shocked, noting to the women in the villa that these sexual advances were uninvited and unwanted. Viewers believed that Dr. Alex had succumbed to the dominant male behaviors performing masculinities which were expected of him. When probed about his interaction with Alexandra in the villa diary room by producers, Dr. Alex admitted feeling pressure to be successful with her as he "didn't want to let the guys down." This example clearly highlights the influence of hegemonic masculinity in the space and that in some cases, men experience pressures to conform.

Diverse Masculinities: Demonstrations of Choice and Resistance in Villa Life

Connell's (2005) concept of the gender order and hegemonic masculinity center upon the notion of power, with the assumption that men are complicit within the maintenance and continuation of hegemonic gender structures and dynamics within society. This idea has been illuminated in the previous section via the discussion of the DBS, whereby the dominant masculinity dictated behaviors and interactions within the villa. However, whilst hegemonic masculinity remains an important tool to adopt in the study of men and gender more broadly, critical examination of the theory uncovers faults ( Hearn, 2004; Waling, 2019). Building on thinking from writers, such as Connell (2005), which indicates multiplicity and contradictions in masculine identity formation, theorizing which illuminates more diverse forms of masculinity has emerged ( Bryson, 1990; Anderson, 2012; Magrath, 2017). Such recent theorizing captures themes including resistance, choice and transgression ( Anderson, 2012; Jewkes et al., 2015; Magrath, 2017).

The diversification of masculinities has become an increasing focus of research. For example, Barrett (2008) in his work on men in the US Navy, asserts that the image of masculine hegemony which characterizes men as physically tough, aggressive, unemotional and heterosexual is not permanent. Anderson (2012) a key critic of the hegemonic model of masculinity adds to this, noting that the esteemed versions of masculinity are changing. Anderson (2012) goes on to argue that "inclusive masculinity" more accurately depicts men's experiences, with men now able to behave in ways once associated with homosexuality, including display of emotion, without experiencing a threat to their public identity. This alternative theoretical framework which explores diverse gender relations and performances has important implications for how masculinity can be understood within Love Island.

A significant facet of inclusive masculinity theorizing, is the suggested shift toward a less rigidly vertical notion of gender hierarchy, with macho behavior denigrated and "softer" masculinities valorized ( Anderson and McGuire, 2010; de Boise, 2014). This acknowledges the presence of multiple masculinities, with the potential for versions of masculinity to be situated alongside one another as opposed to "on top" ( Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; de Boise, 2014). Exploration of multiple masculinities has most commonly been examined within hypermasculine sites including sport, where diverse masculinities have been less common ( Tsay-Vogel and Krakowiak, 2017). An example of such work is by Crocket (2012) and his research on Ultimate Frisbee. Crocket (2012) provides an analysis of the way that participants in his study performed a range of diverse masculinities within one Ultimate Frisbee season. In doing so, Crocket (2012) suggests that one stable version of masculinity is not possible, rather men transition through and between versions of masculinity. This work builds on research by Robinson et al. (2011) on masculinities in transition, where they argue that male identity is processual, always under negotiation and the outcome of ongoing performance.

Extending such ideas to the men in Love Island, it can be argued that over the course of the 2018 series in particular the gender configuration shifted, with the versions of masculinity which were prominent at the start changing and men performing more diverse forms of masculinity ( Markula and Pringle, 2006; Crocket, 2012; de Boise, 2014). The following sections explore these ideas further, starting by examining the idea of the emotional man, followed by discussion of caring men. Notably, it is important to acknowledge that contestants are continually in the process of managing their identity in order to win the show, therefore, the presentation of self and gendered performances might not be authentic. However, these examples remain important stimuli to probe existing masculinity theorizing.

The Emotional Man

Reality TV often emphasizes the expression of emotion, documenting the "emotional journeys" of characters or contestants. This is exemplified in shows including The Bachelor, The Island and Big Brother, in which episodes routinely include an individual becoming openly emotional. This outpouring of emotion has been termed elsewhere as the "money shot," recognized as being utilized by producers to draw in audiences ( Grindstaff, 2002; Dubrofsky, 2009). Most frequently, we see women positioned at the center of scenes of emotional disclosure, or undertaking emotional labor, with less attention given to men ( McQueen, 2017). Within Love Island, there is evidence to suggest that women are still being depicted as those most likely to convey emotion. For example, in the numerous occasions where the female contestants are presented crying in the diary room, or the instances where women comfort each other after dramatic recoupling events. However, what is interesting, is that the men in Love Island are experiencing emotion in a myriad of ways, in doing so beginning to rupture existing understandings of men within this TV genre and showing resistance to the dominant gender structures.

Viewing men as emotional has become more widely accepted, with emotional disclosure and expression seen to be present in even the most hyper masculine spheres including sport ( Muir and Seitz, 2004; Robinson et al., 2011; Campenhout and Hoven, 2014). The notion that men should be more emotional is not new, credited to the rise of the feminist agenda ( Seidler, 1997). However, there have been adverse reactions to this on the basis that this leads to further "emotional insecurities" experienced by men ( de Boise, 2015:3). Regardless of the critique, the idea that "it's good to talk" has remained a prominent discourse resonating throughout society, reflected in the rise in mental health campaigns in the UK including Movember and CALM ( Illouz, 2008; McQueen, 2017).

As noted above, notions of hegemonic masculinity are traditionally built on a system in which men's expression of emotion is downplayed or hidden, with previous studies demonstrating that men's emotional inexpressiveness was influenced by patriarchal privilege ( de Boise and Hearn, 2017; McQueen, 2017). Recent work has acknowledged that men are aware of their emotions, with expression of emotion being more widely accepted ( Lilleaas, 2007; Anderson and McGuire, 2010; de Boise and Hearn, 2017; Nichols, 2018). Studies of emotional disclosure have begun to explore the tensions between the cultural discourses surrounding how to be "manly" and how to "do" emotion. In her work on emotional expression of men in their intimate relationships, McQueen (2017) notes that men value emotional disclosure, experiencing vulnerability associated with disclosure due to popularized narratives, such as "boy's don't cry." Further to this, McQueen (2017) argues that men desire to be emotionally fluent in interactions and relationships, however feel this is challenging due to fear of exposure through sharing their vulnerability. This work is important to consider in relation to the men in Love Island, as intimate relationships normally occurring in private spaces, unfold in the public eye. Arguably, this compounds the pressures to conform to dominant or expected discourses of masculinity, such as that advocated by the DBS, in order to appear "manly," as exemplified in the previous discussion of Dr. Alex ( Wellard, 2009).

One clear example from the 2018 series which demonstrated that men are able to resist the dominant gender structures and express emotion openly, though continue to feel in some ways restrained by expected masculinity, was in the case of Jack Fowler, when he discussed his experiences of breaking up with a female partner outside of the villa. Below is a transcript of his conversation with other contestants, followed by his private and continued reflections from within the villa diary room.

Jack: "Every time you fall in love or something it is a different type of love and when it ended I was heartbroken yeah. I was like brah what's this pain man, I was like what kind of pain is this?"
Josh: Mate its bad Jack: It is nothing physical, its emotional, it can make you be ill. I didn't eat, I lost weight, I was crying all the time Paul: It is sort of funny how you notice that every song that comes on the radio is something to do with like a break up
Jack: Uh huh, mate it enhances you so much.
Jack diary room reflections:
I think especially being a guy, sometimes it is hard to, um voice how you feel. I have been through heartbreak, I have gone through that and yeah it is not nice. So yeah, talking to the others about it was quite refreshing actually, because guys, we don't really do that.
(Season 4, Episode 49: 22nd July 2018)
The reaction to this interaction and the disclosure of his emotions was praised by viewers, with many suggesting that Jack had "quashed" the idea of toxic masculinity ( Gordon, 2018). Significantly, the public reaction to this, understood alongside Jack's narrative, enables the possibility for diverse forms of masculinity to be further explored. Within this interaction, Jack is attributing his reluctance to disclose how he felt to his fellow islanders to the pressures and expectations of masculinity. As a semi professional footballer, Jack was arguably accustomed to performing what Wellard (2002, 2009) refers to as "expected" forms of masculinity. The acknowledgment here from Jack that disclosing his emotions so openly was a " refreshing " experience demonstrates that men remain vigilant in the articulation and expression of emotion. This also exemplifies the role of space in emotional disclosure, as Jack was only completely open in the diary room, away from the other men. Despite remaining constraints, this example shows that the men found ways to convey emotion and to negotiate the structures which limited their behaviors.

Figure 1. Image of Chris Hughes during season 3.

These two examples suggest that utilizing hegemonic masculinity alongside conceptions of performance as a lens through which to understand the men in Love Island exposes tensions and limitations of Connell's (2005) gender order theorizing. Whilst hegemonic masculinity in the form of the DBS persists, understanding the men through this lens alone is problematic, missing the nuance of masculine performances and experiences. Through exploring the ways in which men are conveying emotion in the villa, it is evident that masculinities are multiple and that men are able to make choices and transition between different facets of masculinity, in doing so extending Connell's work and advocating alternative ways of theorizing men's experiences which accounts for diverse performances.

The Caring Man

In order to add depth to the critique of hegemonic masculinity being proposed within the paper so far, and to continue exploration of alternatives, it is beneficial to address emotion more specifically. Existing sociological and psychological work on singular feelings characterize "feminized" emotions as including care, sympathy and emotional display ( Smiler, 2004; Chodorow, 2014; Patulny et al., 2017). Whilst emotional display has been discussed in the previous section, here the notion of care, specifically the value men in Love Island placed upon this, will be the focus of the analysis, once again enabling the potential for more diverse and multiple facets of masculinity to be explored.

This task has been implemented over the last few series, becoming a popular section of the show, framed as "making or breaking" couples. Within the 2018 series we once again saw the arrival of the baby dolls, with intriguing effects on the men and performances of masculinity. During this period the female islanders were sent away from the villa, leaving the men in charge. This signaled Wes branding this change in the men's circumstances as a rebranding of the DBS, he noted: " The DBS Society has now become the Daddy Daycare Society, the DDS." The acknowledgment by Wes of this shift once again shows that men are aware of their behaviors and the parameters under which hegemonic performances are acceptable.

The ability for men to make these quick transitions within their performances of masculine identities was evidenced most clearly when the women temporarily exited the villa, leaving the men to care for the dolls. At first the men cared for the dolls diligently, however, viewers watched as the men proceeded to conduct a pram race, resulting in the dolls being catapulted into the air, actions which had the dolls been real, would have been catastrophic. Immediately after this event the men were seen to show concern for the dolls, transitioning immediately back into "caring mode." This lapse from caring mode back into the hegemonic display of mischievousness was interesting, extending the work on transition and multiplicity outlined so far. Here we see that the men were able to convey diverse performances of gender almost simultaneously, doing so knowingly and moving between these with ease. Patulny et al. (2017) note that it is important to acknowledge the flow and continuity between different feelings which men might experience simultaneously (see also Coles, 2009; and Nichols, 2018). However, knowledge surrounding the agency and immediacy with which this happens remains underdeveloped.

The examples of men showing emotion and care within this section have demonstrated that men are able to display facets of their masculinity simultaneously, in doing so resisting rigid hegemonic structures and demonstrating the capacity for choice. This echoes feminist perspectives on agency, whereby this is understood according to Waling (2019: p. 99) "as the capacity for one to act in a particular environment." Viewed alongside the work of Ralph and Roberts (2018), who note that hegemonic structures are often weakened rather than completely transformed; it can be argued that whilst hegemony is an undercurrent within interactions and identity construction, more diverse forms of masculinity are present and men are able to display these with relative ease.

Blurred Performances

Connell (1995) argues that those who are marginalized, or subordinated by hegemonic masculinity are "complicit" in the continuation of this dominant structure. However, the question remains of what happens to those who enact the hegemonic masculinity archetype, yet do not benefit from it? The confines of the Love Island villa enables the possibility for what Connell (2005: p. 72) refers to as "gender projects" to be undertaken, whereby gender is constructed and negotiated within the parameters of the expected gender structures. So far, this paper has explored the ways in which men have engaged with hegemonic masculinity, resisting and challenging this, in doing so illuminating that typologies of masculinity are problematic, as they do not account for diverse masculine performances. The final part of this paper will examine how hegemonic masculinity was also performed by women, exploring the implications of these blurred performances for understandings of masculinity. Notably, constraints of the paper do not make in depth analysis of the women in Love Island possible, thus, the following interpretation aligns with the methodological perspectives adopted throughout the paper, with alternative analysis possible for future discussion.

Within the 2018 series a contestant called Megan Barton garnered attention for behaving in ways deemed to break the "girl code." Utilizing a Durkheimian and Goffmanian lens, this refers to deviation from the moral norms and unspoken rules which underpin social order ( Goffman, 1963; Durkheim, 2013). Within the example, this refers to when a female begins a relationship or has intimate interactions with a male that her friend is already "coupled up" with. In the latest series, Wes was initially "coupled up" with Laura. This relationship ended abruptly when Megan initiated a relationship with Wes, doing so without consulting Laura about her planned actions. As the premise of the show is to be in a couple, with those not "coupled up" being evicted, arguably Megan was undertaking actions necessary to remain in the villa. However, her behavior was criticized both within the villa by both female and male contestants, as well as by audiences. Her behavior was framed as "unexpected" and unacceptable, as this challenged expectations of female behaviors and femininity. Applying this to sociological thinking, the discomfort and surprise shown toward Megan's behaviors was due to the fact that Megan was blurring the lines of the gender order, performing hegemonic characteristics and "expected" male behaviors ( Connell, 2005; Wellard, 2009).

Lorber (1994) suggests that there is a common sense view within society that men and women are naturally different, and that if this binary is to be challenged, then the gender ideologies which structure everyday lives begin to be unraveled. Megan can be seen to be challenging dominant ideologies of gender within the space and this set a precedent in the villa for other deviations from expected gendered behaviors. As the series progressed, viewers saw other women perform behaviors expected of the men ( Wellard, 2009). A further example is the contestant Georgia Steel and her interactions with Jack Fowler. Jack and Georgia went on a date, this was despite the fact that Jack was already "coupled up" with Laura, however the premise of the show means that if you are requested to go on a date you must do so, regardless of your relationship status. The two islanders spent time together external to the villa, enabling discrete interactions without the watchful eye of other contestants. The date became controversial and a point of contention for the remainder of the series, as at the end of the date, Georgia attempted to kiss Jack, which she later denied, repeatedly protesting her innocence and declaring her "loyalty" to other women and friendships. Both fellow contestants and the public were outraged by this behavior, branding Georgia a "snake" due to her devious actions. Significantly, Georgia initially denied that this interaction had occurred, with the truth being disclosed by producers later in the series. Similarly to the case of Megan outlined above, Georgia's behavior was seen to be particularly problematic, as it directly challenged notions of gender in the space, rupturing the gender order.

Conclusion

Gender is intertwined in representational, interactional and social process, with television and media culture playing a significant role in the construction of gendered identities ( Beynon, 2002; Carter and Steiner, 2004; Brickell, 2005; Gill, 2007; Budgeon, 2013). As reality TV shows, such as Love Island continue to exist and perpetuate heterosexual ideologies, glorifying gendered behaviors and hierarchies, there will be a continuation of a typology of masculinity which aligns with the hegemonic model outlined by Connell (2005). However, analysis of the behaviors and interactions of men within Love Island has shown that diverse masculinities are performed, however, they continue to be softened or minimized within this genre. Significantly, this paper has shown that specific typologies, such as the hegemonic man are problematic, as they do not account for the nuances of men's experiences or divergences from the hegemonic model. Through exploration of choice and resistance, this paper has attempted to capture this nuance, suggesting that men are not struggling to show more diverse facets of their masculine identities; rather such divergences are overlooked. In doing so, this analysis aligns with work on inclusive masculinity theorizing, suggesting that the landscape of masculinity is changing ( Anderson, 2012; Magrath, 2017; Anderson and McCormack, 2018).

Via the exploration of masculinity in Love Island the complexity of hegemonic masculinity theorizing, specifically the interplay of hegemonic, subordinated, complicit and marginalized forms of masculinity has been exemplified, with limitations and relevance critically debated ( Hearn, 2004; Anderson and McCormack, 2018). Stephen Whitehead (1999:58) asserts that:

" The concept of hegemonic masculinity goes little way towards revealing the complex patterns of inculcation and resistance which constitute everyday social interaction... it is unable to explain the variant meaning attached to the concept of masculinity at this particular moment in history."

The analysis of masculinity in Love Island presented within this paper shows the enduring relevance of this quotation, pointing to the continued empirical limitation of the theory, as well as the necessity of continuing to think critically to encapsulate men's everyday experiences and diverse identities. Following on from Hearn's (2004) discussion of the relevance of hegemonic masculinity theorizing, this paper has shown that men are both a social category formed by the gender system and individuals who have the capacity for agency within social practice. Thus, whilst the concept of hegemonic masculinity should be utilized with caution, it remains a relevant tool in order to understand the lives of men, with further research on the continuity and change in the relationship both amongst men and between men and women in relation to their masculinities needed.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this manuscript will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Footnotes

References

Jewkes, R., Morrell, R., Hearn, J., Lundqvist, E., Blackbeard, D., Lindegger, G., et al. (2015). Hegemonic masculinity: combining theory and practice in gender interventions. Cult. Health Sexuality 17, 113-127. doi: 10.1080/13691058.2015.1085094

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

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Learning From Love Island? Diversification of the Hegemonic Man

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It is undeniable that Love Island promotes specific ideas of masculinity and masculine behaviors. There is an "expected" masculinity performed in the villa, exemplified in cases, such as "The Do Bits Society" which advocates heteronormative forms of masculinity and gender relations (Whitehead and Barrett, 2008).

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Political A-Gender: Misrepresentation and Misogyny in Australian Politics

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Political A-Gender: Misrepresentation and Misogyny in Australian Politics

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On the morning of December 18, 1894, women's rights opponent Mr Ebenezer Ward believed that with the passage of the Adult Suffrage Act, adding the clause allowing women not only to vote but to be candidates too, would kill the bill.

He was wrong.

The Bill passed 31 votes to 14, and South Australian women become the first in the world to both vote and run in elections.

It's disabling and rather shocking to remember that it wasn't that long ago when most people thought the idea of a woman in politics was 'hilarious.'

I had no idea that it took until 1974 for the Senate to install ladies' toilets, for instance.

Annabel Crabb has spent the last year interviewing prominent leaders, including Julie Bishop, Anne Aly, Linda Burney and Julia Gillard, to bring together a four-part tv series looking at the trajectory of women in politics since the first suffragettes started campaigning for women's rights in Australia.

Despite their differing political views, Crabb's interview subjects, which also include Natasha Stott Despoja, Amanda Vanstone and Penny Wong, all had similar stories regarding the way they were treated by men.

They were asked if they wanted to have children, while the male candidates would be getting married or expanding their families right before pre-selection.

In the first episode, we're introduced to Joan Pilone, a woman whom, according to Crabb, we are "not supposed to have heard of."

Pilone immigrated to Sydney from the UK in 1952 and made inquires to the Liberal Party for positions of leadership. She was told she needed to have 'experience'. She won a seat on the North Sydney Council in 1959 and in 1962, she sought Liberal pre-selection for the State Parliament seat of Kirribilli. She was unsuccessful. Two years later, she was passed over again. And in 1965, she became the first woman to join the City of Sydney council.

She had all the right pedigree you'd think would make her next steps towards higher leadership smooth sailing. But that wasn't the case.

In 1973, she nominated for a safe federal seat, only to be beaten by 34-year old Suburban solicitor by the name of John Howard, who had no experience serving in public office.

Crabb said in a statement that she wanted to mark the 2021 centenary of Edith Cowan's election with "a documentary about women in Parliament."

"I wanted to capture the stories that women in politics tell each other but often don't share more widely, because of the disinclination most have to make their gender more of an issue than it already is," Crabb writes. "Women in politics do get asked about gender; usually a handful of the same questions in the course of profile articles, but very rarely in an in-depth way, for a project like this one."

In the Francine Act of 1902, Australia was the first independent nation in the world to grant women the right to vote, and run for parliament.

But there was an ugly proviso; "No Aboriginal native of Australia Asia Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll..."

