Days of ignorant bliss, my friends.

Preventative healthcare is defined as “comprehensive care emphasising priorities for the prevention, early detection and early treatment of conditions”. Do you know where I found that definition? At www.seniors.gov.au. This isn’t very surprising; preventative healthcare messages are mostly aimed at people over the age of 50. There are ads for bowel screening, breast cancer checks, flu vaccinations, stroke prevention, cholesterol check-ups, prostate cancer check-ups etc. Of course, all women are advised to get pap smears every couple of years to check for cervical cancer and we are all advised to slip, slop, slap to prevent skin cancer. On the other hand (or body part), STDs are on the rise again. We got a bit too comfortable after the success of earlier campaigns and we started to feel safe… safe enough to have un-safe sex.

You’ve probably heard this before and let it quietly slip in one ear and out the other, but we shouldn’t just think about our health once we have the symptoms.

‘Oh great, I’ve got gonorrhoea – thank goodness medicine can fix it up! In the meantime I’m just going to have to deal with this burning sensation and try and mop up that green discharge coming out of my (insert orifice here) and hope I don’t end up with an internal abscess that makes me infertile’ – you get the picture.

Looking after our health is something that should be a part of our day to day lives, throughout our whole life. Public policy might help educate us, guide us and in some cases, actually force us to do the right thing, but it’s about taking responsibility for the upkeep of our own bodies and minds.

Now I don’t want to stand up here on my pedestal wagging my finger at you and tut-tutting about the last time you visited the dentist, so I’m going to make an example of myself to try and teach you not to make the same mistakes I’ve made and to make sure you listen to your body if it is telling you something is out of whack.

Here is a list of the most major health issues I’ve had from the age of 21 till now and how I have very poorly dealt with these preventable problems.

Whooping Cough

I caught this at Adelaide Uni in about 2006 (it was going around), I put up with the symptoms for almost two months before I saw the doctor. In that time I passed it on to my grandfather who also got sick. Whooping cough is really contagious and I am an irresponsible idiot for not getting a bulk-billed check-up earlier on.

Severe B12 Deficiency

In 2007, I thought I was going crazy; one minute I was happy, over-the top, excited, the next I was a blubbering mess who could barely get off the floor. My memory was terrible, my head felt foggy and I was tired all the time. It was months and months before I saw a doctor and then a simple blood test showed that my B12 levels were severely depleted. After a course of B12 injections, I felt like a functioning human being again and was amazed at how big a role diet played in regards to mental health and at how silly I’d been for not seeing the doctor earlier.

Permanent Hearing Loss

In 2009, after 13 years of playing in bands, I got a hearing check-up. Turns out I had permanent hearing loss in both ears. You know what would have prevented this? Earplugs. If we are ever having a conversation in a noisy room and I am nodding and smiling a lot, I’m sorry but I probably can’t hear anything you are saying.

Chronic Tennis Elbow

I first noticed I had an achy left arm in 2008. It got worse in 2009 and I mentioned it to a doctor, he didn’t seem very interested and advised me to take painkillers. Thanks Doc. It got really, really bad, I couldn’t lie on it and playing guitar was really painful. I finally went to a physio in 2010 but it was too late. The physio treatment helped a lot but it will probably never get completely better, my brain just gets better at ignoring it – amazing thing the brain.

Fructose Malabsorption

I don’t want to ruin your lunch or dinner, so suffice to say I put up with escalating IBS symptoms for about six years before I went to a specialist in 2010 to get it checked out. By the time I went I felt like the living dead and was convinced I had bowel cancer. I was falling asleep at work, I was grumpy, I had really low B12 levels again and my terrible memory was worrying me. Turns out I couldn’t digest fructose. After coming to terms with all the foods that I could never eat again and changing my diet, I got better. I felt so much better that I couldn’t understand how I had put up with feeling awful for so long.

