Zora Simic

Domestic violence and rape are not easy topics to write or read about. It’s not just because of the subject matter itself, as grim and distressing as the details can be. The writer must grapple with centuries of cultural baggage, competing theorisations and research paradigms, and the politicisation of these issues, for better or worse. They have responsibilities to those affected, including amo ... (read more)

How do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or anti-sex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns. Others distinguish between a ‘good’ #MeToo (focused on eradicating sexual hara ... (read more)

Abortion was big news in Australia in 1973. In May, a bill was introduced to Federal Parliament that, if passed, would have allowed women in the ACT to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester. So intense was public interest in this issue that one MP suggested televising the debate. On the day of the vote, activists inside the Women’s Embassy – a tent protest clearly inspired by the Aborig ... (read more)

When Anne Summers first met Germaine Greer at a raucous house party in Balmain in the early 1970s, she threw up in front of her after too many glasses of Jim Beam. Almost fifty years later, she muses that perhaps that early encounter was one of the reasons why they ‘never really connected’. After reading Summers’ latest memoir, Unfettered and Alive, in tandem with Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s Ger ... (read more)