"The language used then, in the parliament of Australia about my people, perhaps even relatives is something that makes me feel quite sick and it's really upsetting," Linda Burney says.

"How do you forgive this?" Asks Nova Peris, descendant of the Gija, Yawuru and Iwatja people who represented Australia in hockey and track and field, and was recruited for the Senate at the 2013 election by then prime minister Julia Gillard to represent the Northern Territory.

"But it was the times we lived in."

Peris was the first Indigenous person to win Olympic gold, and the first Indigenous woman in the federal Parliament.

In the first episode, Crabb examines how female candidates campaigned in mid-century, and the excruciating ways they had to make themselves appear 'normal'. Back then (and perhaps, depressingly, even now) a 'normal' woman is seen cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry - taking care of the management of the family home.

Joan Child, the first woman to be Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives, was often photographed in her home, seen washing the dishes, and posing next to her five sons, whom she raised alone after the death of her husband Hal Child, a business manager who died suddenly in the mid-1960s, leaving her a widow with her sons to raise - the eldest of them seventeen-years old and the youngest only seven. To keep the family sustained, she worked in factories, shops, as a cleaner and as a cook.

The episodes are just under 30 minutes each, and are an extremely eye-opening, confronting look at the history of women's continuous struggle to be treated equally in the halls of power.

Watch the First Episode here, and the rest, on ABCiview. An accompanying podcast, with Annabel Crabb and Steph Tisdell, Not Designed for Women | Ms Represented with Annabel Crabb & Steph Tisdell, is also now streaming live.

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Annabel Crabb sheds light on the political women history forgot in ABC's Ms Represented

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Queer Representation in Australian Children's TV Programs

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Queer Representation in Australian Children's TV Programs

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Peppa Pig's first same-sex couple, a pair of lesbian polar bears, were recently introduced after a petition to include a same-sex family received nearly 24,000 signatures.

Children's television has often been a place to push the boundaries of diverse representations onscreen. In particular, Australian children's TV has been a global leader in screen diversity, including gender and queer representation.

Emmy-winning Australian series First Day (2020-22) tells the story of a transgender girl starting high school.

Another Emmy-winner, Hardball (2019-21) includes gay dads for one of the lead characters.

Even recent updates to The Wiggles' line-up has placed a greater emphasis on gender diversity, including adding a non-binary unicorn.

Diverse representation

Children's TV is often less risk averse than programming aimed at adults.

The ABC is empowered to take risks with representations of gender and sexuality in children's programming because of its publicly funded role.

But such progressive portrayals can sometimes chafe with outdated expectations of children's television. In 2004, Play School faced controversy for showing lesbian mothers.

As social acceptance has progressed, Australian children's TV has been able to achieve more queer representations.

Talking to the Queering Australian Screens research project, television professionals often praised the genre for its openness to new ideas, representations and bringing in new talent.

Tony Ayres, Creator of Nowhere Boys (2013-18), observed those who commission children's TV are "generally very open to diverse representation".

This representation happens behind the scenes, too, with Ayres describing how these shows often give new talent their first credit.

David Hannam, who has written for several kids' TV shows including Dance Academy (2010-13), said children's television "has led the way".

Speaking of his time at the Australian Children's Television Foundation, Hannam noted the foundation had an "almost charter responsibility" to show diversity on screen, "with great caution and responsibility".

Julie Kalceff created First Day, which starred a young trans actor, Evie McDonald, as a trans girl starting high school.

When she was developing the show, Kalceff shared that she was initially concerned about what would be allowed on children's TV:

There were no trans people on television. There were no TV shows with trans actors in the lead role. I thought there's no way the ABC is going to do this. And there's no way they're going to do it with kids' TV. But to their credit, the ABC was so supportive, and was so behind the project from the beginning.

What audiences want

It is not only TV producers who are eager to widen representation in children's television. Audiences are also seeking out more inclusive content.

Just like Peppa Pig in the UK, there have been calls in Australia for more diversity in animated hit Bluey, with the show adding its first Auslan signing character in June.

One of our research projects, Australian Children's Television Cultures' 2021 survey found 90% of Australian parents believe diverse representation is an important element of children's TV.

As one father explained:

Diversity on screen helps children learn about people with different upbringings from their own, expanding their empathy for and curiosity about other people.

In contrast to the controversy Play School received nearly 20 years ago for its inclusion of same-sex parents, a mother praised the show for "doing a fantastic job" of depicting diversity in relationships.

Not everyone believes Australian television is doing enough. One survey respondent praised the way shows like Bluey reflect Australian culture, but said he would "love to see more LGBT representation [...] It would be nice as a kid to know you're valid."

Uncertain futures

The streaming era has changed how families and children watch TV. This raises concerns about the future of Australian children's content.

The recent removal of quotas for Australian networks to air a minimum number of hours of children's television, alongside the absence of quotas on streaming services, has led to a reduction in the production of local kids' TV.

From Play School to Bluey, children's TV has reflected the richness of Australian cultural life. There is a risk that if Australian child audiences need to rely on international content, future generations will not see themselves on screen.

With the loss of local voices, Australian kids' TV may also lose its ability to push boundaries of diversity and inclusion.

Read more: Cheese 'n' crackers! Concerns deepen for the future of Australian children's television
We are conducting a survey of parents and guardians with children aged up to 14 about how families watch kids' TV in the streaming era. You can participate here.

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Peppa Pig has introduced a pair of lesbian polar bears, but Aussie kids' TV has been leading the way in queer representation

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Peppa Pig's first same-sex couple, a pair of lesbian polar bears, were recently introduced after a petition to include a same-sex family received nearly 24,000 signatures. Children's television has often been a place to push the boundaries of diverse representations onscreen. In particular, Australian children's TV has been a global leader in screen diversity, including gender and queer representation.

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Generation LIKE: The Perennial Teen Quest for Identity and Connection (Doco)

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Generation LIKE: The Perennial Teen Quest for Identity and Connection (Doco)

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Watch full-length episodes of PBS documentary series FRONTLINE for free. Generation Like - FRONTLINE explores how the perennial teen quest for identity and connection has migrated to social media - and how big brands are increasingly co-opting young consumers' digital presences.

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisble Knapsack

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisble Knapsack

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Guerilla Art: Activism As Cultural Jamming

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Guerilla Art: Activism As Cultural Jamming

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In a world where gender inequality shoulders up to an ever-vocal artist activist movement, Sydney Contemporary art fair, in partnership with Copyright Agency, has used its Talks Contemporary program to pull together global and local concerns.

In a considerable coup, Gerda Taro, a current member of Guerilla Girls Broadband and a founding member of the Guerilla Girls - the trailblazing New York feminist collective that has monitored blue chip museums and commercial galleries since the mid 1980s - will be in conversation with Alison Wright, the National Gallery of Australia's Assistant Director and Australian champion of the #knowmyname campaign, on Friday 13 September, 6-7pm. This is a ticketed event.

The Guerilla Girls built a global reputation as an industry watch dog on gender disparity in the visual arts, and has also held up a critical lens to racial whitewashing.

This Sydney conversation, Art and Activism, is programmed alongside a panel discussion that addresses another form of inequality.

Indigenous Languages and the Visual Voiceconvenes a panel of First Nations artists who use theirvisual voice to address inappropriate representation and disparity, placing the artist's worldview at the centre of the conversation.

Speakers include Brook Andrew, Tony Albert, APY Lands artists Vicki Cullinan, Illuwanti Ken and Sally Scales, and will be moderated by Clothilde Bullen, Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Exhibitions and Collections at MCA.

These two talks suture the local to the global, and by placing them within the market context of an art fair, reminds us of our empowered choices as art lovers, artists and collectors.

To view the full Talk Contemporary program
Talk Contemporary, 2018; courtesy Sydney Contemporary; Photo Jacquie Manning
Reinventing the "F" word - Feminism in the arts

In the spring of 1985, seven women launched the Guerilla Girls in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, which roll call included just 13 women of the 165 artists exhibited.

The Guerilla Girls' most recent poster campaign asked, If You Keep Women Out They Get Resentful (2018).

Have we become resentful, or is three decades just too long to ask for equality? And when we turn that lens on our Indigenous artists, the question shifts further back another 200 years.
Vicki Cullinan, Courtesy APY Collective and Sydney Contemporary; Photo Jackson Lee
'Just a few years ago, these beautiful paintings were relegated to the trestle tables of market places,' Skye Omeara, Director of APY Gallery, told ArtsHub. 'Now we can see smart and sophisticated bodies of work.'

APY Gallery is a national shopfront for the APY Lands Collective that works in both of access and advocacy. This year is the first time they will be represented at Sydney Contemporary. APY Gallery have a space in Sydney and in March this year opened a space in Adelaide.

'First Nations artists have struggled to be at the same table afforded to non-Indigenous artists,' said Omeara. 'And emerging artists have been so poorly represented in the past. What the art centres wanted to do was to grow our capacity this past last 12 months - to be strategic about events and more aligned with the broader art market.'

Omeara pointed out that leading the conversation for Talk Contemporary is a woman-strong Indigenous panel, which includes Chair of the APY Collective Board, Sally Scales.

'It is a role that is politically really important. She is also one of the leaders driving the Uluru Statement - she is fierce, she is brave and so smart. Sally brings an honest voice to the challenges faced and represents young people and their hope for remote communities,' said Omeara.

Omeara said these three woman are every bit as strong in advocating a voice of truth as the Guerilla Girls.

Talk Contemporary opens a headspace that speaks very much of global-local conversations, a kind of push-pull that has little to do with distance and more to do with attitude.

These notions are also played out through NGA's #knowmyname campaign, which similarly turns to text to invoke memory and affirmation.

The #KnowMyName campaign builds on the work of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. which, in 2016, asked people if they could name five women artists. Its ongoing objective is to recognise and celebrate Australian women artists, through social media, exhibitions, research and creative collaborations.

Wright told ArtsHub: 'The National Gallery of Australia's mission is to lead a progressive cultural agenda and so it is important we are facilitating and participating in conversations that explore issues with many audiences. We think it valuable to ask if we are all doing enough when it comes to equality.'

To view the full Talk Contemporary program
Gorilla Sunbathing. Courtesy of Sydney Contemporary and Guerilla Girls; supplied
Activism as Cultural Jamming

The Guerilla Girls describe what they do as culture jamming, their art activism taking the form of posters, books, billboards and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption.

They added stealth projections to their actions in 2015, emblazoning the façade of the Whitney Museum in New York with slogans about income inequality and the super rich hijacking art.

'It's great to be talking with Gerda as someone who has been passionate and committed to the cause of gender equality and who has seen changes in the art world since the Guerrilla Girls first started putting up posters after dark - something they are still doing,' said Wright.

The art fair setting is an apt platform for these conversations.

This year's talk escalates conversations that were started last year. The panel Sheilas in the art market demonstrated Sydney Contemporary's desire to firmly address gender and racial disparity, in what might be considered the coalface of collecting.

CEO and Group Fairs Director, Art Fairs Australia, Barry Keldoulis: 'Sexism and racism have long been deeply entrenched across most sectors of society, including the arts. The Fair attracts people from the full spectrum of the artworld and is a good place to continue the discussions of the way forward.'

'People are really interested in the #KnowMyName project and eager to learn more about Australian women artists,' added Wright.

All these projects - #KnowMyName, the work of the Guerilla Girls, and Australia's own gender watchdog, The Countess Report - move well beyond the token 'box tick' exhibition or single action that marks that a 'problem' is addressed.

Conversations like these are about shifting institutional attitudes. To recall the Guerilla Girls poster, When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, what will your art collection be worth? (1985-1989).

Wright said the gallery will continue to roll out projects that offer the slow burn to the sector's retina.

Talk Contemporary is presented by Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund and will roll out 14 thought-provoking talks within the domain of contemporary art today, from 12-15 September.
Catch Indigenous Languages and the Visual Voice Sunday 15 September, 3-4pm Art and Activism, Friday 13 September at Talk Contemporary, 6-7pm.
To view the full Talk Contemporary program

Talk Contemporary events are included with the purchase of a ticket to Sydney Contemporary (no bookings required), with the exception of the headline event; Art and Activism, for which an additional ticket is required.

The fifth edition of Sydney Contemporary will showcase 98 leading Australian and international galleries, exhibiting the work of over 450 artists from 34 countries under one roof at Carriageworks from 12-15 September 2019.

Gina Fairley is ArtsHub's National Visual Arts Editor. For a decade she worked as a freelance writer and curator across Southeast Asia and was previously the Regional Contributing Editor for Hong Kong based magazines Asian Art News and World Sculpture News. Prior to writing she worked as an arts manager in America and Australia for 14 years, including the regional gallery, biennale and commercial sectors. She is based in Mittagong, regional NSW. Twitter: @ginafairley Instagram: fairleygina

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Beware Australia: an original Guerilla Girl meets the National Gallery head on

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In a world where gender inequality shoulders up to an ever-vocal artist activist movement, Sydney Contemporary art fair, in partnership with Copyright Agency, has used its Talks Contemporary program to pull together global and local concerns.

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Men's Rights: A History of Australia's Manosphere

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Men's Rights: A History of Australia's Manosphere

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Early last month, in what was Britain's worst mass shooting in years, a man named Jake Davison shot dead five people, including a three-year-old girl, in Plymouth. Davison had posted a series of videos online in which he described feeling socially isolated and struggling to meet women, and made reference to "incels" - an online group of men who complain that women are put off by their looks or their low socioeconomic status.

While Davison didn't identify himself as an incel, his actions echo those of men associated with this movement. In 2014, for example, Elliot Rodger killed six people in a shooting in Isla Vista, California, and in 2018 Alek Minassian drove a rented van through a pedestrian mall in Toronto, killing ten. Each of these men made clear their allegiance to incels.

These killings helped fuel concern about misogynist violence, and particularly violence linked to online forums. As Donna Zuckerberg, who happens to be the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, argued in her 2018 book on the issue, "social media has elevated misogyny to entirely new levels of violence and virulence."

A newly released report from a global team of researchers led by Manoel Horta Ribeiro backs up some of these concerns, finding that online anti-women groups, including incels and "men going their own way" (men who believe relationships with women are so toxic they are best avoided altogether), appear to be growing. Using data collected from forums like Gab and Reddit, the researchers also found the level of toxicity in the "manosphere" had risen significantly.

Policymakers have also expressed concern. In March this year the director-general of ASIO, Mike Burgess, described how a growing number of extremists no longer fit the left-right spectrum and are instead "motivated by a fear of societal collapse or a specific social or economic grievance or conspiracy." Incels were among the groups ASIO is taking more seriously, he said.

Despite the new labels, the ideas motivating these groups are not entirely new. They follow on from a longer-standing men's rights movement that has had significant influence, despite its relatively low profile, in key areas of family policy, particularly during and since the Howard government.

The men's rights movement originated in the United States, where figures such as Warren Farrell, who was once a prominent male feminist, created a movement to oppose what they describe as "institutional misandry," or hatred of men. Focusing primarily on political activism, these groups have campaigned on issues including a perceived bias against men when custody battles go to court, a belief that men are as much victims of domestic violence as are women, and the need for a greater focus on suicide rates, education levels and deaths in the workplace among men.

Several men's rights organisations have been working on these issues for decades in Australia. Groups including Fathers4Equality, the Men's Rights Agency and the Australian Men's Rights Association have focused primarily on father's rights, with the Family Court being a core concern. The Australian Men's Rights Association, for example, argues that an "epidemic" of fatherlessness is hurting children, and has pushed against laws that separate men from their children. They also, somewhat paradoxically, provide men with advice on DNA paternity testing to overcome what they believe is a trend of " paternity fraud."

Despite their relatively low profile, these groups have had some influence in conservative politics. In 2006 the Howard government amended the Family Law Act to prioritise a child's right to have access to both parents in the case of divorce. While the legislation offered an exemption in cases of domestic abuse, there is evidence that the shift has resulted in some abusive men having ongoing access to their children.

One of the key advocates for this change was Bettina Arndt, who advised the Howard government on family law and child support issues. Arndt, who was controversially awarded an Order of Australia in 2020, has followed a similar trajectory to many men's rights activists. Previously a self-proclaimed feminist, she now believes that radical feminism's critique of men's behavour has damaged relations between the sexes.

In recent years Arndt has fashioned herself into one of Australia's leading men's rights activists. "Now it is men's lives we aren't allowed to speak about - the very real problems confronting men and boys in our male-bashing society," she wrote in her 2018 book, # MenToo. She has become a staple on conservative TV, and frequently appears on Sky News Australia, where men's rights issues have become a topic of concern.

But other groups have recently taken a higher profile. The Australian Brotherhood of Fathers, or ABF, which has more than 70,000 likes on Facebook, is one of the most active. Its Facebook page discusses the perceived injustices of the family law system and the plight of men denied access to their children.

Mothers of Sons - launched in 2020 at an online forum hosted by the conservative commentator Prue MacSween and featuring NSW One Nation MP Mark Latham - is run by a "group of ordinary women whose sons have faced extraordinary ordeals in our unfair, anti-male legal systems and workplaces." Mothers of Sons holds to the belief that some women make "false accusations" of sexual assault and domestic violence against men, and rails against the "excesses" of the #MeToo movement.

Like Arndt in the early 2000s, these groups are also achieving some political success, although through different avenues. In recent years men's rights groups have found favour within Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party. In 2019, for example, after lobbying by the ABF and members of the "Blokes Advice" Facebook group, Hanson successfully moved for a parliamentary inquiry into the family law system, which is chaired by herself and the former Liberal minister, and high-profile social conservative, Kevin Andrews.

The ABF argues that twenty-one Australian men commit suicide each week following family breakdown, and link this to failures of the family law system. The figure is highly contested, and even former Queensland One Nation leader Steve Dickson, a key men's rights supporter within One Nation, concedes it is anecdotal. That hasn't stopped its being taken up more widely by men's groups.

In pushing for the inquiry, Hanson herself promoted that other, highly contested, belief of the men's rights movement - that women frequently lie about domestic violence and rape in order to get back at men. "There are people out there who are nothing but liars and who will use that in the court system," she claimed.

The committee is still at work on its inquiry, but One Nation has already adopted many of the demands of the men's rights movement as part of its policy platform. The party's family law policy, for example, takes the view that apprehended violence orders and other court orders shouldn't necessarily restrict parents' access to their children, and that allegations of abuse should only be heard during divorce proceedings if they are accompanied by medical records or a criminal conviction.

Although the men's rights movement has had a growing influence on the conservative side of politics in Australia, Ribeiro and his colleagues found that this older variety of activism is becoming less popular, while groups like the incels and men going their own way are thriving.

Reflecting longstanding assumptions about inherent differences between men and women, men's and manosphere rights groups often focus on reinforcing traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity. Thus, they believe the gender pay gap reflects women's inherent desire to spend less time than men in paid work rather than structural problems in the labour force. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology, the manosphere focuses on these supposed differences in sexual and romantic relationships - arguing that women engage in "hypergamy," a strategy in which they only date men of a higher social, economic or physical status.

The "manosphere" is therefore distinct from the older men's rights groups in a number of ways. First, its members are less focused on political activism and more on fixing their personal lives. Manosphere discussion primarily focuses on sex and relationships, and features constant complaints about women, sex and love.

The second major difference between the newer groups and their predecessors is their online focus. Men's rights activists act in the same way as other established political groups, with men getting together in meeting rooms, in conference halls and, occasionally, on the streets. The manosphere meets most often on Reddit, 4Chan, YouTube, Gab and other social media.

While the influence of the internet in fostering extremism is often overstated, it has had a direct influence on how these groups form and operate. My own research has found that men in these communities have relatively weak connections with each other online. They are attached to the idea of the manosphere but don't find a deep social connection with others. They often remain deeply socially isolated, sitting at home, online, growing angrier about their lives with no one there to support them.

Other researchers have found that the architecture of social media platforms can push participants towards more toxic and extreme discussion. Research by Tiana Gaudette and colleagues, for example, found that Reddit's voting function normalised radical anti-Muslim and anti-left sentiment in the forum dedicated to support of Donald Trump. Voting was used to mobilise members around these sentiments, creating the sense that participants are part of an in-group opposed to an identified out-group. Reddit's upvoting feature produced a "one-sided narrative that serves to reinforce members' extremist views," wrote Gaudette and her colleagues, "thereby strengthening bonds between members of the in-group." My research finds that these sorts of trends are viewable in the manosphere as well.