Chronic Ear Infection

In mid-2011 I got water in my ear at the gym, I got an ear infection. I thought it would get better, it got worse. Again I didn’t see the doctor straight away to get it checked. At the end of 2012 I still had problems with my right ear and after nasal steroids, x-rays and allergy tests it’s not clear (haha) what’s actually wrong with it.

Chronic Leg Pain

My leg started hurting in mid 2012, I ignored it. I ignored it for about 8 months until my foot started cramping and going numb. So I went to the physio – the physio is amazing and slowly fixing the problem, but instead of going to one or two physio sessions early on, you know when it first started hurting I now have to go weekly (which is expensive and painful) until it gets better.

You may have noticed a trend here: lots of the health problems I have could have been treated or diagnosed at much, much earlier stages. Also it seems that I am completely incapable of taking my own advice or learning from experience.

Deep down I think I continue to avoid early treatment because I still think I’m an invincible young person whose body will bounce back from anything life throws at it. And I don’t want anyone to think I’m a hypochondriac. I’ve also avoided spending money on specialists in case, you know, it really is just nothing. But in all these cases, not seeking early treatment has been much more expensive. It’s clichéd, but looking after your health is an investment, it shouldn’t be something you have to think twice about.

I don’t think I’m the only person who thinks like this (or who is scared of being seen as a hypochondriac). Many of us are scared of getting early treatment or advice because we don’t want to have someone confirm there’s something wrong with us; that our bodies are faulty, that they need maintenance, that our bodies decay.

And health problems are for old people, right?

Right?

Clemmie Wetherall is a radio producer on 3CR Community Radio’s ‘Women on the Line’ program, and a Communications intern and Masters of Journalism student at the University of Melbourne. Follow her on Twitter @c_wetherall or follow Women on the Line @WomenOnTheLine.

Although identifying people and actions as feminine or masculine has long been commonplace in North American culture, more and more people are stepping out of the binary gender system. Non-gender conformists and those transitioning from one gender to another are having to identify and be addressed as something they are not for lack of an alternative. Research suggests that removing the traditional male and female identifiers may create all sorts of positive changes within society, and not just for the minority.

Identifying as transgender is not an easy feat, especially for youth. A national U.S. survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network in 2006 found 90 percent of transgender respondents reported hearing negative remarks about one’s gender, specifically remarks about not being feminine or masculine enough. Introducing a gender neutral pronoun to everyday language may, albeit slowly, rid the traditional assumption that matching sex and gender is necessary, making education a more enjoyable experience for the currently harassed youth.

Alongside hallway harassment, eradicating the familiar ‘he’ and ‘she’ pronouns may even be beneficial inside the classroom. One study analysed gender stereotypes by creating a writing assignment on two identical essays, one said to be narrated by a female and the other said to be narrated by a male. The students who were assigned the ‘male’ essay deemed the narrator to be heroic and described him with high esteem. The students who were assigned the ‘female’ essay described the narrator as submissive and vulnerable. It can be assumed that by withholding information about the narrator’s gender any preconceived notions of how the narrator should behave would be relieved, creating an opportunity for an interpretation of the essay untainted by gender bias and stereotypes.

Language and the written word are not the only occurrences where male and female gender assignments are used. Binary labels are common requirements for surveys, higher education applications and voter registration forms. Corporations and organisations worldwide are beginning to make changes to be more inclusive of all persons: in 2009, the University of Michigan Student Assembly passed a resolution to rid gender-specific pronouns from the university’s Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities, Google+ offers ‘other’ as a gender assignment and Australians can identify as ‘indeterminate’ on their passports.

With a third gender pronoun, individuals will be able to identify as their true self, gender-based stereotypes within literature may dissolve, and the possibility to increase learning in the classroom may occur. Some action has taken place but more is still needed, and with these benefits coinciding with the change, there is no reason not to.

This is an amended version of Making a Case for a Third Gender Pronoun published on the medes, an online multimedia publication that seeks to bring awareness to the gamut of human rights issues which receive little to no attention through conventional media outlets. The medes is a project of Media Action Network (@MediaActionNet).

