Feminist of the week: Jamie Freestone

Name: Jamie Freestone
Age: 27
Occupation: English teacher, radio announcer and science communicator

How would you describe yourself and your life?
I grew up in the brave city of Wollongong and now live in Canberra. I am a perpetual student and I am blessed/cursed by being interested in virtually everything and everyone — except politics. My family was pretty progressive and pretty out of place in the suburbs of the Illawarra. At school I was kind of shocked by guys who were generally awesome dudes (loyal friends, ethical people, etc.) but who were totally callous towards girls they hooked up with or went out with. Since then I’ve been interested in feminism and gender relations.

What does Feminism mean to you?
I guess it’s the view that acknowledges the ubiquitous oppression of women throughout history and across the world and which aims to resist this oppression by fighting for equal rights and cultural power. To me it’s more about the fundamental issue of combating misogyny, rather than some of the recent debates about things like porn, pole-dancing and prostitution — which are still important issues, but seem less vital and less straightforward than, say, honour killings and female circumcision.

Do you think feminism has a place in today’s society?
No. Just kidding, that’s a bit of a Dorothy Dixer isn’t it? In poorer nations, especially poorer nations where fundamentalist Islam is the dominant religion, it is cardinally important. In somewhere like Australia it’s still important but it’s sometimes harder to see exactly how sexism is manifested and what should be done about it.

Which feminist stereotype annoys you the most? Why?
The most annoying stereotype is the one that’s true. In academic circles people who do gender studies or who are outspoken feminists are often seen by people in other disciplines as having an outdated view of sex and gender which assumes there are no innate differences between men and women. Although there are no doubt political advantages to such a view, it is, unfortunately, untenable. While Theorists declared some time in the 1970s that nurture rules over nature, neuroscientists, geneticists and evolutionary biologists meanwhile continued discovering things that showed this wasn’t the case, including with regard to male and female differences. For feminist academics to be taken seriously by others they need to update their knowledge. This isn’t the place to argue this case, but the literature is out there for anyone to investigate and it is vast, comprehensive and widely accepted outside of some branches of the humanities and social sciences.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to other feminists, what would it be?
I don’t really know that I have the mien to give advice! One thing that I found really valuable, though, was reading the classic texts of feminism, like The Female Eunuch and The Feminine Mystique which I got a lot more out of than reading secondary commentaries on the texts. The other thing I would say is that it’s not all bad. I think people should remind themselves that this is a pretty good time in history (for people in countries like Australia) regarding equal rights. If we take the rough beginning of equal rights for women to be about 1970, then we’ve had about 40 years of equality in the 500,000 years since the delineation of the Homo Sapiens sub-species. So if all of human history were condensed to one year, we’ve only had equal rights for about 40-odd minutes (dodgy calculation using Wikipedia and WolframAlpha, but you get the idea). I think women in Australia face subtle, insidious discrimination, but rarely suffer overt or legal discrimination and I reckon that’s worth celebrating.

Do you think it is okay to laugh at sexist jokes if you are a feminist?
This one will definitely get me in trouble but I absolutely have laughed at sexist jokes and will no doubt continue to do so — if they’re funny. I think the idea that you can’t laugh at a sexist joke is one of the most pernicious ideas that gets let through in contemporary feminist discourse. The same goes for jokes that are offensive in other ways too. A joke should be laughed at if it is funny and if the joke has a good structure and unexpected punch line, then it’s funny. Most jokes are offensive to someone and are often based on a barbed, slightly wicked attitude. It is important to laugh at these things though, as it indicates one is capable of laughing even at things that are important. Ultimately, it points to an ability to laugh at oneself, which I think is one of the most admirable virtues. If a joke is truly hateful, than I doubt it’s actually funny. But this idea that we can’t laugh at sexist jokes is blatant (and actually quite funny) hypocrisy. Most sitcoms and comedy films, for example, are based on making fun of stupidity and yet we’re not supposed to discriminate against stupid people. A more pertinent question might be: is it OK to tell people what they can and can’t laugh at? I think the answer is, outside of North Korea, no. I’ve probably opened a can of worms so I’ll stop there!