These new features create a noxious combination. Alongside ongoing social isolation, the belief in essential differences between men and women fosters a form of nihilism in which men see no solution for the problems they are facing. Matched with growing extremist content, this can create an environment of hatred and misogyny, which can push some individuals to undertake deadly attacks.

Australia has yet to see any incel-motivated attacks of the kind experienced in the United States, Canada and Britain. But does that mean the threat doesn't exist?

The influence of these groups is often harder to measure than traditional men's rights groups. While many of the online communities are very large, it is impossible to know individuals' locations or level of commitment.

Some signs suggest that the influence of the manosphere is present in Australia. Prior to the pandemic, influential American manosphere activists frequently made Australia a destination. In 2017, for instance, filmmaker Cassie Jaye visited the country promoting her movie The Red Pill. Taken from the movie The Matrix, the Red Pill is a term used by these groups to describe the process of learning the harsh truths about feminism. Local men's groups organised screenings of the movie, and Jaye made several high-profile media appearances.

Later, in 2019, Canadian conservative and anti-feminist thinker Jordan Peterson sold out theatres across the country promoting his anti-feminist self-help text 12 Rules for Life. While he is unlikely to see himself as a member of the community, Peterson is famous in the manosphere, particularly for his perceived tendency to "destroy" feminists in interviews or forums.

Similarly, the "seduction industry," made up of companies and individuals that teach men a range of (often coercive) tactics in order to "pick up" women, has had a presence in Australia for well over a decade. Way back in 2014, Julien Blanc, who has publicly advocated for men to coerce women, had his visa revoked while on a trip to Sydney. Despite this controversy these groups have stayed strong. Early last year the Sydney bookstore Kinokuniya announced a ban on such behaviour when it discovered that pick-up artists were operating on its premises.

The views of these groups are unlikely to represent a significant portion of the Australian population, or even of Australian men. Like the men's rights movement, the manosphere is relatively small, both globally and in Australia. Yet, with its growth online and its influence in politics, it is a force worth watching. If even one of its members decides to take out his anger in the real world, as happened in Britain just weeks ago, the consequences could be very serious.

Of course, some of the complaints made by these men are well founded. Male suicide rates are extremely high, as are deaths in the workplace. It is also true that men are, at times, the victims of domestic abuse and rape, and as victims are sometimes ignored. Boys often fall behind in our schools, and men face high levels of mental ill-health. These are all issues that need serious attention.

But the ire of the manosphere is directed at feminism rather than the real causes of these problems, and too frequently turns misogynistic. While claiming they stand for gender equality, these groups undermine the serious work needed to achieve it. *

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Australia's manosphere: a prehistory * Simon Copland

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Early last month, in what was Britain's worst mass shooting in years, a man named Jake Davison shot dead five people, including a three-year-old girl, in Plymouth. Davison had posted a series of videos online in which he described feeling socially isolated and struggling to meet women, and made reference to "incels" - an online group of men who complain that women are put off by their looks or their low socioeconomic status.

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Nonconformity and Its Influence on Human Behaviour

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Nonconformity and Its Influence on Human Behaviour

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The Power of Non-Conformity: Grant Cox at TEDxHoughton

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The Pronoun Lowdown: Exploring The Language and Representation of Gender Diversity in Shaping Personal Identity

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The Pronoun Lowdown: Exploring The Language and Representation of Gender Diversity in Shaping Personal Identity

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The Pronoun Lowdown: Nevo Zisin in conversation with Misty Farquhar

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Authentic Autism: Neuro-diverse representation on Australian Teen TV

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Authentic Autism: Neuro-diverse representation on Australian Teen TV

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Opinion

By Mitchell Adams

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Warning: contains mild spoilers for the new season of Heartbreak High.
There's been a lot of buzz surrounding the recent premiere of Heartbreak High on Netflix and for good reason. The reboot of the '90s Australian TV classic, one of the streamer's biggest Australian productions so far, has everything you would expect of a modern teen drama series akin to Sex Education or Euphoria: a stellar young cast, themes of class division, LGBTQ+ positive storytelling, frank depictions of addiction and mental health issues, and, of course, a large amount of sexual discussion and activity that would make even the most progressive parents nervous.

Actor Chloe Hayden plays Quinn "Quinni" Gallagher-Jones in Netflix's reboot of Heartbreak High. Credit:Lisa Tomasetti/Netflix

But there's one stand-out factor in the new series that has mostly flown under the radar: the character of Quinn "Quinni" Gallagher-Jones. In the show, Quinni has her own social circle, she's started dating, she has her struggles, and most importantly she has a respectful level of teen angst that anyone her age should. But Quinni is so much more than all of this. She is also the first truly accurate portrayal of a young autistic person on the Australian TV landscape.

At a time when singer Sia can write and direct a film loaded with stereotypes that reinforce society's negative and inaccurate perception of people on the spectrum, the notion that young autistic people can see a character like Quinni on their screens isn't just refreshing... it is life-saving. In a world where people like me are reduced to caricatures, seeing ourselves represented authentically is a game-changer. This is the moment autistic people like myself have been waiting decades for. Better yet, it is an accurate portrayal of someone on the spectrum by an actor who is on the spectrum themselves.

Watching Chloe Hayden, a brilliant young actor and disability rights activist, play Quinni on screen is an incredibly joyous but also a somewhat painful experience. Being on the spectrum herself, it's clear the amount of real-life experience she's adding to her performance is immense. Scenes where Quinni feels overwhelmed just sitting on a bus, or being at a party while forcing herself to mask how she feels in order to better fit in and not upset people, depict a pain neurodivergent people know all too well.

In particular, the moment where Quinni reveals to her love interest, Sasha, that she is on the spectrum was heartbreaking. Sasha was shocked and bewildered due to her knowledge of autism being limited to those people on the more severe end of the spectrum. The scene cuts deep as Sasha struggles to find a non-offensive way to begin the "you don't look autistic" conversation that all neurotypical people feel the need to start (tip for all neurotypicals out there: don't start that conversation, ever).

Thankfully, the scene becomes more affirming when Sasha realises what she got wrong, and lists the personal traits of Quinni's that she loves, before the two kiss - a moment that has gone viral on social media.

What is even more remarkable than Hayden's extraordinary performance is the lens the creators of the show have chosen for her character. The stereotypes are immediately thrown out the window. Quinni is not a savant, she is not a child in an adult's body, she is just a regular teenager who drinks, swears, thinks, and talks about sex almost constantly. We see the world through her eyes, as opposed to shows like The Good Doctor, which plays up stereotypes and focuses on how the world sees the show's main character, Dr Shaun Murphy, rather than his own perspective.

Hayden (left) with co-stars James Majoos and Ayesha Madon. Credit:Lisa Tomasetti/Netflix

The response from the autistic community to Heartbreak High has been overwhelmingly positive. At a time when the internet is awash with people throwing scorn at everything they perceive as a "woke agenda" and harassing every creative, actor and viewer of any film and TV series that doesn't exclusively cater to them, it is a perfect example of why representation in media matters so much. It also makes the point that film and television studios need to tell more stories that better reflect the wonderfully diverse world we live in.

Feeling seen and valued in media is something people on the spectrum have arguably never felt, until Quinni came along. And guess what? We want and deserve to see even more characters like her on our screens.

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Heartbreak High has the best representation of autism I've ever seen

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Opinion By Mitchell Adams Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Warning: contains mild spoilers for the new season of Heartbreak High. There's been a lot of buzz surrounding the recent premiere of Heartbreak High on Netflix and for good reason.

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The Impact of Political Correctness on Superhero Representation and Discourse

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The Impact of Political Correctness on Superhero Representation and Discourse

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Is Wokeness Killing the Marvel Franchise?

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Internet activism: How are political movements shaped online? | Big Think

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Language around gender and identity evolves (and always has) | Archie Crowley

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Katherine Mangu-Ward: What capitalism gets right -- and governments get wrong

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Is capitalism a good thing? Journalist Katherine Mangu-Ward makes the case that "weirdos" left alone to innovate and explore far-out ideas in a free market system are our best hope for the future. She asks us to reconsider our qualms about capitalism, failure and corporate death, analyzing the recent history of General Motors and Facebook to illustrate why we're better off with a lot less government intervention.

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Gala Marija Vrbanic: The new reality of fashion is digital

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Picking an outfit? Take inspiration from this thrilling talk about digital fashion: the new, weird and wonderful world of fashion designed for our virtual worlds. Watch as Gala Marija Vrbanic, a leader in this emerging field, showcases what you could wear across your digital channels -- be it TikTok, Instagram or in the metaverse -- and shares how it could infinitely expand the creative possibilities of fashion, identity and self-expression.

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Takis S. Pappas: The rise of modern populism

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In many democratic countries, charismatic leaders vilify political opponents, disparage institutions, and claim to be for the people. Some critics label this approach as authoritarian or fascist, while others argue that these leaders are manipulating voters. This style of politics goes by the name of populism. Takis S.

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Decolonizing Beauty: More Than Eurocentric Archetypes

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Decolonizing Beauty: More Than Eurocentric Archetypes

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Beauty is about more than the body you inhabit -- it’s a way of being that goes beyond genetics or societal ideals. Aboriginal writer and former model Sasha Sarago invites you to decolonize beauty, moving away from the monolithic Eurocentric archetype and towards a more essential, authentic understa…

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Grown men are getting triggered by a little mermaid. Disney recently released a trailer for a new live-action version of the Little Mermaid starring Halle Bailey, a Black actor, and it has sparked a depressingly predictable racist backlash. The trailer has received 1.5m dislikes on YouTube and caused a lot of bigots to have a conniption fit. If you're getting a sense of deja vuabout all this, it's because the same people already had a meltdown in 2019, when the live-action remake was first announced.

It's not just the Little Mermaid: rightwingers, the people who love telling liberals to toughen up snowflake, routinely get their knickers in a twist over animated entertainment targeted at the four-to-12-year-old crowd. There seems to be a backlash about diversity onscreen every five minutes. Earlier this month, for example, the right were getting het up over a lesbian polar bear family in Peppa Pig. I don't know how they have the energy to care about cartoon polar bears; it really must be very exhausting.

While there may be nothing new about bigots raging over animated entertainment, this particular backlash is noteworthy because of just how unhinged the response has been. An anonymous computer scientist, for example, went to the trouble of using artificial intelligence to whiten Halle Bailey's appearance in the trailer. A (now-suspended) Twitter account jubilantly shared the altered trailer, announcing: "Credits to our memer Artificial intelligence scientist. He fixed The Little Mermaid and turned the woke actor into a ginger white girl." Shortly after the Twitter account added: "This is purely for educational purposes, please do not misinterpret this in a racist way." Uh huh.

Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh also spent a lot more time thinking about the physiology of fictional creatures than is healthy. Walsh told viewers of his eponymous show that "from a scientific perspective, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean. If anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, she should, actually, be translucent. If you look at deep-sea creatures, they're translucent. They have no kind of pigmentation whatsoever ... [The Little Mermaid] should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face."

Walsh later said what all racists say when people call them out: his statement about a Black mermaid being unscientific was a joke! Which would have been a lot more convincing of an argument if Walsh hadn't built his brand on far-right views.

Walsh clearly has an active imagination so I'd like to suggest a little thought experiment to him: try imagining a world where you grew up rarely seeing someone like yourself be a hero onscreen. Walsh is an able-bodied thirtysomething white guy. He grew up with no end of TV shows and movies starring boys who looked like him. If you take that representation for granted then it can be hard to understand how important it is to see yourself included in popular culture. It can be hard to understand how dehumanizing it is to be constantly sent the message that people who look like you can never be heroes. I'm speaking from personal experience here: the other day I found myself unexpectedly shedding a tear because Mo Amer was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon talking about how his new Netflix show, Mo, is "the first ever show created by, starring a Palestinian, and showing a Palestinian family on television". As a Palestinian, I wish there had been something like Mo on TV when I was growing up.

The nine millionth remake of the Little Mermaid may not be something that you personally care about, but do try and imagine how important it is for a little girl to see someone who looks like her playing a heroine onscreen. There's a very wholesome TikTok trend of Black girls watching the Little Mermaid trailer and being delighted that " she's like me! She's like me!" If your reaction to little girls feeling included is to dismiss is it as "woke", then there is something deeply wrong with you. Not only are you a bad human, you're also a bad capitalist. The US is growing increasingly diverse, whether people like Walsh like it or not. In 2019 non-whites and Hispanics constituted a majority of people under age 16 for the first time. Forgive my cynicism, but I don't think Disney isn't trying to be "woke" with the Little Mermaid. It is simply responding to good old-fashioned market forces.

Researchers surveyed 238,000 people across 140 countries about the effects of premenstrual syndrome (PMS). They found (unsurprisingly!) that PMS is incredibly common and "a majority of women reported that their premenstrual symptoms interfered with their everyday life at least some of the time".

This week I spoke to Pragya Agarwal about her new book, Hysterical, which examines how we gender emotions. You can watch the event, hosted by the RSA, for free here.

It costs $75,000 for the procedure which adds between three to six inches to your height, and involves getting both your femurs broken. One man interviewed by GQ said he's keeping the surgery a secret and is going to tell everyone that his extra inches are a side-effect of the Covid vaccine. While that's hilarious, the story itself is a sad reminder that gendered expectations negatively affect men just as much as women.

A tiny bit of good news in a story that will make your blood boil.

A third of the country is under water and almost 650,000 women in affected areas need maternity services.

Having strong opinions about whether pineapple belongs on a pizza is apparently one of them.

A few weeks ago a Reddit user with a very overactive imagination came up with a wild theory that a chess champion had been using vibrating anal beads that indicated the best moves. This theory somehow took on a life of its own and become a huge scandal in the chess world. Now a popular cam site is offering $1m to Grandmaster Hans Niemann to broadcast himself playing a live game of chess naked to disprove the accusations. Your move, Niemann.

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Little Mermaid's racist critics pollute magical undersea world with bigotry | Arwa Mahdawi

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Grown men are getting triggered by a little mermaid. Disney recently released a trailer for a new live-action version of the Little Mermaid starring Halle Bailey, a Black actor, and it has sparked a depressingly predictable racist backlash. The trailer has received 1.5m dislikes on YouTube and caused a lot of bigots to have a conniption fit.

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Reproductive Anxiety: Birthstrike for Climate Change

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Reproductive Anxiety: Birthstrike for Climate Change

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In March 2019, Blythe Pepino, singer-songwriter and founder of the environmental activist group BirthStrike for Climate, appeared on the right-wing Tucker Carlson Tonight show on Fox News in the US.

Carlson is a climate change denier, whose fans include Donald Trump and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Yet, he started his interview with Pepino with a welcoming tone saying: "This story makes me sad, I don't wanna attack you, I want to take what you're saying seriously, but I'm not sure I understand why you're choosing not to have children, so I would be grateful if you'd tell us." In her early thirties and smartly turned out, Pepino came across as someone who was pushing back her trepidation to try and convey an important message. She told Carlson:

BirthStrike isn't about trying to stop other people from having children ... we feel too afraid to have kids because we feel we are heading towards civilisation breakdown as a result of the environmental crisis.

Carlson - usually known for his confrontational interview style - remained apparently sympathetic, saying her answer was "sadder" than he was expecting. "You're basically saying the species is over ... we should in effect as a group end it, commit suicide?"

For Pepino, sharing her personal feelings about having children and the future they could face was intended to build solidarity and raise awareness. But her campaign raised a lot of people's hackles and caused a lot of personal strife for her, ultimately leading to burnout and an early end for BirthStrike.

This story is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.

Looking at the case of BirthStrike offers insights into public conversations about the climate crisis - and how they intersect with personal decision making, representations of women in the media and the thorny topic of how reproduction and environmental concerns might, and might not, be related. While BirthStrike achieved wide media coverage, we were in the privileged position to carry out in-depth research with members of the group, including Pepino.

What we found offers a salutary lesson about how core messages and themes can be misconstrued and misunderstood when put through a high-profile media lens. What we describe here centres on Pepino's account, as a founder of the group and who we got to know over the course of our research. But our experience of researching and speaking with people about BirthStrike has made it clear that many accounts exist; many stories could be told and landing on a single or complete take on what BirthStrike was, meant, or achieved is not possible.
You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here.
What was BirthStrike?

BirthStrike was founded by Pepino in the UK, but was open to people around the world. Pepino is a singer-songwriter who has experienced popularity and acclaim as part of the band Vaults, whose music appeared on the soundtracks of the film Fifty Shades of Grey and a John Lewis Christmas advert. She now fronts the band Mesadorm.

Birthstrike sought to draw attention to the severity of the existential threats of climate change through public discussions about how they would affect future generations. It curated video and written testimonials on its website and social media so people could share their personal concerns about having children in the climate crisis, while Birthstrike activists attended demonstrations, rallies and other climate-related events.

Pepino carefully explained her fear about the likely effects of the climate crisis and the need for people to come together to try and prevent it becoming worse through demanding government action and corporate accountability.

This conversation about how reproductive decision making might be entwined with anxieties about the future of humans on a warming planet has come to the fore in recent years. One well-known example is an Instagram video in which American congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez says: "There's scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?"

BirthStrike aimed to provide a space for people - most, but certainly not all of whom, were younger women - to share and express their concerns about their future children's lives in a world with an irrevocably changed climate. Pepino told us:

When I'm afraid of something, where I want to change something, I think about how can I make this into a piece of theatre? Or how do I communicate this by song? Or ... how can I communicate and connect with people around this and do something?

We carried out in-depth interviews with 16 members of BirthStrike and the similar climate activist groups, Conceivable Future, based in the US, and No Future No Children, based in Canada, as well as others with related concerns to talk about their thoughts and decision making when it came to having children during the climate crisis. We analysed media coverage and 164 testimonials on the collectives websites - all of which centre on the idea that children born today will have very difficult lives. For the people involved in these campaigns, this is both a source of personal grief and a motivation for activism to halt the climate crisis.

BirthStrike fascinates us as researchers because it was an activist intervention that mobilised powerful "normal" ideas, such as the desire to have children, and which capitalised on the privileged idea that, if young articulate women expressed fear about bringing children into the world, this would be sufficiently alarming to galvanise broader action.

Yet at the same time, it sought to effect radical ends and Pepino and the other leaders of BirthStrike genuinely wished to work towards a world in which everyone felt safe enough to enjoy family life. In this way, it was progressive and problematic at the same time.

Sounding the alarm

We first met Pepino in 2019 and have interviewed her several times since. We have found her to be an intelligent and articulate person who thinks seriously about issues, but also has a keen sense of fun. Drinking coffee in the sunny kitchen of her rented house in east London during the summer of 2021, we asked her to reflect on the story of BirthStrike.

In 2019, she was living in Stroud, a rural town in south-west England with a long history of involvement in the environmental movement. Attending an Extinction Rebellion (XR) seminar and reading the IPCC's 2018 report led her to "wake up" to the existential threats of climate change. She knew she needed to do something and an idea occurred to her, which became BirthStrike.

She started to discuss her fears about the existential threats of climate change with friends and members of XR, and her particular concerns about the future of any children she might have. She said:

The impression I got [from others] was, 'I've been thinking about this, I don't know how to speak about it because it seems really taboo and almost too scary for me to say out loud'.

In our conversations, Pepino has reflected several times on how meeting her partner Josh had led to a profound conviction that she would like to have children with him. Yet, her deeper understanding of the climate crisis threw this into disarray. Like the other members of BirthStrike who joined her, she wondered how she could possibly bring children into a world facing ecological collapse. Another research participant described her feelings about finding BirthStrike like this:

It was quite empowering to come across BirthStrike, because it felt like going out and talking about it was another form of protest ... It's sounding the alarm and saying 'this is how bad it is' ... saying that 'I'm too scared about this exact same society that you're living in, to have children in it' ... On some level I hope it might wake somebody up. I mean, that's kind of why I do it.

In 2015, Pepino was involved in the Each Body's Ready campaign against a notorious Protein World advert that many criticised for being sexist and body-shaming.