Kristen Francis is a co-founder and Chair of the non-profit Media Action Network and staff writer for the medes. Contact her at kristen@mediaactionnetwork.org.

Currently, we’re seeking a broad range of stories that explore anything to do with health – whether that be mental health, the health system, health services, disability, fitness, nutrition or physical health matters.

Do you have something to add to The Biggest Loser and fat-shaming debate?

Are you passionate about funding and program cuts in the Victorian public health sector?

Is sexual education prominent enough in our schools?

How are our busy work lives affecting our bodies and minds?

We’re looking for features, opinion pieces, interviews and more.

Pitch your ideas to features@wemattermedia.com by April 3.

Just before the walk I heard something new: some women see SlutWalk as a way of reclaiming the word ‘slut’; reclaiming as in stripping it of its negative connotations. Apparently women who like to have a lot of sex want to be able to be called sluts and call themselves sluts without it being an insult or put down.

They want SlutWalk to be both an anti-victim blaming protest and a promiscuity pride parade. While these are both important feminist issues, I’m convinced that they are so disparate that one event cannot be about both.

‘Slut’, to paraphrase several dictionaries, means ‘a woman who has many sexual partners’. Women who want to reclaim the word, including one of Slutwalk’s founders, don’t really want to change the definition; they want to change the qualifier that comes in brackets before or after the definition: derogatory.

Oppressed social groups reclaiming words is not without precedent. One of the most well known instances is the reappropriation of ‘queer’ in the 1990s. ‘Queer’ appeared in English in the sixteenth century and was first used to describe anything not quite right. Sometime in the nineteenth century, people with money trouble were said to be ‘on Queer Street’.

In the early twentieth century, it began to be applied to men who displayed unacceptable forms of masculinity, which were: being effeminate (no matter who they wanted to have sex with), having receptive penetrative sex with other men, being trans, and cross-dressing. Men who did the penetrating were called ‘straight’. (Mmmkay.)

Then, in 1990 there was a gay pride march in New York. Someone distributed flyers entitled Queers Read This and an organisation called Queer Nation was created. From then on, non-heterosexual people used it more and more to describe themselves. Academia joined in, creating new fields of study: ‘queer theory’, ‘queer cinema’, ‘queer studies’. And so we can now say that ‘queer’ has been reclaimed, although this is a still contested idea. (If you want to know more, go here and here.)

Oppressed social groups reclaiming their derogatory labels is problematic. No matter what vocabulary they choose, those who oppress and discriminate will continue to use these terms derogatively. ‘Queer’ is still used as an insult. ‘Gay’ has a new(ish) life as a catch-all descriptor for all things stupid. ‘Nigger’ has never been reclaimed outside of extremely specific contexts.

As for words with negative connotations that are used to describe women, the situation is far beyond the help of a token reclamation. Any word used to refer to women is a potential insult. And it’s not just the obvious ones—slut, bitch, whore—that are the problem. People—not just men—call men and boys ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ to insult them, to say that they are less. By merely being associated with the female, men are denigrated.

The underlying problem is that in our culture, women are simply valued less than men. We are considered less capable, less intelligent and less powerful; essentially a lesser type of human. This is what patriarchy is. If we are less for simply being female, women’s social oppression is a much bigger problem than a single example of the insulting words directed at us and the one issue of sexual empowerment.

Sexual empowerment is part of feminism. It is about liberating all of us—women, men and everyone in between—from thinking that how a woman approaches her sex life is an acceptable method of ascribing value to her as a person. However, focusing on the approaches of those with high sex drives, or who have sex outside relationships, or who maintain non-monogamous relationships, by trying to reclaim ‘slut’ is only part of this story.

The urge to reclaim terminology, I think, often comes from a wish to overcome one’s own internalised discrimination. If you can label your choices with something supportive, it’s easier to convince yourself that you and the way you feel are OK. It’s an internal problem and not one that will be solved by feeling vindicated by society.

There will always be people who don’t approve of our choices. There will always be times when we feel that maybe we’re not making the right ones. There will always be people eager to help us feel that way. Overcoming these feelings is a challenge deeper than finding the right label for ourselves. My thinking is this: if you enjoy having sex with many partners, do it. If you feel guilty about enjoying it, that’s something you need to work out with yourself before you try to change how other people think.

So, yes, sexual empowerment is one part of feminism. But fighting rape-victim-blaming is quite another.

Rape is not sex. Rape is violence. It is born of hate and anger. Linking discussions of rape and victim blaming to discussions of women’s sexual freedom reinforces the idea that how a woman presents herself and how she approaches her sex life is connected with whether or not she is raped. It makes a woman’s sex life relevant in a dialogue about victim blaming.

Therefore, I believe that any discussion about rape that links it with sex is deeply misguided. That this link is enmeshed in the founding of SlutWalk, an invaluable global event that has been instrumental in kick-starting an unprecedented discussion on blaming victims of sexual assault, is a chilling reminder of how deeply entrenched these sexist ideas are, even in the minds of thoughtful feminists.

I can’t imagine how confusing the competing narratives around SlutWalk must be for people who are less acquainted with feminist ideas than I am, and as a result it’s not surprising that it struggles to gain support in some quarters.

SlutWalk is problematic and always will be, just as discussions of feminism and sexism and patriarchy and society are always problematic. Humans are not rational; we live in big, messy, overlapping communities and societies. It’s my opinion that SlutWalk should focus on fighting victim blaming and remove sexual empowerment from its mandate. But that’s not up to me. It’s up to the big, messy community around it.

Sarah Jansen writes fiction about relationships and odd situations, and ranty blog posts about feminism, religion and the arts. Her online profile is at sarahjansen.com and you can follow her on Twitter @sarahjansencom.

We’ve come such a long way, but there is still so far to go.

Despite our advancements in representation, or perhaps because of them, women’s voices in the media continue to be marginalised and denigrated. We are often segregated by our sex – female-indentifying individuals are put in boxes, or indeed newspaper sections; our work is literally painted pink, and those of us with children are reminded constantly of our biological functioning and how that makes us different.

A recent example of this marginalisation occurred as The Age made its historic move from broadsheet to tabloid size. The website, too, underwent a transformation. The new Age online is cleaner, with easily defined columns and sections of content. If you are one of the 588,000-strong audience of the Daily Life subset it would have taken you some time to find its section – and then discovered that it had been re-branded under the banner of ‘Women’s Perspective’.

Cue social media shit-storm.

The site, much beloved by women and men, had been reduced to a niche interest, 1950s style news-lite afterthought. (Note: Daily Life the publication is still called Daily Life, it was only the section header in The Age that had been re-named, which ‘was not Daily Life’s decision,’ says editor Sarah Oakes.) Daily Life is ‘proudly female-biased’ in terms of contributors and content, for the purpose of redressing the imbalance in the rest of the media. The problem with Women’s Perspective was all in the name. It suggests, ‘You’ve read the real news, now here are some women yacking on about women’s stuff.’ It suggests that women’s issues and interests are only important to women, that only women have these perspectives, and it suggests that only women read and write for DL. All of which are false, and it reveals the sexism behind the decision to label DL as such.

It only took about a day for Women’s Perspective to be changed back to Daily Life, but one thing about the reformatting remains – its physical position on the website. To find DL one must scroll past nine other sections: Federal, Editor’s Picks, Video, Business (including Executive Style), Entertainment, Lifestyle, and Food & Wine. DL is still essentially a flimsy lifestyle blog by The Age’s standards.

While placement and ill-fated branding marginalised the voices of the women contributors (and even the men contributors writing on ‘women’s issues’) of DL, there are other media industries in which this occurs.