Read more: Thank you bikini terrorists for moving us on from throwback diet ads - now #eachbodysready

She drew on this and her experience in the music industry when she decided in 2019 that she needed to spread the message about the climate crisis to the general public. The aim was to spark conversations and use her own (in her words) privileged status as a middle-class white woman to "pull everyone in" and provoke "fast change". She told us:

Those are the people I was trying to get to, the privileged community. The point of BirthStrike in a way, was to get to those people, and I was most happy when we were in Cosmopolitan, when we were in those kinds of magazines, where we would be talking to people who were still in that dream of like, 'everything's cool ... the world's really nice', you know?

One of the aspects of the climate crisis that particularly concerned her, as she tried to explain to Carlson, is the political inertia and mismanagement of environmental threats that has led to climate change being a present reality rather than a future threat.

She wanted to spread the message - and, perhaps, some of the fear that she felt - in order to persuade others to unite to pressure governments and corporations to act to prevent the worst predictions coming true. Though, as she later acknowledged to us, she became increasingly unconvinced that many journalists were understanding the nuance of her argument.

An epiphany?

At one point in his interview, Carlson suggested Pepino had had something akin to a religious conversion, and in some ways it is an apt comparison. The story she tells of her awakening to the existential threats of climate change does sound like an epiphany - it was a point of no return where she could no longer un-see the realities of the climate crisis, and felt compelled to warn others.

The 2021 Netflix film Don't Look Up has been read as an analogy for inertia about the climate crisis. In the movie, PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discovers an enormous comet headed for a collision course with the Earth. Along with her PhD adviser, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), she tries to convince the world of the threat that the comet poses for life on Earth while there might still be time to avert its course. They appear on television breakfast show, the Daily Rip, where the frivolous, and scientifically illiterate, treatment of their message by the show's hosts infuriates Kate to the point where she screams, "we're all going to die!", only to be discredited on social media as a hysterical lunatic.

Watching Don't Look Up, and the character of Dibiasky in particular, reminded us of Pepino and the struggle she had to be taken seriously as a conveyor of a very serious message. Both she and Kate were cropped-fringed Cassandras, trying to convince the world of an existential threat that was incontrovertibly supported by scientific data.

Losing control of the message

While Pepino and other spokespeople for BirthStrike consistently emphasised that they had no intention to tell people what to do, this was often how their message was interpreted. Pepino told us how the media "ended up talking about population numbers a lot" and "constantly referring to fertility rates" which she felt undermined their call for system change.

This interpretation can be attributed to two existing narratives about climate change. The first of these is a " neo-Malthusian" argument that people should have fewer children because a growing human population contributes to carbon emissions. The second one is that people should take personal actions to mitigate their own impact on the environment. Both of these arguments, which were officially disavowed by BirthStrike, have been criticised: the first for ignoring the insidious history of population control, from mass murder during the Holocaust to compulsory sterilization in India in the 1970s and China's one-child policy. It has been used to justify curtailing the sexual, reproductive and human rights of people on the grounds of race, people on low incomes, people with disabilities and people with diverse gender and sexual identities. The second argument has been criticised for deflecting responsibility away from corporations and governments which hold far greater responsibility - and power - to prevent climate change than individuals. Pepino said:

I knew right from the beginning that population was going to be an issue ... So the name BirthStrike, I think, triggered a lot of populationism, essentially, in people's brains most of the time. So whenever people did read pieces on us, unless it categorically was all about the fact that we weren't doing a population thing, then it would often be misconstrued as a population thing.

She noted that some journalists didn't know about the history of population control. Because of this, they didn't understand the potential danger of inciting ideas about overpopulation.

In reality there is clear evidence which shows that global human population is not increasing exponentially, but is in fact slowing and is predicted to stabilise at around 11 billion by 2100. It could be argued that focusing on human numbers obscures the true driver of climate change - modern capitalism's focus on endless growth and profit accumulation.

Read more: Why we should be wary of blaming 'overpopulation' for the climate crisis

The danger that Pepino described reached its grim nadir in recent mass killings by eco-fascists, animated by the " Great Replacement " theory (which has repeatedly been pushed by Carlson). The theory is predicated on the premise that white Americans and Europeans are being actively "replaced" by immigrants of colour.

Another problem for the BirthStrike campaign was that sex and reproduction are usually thought of as private matters, so many were confused about the link that Pepino and others were making between their personal feelings and decisions and their political demand for systemic change to address the climate crisis. We are used to hearing about how we should care for the environment and reading lists of tips about how to reduce our carbon footprint, so it's not surprising that many heard BirthStrike as an instruction not to have children in order to save the planet.

Sex and reproduction are still in many ways taboo subjects and many, especially those who are more conservative, do not want to hear about them in the media. Childlessness is also stigmatised, especially for women, while declining birth rates are causing some governments and public commentators to panic about ageing societies and the future of humanity.

Carlson, who is married to his boarding school sweetheart and has four children, ended his interview with some paternalistic counsel, remarking:

It's a bit early for me to be giving you advice, but I just wanna end with this: I think you should have children, I think they solve a lot of problems, put things in perspective. You seem like a nice person ...

Carlson claimed to be taking Pepino's concerns seriously though, like other rightwing commentators who discredited BirthStrike as just another example of " climate hysteria ", he framed this in terms of her personal feelings rather than her political opinion. His comment, "you seem like a nice person", while apparently friendly, also implies a judgement about what "kind" of person should reproduce.

Pepino recognised that she was unsettling deeply held ideas about what makes a "good life". She said:

It's critiquing the very pro-natalist aspect of our society and how we're led to believe that children equals good ... I suppose we were playing with the shock element of disagreeing with that in order to show how fucked up things are, basically.

Carlson has a history of pushing climate denialism and, during the interview, he made several attempts to reposition Pepino's specific focus on climate change towards a narrative of the fall of western "civilisation" and political influence. Pepino had mentioned "civilisational collapse" as a likely outcome of the climate crisis and he picked up on this to suggest that her argument was that, "the species is over, we should effectively as a group commit suicide". This kind of misanthropic argument has been rejected by Pepino, as it can invoke apathy and a sense of doom that can paralyse activism - precisely the opposite of what she was aiming to do with BirthStrike.

BirthStrike suffered a problem of representation - both in terms of who and what people understood the movement to be, and in how their message was interpreted and represented to the public by journalists. This is illustrated by the Carlson interview, but also by subtler approaches, such as frequently pairing BirthStrike with campaigners who are focused on "overpopulation" in articles and panel debates. Or misrepresenting BirthStrike as only including women, or conflating BirthStrike's specific argument with a generalised misanthropy or anti-natalism.

Conservative commentators like Carlson clearly have a reason to downplay or reframe such unambiguous messages about the existential threats of climate crisis, yet even for those who are more sympathetic to Pepino's point of view, the message of existential threat is very troubling to hear. Indeed, Pepino's own sense of despair when she realised the potential effects of climate change was precisely what led her to question whether having children was the right thing to do. When she read the 2018 IPCC report and attended her first XR seminar, she said she felt that:

... a lot of the fears I'd had about climate change and, and the environment and how humans treat the world were essentially coming true ... and so I became sort of addicted to the idea of telling the truth [about the climate].

Whose reproduction is newsworthy?

Importantly, the critique of BirthStrike didn't only come from the right. When we have told people about our research on this movement, those on the left sometimes dismiss those involved in BirthStrike and groups like it as just being "privileged" white, middle-class women who are demonstrating a sense of entitlement. In other words, why should anyone would care whether they have children or not?

This critique is a generalisation, of course - not everyone involved in BirthStrike fits this characterisation and Pepino herself deliberately tried to leverage her position as a white middle-class woman (and as someone with a media profile) to effect progressive goals. Nonetheless, it is crucial to recognise that, throughout history, some people's reproductive decisions have been more respected and supported than others and that this tends to reflect how people are categorised by race, class, disability, gender and sexuality.

Read more: 'It's a national crisis': UK's birth rate is falling dramatically

As some commentators have also pointed out, many people in marginalised groups and throughout history have experienced existential threat. So the idea of climate change's threat to survival being a wake-up call reflects the relative privilege of those involved in the campaign.

As the campaign grew, the leadership expanded. Jessica Gaitán Johannesson became more involved in leading the group, and became co-founder. Johannesson is a writer, who published a collection of essays related to climate and responsibility, including one about her involvement in BirthStrike and her perspective as a queer woman of colour.

Reflecting on the experience Johannesson wrote: "Running BirthStrike taught me that using birth as a political tool, in a society that only sees individual choices and not the context in which they're made, nor the incredible injustice surrounding them, inevitably leads to judgment. In a society mired in racism and exploitation, this is dangerous: whose children are deemed desirable? Who should be having fewer? It was a difficult lesson to learn in many ways, but one I'm also grateful for."

Burnout: the end of BirthStrike

Ultimately, in the summer of 2021, the leadership of BirthStrike decided to disband the campaign and propose rerouting members towards a private group in which they could share their feelings and gain support, instead of an explicitly political campaign.

During 2020 and 2021, Pepino had conversations with her partner about the "political danger", as he saw it, of getting involved in the population debate. She also asked for advice from researchers (including us) about why BirthStrike was being misrepresented as a campaign to tell people to have fewer children to reduce their carbon footprint. Further reflecting on this, Pepino said "the whole conversation about population is just inappropriate right now because we are too immature to have the conversation ... We haven't done our homework. We haven't cooperated, we haven't evened things out, we've not accounted for wealth inequality".

It is no coincidence that this realisation about the political dangers of the campaign came at the same time in which people in the UK, US and all around the world were coming to recognise the true scale of racism and inequality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on racialised groups.

This is apparent in the statement that BirthStrike released announcing its decision to end the campaign, which described how months of reflection and the public conversations about racial and social justice sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement had led to an understanding that it would be "dangerous" to continue in the same vein.

In the public announcement the group named the "flaws" in the campaign. First, they attributed the name itself, BirthStrike, to their being aligned with the neo-Malthusian argument that more children means a bigger carbon footprint. The statement continued:

Witnessing the loss of control of our narrative has been very distressing and humbling. We have to concede that we underestimated the power of 'overpopulation' as a growing form of climate breakdown denial - even in some of our most revered scientists and fellow climate activists.

The announcement reflected the intense consideration and reflection that Pepino and others put into BirthStrike and its future, as well as the importance of understanding the histories of previous activism around reproductive rights and environmental justice when starting a new campaign.

So, why did BirthStrike come to an end? As well as the leaders' own sense of it having become dangerous, the fundamental problem for BirthStrike was the tension between individual reproductive decision making and the much broader "ask" of rapid structural change from governments and corporations to arrest the climate crisis. This tension ultimately confused their message.

The wide audience that BirthStrike were trying to reach found it hard to hear the message about the existential threats of climate change. Pepino aimed to raise the alarm but, for many, it was just too alarming. As she told us:

I think a lot of those [media] interviews, not only was it a prism of their not really understanding, but it was also a real inability to connect with the full emotional truth of what's happening.

The implication of this message, that individual actions will not solve the crisis, also exacerbated the anxiety and uncertainty of this historical moment. Nonetheless, along with other contemporary social movements, BirthStrike did open up a space for discussion and provide a forum for people to discuss their concerns about having children in a warming world. Reflecting on this after the disbanding of BirthStrike in 2021, Pepino told us:

I'm still worried that its overall effect has been to amplify populationism as a topic, essentially ... Then again, it did give a lot of the people who joined a sense of community ... which was really useful, I think, for a lot of people who were really struggling at that time.

Historically, climate activism has focused on extreme weather events and their consequences. But the environmental crisis is also bound up with how people think about the future and what kind of world they want to live in. For many, this prompts thoughts about future generations - whether their own children, or a more generalised sense of people who will be born in coming decades, as well as the kinds of responsibilities that current generations bear towards them. Yet, attempts to appeal to apparently universal values, like women's desire to be mothers, are tricky because they can reinforce norms of gender, family and sexuality.

Pepino has never completely discounted the idea of ever having children but recognised she needed to slow down and take care. She reflected:

I realised I was burnt out. I had a lot of health issues that I needed to look at ... As a sensitive, artistic human, essentially, I could pretend to be that person for a bit. But I've given up on abusing my mind and my body to the point where I can be someone else, because I saw the road and the road was ill health.

The short history of BirthStrike shows that raising the alarm can be galvanising for some, but paralysing for others. Similarly, eye-catching demands can succeed in grabbing attention, including that of those who are not normally interested in these topics, but this can come at the cost of losing control of the political message. Because of the flaws in the campaign, the message about the existential threats of climate change and the likely unstable future of children born today often went unheard.
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'Too afraid to have kids' - how BirthStrike for Climate lost control of its political message

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In March 2019, Blythe Pepino, singer-songwriter and founder of the environmental activist group BirthStrike for Climate, appeared on the right-wing Tucker Carlson Tonight show on Fox News in the US. Carlson is a climate change denier, whose fans include Donald Trump and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

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Gamer-Gate: The Shift of Misogynistic Values in Video Games Across Time

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Gamer-Gate: The Shift of Misogynistic Values in Video Games Across Time

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Video game developers have always sought to "find the fun" for their audiences and to provide players with exciting worlds to escape to. However, the cost of "finding the fun" was highlighted in 2014 when women in the games industry attempted to expose the misogyny in some games and in their communities.

In response, some members of the gamer community lashed out. In what became known as the GamerGate controversy, predominantly male activists sought to intimidate women in the industry with death threats and rape threats. These gamers expressed a desire to isolate the world of gaming from broader social mores.

GamerGate was a low point for the gaming world, seemingly confirming yet another poor stereotype. But in the eight years since GamerGate, the games industry has transformed. As game developers have become more diverse, so too have the people who play their games.

The things developers and players care about have changed too, heralding a new era of "values-conscious games" which explore a variety of topics, such as empathy, diversity and wellbeing. These are proving increasingly popular with existing and newfound audiences.

The gaming landscape has changed dramatically since 2014. Reports of violent video games causing real-world violent behaviour have been found to be greatly exaggerated.

Meanwhile, gaming showcases such as Wholesome Direct have grown rapidly, providing a platform for hundreds of "thoughtful, uplifting and compassionate" games that focus on " cosiness " rather than competition.

Read more: Why do we keep having debates about video-game violence?

" Walking simulators" are a genre of game that focuses heavily on stories that unfold as characters walk around, with more emphasis on atmosphere and artistry than exciting gameplay. Games in the genre had previously been regarded as " notgames ", or games that value creativity over conventional game design, but their critical and commercial success challenges the notion of what games can be and shows that what players want from their games may be changing.

The ongoing success of Fortnite and Call of Duty, which are fairly traditional shooter games, demonstrates that "fun" is still alive and well in video games and that old gameplay formulas still appeal to many gamers. But it was Animal Crossing, where players plant trees and build homes on an island, that became known as the game of the pandemic by emphasising the importance of friendship and compassion.

Many popular games now foster a similar message, even if they also feature weapons and combat. The Last of Us: Part II, a game about the aftermath of a zombie pandemic, highlighted gay and trans characters and storylines. It sold 10 million copies.

Death Stranding, in which players traverse a post-apocalyptic America, focuses on the importance of connection. Life is Strange: True Colours, the latest in a game series in which teenagers discover and harness supernatural abilities, has even made a superpower out of empathy.

Values-conscious gaming

The notion of games being used as vehicles for good is nothing new. Games For Good, which aims to harness gaming's popularity to achieve social good, was founded in 1998. However, in recent years, the ways in which games can achieve this have expanded significantly.

It's not unusual to hear gamers state that a game fostered their empathy for a cause, encouraged them to get more active, or even changed their lives by approaching issues that they value in a uniquely immersive way. This is becoming even more important as the gaming community, almost half of whom are now women, continues to evolve.

Read more: Debunking one of the biggest stereotypes about women in the gaming community

Values-conscious game design is a growing field in academia that aims to satisfy the demands of this evolving audience. The field suggests that a focus on values really could help enable games to both "do good" and do well.

Values-conscious games aim to make people reflect on the content of the games they play, ask questions about their own lives, and examine their biases. Players have claimed that The Walking Dead, a zombie game based around moral decision-making such as whether to save a character or escape, was more engaging because it encouraged them to reflect on their choices and actions.

Some players expressly seek to challenge their own values through " dark play ", replaying a decision-making game in order to make different choices that explore difficult topics such as sexuality, power dynamics and societal taboos.

Changing values affects game developers too. As the average age of male game developers has increased, more games have come to explore the father-child relationship. Many developers also take part in " game jams ", which encourage them to tell their personal stories through games.

More importantly, developers from different backgrounds and with different perspectives now have a seat at the table. More women, nonbinary, genderqueer and transgender people are making games, with surveys finding that these made up 38% of developers in 2021 compared to 24% in 2014.

This increased diversity has led to game-based retellings of developers' personal experiences, such as Nina Freeman's Cibele, which details her first sexual relationship, or Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest, a game inspired by her own lived experience of mental health issues.

Games for good

While some developers bristle when their work is classified as just another "empathy game", it is nevertheless heartening to see how values-conscious games are meaningfully affecting the lives of their players. Players of Depression Quest, for example, cite the game as the reason they sought help for their struggles.

Positive outcomes can also come from the most unexpected of sources: Tetris has been shown to reduce flashbacks of traumatic memories, Bejewelled may reduce depressive symptoms and stress, and Pac-Man can help autistic children build social skills.

Read more: Five digital games to help your child's development

It's clear that values-conscious gaming is not here to take the "fun" out of video games or to fan the flames of GamerGate. Instead, by presenting games as a medium for exploring the important things in our lives, value-conscious games provide a valuable opportunity for new demographics of developers to start making games, and new demographics of players to start playing them.

In 2022, games don't just have to value fun. They can value empathy, mental health and an array of diverse and inclusive stories, among other things. The trend since GamerGate suggests a hunger for games that challenge players in fresh, new ways and speak to things that players care about. I, for one, can't wait to play what's coming next.

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How 'GamerGate' led the gaming industry to embrace more diverse and caring values

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The games industry is evolving with the changing values of its players.

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‘We need to find our kin, people who speak the same language’: the power of shared grief, from Covid to the Queen

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Why are so many of us mourning a queen we never met? Is it about Elizabeth II the person, or what she represented for Britain and the world – or us, and our apparently unrelated sorrows? We talk to psychotherapists, anthropologists – and the bereaved

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Lost In Translation: The Effect of Face Masks on Interpersonal Communication and Relationships During Covid-19

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Lost In Translation: The Effect of Face Masks on Interpersonal Communication and Relationships During Covid-19

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Effect of Face Masks on Interpersonal Communication During the COVID-19

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The Rise of Nationalism in the Face of "Imaginary Conflict"

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The Rise of Nationalism in the Face of "Imaginary Conflict"

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ar in Ukraine has not interfered with the Australian right's tireless prosecution of domestic culture war. Indeed many have simply seized on the Russian invasion as a way to add a new flavour to attacks on their perceived domestic adversaries.

Given that the Australian left has nothing to do with the ongoing conflict, this has required the writers to torture logic to within an inch of its life.

Peta Credlin, writing in the Australian, was just one of those who looked at Ukrainians' defence of their country, then posited an entirely hypothetical invasion of Australia, decided that her compatriots would not be capable of such tenacity, and proffered this as proof of her country's complacency.

Credlin claimed that the invasion showed that we need "to dump our politically correct preoccupations". Somewhat astoundingly, she contended that "the most obvious rethink the security crisis should prompt is the west's response to climate change".

She claimed that European dependence on Russian gas should lead the west to double down on its dependence on imported carbon-based fuel, since reducing emissions would constitute "one-sided economic disarmament".

Having drawn this longest of bows, she then complained about "the internal culture wars that western countries seem always to be fighting" as a "unilateral moral disarmament" to which the only solution is a steadfast nationalism.

In the same pages, Greg Craven also claimed that Australians would not be up to the job of defending the country from an imaginary invasion. His evidence included the response to the Covid-19 epidemic which had revealed "a nation of bed wetters", the growth of the #MeToo movement, and leftwing virtue-signalling.

His solutions? A nationalistic civics program and the timeless rightwing standby, national service.

In the Daily Telegraph, Erin Molan also doubted the capacity for Australia's "young adults" to muscle up to an entirely fictional invasion.

While on "climate change policies, gender issues or Indigenous affairs, they gather, march, protest and post (on social media of course) with the kind of bravado and uncompromising resolve we might recognise in ... Ukrainian youth", unfortunately the "focus of much of their lives, including time spent at school, seems to be on what is terrible about this country, how we have failed and all the ways in which we continue to do so".