Take the term, ‘mummy blogger’, for women who write blogs about life and motherhood. That writing about something as profound, stimulating and difficult as motherhood is reduced to this babyish and light-sounding label goes to show how much the mother’s voice is valued, even if some bloggers apply it to themselves (hello, internalised sexism!). There is no ‘daddy blogger’ label, and if there is, it is nowhere near as widespread as the maternal equivalent. A man who writes about fatherhood – like the man who publically pushes a pram – is regarded as a shining example of manhood, a rarity, as a man going above and beyond the call of duty – when, really, they’re performing the absolute basics of parenting. When the woman writes about motherhood, she is seen as irrelevant, unimportant, or worse: fussy, emotional, and too bodily and physical with all of her functionings. ‘Mummy’ removes her sexual agency, her autonomy, as she is identified by her relationship to her child. Her writing about her work (as child-rearing is work) is denigrated while her male or childless counterparts are praised and celebrated for writing about ‘real’, relatable issues.

Consider also ‘chick lit’. It refers to a genre of fiction in which women write about womanhood (i.e., their LIFE), often lightheartedly. But publishers also apply the term far more liberally, using it to categorise any fiction written by women. Recently, the famous American Modernist Sylvia Plath’s novel ‘The Bell Jar’ was reissued to celebrate 50 years since first publication. It takes one with only the slightest knowledge of Plath to know that her work would never have been considered chick lit. Plath is perhaps most well known for her internal struggles with mental issues, much of which is popularly extracted from her poetry and prose. Yet, on the 50^th reissue, the cover design for the book was positively chick lit – a red cover featuring an image of a woman applying powder to her face, her red, slightly smiling lips reflected in her compact mirror, with the title in delicate, cursive script. It’s an overly feminine and commercial representation, vastly different from the actual content of the book. I use this example because it demonstrates publishers’ zeal to categorise women’s writing – even incorrectly – as chick lit.

The problem for women has always been that the genre lacks the ‘credibility’ of men’s writing. The genre where women writers make the most money – romance – is likewise denigrated as non-serious, easy, fluff – the stuff you’d be embarrassed to read on the train. When women do write ‘like men’, publishers either want them to write under a male pseudonym or gender ambiguous initials because of a bias against women that doesn’t believe they can write ‘serious’ novels. Otherwise, publishers market the work as chick lit. Women writers either have to masquerade as men, or dress up their work as hyper-feminine. Genuine chick lit is considered unimportant because it lacks ‘masculine’ intellectualism – the bias of which can be traced back to the Cartesian dualism that values the mind (masculine) over the body (feminine). There is little room for the woman writer.

The terms, ‘Women’s Perspective’, ‘mummy blogger’ and ‘chick lit’ have several aspects in common: they serve to infantalise, de-sexualise and de-intellectualise women’s voices. These terms make the woman’s words passive and non-threatening. Nothing she produces is serious, critical, cerebral or aggressive; her work can be safely tucked away into a niche corner, despite women being a majority – 51% of the world’s population.

Her place is reinforced as domestic and social. On The Age website, Daily Life/Women’s Perspective is kept far away from the Business section and its telling blog, Executive Style. Exec Style is a men’s lifestyle section without the too-feminine sounding ‘lifestyle’ label. All men are executives, apparently.

The marginalisation of women’s voices needs to stop. We need to stop defining a writer or media maker’s work on the basis of their gender or familial status. This does not mean abolishing women-only or women-biased spaces, such as Daily Life, as these are important for redressing the current underrepresentation in the mainstream. However we need to stop considering women as a niche, fringe or lesser group – we must recognise the common humanity of male and female-identifying individuals, and the common worth of their voices, experience and contributions.

When we talk about women, we must be including trans women, queer women and women of colour. We must avoid gendering content and using cheap, inaccurate stereotypes and essentialisms.

We must strive for equal representation. Organisations must know their stats and, if a bias against women exists, actively do something about it. Challenge the fallacious meritocracy that under-represents everyone but straight white men. This involves encouraging more women to become media makers, training them, actively seeking their work and making space for their content. This is not about placating noisy feminists; this is about recognising human value, and making our media landscape better because of it.