Given all of these grim reports of our failure to repel a non-existent invasion due to the corrupting influence of leftist cultural values, it was amusing to read once-popular blogger Tim Blair's phoned-in objections to leftists shoehorning their "woke obsessions" like climate change into commentary on the invasion.

It's possible to raise obvious objections to all of this. If the west reduced its dependence on fossil fuels, whatever leverage Putin has over western Europe would be greatly diminished.

Ukraine's low vaccination rate, the outflow of refugees, and war conditions are likely to greatly complicate the impact of the conflict, so the idea that their heroic defence of their country somehow exposes the folly of robust public health measures is entirely backwards.

And on the "woke" front, the relatively liberal framework of LGBTQ and women's rights in Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, where they are persecuted, is a source of acute concern for young Ukrainians, many of whom are organising to help the armed forces because they see Russia as a threat to their hard-won rights.

There's a reason that so many on the far right in the west are barracking for Putin in this war: they see him as a leader who is pushing back on the liberal freedoms that LGBTQ people, women and others have won in the west.

There's also the fact that Australia is not being invaded, and that this is not remotely on the cards.

But the Australian right's opinion division is impervious to sense, so these objections are mainly useful as a reminder to ourselves.

History, facts and context simply don't figure in their ceaseless prosecution of culture war, and their constant struggle to pull Australian politics to the right.

This effort is as unimaginative and unthinking as it is amoral.

A detailed understanding of the conflict in Ukraine would be a hindrance. The calamity of a foreign invasion is simply grist for their mill.

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Dragging Russia's invasion into Australia's culture war is as unimaginative as it is amoral | Jason Wilson

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ar in Ukraine has not interfered with the Australian right's tireless prosecution of domestic culture war. Indeed many have simply seized on the Russian invasion as a way to add a new flavour to attacks on their perceived domestic adversaries.

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READER QUESTION: Many people assume the patriarchy has always been there, but surely this isn't the case? How did it really originate? Matt, 48, London.

The patriarchy, having been somewhat in retreat in parts of the world, is back in our faces . In Afghanistan, the Taliban once again prowl the streets more concerned with keeping women at home and in strict dress code than with the impending collapse of the country into famine.

And on another continent, parts of the US are legislating to ensure that women can no longer have a legal abortion. In both cases, lurking patriarchal beliefs were allowed to reemerge when political leadership failed. We have an eerie feeling of travelling back through time. But how long has patriarchy dominated our societies?

This article is part of Life's Big Questions
The Conversation's series, co-published with BBC Future, seeks to answer our readers' nagging questions about life, love, death and the universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

The status of women has been a long-standing point of interest in anthropology. Contrary to common belief, research shows that the patriarchy isn't some kind of "natural order of things" - it hasn't always been prevalent and may in fact disappear eventually. Hunter-gatherer communities may have been relatively egalitarian, at least compared to some of the regimes that followed. And female leaders and matriarchal societies have always existed.

Male wealth

Reproduction is the currency of evolution. But it is not only our bodies and brains that evolve - our behaviours and our cultures are also products of natural selection. To maximise their own reproductive success, for example, men have often tried to control women, and their sexuality.

In nomadic societies where there is little or no material wealth, as was the case with most hunter gatherers, a woman cannot easily be forced to stay in a partnership. She and her partner may move around together with her relatives, his relatives, or other people entirely. If unhappy, she can walk away.

That could be at a cost if she has children, as paternal care helps children's development and even survival, but she can go and live with relatives elsewhere or find a new partner without necessarily being worse off.

The origin of agriculture, as early as 12,000 years ago in some areas, changed the game. Even relatively simple horticulture necessitated defending crops, and thus staying put. Settlement increased conflict within and between groups. For example, the Yanomamo horticulturalists in Venezuela lived in heavily fortified group households, with violent raids on neighbouring groups and "bride capture" being part of life.

Where cattle-keeping evolved, the local population had to defend herds of livestock from raiding, leading to high levels of warfare. As women weren't as successful as men in combat, being physically weaker, this role fell increasingly to men, helping them gain power and leaving them in charge of the resources they were defending.

As population sizes grew and settled, there were coordination problems. Social inequality sometimes emerged if leaders (usually male) provided some benefits to the population, perhaps in warfare or serving the public good in some other way. The general population, both male and female, therefore often tolerated these elites in return for help hanging on to what they had.

As farming and herding became more intensive, material wealth, now mainly controlled by men, became ever more important. Rules of kinship and descent systems became more formalised to prevent conflict within families over wealth, and marriages became more contractual. The transmission of land or livestock down the generations allowed some families to gain substantial wealth.

Monogamy vs polygamy

Wealth generated by farming and herding enabled polygyny (men having multiple wives). In contrast, women having many husbands (polyandry) was rare. In most systems, young women were the resource in demand, because they had a shorter window of being able to produce children and usually did more parental care.

Men used their wealth to attract young women to the resources on offer. Men competed by paying "bridewealth" to the family of the bride, with the result that rich men could end up with many wives while some poor men ended up single.

So it was males who needed that wealth to compete for marriage partners (whereas females acquired resources needed to reproduce through their husband). If parents wanted to maximise their number of grandchildren, it made sense for them to give their wealth to their sons rather than their daughters.

This lead to wealth and property being formally passed down the male line. It also meant women often ended up living far away from home with their husband's family after marriage.

Women began to lose agency. If land, livestock and children are the property of the men, then divorce is almost impossible for women. A daughter returning to mum and dad would be unwelcome as the brideprice would need to be returned. The patriarchy was now getting a firm grip.

When individuals disperse away from their natal home and live with their new husband's family, they do not have as much bargaining power within their new household than if they had stayed in their natal home. Some mathematical models suggest that female dispersal combined with a history of warfare favoured men being treated better than women.

Men had the opportunity to compete for resources with unrelated men through warfare, whereas women only competed with other women in the household. For these two reasons, both men and women reaped greater evolutionary benefits by being more altruistic towards men than towards women, leading to the emergence of "boys' clubs". Essentially, women were playing along with the gender bias against themselves.

In some farming systems, women may have had more autonomy. Where there were limits on the availability of farmland, this may have put the brakes on polygyny, as men couldn't afford multiple families. If farming was hard and productivity was determined more by the work put in than by how much land was owned, then women's labour became a key requirement and couples worked together in monogamous unions.

Under monogamy, if a woman marries a rich man, all his wealth goes to her offspring. So women then compete with other women for the best husbands. This is not true of polygyny, where the family wealth is shared between numerous other wives offspring, so the advantages to women of marrying a rich man are marginal.

Thus marriage payment under monogamy is in the opposite direction than it is under polygyny and takes the form of "dowry". The parents of the bride give money to the parents of the groom, or to the couple themselves.

Dowry, which is still important in much of Asia today, is the parents' way of helping their daughters compete with other women on the marriage market. Dowry can sometimes give women more agency and control over at least part of their family wealth.

But there is a sting in the tail. Dowry inflation can make girls expensive for parents, sometimes with dire consequences, such as families which already have daughters killing or neglecting female babies (or now female-selective abortion).

There were other consequences of monogamy too. As wealth was still passed down the male line to children of one wife, males did all they could to ensure that those children were theirs. They did not want to unwittingly invest their wealth in the offspring of another man. So women's sexuality became strongly policed as a result.
Keeping women away from men (purdah), or placing them in religious "cloisters" such as monasteries (claustration) in India, or 2,000 years of binding women's feet to keep them small in China, may all be the results of this. And in the current context, banning abortion makes sexual relationships potentially costly, trapping people in marriages and hindering women's career prospects.

Matriarchal societies

It is relatively rare for wealth to be passed down the female line, but such societies do exist. These female-centred systems tend to be in somewhat marginal environments where there is little wealth to physically compete over.

For example, there are areas in Africa known as the " matrilineal belt " where the tetse fly made it impossible to keep cattle. In some of these matrilineal systems in Africa, men remain a powerful force in households, but it is older brothers and uncles who try to control women rather than husbands or fathers. But in general, women do have more power.

Societies with an absence of males for much of the time, due to long distance travel or high mortality risks, for example due to dangerous ocean fishing in Polynesia, or warfare in some Native American communities, have also been associated with matriliny.

Women in matriarchal system often draw on the support of their mothers and siblings, rather than their husbands, to help raise children. Such "communal breeding" by women, as seen for example in some matrilineal groups in China, makes men less interested (in an evolutionary sense) in investing in the household, as the households include not only their wife's children, but many other women's children to whom they aren't related.

This weakens marriage bonds, and makes it easier to pass down wealth between female relatives. Women are also less controlled sexually in such societies as paternity certainty is less of a concern if women control the wealth and pass it to their daughters.

In matrilineal societies, both men and women can mate polygamously. The matrilineal Himba of southern Africa have some of the highest rates of babies produced in this way.

Even in urban settings today, high male unemployment often sets up more female-centred living arrangements, with mothers helping daughters to raise their children and grandchildren, but frequently in relative poverty.

But the introduction of material wealth, which can be controlled by men, has often pushed matrilineal systems to change to patrilineal ones.

The role of religion

The view of patriarchy I have outlined here may appear to downplay the role of religion. Religions are frequently prescriptive about sex and the family. For example, polygynous marriage is accepted in Islam and not in Christianity. But the origins of diverse cultural systems around the world cannot simply be explained by religion.

Islam arose in the year AD610 in a part of the world (the Arabian peninsula) then inhabited by nomadic pastoralist groups where polygamous marriage was common, whereas Christianity emerged within the Roman empire where monogamous marriage was already the norm. So while religious institutions definitely help to enforce such rules, it is hard to make the case that religions were the original cause.

Ultimately, the cultural inheritance of religious norms, or indeed of any norms, can maintain harsh social prejudices long after their original cause is gone.

Is patriarchy on its way out?

What is clear is that norms, attitudes and culture have a huge effect on behaviour. They can and do change over time, especially if the underlying ecology or economy changes. But some norms become entrenched over time and are therefore slow to change.

As recently as the 1970s, children of unmarried mothers in the UK were taken from them and shipped to Australia (where they were placed in religious institutions or put up for adoption). Recent research also shows how disrespect for women's authority is still rampant in European and American societies that pride themselves in gender equality.

That said, it is clear that gender norms are becoming much more flexible and the patriarchy is unpopular with many men and women in much of the world. Many are questioning the very institution of marriage.

Birth control and reproductive rights for women give women, and also men, more freedom. While polygamous marriage is now rare, polygamous mating is of course quite common, and is perceived as a threat by incels and social conservatives alike.

What's more, men increasingly want to be part of their children's lives, and appreciate not having to do the lion's share of providing for their families. Many are therefore sharing or even taking on the full weight of child-rearing and housework. Simultaneously we see more women confidently gaining positions of power in the world of work.

As men and women both increasingly generate their own wealth, the old patriarchy is finding it harder to control women. The logic of male-biased investment by parents is gravely injured if girls benefit equally from formal education and job opportunities are open to all.

The future is hard to predict. Anthropology and history do not progress in predictable, linear ways. Wars, famines, epidemics or innovations are always lurking and have predictable and unpredictable consequences for our lives.

The patriarchy isn't inevitable. We do need institutions to help us solve the world's problems. But if the wrong people come to power, the patriarchy can regenerate.
To get all of life's big answers, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value evidence-based news by subscribing to our newsletter. You can send us your big questions by email at bigquestions@theconversation.com and we'll try to get a researcher or expert on the case. More Life's Big Questions:

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How did the patriarchy start - and will evolution get rid of it?

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READER QUESTION: Many people assume the patriarchy has always been there, but surely this isn't the case? How did it really originate? Matt, 48, London. The patriarchy, having been somewhat in retreat in parts of the world, is back in our faces .

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Clothing as a Cultural Identifier - Japan

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Clothing as a Cultural Identifier - Japan

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How the kimono became a symbol of oppression in some parts of Asia

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The Kimono is a distinct cultural symbol of Japan and for that reason, it has a complicated reputation around much of Asia.

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Virality on Tik Tok - The 'New' Popular Culture and Its Impact on Music

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Virality on Tik Tok - The 'New' Popular Culture and Its Impact on Music

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AP/Chris Pizzello

"Tik-a-Tok-a-Who?", was Adele's response to her management's suggestion to promote her music to younger audiences on Tiktok, the video-sharing platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance.

"If everyone's making music for the TikTok, who's making music for my generation?", she asked.

Adele might resist, but the platform has nonetheless been popularising and promoting her song Easy on me, with creators using it in almost one million videos in the first month after its release, making it viral on the app alone.

That's because creator culture on TikTok is changing the way hits are made, how music is promoted, and how the world discovers music, even for those artists who choose not to engage with it.

TikTok makes hits

In early 2019, an unknown 19-year-old college drop-out from Atlanta, Georgia, made headlines around the world.

Living at his sister's house and feeling bit lonely, in December 2018 he had bought a simple beat for US $30, recorded a song, half country and half rap, and posted it on Soundcloud and social media. The artist made news because Billboard magazine had removed the song from its country charts, after it took off in popularity, entering both the country and general Hot 100 charts.

The artist's name was Lil Nas X and the song Old Town Road, which has since become the most successful song of all time, the first ever song to reach 15 times platinum. Much of this success can be credited to the song becoming an early TikTok "meme", picked up by millions of users.

Old Town Road has become the origin story for a remarkable series of viral musical successes on TikTok. In each case artists have shot to popularity, because their songs were used by millions of TikTok users in their videos.

Virality on TikTok is powerful yet unpredictable. Some of 2021's biggest global hits gained little traction when they were initially released to small audiences. Africa's most successful pop song ever, CKay's Love, Nwantiti, was released in 2019, but shot to fame only in 2021 and has now been used in more than 7 million TikTok videos.

Similarly, Australia's Masked Wolf found himself in the spotlight in 2021, making Barrack Obama's summer playlist and having been nominated for five ARIA awards. While his song Astronaut in the Ocean became a global hit more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, it was released two years prior by a small Australian label. It has since been used in more than 18 million TikTok videos.

And while many artists, like Lil Nas X, create for virality on TikTok, others go viral even when unaware of the platform. We spoke to Masked Wolf who admitted:

I never made Astro to be on TikTok. I didn't even know what TikTok was when I released Astronaut.

But it is not just new songs. Old songs are making remarkable comebacks with entirely new audiences. When a man named Nathan Apodaca went viral after he posted a video of himself gliding down a highway on his long board, casually drinking cranberry juice from a bottle, he was lip-syncing to Dreams, the 1977 Fleetwood Mac hit. Dreams was subsequently used by millions of TikTok creators and re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 more than 40 years after its original release.

How it works

Videos created on the TikTok app are short. Most videos are less than 15 seconds long (though videos of up to 60 seconds are possible). Music plays a big part in these videos, many show dance moves or lip syncing, though there are others where users talk, even giving financial advice. When users create their videos, they will usually choose a song and select a short clip, often the catchiest bits of a song, like the chorus or beat drop.

Users can upload their own sound clips, but the app will detect copyrighted material that its owners do not allow on the platform and mute the sound. Instead, the app has in recent years put together an extensive catalogue of music authorised by big music labels, who have come on board due to TikTok's role in producing global hits.

Behind this virality are so-called challenges, in which often millions of users create their own versions of a visual story or dance move set to the same music clip, and promoted by the platform using hashtags. For example, in the #yeehaw challenge that brought Old Town Road to fame, people dressed in normal clothes and danced until the beat changed in the clip, when they would instantly transform into cowgirls or cowboys.

But videos on TikTok do not directly contribute to chart success. However, there is a direct correlation between a song going viral on TikTok and it gaining in popularity on music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube, all of which in turn contribute to the Billboard charts.

Read more: 'OK Boomer': how a TikTok meme traces the rise of Gen Z political consciousness

What it means for artists, listeners and the music industry

In our research, we spoke to Ole Obermann, Global Head of Music for TikTok and ByteDance, about the impact for artists, the music industry and music lovers. Ole points to the diversity of music on TikTok and new opportunities for finding music far beyond one's usual taste.

He also stresses TikTok's role in discovering artists from all corners of the globe: "I do see a pretty profound impact on the global nature of music as a result of TikTok but also music streaming overall. It's so much more possible for a song that comes out of Australia or India or Korea or Japan or Saudi Arabia. To end up becoming a global hit and to be listened to by audiences all over the world."

The recent successes of Love Nwantiti and Astronaut in the Ocean are just two examples to make this point.

TikTok is an excellent platform for listeners to gain exposure to new and different music. TikTok's self-learning algorithm serves up new videos as a seemingly endless stream, allowing users to be exposed to a large amount of new music quickly, given videos are very short. When a user likes a particular song, with a simple tap they can instantly watch more videos set to the same clip.

The music industry is also coming on board, convinced by the viral success the platform produces. Ole Obermann again:

I think the acceptance has come now because that's what the fans want. And it's a way to create more engagement with the music, but there was a lot of resistance for many years, because it was just not the way that the music industry has traditionally worked.

The initial resistance is not surprising, given TikTok presents a significant shift from the industry's understanding of recorded music as something to be listened to, to be passively consumed. Engagement with music on TikTok is very different, because music becomes a material for creation, for creative expression.

Importantly, what we see today is likely only the beginning, both in terms of new forms of creative expression, and promoting and marketing music in new ways.

But success also attracts investment, and creating on TikTok will likely become more commercialised over time. So far much of the virality has happened organically. But music labels increasingly hire professional influencers to use their music, or work with consultants to make songs more "TikTokkable", in an attempt to engineer the next viral trend.

It remains to be seen if this will crowd out organic creativity, or if artists will feel pressure to create for TikTok virality, as foreshadowed by Adele.

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Love it or hate it, TikTok is changing the music industry

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"Tik-a-Tok-a-Who?", was Adele's response to her management's suggestion to promote her music to younger audiences on Tiktok, the video-sharing platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance. "If everyone's making music for the TikTok, who's making music for my generation?", she asked.

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Gen Z Clutter Core: The Revolt Against Millenial Trends

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Gen Z Clutter Core: The Revolt Against Millenial Trends

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Cluttercore: Gen Z’s revolt against millennial minimalism is grounded in Victorian excess

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More is more in #cluttercore, the new interior trend championed by the young maximalists of TikTok.

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Confucius in the Classroom: Cultural Appreciation or Indoctrination?

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Confucius in the Classroom: Cultural Appreciation or Indoctrination?

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This was published 3 years ago

Updated first published at

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A Chinese government-funded language and culture program will be removed from NSW public schools and replaced with one run by the NSW Department of Education.

The Confucius Classroom program, run in 13 NSW schools, had been paid for by Chinese government agency Hanban, and employed teaching assistants that were vetted by the Chinese government for "good political quality" and a love of "the motherland".

NSW Department of Education is the only government department in the world that hosts a Confucius Institute. Credit:7News

While a NSW Department of Education review into the program did not "discover any evidence of actual political influence being exercised", it found there were "a number of specific factors that could give rise to the perception that the Confucius Institute is or could be facilitating inappropriate foreign influence in the department".

"The primary concern is the fact that the NSW Department of Education is the only government department in the world that hosts a Confucius Institute, and that this arrangement places Chinese government appointees inside a NSW government department.

"Having foreign government appointees based in a government department is one thing, having appointees of a one-party state that exercises censorship in its own country working in a government department in a democratic system is another."

The review also flagged the number of Chinese representatives on the board of directors as a concern that could "give rise to the perception of foreign influence", while the financial contributions from Hanban to the department, specific schools and specific senior officers was scrutinised. The report suggested these contributions could be seen as an incentive for schools or officials to "ignore certain activities".

It also found problematic the department's limited power in appointing assistant teachers, who are selected by Hanban.

The report made six recommendations, which the department has accepted. These include reviewing existing arrangements with foreign governments and organisations, which should be completed by the end of the year, and forming a team to establish guidelines for future agreements with foreign governments and organisations.

One Chinese-Australian parent has likened the program to "the infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party into the NSW public school system". It was the only language program in NSW schools that was funded by a foreign government.

The NSW Department of Education has been reviewing the program since May last year, and on Friday will announce the program would end when the agreement with Hanban expired in December. Department staff would continue to monitor the classes until then.