Jessica Alice edits poetry for Voiceworks magazine, produces Spoken Word and Women on the Line for 3CR 855AM, and co-presents the feminist podcast Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am. She blogs at hersute.tumblr.com and tweets @jessica_alice_.

In protest of gender stereotyping and discrimination, some are taking extreme measures. In 2011, Toronto-based couple Kathy Witterick and David Stocker chose not to reveal the gender of their child Storm, instead choosing to raise Storm as gender-neutral in the hope of eradicating all the gender-based pressures and expectations imposed on us from birth. Needless to say, this “experiment” prompted a wave of criticism. Dr. Eugene Beresin, director of training in child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital claimed raising a child as genderless “sets them up for not knowing who they are”.

“We all have sexual identity,” said Beresin. “The mission to have masculine and feminine traits more equalized and more flexible and not judgmental is awesome in a utopian community. But we take pride in our sexual identity.”

The strength and longevity of the feminist movement in particular suggests that women take pride in their sexual identity – but, of course, it’s complicated. There seems to exist a tug-o-war between wanting to celebrate one’s womanhood and wanting to deny it, naming it inconsequential in regards to ability. Women can do just as men do. There’s a push for equality, but at the same time, a celebration of difference, which can lead to confusion for many people wary of labelling themselves as feminists.

Emily Maguire in her Sunday Life article ‘We Can Do It!’ published on February 3^rd calls attention to the men who are identifying as feminists, which brings about its own problems. For many, feminism is synonymous with advocating against sexism. However, some feminists are protective of the movement and have concerns about the possibility of its most predominant voices coming to belong to men. According to Michael Flood, senior lecturer at the University of Woolongong, men speaking on women’s issues are generally taken more seriously than their female counterparts because they appear less biased. It’s a convoluted, political minefield.

While most of the discussion about gender centres on women’s issues – women as the oppressed, women as the empowered – men are more than the symbolic representation of a patriarchal system. Being a man is not without its own pressures and expectations. In Australia, men are four times more likely to take their own lives than women – a thought-provoking discrepancy. To what extent is maleness and all that comes with it playing a part in this statistic?

My hope is that this month We Matter Media will serve as a platform for intelligent debate and discussion on gender matters where we recognise the significant steps that have been taken towards gender equality, as well as the many cultural issues yet to be resolved.

Laura James is the Features Editor at We Matter Media. You can follow her on Twitter @the_prattler.

If you would like to contribute to Gender month on We Matter Media, please forward your pitch to features@wemattermedia.com.

A fair court system is the basis of a democratic society. In Australia, a crucial component of the courts is skilled representation by a lawyer who is able to put an individual’s best case forward. This is particularly important in criminal and family matters where the complexity of the legal system requires the skilled knowledge of a legal specialist. In Victoria, funding is provided for those that cannot afford legal representation through Victorian Legal Aid, an organisation which ensures access to justice for marginalised and economically disadvantaged Victorians. However, recent changes to eligibility for grants to fund a solicitor and barrister to represent an individual in court threaten one of the most basic principles of our legal system, a right to a fair trial.

In a nutshell, the changes made to VLA eligibility guidelines, which came into effect earlier this year, work to limit the amount of funding individuals can receive in various proceedings. For family law matters, parents can now only be funded for trial preparation and not for representation at a trial unless the other party has a privately funded or pro bono lawyer. In civil law matters, a grant of assistance will not be made to people who have fines of less than $5,000. Perhaps most significantly, in criminal law matters, instructing solicitors’ fees are capped to two half-days with only limited exceptions. Previously, instructing solicitors were funded for the duration of the trial. These cuts emerge due to constraints within VLA’s budgets caused by an increase in demands for its services without any increase in funding from the state government. The cuts have been introduced to address a possible budget deficit of $3.1 million in the next financial year.

Already the effects of the changes to the eligibility guidelines have been felt in the court system. Two serious criminal trials have been put on hold as the presiding judges both felt the representation provided to the accused persons was inadequate. A double murder trial was postponed by the judge until VLA could provide the defendant a solicitor for the duration of the trial. An instructing solicitor usually works with the client from the time they are arrested to the end of the trial and assists the barrister to prepare and structure the defence. In this particular case, the defence had a complex task which involved up to 78 prosecution witnesses. The barrister representing the defendant threatened to withdraw from the case for ethical reasons if the grant for the stay was unsuccessful. In ordering the postponement, the judge stated that a fair trial could not be guaranteed unless the legal team was expanded to include an instructing solicitor. Another less complex case was stayed when the judge agreed with the defence barrister’s application that the funding of a solicitor for one day of the criminal trial was inadequate.

The VLA states that trials should not proceed if they cannot be fair to the accused. Further, VLA claims that people are not going to court facing serious charges without at least one barrister to represent them and a solicitor to prepare their case. While this may be the case, it is troubling that the judiciary has already seen cases where there have been inadequacies in a defendant’s legal representation that have required trials to be postponed indefinitely. Cuts to VLA funding have put the organisation in a difficult position, however the changes to the eligibility guidelines and decision to stop funding crucial services is a worrying response. As identified by the Law Institute of Victoria, the real answer may be for VLA to join the call to secure more funding from the state government to save the essential service. Otherwise, access to justice and the right to a fair trial could become a privilege for the few.

Jessica Dawson Field is an arts graduate and current law student with a keen interest in social justice and human rights.

In recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8, We Matter Media will be featuring stories throughout March that explore the theme of gender.

We’re looking for features, interviews, videos, comics, poems, fiction and audio that bring to light any of the myriad of issues associated with being male, female or somewhere in between. We’re seeking stories about social roles, gender identity and much more.

Can men be feminists?

Is growing up in a gender-neutral environment liberating or confusing?

Who is speaking out about the gender divide? Who is trying to make changes? Is there such a thing?

What’s the significance of genres like chick-lit and mummy blogs?

Do equity, equality, safety and equal development opportunities exist between sexes?

If you’ve come across something in the media that made you think about the similarities or differences between genders or if you feel that there are gaping holes and issues going unaddressed, we’d like to hear from you. Are the attitudes and prejudices highlighted in the media a fair representation of what it’s like living as a man or a woman today?

Please send story ideas and drafts to features[at]wemattermedia.com by Sunday 3rd March.

Micro-finance is the currently popular trend in poverty alleviation of getting small loans to those who are impoverished, typically through a non-profit or government agency. By doing so, individuals gain access to money that formerly would not have been available. Micro-financing is very popular nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, there is a growing amount of literature that suggests that micro-finance is not the boost it seems.

Given the socio-economic situation of El Alto, people do not do regular maintenance on their cars, only bringing them into the shop when they are on their last legs. Due to Luisa’s lack of consistent business and reliable income she is often compelled to use her loan to buy basic necessities for her family. In doing so, she spends her loan money on things that do not get a monetary return, forcing her into further debt. Luisa is not unique in this regard. Academic studies carried out in Africa, Vietnam and many other countries find loan recipients in similar circumstances.

Micro-finance organisations are targeted towards those in the ‘informal economy’, those who carry out work off the books – such as garment makers, farmers, or craftspeople. More often than not, these individuals are from impoverished areas and uneducated in the ways of business. In Luisa’s home country, it is estimated that 60 to 80 percent of working-age people work in the informal economy. Almost 70 percent live below the poverty line.

Afforded the opportunity to be given money, the individuals take it. However, a major consideration in understanding the plight of these individuals and the role of micro-finance is education. Ideally, these individuals receive money (typically $US 50 – $US 100) after they take training courses in debt repayment and accepted business practices. Too often this training is skipped over, as are the contracts individuals sign saying that they will use their loans for business purposes only. A study in Bolivia found that roughly 40 percent of the women who took on loans used the money for things unrelated to business practices like food, school supplies and clothing for their children.