"Following the review of foreign government/organisation support for language education in NSW government schools, the NSW Department of Education will be ending its Confucius program in 13 schools," department secretary Mark Scott said.

"The review found the Confucius Institute program arrangement with NSW Department of Education is unique and the program is better placed with a higher education provider.

"The department has accepted all the review recommendations and already begun work on implementing them. Confucius Institute students make up 15 per cent of Chinese-language students in NSW public schools."

The department would replace it with a $1.2 million program to teach Chinese at the schools affected, which included four primary schools, including Chatswood and Rouse Hill, and nine high schools, such as Fort Street, Concord and Homebush Boys'.

"Schools will have certainty and clarity by getting a six-month transition to the Chinese-language classes I have announced today," he said. "We will continue to deliver first-class Chinese-language and cultural programs to students in NSW public schools."

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell supported the decision. "Whilst the department's review concluded there was no evidence of any undue influence in the Confucius classrooms, there were clearly inappropriate governance arrangements in place," she said.

The Confucius Institute is headquartered in Beijing's agency known colloquially as Hanban, the Office of the Chinese Language Council. It also runs Chinese-language programs at Australian universities.

Several universities are tightening their agreements with the institute after the Herald revealed some signed deals explicitly stating they must comply with Beijing's decision-making authority over teaching at the facilities.

Connect via Jordan Baker is Chief Reporter of The Sydney Morning Herald. She was previously Education Editor. Twitter or email.

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NSW schools to scrap Confucius Classroom program after review

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This was published 3 years ago Updated first published at Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size A Chinese government-funded language and culture program will be removed from NSW public schools and replaced with one run by the NSW Department of Education.

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How capitalism reduced diversity to a brand

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A law professor explains how corporations commodify people of color.

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Knowing One's Place: The Reliability of Rituals, Hierarchy Social Order and Conformity

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Knowing One's Place: The Reliability of Rituals, Hierarchy Social Order and Conformity

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As we have seen from coverage of "The Queue" - capitalised and thus now, apparently, a proper noun - the English are proud of their queuing prowess.

The Queue for the queen lying in state is portrayed as testament to the English ideals of civility, duty and sacrifice.

David Beckham's 13-hour wait in the crowd was widely praised, while TV hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield's alleged (although denied) "push-in" has been admonished.

But The Queue is part of a bigger picture. Like class, the English propensity to celebrate queuing illuminates a peculiar national obsession with order, hierarchy, and one's place within it.

Queueing as a form of ceremony

Let's address something important: are we talking here about Britishness or Englishness? What is seen to define an English person, British person or person of the United Kingdom is a matter of considerable debate. Our choice of the word "English" over "British" in this article reflects the fundamental Englishness of the British national project, to which the monarchy is central.

The English proclivity for queuing has been the subject of cultural commentary for decades.

In 1946 Hungarian humourist George Mikes reportedly noted:

An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one [...] [queueing is] the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race.

British anthropologist Kate Fox, author of Watching the English, wrote that in the 2011 London riots:

I witnessed looters forming an orderly queue to squeeze, one at a time, through the smashed window of a shop they were looting.

Queueing as a form of ceremony, such as seen in London this week, is perhaps a particular type of queue.

In defiance of the typical English reservedness, The Queue has been credited with fostering cameraderie and even chance meetings.

Read more: Queen Elizabeth II: capturing the world's most photographed woman in life and death

Queuing in England and around the world

Of course, it's not only the English who queue. Regulating the flow and order of people is a universal human need.

Saving space in densely populated urban milieu, Japanese people form tight zig-zags.

In Spain, the penultimate person to arrive for a bus merely nods to the last person to let them know whom to follow.

In both cases, what appears to be anarchy is, in fact, tightly regulated.

However, there is something culturally distinctive about the English queue. The English seem to have a fondness for publicising their queuing ability.

Queuing and deficiency

While much of the recent coverage has emphasised the egalitarianism of The Queue, researchers such as Joe Moran have noted queuing has endured a chequered past.

In economically impoverished postwar Britain, food queues became a source of national resentment.

Many felt the queue was an unfair method of distribution - especially for older people, mothers with young children or working women, who faced more difficulty to wait in line for essential items.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Winston Churchill seized on the unpopularity of queues to argue:

We [The Conservatives] are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They [Labour] are for the queue. Let each wait in his place till his turn comes.

Queues, he argued, were socialist, and that, should a Labour government have its way, the country could become "Queuetopia".

In the 1960s and '70s the English faced recurrent queues at banks and post offices. The queue was widely depicted as a symptom of inefficiency of the national economy, something one might expect on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but not appropriate for Britain.

Throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s, associating queues with incompetence and disorganisation was a constant theme in politics.

Advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi produced a 1978 election poster for the Conservatives depicting a queue outside the unemployment office and the slogan: "Labour isn't working".

Queues and queue-jumping

More recently, as observed by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, the queue and queue-jumping have been weaponised in political discourse regarding minorities.

As one of us ( Andrew Dawson) has noted, many of Britain's white working class perceive the British policy of multiculturalism as a relegation of their status.

The benefits that flow to immigrant ethnic minorities are often presented as an unfair "push-in" for the social mobility ladder, allowing them to effectively "jump" Britain's class queue.

That queuing for social occasions such as the queen's death has been reimagined in recent years as a positive phenomenon is curious.

Whether in a queue or a ladder, however, such appeals to social organisation are about knowing one's place - a particularly English preoccupation.

Ask any Englishperson about their position in society. Depending upon their class, they may be embarrassed or affronted by the question, but they will have an answer, whether they share it with you or not (determined, again, by their class).

To this end, the reaction to Willoughby and Schofield's alleged transgression speaks to the ability of this class system to reassert itself in the face of celebrity and fame.

Perhaps The Queue helps to explain why Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, has experienced such hostility upon entering British society. Not just because of discriminatory and racist attitudes based on her biracial, divorcee, actress status, but also because she is American.

Queuing is seen by some as antithetical to America's rampant individualism - where your place is often imagined as malleable rather than rigid, dependent on achievements, popularity and wealth.

Australians also may recoil at suggestions of one's place in society, with some insisting that in contrast to the stuffy British "motherland", we are a classless society.

While "The C-word", as the Australian author Tim Winton called class, of course very much exists in Australia, we have far less of a vocabulary or understanding of class than the English.

While it may be less obvious in Australia, or railed against in America, many English people continue to embrace these systems even as the wider world moves on in seemingly disordered ways.

Read more: How does class impact on Australians' love lives? New research brings a complex issue into the open

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'An obsession with order, hierarchy, and one's place within it': what The Queue says about Englishness

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As we have seen from coverage of "The Queue" - capitalised and thus now, apparently, a proper noun - the English are proud of their queuing prowess. The Queue for the queen lying in state is portrayed as testament to the English ideals of civility, duty and sacrifice.

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The Australian Wars (Doco): Re-writing the Narrative on our Indigenous History

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The Australian Wars (Doco): Re-writing the Narrative on our Indigenous History

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Rachel Perkins journeys across the country to explore the bloody battles fought on Australian soil and the war that established the Australian nation, seeking to change the narrative of the nation.

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Challenging Stereotypes: Re-writing the Narrative on Islamophobia in the Australian Context

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Challenging Stereotypes: Re-writing the Narrative on Islamophobia in the Australian Context

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Michael Mohammed Ahmad is reading his new book, The Other Half of You, to his young son, who nestles into his father's side.

"Parents of colour, parents from minorities, feel compelled to tell their children the stories of how they came to be, and tell them the stories about how they are going to inherit and navigate the world around them," Mohammed says.

I grew up in Australia very consciously aware that I was from a Lebanese background.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

"This was the time when the

took place ... the time of the

. I was a teenager at the time of the

It was in this setting that a young Mohammed decided he would become a writer.

Transforming the narrative

The Other Half of You is autobiographical fiction, exploring how Mohammed came to meet Kahlil's mother.

Set at Punchbowl Boys High School in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, challenges the reader to observe an environment in which a teenage Bani Adam must navigate cultural and social friction while he searches to understand and create his identity.

I wanted to create a humanising portrayal of what it means to be a Muslim and an Arab Australian.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Inspiring the next generation

"For me when I first met Mohammed - he's a quirky guy with flared jeans and he has a very 'Leb' accent from Bankstown," she says.

"So often on the Australian television, what we see is a very white-washed version of Australia, full of beaches and middle-class people, but Australia is much richer than that."

Challenging stereotypes

"The idea of creating a narrative like the one I created in The Other Half of You , which shows the tremendous love that Arab and Muslim fathers feel for their children, is about reclaiming our humanity and reclaiming our dignity, and ultimately changing a perception that has broken our hearts."

It's a love that his character Bani Adam experiences and one that is visible as he watches his son Kahlil scribe his name with chalk on concrete at their home.
This article is part of the . Change Agents . Would you like to share your story with SBS News? Email podcast series also hears from people in Australian communities who have become role models for change. My Australia series which explores the untold stories of extraordinary people in Australia.

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Mohammed rewrote the narrative about Arab Australians. Now he inspires new voices

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Michael Mohammed Ahmad is reading his new book, The Other Half of You, to his young son, who nestles into his father's side. "Parents of colour, parents from minorities, feel compelled to tell their children the stories of how they came to be, and tell them the stories about how they are going to inherit and navigate the world around them," Mohammed says.

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Racism in the Australian Political Sphere

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Racism in the Australian Political Sphere

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‘Subtle racism’ and ‘micro-aggressions’: Can a code of conduct fix Australian parliament’s culture issues?

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Labor minister Anne Aly says she has “witnessed instances of subtle racism and micro-aggressions towards people of colour in commonwealth parliamentary workplaces and have experienced them myself”.

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"Up to now, my total spent is more than US$470,000. I feel to become someone I like; the price is worth it." Beauty blogger
The plastic surgery industry in China is booming. Demand for cosmetic procedures is so widespread among the country's young population it's now estimated the industry will be worth $200 billion US by 2030.
"Because we are in a digital era now, we are in contact with the world more often. We hope to become more beautiful" Plastic surgeon
On Monday, Four Corners examines the massive growth in China's beauty obsession. The program meets the social media influencers and the ordinary young Chinese who are prepared to undergo extreme procedures to radically change their appearance.
"Everything you see is fake ... I have done hair transplants, I have done cranial top procedure. I have done forehead fillers, operated on my eyebrow arch, my double eyelids have been injected with hyaluronic acid. My nose has undergone four surgeries and three types of fat fillers." Social media influencer
The plastic surgery boom is being influenced by beauty apps which promote an ideal ratio in human facial features. Once faces are assessed users can have plans for surgeries drawn up and be connected to endorsed clinics.
"The app said that I can go for a nose job, because the bottom of the nose is really low, and inject facial fillers to improve the sunken cheeks, because I may have laugh lines, right? Overall, I feel that it is quite scientific." 21-year-old student
The growth in the industry has led to an expansion of medical beauty institutions who employ staff without adequate medical qualifications. Whilst some extreme procedures have been banned the demand for cosmetic change continues.
"It is unlike 10 or 20 years ago where plastic surgery was something that was embarrassing, it's not like that anymore. It is now popularised by the masses." Medical consultant. Facing Beauty goes to air on Monday 18th July at 8.30pm. It is replayed on Tuesday 19th July at 11.00pm and Wednesday 20th July at 10am. It can also been seen on ABC NEWS channel on Saturday at 8.10pm AEST, ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners.

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Facing Beauty: China's plastic surgery addiction

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The plastic surgery industry in China is booming. Demand for cosmetic procedures is so widespread among the country's young population it's now estimated the industry will be worth $200 billion US by 2030. On Monday, Four Corners examines the massive growth in China's beauty obsession.

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Perpetuation & Propaganda: Are We All Puppets?

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Perpetuation & Propaganda: Are We All Puppets?

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23 August 2021

Four Corners

Fox & the Big Lie

Part 1

RUPERT MURDOCH: This is my son James.

STANLEY SIEGEL: James are you in the newspaper business too?

JAMES MURDOCH: I wanna be.

STANLEY SIEGEL: Do you really?

JAMES MURDOCH: Yeah

STANLEY SIEGEL: Tell us about your Dad. We only know about him through the newspapers. How would you describe your Dad?

JAMES MURDOCH: Well, different to what the newspapers say and the TV shows. Well, I think the papers and the shows about him and stuff make him look too mean and dark and sinister and really he's a really nice person, a fun person.

RUPERT MURDOCH: Sometimes, eh?

JAMES MURDOCH: Yeah

SARAH FERGUSON, REPORTER: It's L.A 1984. The newspaper baron will soon buy a Hollywood studio and become an American in order to create the Fox television network.

RUPERT MURDOCH: Here's another witness for the defence, Lachlan Murdoch.

STANLEY SIEGEL: We're talking about your father. I'm Stanley Siegel and you know your brother and of course you know your father right?

SARAH FERGUSON: The proud father's two sons are the future of his dynasty.

STANLEY SIEGEL: Tell us about your father a little bit. Tell us the best thing about your Dad.

LACHLAN MURDOCH: The best thing?

STANLEY SIEGEL: Yes

LACHLAN MURDOCH: Um, let's see..Um well he always likes to go camping with us.

SARAH FERGUSON: Nearly four decades later these three key figures in the Murdoch succession story are no longer in the same tent.

In 2019 Rupert Murdoch splintered his media empire, selling its biggest assets to Disney and breaking up the family business.

LACHLAN MURDOCH: I never thought we'd sell the TV studio or the film studio. It provides a cathartic moment for all of us and James has gone through that and decided that he would like to use this moment to go out and do something on his own.

JAMES MURDOCH: I saw this as an opportunity that is just so unique right? To be able to start, at not too advanced an age. But to completely reset and work for myself.

RUPERT MURDOCH: The commander in chief, the President of the United States, my friend, Donald J. Trump.

SARAH FERGUSON: The resistible rise of Donald Trump and his influence over their Fox News cable network caused a rift in the family...

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you to my very good friend Rupert Murdoch. There's only one Rupert. That we know.

MICHAEL WOLFF, MURDOCH BIOGRAPHER: More and more the network became the Trump network.

SARAH ELLISON, MEDIA WRITER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Trump's behaviour and the power of Fox in the Trump era split James and Lachlan. And that split really troubled Rupert.

MICHAEL WOLFF: The animosity that this created grew kind of ever more fierce and to the point where James could really no longer get along with his father and barely with his, with his brother and creating this, this situation where, um, where Murdoch didn't see how he could pass this company to his children.

SARAH FERGUSON: Trump also divided the Fox News family.

FOX NEWS OPINION PROMO SEAN HANNITY: Who controls my voice? Nobody.

CONOR POWELL, FORMER FOX CORRESPONDENT: There isn't a day that goes by where I'm not ashamed or troubled by my association with what I think is the biggest purveyor of misinformation in the world, which is the Murdoch media empire.

LT. COL. RALPH PETERS (RET.) FORMER FOX MILITARY ANALYST: What you saw Fox becoming was an ethically and morally corrupt enterprise. The United States of America gave Rupert Murdoch a great deal, and he repaid it by doing a great deal of harm.

SARAH FERGUSON: Now the inside story of Fox News from those who were there.

GRETCHEN CARLSON, FORMER FOX HOST: I think that they allowed the former President to dictate what news they put out to the American people. We're in a dangerous political climate in our country right now, sort of on the precipice of whether or not we're going to actually believe facts or we're not.

CHRIS STIREWALT, FORMER FOX POLITICAL EDITOR: What cable news runs on is fear. And what, what fear leads to is hatred. If we don't find in the United States a healthier way to run the news business, we're going to fall apart. This is killing us.

CARL CAMERON, FORMER FOX CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It is important for Fox to report what Trump's henchmen say. They have to, it has to be reported. Buying into it and selling it is the problem. The risk is people can get killed.

Crowd shouting: Stop the steal, stop the steal, stop the steal, stop the steal.

SARAH FERGUSON: We saw on January 6 how President Donald Trump's stolen election lies provoked an insurgency.

SARAH FERGUSON: Fox News didn't send the mob but its worst outrage generators certainly fuelled its anger. Trump wasn't alone in his assault on the truth but he could never have spread the big lie so widely without his most reliable echo chamber, the Murdoch-owned and run Fox News. Tonight on Four Corners, how America's number one cable news network became a propaganda vehicle for Donald Trump and helped destabilise democracy.

TITLES: FOX AND THE BIG LIE

RUPERT MURDOCH: Our next challenge is to build a 24-hour Fox News channel. Once again we will be the insurgents in a business of very strong incumbents.

SARAH FERGUSON: What better place for a 24-hour news channel than the city that doesn't sleep? Like Donald Trump, Fox News is a creature of New York.

To understand how Fox News effectively became the Trump Network we need to go back to its beginnings.

Back to 1996 and to Rupert Murdoch's insurgency against the major networks.

FOX NEWS PROMO: Fox news channel. Fair and balanced. Where news is going.

RUPERT MURDOCH: Everybody said no, CNN's been there for years. There's no room for more than one news channel. And we tried it and we put a different viewpoint if you like, I would say, and we were fair and balanced.

CARL CAMERON: From the very beginning, the, the mantra, the slogans, the branding of the company was fair and balanced. We report. You decide.

RUPERT MURDOCH: We've been very lucky in being able to obtain the services of Mr Roger Ailes.

SARAH FERGUSON: Roger Ailes was Murdoch's first recruit. As Fox News' founding CEO Ailes was the network's creator and its dark eminence.

ROGER AILES, FORMER CEO, FOX NEWS: We'd like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking.

PROFESSOR SUSAN ESTRICH, LAWYER AND FORMER FOX CONTRIBUTOR: Roger's idea was yes, the mainstream media was liberal, but it was also sort of elitist, and it might have been its elitism more than its left-wing stance that motivated Fox in the first place.

FOX NEWS DEBUT BROADCAST, HOST: Good morning welcome to Fox News Channel. This is Fox News now.

SARAH FERGUSON: Murdoch's News channel began broadcasting in October 1996.

Roger Ailes was there pulling the strings behind the scenes as he would be for the next 20 years.

CHRIS STIREWALT, FORMER FOX POLITICAL EDITOR: The experience of working for Roger was the experience of working for a guy who was a genius, right? But the thing that he knew most of all, and this is really what is too bad about his demise, what he knew most of all was that you had to keep that fair and balanced concept, right?

SUSAN ESTRICH: Roger Ailes came from my world. He came from the world of politics.

SARAH FERGUSON: Susan Estrich and Roger Ailes were unlikely friends. They met in 1988 when she was campaign manager for Presidential candidate Democrat Michael Dukakis

Ailes was very much on the other side. The favoured media guru of three Republican Presidents: Nixon, Reagan and George Bush.

SUSAN ESTRICH: I spent more time on his air, you know, promoting Obama, promoting Hillary Clinton. I mean, he didn't have to give me his air time to do it and he did.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Thanks very much to Roger Ailes who runs this corporation for believing in me and giving me this opportunity.

SARAH FERGUSON: Gretchen Carlson was one of Fox News' biggest stars for 11 years.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: I mean it used to be in the olden days where you had a show called Hannity and Colmes, you had the right opinion and the left opinion. And that was actually entertaining because you could watch it and you could say, oh yeah, I kinda see it that way. And I kinda see it this way, that- that just doesn't exist anymore.

SARAH FERGUSON: Carlson is most famous for her role in exposing Roger Ailes' as a sexual predator - she may be the last person you'd expect to have a good word to say about him.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Well, for all of the allegations and, uh, difficulties that Roger Ailes got himself into, uh, I don't know exactly if he would have allowed Fox to become what it is today. He did, I think in his own mind believe in fair and balanced. And by the way, let me clarify that. I'm not saying it was run better. I'm saying that I don't believe he would have allowed it to get to this point. He would have called up Trump and you know, said knock it off, right? And he did in the past.

CHRIS STIREWALT: If we had known what a monster he personally was. We knew that he was robust, told dirty jokes. There was a little bit of eye-rolling, but no idea that he was a sexual predator. No idea that the kinds of- of heinous acts that would later be revealed. Roger was falling apart due to his horrific sins. He was, he was curdling from the inside out.

SARAH FERGUSON: For more than ten years Chris Stirewalt was Fox News' Washington-based political editor.

He spent much of his career reporting on political machinations in the US capital.

But his story of the toxic culture he witnessed inside Fox has all the drama of a political powerplay. The key players were Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch and both of Murdoch's sons.

CHRIS STIREWALT: Roger Ailes kept Rupert Murdoch out of the company, uh, in every way that he possibly could in a long, titanic struggle between those guys.

FOX AND FRIENDS, 15TH FOX ANNIVERSARY

PRESENTER: It all started 15 years ago today the Fox News Channel started.

MALE ANCHOR #1: Fifteen years, that was fast.

RUPERT MURDOCH: That's right.

SARAH FERGUSON: There are very few recorded moments of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes talking together about the network they created.

RUPERT MURDOCH: 15 years ago, exactly.

ROGER AILES: 15 years ago.

RUPERT MURDOCH: And we haven't been off the air for a minute.

SARAH FERGUSON: The network's fifteenth anniversary is one of those rare moments and here they are sitting opposite Gretchen Carlson on her breakfast show.

MALE ANCHOR # 2: So Rupert you get Roger Ailes, you sign him. What made you think that this whole thing would work?

RUPERT MURDOCH: I just had a hunch there was room for another point of view, and another service, I don't like monopolies when I see them.

SARAH FERGUSON: In a few years Carlson would bring down the big man using recordings of his sexual harassment of her.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: And of course that's what makes Mr Ailes Mr Ailes, is not only brilliant man in television but his funny quips like that.

SARAH FERGUSON: But not today, today was a celebration of his genius for reaching conservative viewers.

ROGER AILES: Charles Krauthammer, our friend said that we discovered a secret niche in broadcasting, half the American people (laughter).

SARAH FERGUSON: And a time to suck up to Rupert.

ROGER AILES: Rupert Murdoch is extraordinary in many ways. He really is a genius in terms of media but..

SARAH FERGUSON: But there were tensions below the surface between Murdoch and Ailes.

CHRIS STIREWALT: Roger made no secret of his delight, uh, in besting the Murdochs. It was one of his true pleasures, uh, and he was, uh, not shy about bragging about it, nor was he shy about complaining about, uh, their attempts to interfere.

ROGER AILES: He backed it, was always there when I needed advice or help but really, let me run it. Now if I'd screwed it up I'd be dead. (Laughter)

RUPERT MURDOCH: That's right!

ROGER AILES: But fortunately, I didn't screw it up.

SARAH FERGUSON: Ailes counted on Rupert's support but he was increasingly worried that the Murdoch sons were out to get him.

MICHAEL WOLFF, MURDOCH BIOGRAPHER: Fox had been an issue in the Murdoch family and with James Murdoch being more and more increasingly opposed to what Fox stood for.

JAMES MURDOCH: There was a, a sort of, a bit of a corporate empire that was built up within Fox News. It had too much independence perhaps.

SARAH FERGUSON: By 2016, as he embarked on his fourth marriage, with Jerry Hall, the patriarch seemed to be handing over the empire to his sons. After a decade out of the family business the prodigal son Lachlan was back as an executive at 21st Century Fox - And Rupert had stepped aside to make James the company's CEO.

SARAH FERGUSON: This power shift would prove fatal for Roger Ailes.

SUSAN ESTRICH: There certainly was tension between Roger's view and James' view and James was much more liberal in many ways.

CHRIS STIREWALT: Roger played up the idea that the Murdochs were liberal and were going to come in and make Fox be liberal. Uh, he played that up in meetings and talked about it out of some desire probably to create anxiety inside the company that, "I am the one who will protect you right-wing opinion-mongers. I will protect you, because they want to get rid of you."

SUSAN ESTRICH: Roger told me that he not endeared himself to James Murdoch. Blood is thicker than water, I used to say to Roger. You don't know how to do your own politics? I mean, you're in there attacking the son to the father and you think it's not gonna come around? It's, it's gotta come around.

SARAH FERGUSON: It was Gretchen Carlson who gave the young Murdochs the excuse to bring down Roger Ailes.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: After my story, there was an investigation and, you know, Ailes himself was fired just two weeks after my case.

SARAH FERGUSON: 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox news, now controlled by James and Lachlan handled the investigation.

JAMES MURDOCH: We had an allegation that was, that was public and that had to be investigated. It was a serious allegation. A big spotlight on it.

LACHLAN MURDOCH: With Roger Ailes, what we were able to do is go in we, we hired an independent law firm, an outside law firm to work for us, not technically independent but to work for us and go in and investigate all the allegations, which included speaking to the women involved corroborating their stories.

SARAH FERGUSON: And then paying them off to remain silent.

GRECHEN CARLSON: I can't talk about the culture at Fox News.

SARAH FERGUSON: Carlson's secret recordings of her meetings with Roger Ailes corroborated her allegations. His own words supported her most damaging claim that her contract was cancelled "as a direct and proximate result" of her refusing Ailes' sexual advances.

She would eventually settle with Fox News for $20 million US dollars.

SARAH FERGUSON: There's a number of things that you can't discuss here can you explain that?

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Yeah. Because I signed unfortunately, a stringent NDA. Not knowing that we'd actually kick off a cultural revolution and that we'd actually be discussing now how women shouldn't be silenced anymore. And had I known then what I know now, I would've never signed it.

SARAH FERGUSON: And that's a Nondisclosure Agreement?

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Yes. Nondisclosure Agreement, which says that I can never say anything about what happened to me there or any of the people that were involved.

SARAH FERGUSON: Have you asked Lachlan Murdoch to release you from the NDA?

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Yes. Several of us who have NDAs at Fox News after harassment claims have asked to be released from our NDAs, and we have not heard anything back.

SARAH FERGUSON: During the internal investigation Roger Ailes called on his old Democrat friend and lawyer Susan Estrich to run his defence. He'd already brought in a private detective to investigate Gretchen Carlson's life.

SUSAN ESTRICH: I said to him there were two ways to defend a sexual harassment case like this. One is by going out-and-out attack the complainants, the victims. Nuts and sluts. I, I coined the phrase, you know. The nuts and sluts defence, right? She's either crazy or she's a slut or she's one or both. I said if you want somebody to that, I am the last person in the world to do it. If, on the other hand, our goal here is to, try to do this in a dignified way, to try to secure for you the most dignified exit we can then I'll be good at that ok? That I know how to do all right.

SARAH FERGUSON: Estrich negotiated a departure package for Ailes - worth more than $70 million US dollars -directly with Rupert Murdoch

SUSAN ESTRICH: When it came to the terms, I found both - he's sitting on one side of me, and Lachlan's sitting on the other side of me - very eager and supportive of providing to Roger and his family what they needed so that we could have, as much as you could have in that circumstance, a transition which didn't destroy the network.

SARAH FERGUSON: Chris Stirewalt witnessed the final act of Roger Ailes' downfall from inside Fox News.

CHRIS STIREWALT: He was growing increasingly paranoid. He was growing increasingly, um, incoherent in his ramblings. He was changing in front of our eyes. What we did not know of course, was that he was a sick man who was desperately afraid that his marriage, his life, his career were about to be incinerated, uh, by his vices.

LACHLAN MURDOCH: It took us 13 days from the time we had the first ..we learned of the first allegation against Roger Ailes until the time we sort of walked him out of the building.

SARAH FERGUSON: In the end the Murdoch brothers locked the sick and corrupted Roger Ailes out of the building that had become his fiefdom.

LACHLAN MURDOCH: It is completely, completely unacceptable for men and particularly unfortunately we're seeing powerful men, you know to have and allow or engage in harassment in the workplace. And the fact that we've gone through this sort of cathartic moment, not just in media but as we see throughout all of society, all business and elsewhere, I think it's a tremendous thing and I think we come out of this as a community far, far stronger.

SARAH FERGUSON: It seems that memo didn't get to Rupert.

SKY INTERVIEWER: How harmful has the whole raft of allegations about sexual harassment at Fox News been for the business?

RUPERT MURDOCH: Oh, it's all nonsense. There was a problem with our chief executive um, sort of uh over the years but ah, isolated incidents. As soon as we investigated he was out of the place in hours.. well, three or four days, um, and there's been nothing else since then. Now of course, but that was largely political, because we're conservative.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: That is a complete disservice to the myriad of women who worked at Fox News, who were subjected to harassment and retaliation. And to all women and men across the world who have been a part of this pervasive epidemic, it's not just at Fox.

DONALD TRUMP: Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

SARAH FERGUSON: News of Ailes sacking reached his Fox colleagues covering the Republican Convention on the day of Donald Trump's nomination.

CHRIS STIREWALT: And it's right in the middle of that, that Roger gets detonated, in this makeshift conference room, uh, with the speakerphone on and standing with these executives looking at the, at the blower.

SARAH FERGUSON: The immediate question was who would take over Fox News?

SARAH ELLISON: After successfully getting Ailes out, James really saw the opportunity to reimagine Fox, and make it a modern voice of conservatism in the country.

SARAH FERGUSON: James Murdoch wanted to recruit the president of CBS News David Rhodes, to shift Fox back to the centre right.

SARAH ELLISON: Rupert had his own ideas, he thought, you know, it was one thing to get rid of Roger. But Rupert didn't trust his sons to figure out who it was that should run the place. And so he stepped in himself to do it.

SARAH FERGUSON: With Citizen Murdoch now in charge, Donald Trump's influence would grow exponentially. The lure of a ratings driven bonanza proved irresistible. All of our Fox News insiders point to a dramatic drop in editorial standards.

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you everybody. We're going to get to work immediately for the American people.

SUSAN ESTRICH: Trump gets elected. You have this frenzy, almost, that translates into ratings going up and up and all of a sudden, you know, the President is calling Fox News and you've got your guys in there, it's really seductive. Even if you've been there a lot it's seductive.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: I think that they allowed the former president to dictate what news they put out to the American people. They were seeing that when they showed his rallies that the ratings went up. I mean, listen, this is all a money game. This is all about ratings. This is all about the bottom line.

CONOR POWELL: By the time that Trump becomes the nominee and is elected, um, Fox News has jumped on the bandwagon. They understand that they're gonna live and die with Donald Trump, that his fans, his supporters, were essentially rabid, and that they couldn't cross him, that they had to go with him.

CHRIS STIREWALT: Trump was a dangerous entity, uh, and no one could control him.

SARAH FERGUSON: Chris Stirewalt is no bleeding heart liberal, he now works at a conservative think tank which reveres Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But when still a senior political journalist at Fox News he was appalled at the sudden shift to the right under Rupert Murdoch's direct leadership.

CHRIS STIREWALT: The company went through a rebranding several months later. And we were stunned to see that the phrase Fair and Balanced, which had been our core, had been removed.

SARAH FERGUSON: Nowhere was the shift more obvious than when two of the main Fox News anchors left their broadcast box at a Trump election rally in 2018 and went on stage to campaign for him.

SEAN HANNITY: This is literally like a rock concert!

SARAH FERGUSON: Sean Hannity, then the network's biggest star, bantered back stage with the night's main act.

SEAN HANNITY: How are you? You're not even tired are you?

SARAH FERGUSON: Like a starstruck fanboy Hannity conducts what amounts to a Trump info-mercial.

DONALD TRUMP: There's something going on. There's an electricity that feels like 2016.

SEAN HANNITY: I wish I had a penny for all the Make America Great hats I signed today.

DONALD TRUMP: I was speaking to Sean Hannity backstage. Do we love Sean by the way?

I have a few people that are right out here, and they're very special. They've done an incredible job for us. I'm gonna start by saying Sean Hannity come on up. Sean Hannity.

SEAN HANNITY: By the way all these people in the back are fake news.

The one thing that has made and defined your presidency more than anything else. Promises made, promises kept.

CHRIS STIREWALT: Once Roger did himself in standards for conduct for the opinion hosts went way down, right? We would have never been in a place where Sean Hannity could appear onstage at a rally with Donald Trump. It's bad for business, it's bad for the country, it's bad for everything, when you become an arm of a political party.

Lt. Col. RALPH PETERS (Ret.): In the decade that I was at Fox, it changed profoundly. And it went from being a conservative voice, if a sometimes unruly one, to being a propaganda organ for Donald Trump.

FOX AND FRIENDS HOST: By the way, thank you very much for the shout out you gave at your press conference about ten days ago.

DONALD TRUMP: That's true, I did. You treated me, you have treated me very fairly and I appreciate it.

SARAH FERGUSON: Allowing Fox News to become a propaganda vehicle for Trump was too much for James Murdoch to put up with.

SARAH ELLISON: Trump's behaviour and the power of Fox in the Trump era split James and Lachlan. And that split really troubled Rupert.

MICHAEL WOLFF: The animosity that this created grew kind of ever more fierce and to the point where, James could really no longer get along with his father and barely with his, with his brother and creating this, this situation where, um, where Murdoch didn't see how he could pass this company to his children.

SARAH FERGUSON: Ahead of the 2020 election James Murdoch severed his last ties with the family company. He resigned from the News Corp board, saying: "My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets..."

JAMES MURDOCH: The Fox News business was always one that was not operationally, directly under me so it's something that I have to, you know and I look at it now and I'm out of it. So I'm not, I'm not involved and haven't been for a little while.

INTERVIEWER: Do you watch Fox News.

JAMES MURDOCH: Ah, no.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think there's ever a future in which you would go back to Fox?

JAMES MURDOCH: I don't think so, they're off doing their own thing there.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: It's election night in America and a nation in crisis is at a crossroads.

SARAH FERGUSON: The 2020 election was one of the most consequential in US history.

Lachlan Murdoch was now the boss of Fox News. Rupert, as always, was watching over his shoulder.

FOX NEWS ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE, BRET BAIER: Welcome to Fox News world headquarters in New York. After months of campaigning, virtual conventions and two contentious debates we are now less than one hour away from the first poll closings of 2020.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Election night is Rupert Murdoch's night. It has always been his night. It's his Oscars. It is literally what makes, um, having Fox network, besides the money, so satisfying for, for him. In his entire career, there's something about an election and election nights that, that, that really moves, moves him. I mean, it gets the juices running.

FOX NEWS ELECTION NIGHTH COVERAGE, HOST: And it is 7.00 o'clock on the east coast which means polls have just closed in half a dozen states.

CHRIS STIREWALT: Fox advertised us as the best-in-class decision desk, and we were. We called it the nerdquarium, uh, a fish tank for nerds.

SARAH FERGUSON: Chris Stirewalt had a critical role on the Fox decision desk

CHRIS STIREWALT: The news networks, for competitive reasons, developed these election forecasting models in order to beat the competition.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: There's some great people that work there who are, you know, straight down the line, hard news people and specifically the people in charge of the election. You know, I know a lot of those people and they called it as they saw it.

SARAH FERGUSON: The Decision Desk prized its independence but Stirewalt and his team knew that this would be an election like no other.

DONALD TRUMP: The only way we're gone lose this election is if the election is rigged, remember that. It's the only way we're gonna lose this election.

CHRIS STIREWALT: They had made a point about laying down a predicate for what would turn out to be their effort to steal the election, and they were explicit. It wasn't a mystery what they were trying to do.

DONALD TRUMP: If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that... I'll tell you what it means. It means you have a fraudulent election. They cheat, they cheat!

CHRIS STIREWALT: That's why it was doubly important for us to be right out front, open-faced, and clear about things. There could be no excuse a- at a time where you have the sitting president who is trying to engage in this kind of power grab, the totally unacceptable, you cannot then play along to any degree, right?

FOX NEWS ELECTION COVERAGE, BRET BAIER: Can I interrupt you? We're gonna make a big call right here. The fox news decision desk can now project that President Donald Trump will win the state of Florida, and he will win it convincingly.

SARAH FERGUSON: The decision to call the state of Florida at 11pm caused a surge of optimism amongst President Trump's team in the White House.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Celebrating, everybody's celebrating. The President had absolutely come to believe that he had won this election.

SARAH FERGUSON: But the fox decision desk was getting ready to make a crucial call for Arizona. A Republican state that Trump expected to win.

SARAH FERGUSON: Why was Arizona so important?

CHRIS STIREWALT: Arizona is still a pretty Republican state. If Trump is gonna lose there, that has very bad portent for him in states that are genuine swing states or democratic leaning states like Pennsylvania, like Michigan, like Wisconsin.

SARAH FERGUSON: And this is to take us back to November, back to election night.

FOX NEWS ELECTION COVERAGE, BILL HEMMER: I tell you there's some phenomenal things happening on this map guys... Somethings moving out there.

BILL HEMMER: But what is happening here? Why is Arizona blue? Did we just call it?

Did we make a call on Arizona? Let's see there's a check mark. Did our decision desk make it? Arizona, eleven electoral votes?

MARTHA MACCALLUM: Yes, yes. We can confirm.

BRETT BAIER: Ok. Time out. This is a big development. The Fox decision desk is calling Arizona for Joe Biden. That is a big get.

FOX NEWS ELECTION COVERAGE, BRET BAIER: Politics editor Chris Stirewalt joins us now. Here we go. How can you call Arizona but we can't call Ohio?

CHRIS STIREWALT: Well, because the races are very different. We looked at every possible way that this could go and if there was some way that it looked like Donald Trump was going to be able to bring Arizona in we wouldn't have called it.

SARAH FERGUSON: At the White House, Fox's Arizona call ended the premature celebrations.

FOX NEWS ELECTION COVERAGE, BRET BAIER: There has been pushback to our call for Arizona to be in the Biden column and ah my phone is lighting up.

SARAH FERGUSON: Trump ordered his aides to call the Murdochs to demand they reverse the Arizona call.

MICHAEL WOLFF, AUTHOR "LANDSLIDE": Everybody is instructed to call somebody, whoever their person in the Fox organisation. Um, and, um, and it doesn't happen. I mean, the Murdochs wipe their hands of this. Can't do anything about it. And then it goes into, the shift of other people in the Trump circle starts to play out with Rudy Giuliani starting to talk about they're trying to steal this from you and suddenly he has, um, Trump's ear.

SARAH FERGUSON: Were you asked by any of your superiors to reconsider the decision?

CHRIS STIREWALT: No one who was my superi- i- I received no instruction to reverse the call.

SARAH FERGUSON: Was it, was there a consideration?

CHRIS STIREWALT: There was a lot of questions, right? "Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Are you sure?", but there was not, "Reverse this. You must reverse this." This was, wasn't that, it was, "Are you sure, sure, sure, sure, sure?".

SARAH FERGUSON: Wasn't there an executive who said that you should stop making calls?

CHRIS STIREWALT: I'm not gonna talk about that stuff.

SARAH FERGUSON: Trump meanwhile was obsessing about the role of the Murdochs.

MICHAEL WOLFF: There were a couple of things g- going on. I mean, first a sense that he was being fucked by them. And he has always had this weird thing with Fox, um, in which he had kind of come to believe that they owed him, Fox was a success because of him. So this was a double kind of, kind of disloyalty. There were forces aligning against him to keep him from winning this election, which he had already at that point decided he had won.

SARAH FERGUSON: At 2.30am Trump emerged.

DONALD TRUMP: This is without question the latest news conference I've ever had.

Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won't stand for it. We will not stand for it.

SARAH FERGUSON: His speech would set the tone for his final fractious months in office.

DONALD TRUMP: This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.

CHRIS STIREWALT: None of us had any way of knowing that night when we made that call for Arizona that it would become the first brick in this enormous wall of deception . It's the worst thing that a president has done in my lifetime, certainly.

SARAH FERGUSON: Worse than Watergate?

CHRIS STIREWALT: Oh, far worse than Watergate.

SUSAN ESTRICH: It was after election night that the problems began.

CHRIS STIREWALT: I came home to Washington on the Saturday after the election content that we had shot the rapids, everything was okay, and that things would go and heal themselves now, because there was no way that anybody could think that Donald Trump had really won the election.

SARAH FERGUSON: The mood swing came quickly.

CHRIS STIREWALT: I'm getting tweets sent to me and then a US senator is on the radio show calling for me to be fired. And I'm like, "What is going on here? What is wrong with you people, there's this river of hate out there over this call. Like I made Arizona vote for Joe Biden.

HOST: We have not yet called this election. You know why? Because it's not over.

SARAH FERGUSON: Fox's ratings plunged as Trump loyalists turned off in disgust and switched to rival far-right networks.