Spending like this has no opportunity for debt payback (i.e. is not a technical financial investment) and leads to those that borrow to become over-indebted, meaning that a customer is in a constant struggle to repay on time, finding themselves making heavy sacrifices in order to do so. One study in Mozambique found that 30 percent of borrowers were over-indebted. The very poor are more likely to take out micro-loans but are the people in the worst position to assume such a risk, having the most to lose if their businesses fail.

Another problem arises in the relationships between men and women, wives and husbands. In many countries where micro-financing flourishes, women are disproportionately disadvantaged and, as such, are targeted by financing programs. This is because they have a better record in debt repayment and a higher likelihood than their male counterparts to use the money for their families and communities. Women’s empowerment is a key facet of micro-financing websites and it is estimated that 85 percent of micro-finance customers are women.

While on the surface, this seems like a fantastic opportunity, the reality is that it upsets the culture of household relations. In many economically-depressed cities, the population is growing as more people move with the hope of gaining employment. This increase in population causes an increase in labourers who now see smaller wages as their numbers grow. Many men lose their jobs. This puts pressure on women to take on loans, which challenges the position of the man as the main breadwinner and head of the household. With their role of provider now called into question, many men resort to alcoholism, violence and even abandon their families.

These issues are hard to see from the surface, but a deeper look shows that many women and families are harmed by the micro-finance system. There are positives, however, and this research is not meant to dissuade involvement in the system. It is meant to offer more understanding of a very complex issue. If you are looking to loan money through an institution, it is important to know who is getting the money, the training they are getting for their debt and how exactly the money will be used.

This is an amended version of Micro-Finance and the Issue of Payment published on the medes, an online multimedia publication that seeks to bring awareness to the gamut of human rights issues which receive little to no attention through conventional media outlets. the medes is a project of the Media Action Network (@MediaActionNet).

AJ Oscarson is a graduate student in applied anthropology at the University of Colorado, Denver. In January 2012, he co-founded the non-profit Media Action Network as a way to bring attention to social justice, and is currently Creative Lede and staff writer at the medes. Follow him @AJOscarson.

even with their lips sewn

their mouths speak.

- Jake Dennis

Alarmingly, the last resort for many whose cries for help are ignored is self-harm. From early twentieth century American suffragettes like Alice Paul, who went on hunger strikes, to self-immolating Vietnamese Buddhist monks like Thich Quang Duc, people suffering from human rights violations have turned to self-harm to open the public’s eyes to their plight.

In this new millennium, as close to home as Christmas Island, and as recently as last year, reports surfaced that asylum seekers and refugees continue to self-harm and hunger strike in response to the poor conditions under which they are trying to survive. In over-crowded offshore detention centres like Nauru and Manus Island, the living conditions are such that the United Nations considers them a violation of human rights. For these people the promise of timely processing and release is a fantasy.

Photographs released in November 2010 showed detainees on Christmas Island who had sewn their lips together in protest. Those images remain with us. The silence of their protest is as deafening as the most cacophonous riot, perhaps more so, because instead of an unruly boisterous mass of protesters, you have the slow mute starvation of a few desperate and courageous people.

We need to understand refugees not as an easy-to-stereotype mass, but instead adopt a way of seeing that is open to the complexities of individual situations. The characterisation of asylum seekers as unsanitary, unintelligent, and unruly “boat people” denies their humanity. It is easy to argue that Indigenous Australians and British colonisers both accessed this island by boat, and that legal processes are not always an option for third world inhabitants, but what cannot be characterised as argument is the fact that the mental and physical health of refugees seeking a better life can only deteriorate as a result of the current system of detention.

Jake Dennis is a poet, jazz singer, and freelance journalist published in Art Monthly Australia, The Disappearing, Drum Perth, MeDeFacts, Page Seventeen, and Wet Ink. He blogs at poetofjazz.wordpress.com and can be found on Twitter @poetofjazz.