HOST: Trump is on a mission to clean up corruption in Washington.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: That just gave the green light to OAN and Newsmax to go hardcore totally in for Trump. And if you look at the ratings, just from that particular week, you will see that the 7:00 PM Eastern time show on Newsmax, came close or did beat the 7:00 PM Eastern show on Fox News. I mean, that was completely unheard of. And I guarantee you that that sent a shockwave inside of Fox News.

SARAH ELLISON: It shows that the Arizona call was enough of a shock to the overall Corporation, that Rupert Murdoch decided I need to do something myself here about this. He gets his hands dirty at this moment and really takes a more hands on role for what's going on inside Fox.

SARAH FERGUSON: To satisfy the mob, the Murdochs needed scapegoats. They chose the two senior journalists on the Election Decision Desk. Fox News's managing editor in Washington was forced to retire. Chris Stirewalt was sacked.

CHRIS STIREWALT: Well, it was, it was, um, as a father it was uh, as a father it was very challenging because I did not know how I was going to tell my sons that I was unemployed. Because, you know, you're just making me think about um, how I felt thinking about having to tell my kids and it was a terrible feeling of humiliation that you have to tell your kids that you lost your job.

SUSAN ESTRICH: The clear message when the guys who made the right call on election night get fired in the aftermath because people are complaining, the clear message, we're not going to try to tell people what they don't want to hear, we're going to tell them what they do want to hear.

CHRIS STIREWALT: The amount of ignorance and the amount of wilful ignorance was concerning and disappointing and a foretaste of what was to come.

SARAH FERGUSON: On Saturday, Fox News sent us a statement saying:

"The use of former disgruntled employees, some of whom were not part of the company during our coverage of the U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, completely discredits any credibility of this program... We stand by our coverage with our millions of viewers who make us the most-watched cable television network."

SARAH FERGUSON: Next week, how Fox News bought, sold and amplified Donald Trump's big lie.

CHRIS STIREWALT: The secret that Trump knows is, if you're going to lie, go big. Right? Don't waste your time on niggling little, tiny prevarications. Go big. And then what you do is you wait for the obsequious toads to come along and rationalise your lie.

SARAH FERGUSON: And now truth is going on trial as the Murdochs face dramatic legal consequences.

SARAH FERGUSON: These are the simple facts.

SIDNEY POWELL: No. No, we're done. I'm sorry.

SARAH FERGUSON : These are facts.

SIDNEY POWELL: I'm sorry. I'm not going to talk about matters in litigation.

SARAH FERGUSON: There's no need for us to cease.

SIDNEY POWELL: Thank you very much but we're done.

SARAH FERGUSON: But these are very basic facts that we're dealing with.

SIDNEY POWELL: No, turn the camera off, we're done.

SARAH FERGUSON: Sidney I think we should talk.

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23 August 2021 Four Corners Fox & the Big Lie Part 1 RUPERT MURDOCH: This is my son James. STANLEY SIEGEL: James are you in the newspaper business too? JAMES MURDOCH: I wanna be. STANLEY SIEGEL: Do you really? JAMES MURDOCH: Yeah STANLEY SIEGEL: Tell us about your Dad.

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How racial bias works -- and how to disrupt it | Jennifer L. Eberhardt

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The problem with moral outrage on the internet | Alice Dreger | Big Think

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Inside the mind of a sceptic: the ‘mental gymnastics’ of climate change denial

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The findings of a new study suggest mistrust in climate science and uncritical faith in “alternative science” lead people to reject consensus science and generate alternative explanations.

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Shoulder to Shoulder: Feminism in Australia

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This Digital Classroom Module is supported in memory of Averill Edwards Using this resource This resource is aligned with the Australian Curriculum: Modern History for Senior Secondary students, with specific reference to content descriptions for Unit 2: Movements for Change in the 20th Century, and…

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An earworm has gnawed its way into my brain, looping the same melody over and over. It is Italy's most famous resistance song, Bella Ciao, which I recently heard played as a high-decibel dance remix in an exclusive Balinese bar overlooking the Indian Ocean. Well-heeled patrons of diverse nationalities bopped to the catchy tune in the glow of a glorious sunset and, fuelled by exotic cocktails, chanted the chorus. I wondered how a sacred anthem of radical credentials could have strayed so far from its original meanings and contexts.

Bella Ciao began as a partisan anthem, possibly with roots in folk laments sung by exploited workers in the north of Italy. It is associated in Italian minds with the resistance of 1943-45.

The song's popularity peaked when it was used as a soundtrack for the popular Netflix series Money Heist (2017). It was sung from balconies in Europe during the pandemic; it is de rigueur at political rallies by groups of all political leanings. It is used to sell burgers in Korea and to celebrate quashing an opponent in football matches ("Messi Ciao"). Unanchored from its local habitation as a protest folk song, Bella Ciao is now a tune that can travel anywhere and represent everyone and everything.

The less benign phrase "cancel culture" (and its cognate "cancelling"), which has roots in oral Black vernacular traditions, has suffered a similar semantic drift.

"Cancelling" originally referred to a practice among the disempowered of "calling out" socially unacceptable behaviour and discrimination. It has now become a catch-all phrase, imprecisely applied to all manner of people, places and things. It is used to signify everything from vigilante justice, hostile debate, intimidation and harassment, to levelling statues and de-platforming books and lectures in universities and school syllabi.

Cancel culture is often conflated with adjacent phenomena such as outrage culture, boycotts and backlashes. It is linked to debates about censorship, free speech, decolonising the curriculum, "wokeness" and "political correctness". The noisy doxxing and bad faith piling-on feels, to many, like a rudderless surrogate of the judicial process, at once chaotic and ritualised, and has invited comparisons by some commentators to ancient, ritualised practices of scapegoating.

A real phenomenon

While cancel culture may be a hot topic among journalistic and intellectual elites, a recent UK YouGov survey found that only around a third of Britons (35%) think they know what "cancel culture" means. Of the two-thirds who don't know what it means, close to four in ten claimed never to have heard the expression in the first place (38%).

That many people have not heard of "cancel culture" doesn't mean the phenomenon isn't real. On August 19, the NSW Minister for the Arts, Ben Franklin, demanded that Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas cancel a talk about bestiality by eminent historian Joanna Bourke. After being contacted for comment by 2GB talkback radio host Ben Fordham, Franklin's office said he was

deeply concerned by the contents of Bourke's scheduled talk entitled "The Last Taboo", and is demanding festival organisers remove it from their program.

Festival curator and Ethics Centre director Simon Longstaff refused to comply with the request, stating Bourke's views have been misunderstood. "If somebody was to provide a history of cannibalism or slavery," said Longstaff, "does that mean they are therefore encouraging us to eat each other or enslave our fellow man?" As a result of this media attention, he added, Bourke has been "trolled by lowlifes".

In 2019, the Macquarie Dictionary committee named "cancel culture" Word of the Year, noting it captured an important aspect of the zeitgeist. According to its definition, it describes community attitudes that

call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from [for] a public figure, such as cancellation of an acting role, a ban on playing an artist's music, removal from social media, etc., usually in response to an accusation of a socially unacceptable action or comment.

Franklin's attempt to cancel Bourke falls squarely within this circumscribed definition.

Read more: Cancel culture, cleanskin, hedonometer ... I'm not sure I like any of Macquarie Dictionary's words of the year

The strikethrough option

Is this attempt to "cancel" Bourke simply another example of the anti-intellectualism evident across the political spectrum? Is vitriolic misinterpretation really replacing thoughtful debate?

Attempts at "cancelling" often aim to inflict maximum reputational or economic damage to otherwise out-of-reach public figures and celebrities. But as the case of author J.K. Rowling suggests, the more famous you are, the more difficult you are to topple. Rowling appears to have suffered no significant career setbacks following calls for her cancellation after she tweeted controversial views on gender identity and biological sex.

Cancelling, in this sense, is a bit like executing the strikethrough option in the keyboard: a function that enables you to draw a line through a word while allowing it to remain legible and in place.

Cancel culture is not always discerning in its targets. The transnational #MeToo movement, to cite one example, has contributed to the exposure of high-profile sexual predators such as Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, leading to criminal convictions. But other cancellations enact a more casual cruelty on ordinary, innocent people. I am reminded of the US writer Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery (1948), in which a member of a small American community is selected by chance and stoned.

Origins in social justice

The idea of cancelling or calling out transgressions has its origins in the creative spaces occupied by marginalised groups. Exemplified by hashtag-oriented social justice movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, the strategy has been successfully deployed by activists to call out real harms and demand accountability.

Journalist Aja Romano notes the idea of cancelling a person, place or thing has long circulated within Black culture, and traces it to Nile Rodgers's 1981 single "Your Love Is Cancelled".

Writer and researcher Meredith D. Clark argues that "calling out", which begat cancelling, is "an indigenous expressive form" of "useful anger" perfected by Black women. The practice was colourfully deployed to name individual transgressions. In its networked forms, it became a critique of systemic inequality.

It developed into a socially mediated phenomenon with origins in queer communities of colour. In the early 2010s, Black Twitter - a meta-network of culturally connected communities - made the language of being "cancelled" into an internet meme.

The term "cancel culture", however, has become unmoored from its history and its original significations. In its clamorous current form, it has no coherent ideology: cancellations come just as steadily from the right as the left. Reframed by the dominant culture, and amplified by the media, it has come to be used as a term of approbation wielded against minorities to maintain the status quo.

In the attention economy of the 24-hour news cycle, journalists routinely extract and decontextualise rich traditions of collective resistance (or in Bourke's case, scholarly research) to meet the demand for attention-grabbing content. In doing so, they often fail to explain why these debates should or shouldn't be part of mainstream public discourse.

Franklin is on record as championing freedom of expression and diversity of opinion. Earlier this year, he stated an artist's boycott of the Sydney Festival was "censorship" and that it risked silencing diverse voices and important perspectives to the "great detriment" of society.

Given free speech is a sovereign human right many liberals and conservatives claim to hold dear, attempting to cancel a reputable academic seems an awkward spot to be occupying. Bourke is a prizewinning author of 14 books and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is an expert on the history of violence in British, Irish, US and Australian societies. Her work includes histories of rape, fear and killing. Her most recent book, Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love (2020), has been widely reviewed in scholarly journals.

Read more: Was the Sydney Festival boycott justifiable to support Palestine?

Mediated speech

How is it that the most ardent defenders of free speech and diversity are often the same people who seek to silence those with whom they do not happen to agree, without a sound knowledge of the ideas on which they are passing judgement?

Let's be clear. Platitudes about freedom of expression, in the contexts we are discussing, are not about the abstract principle of free speech as such. They are about the greyer areas of where we draw the boundaries. What kind of discourse and actions are considered acceptable? Which are morally out of bounds? And, crucially, who gets to decide?

All societies place some limits on the exercise of speech, because it always takes place in a context of competing values. And in the case of cancel culture, this exercise of free speech is mediated by commercially owned social media platforms such as Twitter - the main arena of cancel culture - which, while free, thrives on the scandal that generates profit.

In this respect, it is useful to remember that the kinds of speech and actions that society deems acceptable are historically contingent and an effect of power relations.

Societies evolve; norms change; attitudes progress; the boundaries of moral acceptability are redrawn over time. It is also in the nature of linguistic meaning to be fluid and provisional, not fixed or rigid. As Judith Butler explains in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1996), speech acts are constrained by a larger set of discursive rules. Those rules are negotiable. In this sense there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as free speech, in the sense of unlimited and decontextualised speech.

An idea deeply embedded in liberal democracies is that people are equally empowered to engage in debate and freely express their ideas. But is this really so? The public sphere is a fractured space of competing elites. Idealistic visions of equal access fail to acknowledge disparities of knowledge and resources between social elites and disempowered groups.

Right-wing politicians and commentators have claimed in recent years that a progressive cancel culture has silenced alternative perspectives and stifled robust intellectual debate. The pejorative label "cancel culture" has been misappropriated to discredit social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.

The question that remains to be answered is why, even as pundits condemn cancel culture as the mob running amok, the injustices and systemic inequalities that cancelling strategies evolved to name remain largely in place. The example of Franklin and Bourke suggests hypocritical censoriousness remains part of the dominant political culture.

Understanding the genealogy of "cancel culture", and how its language has been reframed and mobilised, may help us see such moral condemnations for what they really are: a reactive rearguard reflex by those in power, who are no longer congruent with the progressive liberal culture that dominates a fractured public sphere.

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Friday essay: Joanna Bourke, the NSW arts minister, and the unruly contradictions of cancel culture

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An earworm has gnawed its way into my brain, looping the same melody over and over. It is Italy's most famous resistance song, Bella Ciao, which I recently heard played as a high-decibel dance remix in an exclusive Balinese bar overlooking the Indian Ocean.

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Ultimately, whether or not you consider Australia to be secular depends on the definition of secularism used. shutterstock

Australia is often described as a secular country. But is it? What does it mean to be secular? Is permitting halal certification, the wearing of Islamic headscarves, religious chaplains in state schools or political lobbying by religious organisations inconsistent with a secular Australia?

Ultimately, the answer comes down to what you mean by "secular" and "secularism".

Three forms of secularism

In his book A Secular Age, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor identified three different forms of secularism.

First, secularism can mean the complete removal of God and religion from the public sphere. France has this version of secularism. Children attending government-funded schools in France are prohibited from wearing overt religious symbols - as are public officials.

This version of secularism is sometimes described as a strict separation of church and state, or in France as laïcité. This form of secularism does not necessarily mean a decrease in religious belief by the population. Instead, religion is simply removed to the private sphere. The state can be secular while its population is religious.

Taylor's second form of secularism concerns the level of religiosity of the population. In this version, there is a measurable reduction in religious belief and practice. This may occur even where the state still supports religion.

Taylor argues this has already taken place in much of Western Europe. For example, in the United Kingdom a significant proportion of the population identify with having no religion, despite the Church of England still being the established church. In this version the people are atheist while the state may be religious.

In Taylor's third version of secularism, religious belief is just one option for both the state and its people. Religion is not removed from the public sphere; rather it is just once voice among many, include those with no religion.

As a result, a state may have a relatively high level of interaction with religion and still be considered secular so long as the state does not endorse one religion to the exclusion of other points of view. Countries that conform with this form of secularism may also be described as religiously plural.

What about Australia?

Ultimately, whether or not you consider Australia to be secular will depend on the definition of secularism you use. The best fit for Australia is arguably Taylor's third form of secularism.

Section 116 of the Australian Constitution provides that:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

As a result, the federal government cannot establish a state church. However, the state does interact with religion. For example, the federal government funds schools run by religious organisations and recognises marriages conducted by religious celebrants. This rules out Taylor's first form of secularism.

Australia's population is still predominantly religious, although the number of people identifying as having no religion is growing. In the 2011 Census, 68.3% of the population had a religion and 61.1% of Australians identified as Christian. This rules out Taylor's second form of secularism - at least for now.

Australia is a secular country. But it is not one where the majority of the population has turned their backs on religion, even if the numbers doing so are increasing with each census. Nor is Australia a country where the state has no interaction with religion.

Secularism in Australia means no state church. It means giving people a choice between belief and un-belief. It means religious leaders may lobby for their point of view but so too may leaders of atheist, humanist and rationalist organisations.

Under Taylor's third form of secularism, accommodating Islamic or Christian (or any other religion's) practices, or permitting chaplains to operate in state schools, does not transform Australia into a Muslim or Christian country. Australia is still secular, but it has a form of secularism where religion is allowed in the public sphere. As long as religion remains one voice among many and one option among many Australia will remain a secular country.

For those who advocate a strict separation of church and state, as in Taylor's first form of secularism, this is likely to be an uncomfortable conclusion. For those who support this position the only way in which a country can truly live up to the ideals of secularism is if religion is completely separated from the state and as a consequence removed almost completely from the public sphere. Those who take this position are not wrong; this is one possible meaning of secularism. However, it is not the only meaning.

The definition of secularism you choose will ultimately determine your answer to the question: Is Australia a secular country?

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Is Australia a secular country? It depends what you mean

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Australia is often described as a secular country. But is it? What does it mean to be secular? Is permitting halal certification, the wearing of Islamic headscarves, religious chaplains in state schools or political lobbying by religious organisations inconsistent with a secular Australia? Ultimately, the answer comes down to what you mean by "secular" and "secularism".

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Media Saturation of the Monarchy: Message or Manipulation?

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Media Saturation of the Monarchy: Message or Manipulation?

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In Australia, as in Britain and the United States, professional mass media are part of the Establishment. This status even has its own name: the fourth estate. So at times like the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the pressure to conform to political and social expectations is intense.

Those expectations include treating such a story as being of overwhelming importance, and preferring to promote unity over divisiveness, respectfulness over criticism, the status quo over radical change, politesse over frankness, and sentimentality over hard-headedness.

It is a time when the fourth estate puts aside its fundamental role of holding power to account so as not to risk being pilloried for betraying those expectations.

The end result is what we have seen in abundance since Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8 2022. If it looks like a reflection of Establishment interests, that's because it is.

But it is also, to an immeasurable but unmistakable extent, a reflection of public expectations too.

Queen Elizabeth was the only head of state any Australian not in their seventies has ever known. The esteem in which she was held has been obvious for many years simply by virtue of the accepted political wisdom that the prospect of Australians voting for a republic in her lifetime was nil.

It is only fair, then, that any critique of the coverage be set against the background of those realities.

The Australian media certainly treated this as a story of overwhelming importance. On the Friday and Saturday immediately following the Queen's death this was amply shown by rolling television coverage, commemorative lift-outs and wraparounds in the newspapers, followed by extensive coverage on inside pages.

There is a fixed routine to covering events like this - a trunk story summarising the main news points, reaction from political leaders, tributes, stories of ordinary people's encounters with the queen, a potted history of her reign, reminiscences of her visits to Australia. It was all there.

So was the shmaltzy tone. From the Sydney Morning Herald: her "lasting love for the harbour city" and "We did but see her passing by [...]".

However, there was also in the SMH and elsewhere clear-eyed analyses of the fragile state of the United Kingdom and the contrast between the two Elizabethan eras. In the late 16th century, England was growing into a mighty military and commercial power; the reign of Elizabeth II was a period of long-run decline.

Read more: The Queen has left her mark around the world. But not all see it as something to be celebrated

A striking aspect of the television coverage was that on the Friday night, Seven's and Nine's news bulletins heavily outrated the ABC's. OzTAM TV ratings, from Australia's five biggest cities, showed Seven News attracting 852,000 viewers, Nine News 736,000 and the ABC's Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022), only 201,000.

Even allowing for the fact the commercial bulletins usually out-rate the ABC's, on a story like this it might be expected that the national broadcaster would at least close the gap.

However, over the weekend none of the networks' news specials attracted many viewers. Seven's coverage of the proclamation of Charles III attracted 279,000, its tribute to the Queen 136,000, and the ABC's continuing coverage 206,000.

There is a lesson here. Public expectations about how stories of overwhelming importance are covered have clearly shifted. Rolling television coverage now loses impetus swiftly unless there is new material continuously replenishing it, as with the September 11 attacks on the US or bushfire emergencies. The same lesson probably applies to the print media also.

The steam had started to go out of the royal story by Saturday evening. The death of the Queen and the proclamation of the King had been done.

By Sunday, the only development was the start of the journey bringing the Queen's body from Balmoral Castle to London.

Read more: Beheaded and exiled: the two previous King Charleses bookended the abolition of the monarchy

Yet the ABC's 7pm bulletin stuck with this for 24 minutes, nearly all of it rehashed from the previous day, and on Monday the newspapers were still giving over six or more forward news pages to it.

The coverage has just got more bizarre and banal by the day: clouds containing visions of the queen's head or the queen on a horse; the new king losing his temper over a leaky fountain pen; a little girl who dresses up like the queen when she rides her horse; another little girl cuddling a corgi.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine there has been a decisive thrust by Ukrainian forces, which has pushed the Russians out of a substantial part of the Donbas region.

There comes a point at which editors and news directors need to recognise that expectations about the big story have been met. That point was reached by Saturday evening. Then was the time to cut back hard and wait for the funeral.

The fact that thousands of dollars have been spent sending teams to London doesn't justify clogging up the news with non-stories.

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Media coverage of Queen Elizabeth's death began well, but quickly descended into farce

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In Australia, as in Britain and the United States, professional mass media are part of the Establishment. This status even has its own name: the fourth estate. So at times like the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the pressure to conform to political and social expectations is intense.