An academic says hostage diplomacy is a well-known tactic of the Iranian regime and New Zealanders should not go to the country.

Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray are understood to have been detained for months after entering Iran.

The New Zealand government negotiated for the safe release of the pair but has remained tight-lipped about the details.

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A senior lecturer from Massey University who was born and raised in Iran, Dr Negar Partow, said there was a pattern of this kind of action in Iran.

However, she told RNZ Morning Report it was not necessarily naive for the couple to visit the country.

When they arrived in July it was much quieter than what it became when the unrest started in September after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained by morality police for allegedly not covering her hair properly.

However, travelling in a Jeep — a US brand — might have created suspicions, she said.

NZ not especially targeted
The move against the New Zealanders was not especially targeted at this country, she said, with as many as 70 nations having citizens in Iranian prisons.

“The fact that Iran entered a revolutionary phase complicated the situation and gave the Islamic Republic the opportunity to use them and to create a hostage diplomacy. This is not particular to Aotearoa. They do it all around the world,” she said.

People with dual citizenship, diplomats, activists, and human rights and environmental advocates were especially vulnerable to attention from Iranian authorities.

If the couple had been focusing on environmental concerns that may have made them a target, she said.

“As the Islamic Republic becomes more and more challenged and de-legitimised by this revolution, these hostage crises will increase and they will use any opportunity as a bargaining chip.”

There have been conflicting reports on now the couple were detained.

Dr Partow said Iran used different models, including imprisonment or being detained in a safe house and not being allowed to communicate.

Richwhite and Thackwray would have had their passports confiscated and their cellphones removed with their Instagram posts stopping in July.

She believed they were not put in prison.

Tepid resoponse by NZ
Asked about the tepid response by the New Zealand government to the unrest in Iran, she said the government was trying to do a delicate balancing act while the couple were being detained.

Many Western governments had to resort to hostage diplomacy with Iran.

While Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has warned against visiting Iran due to the potential for violence, Dr Partow said it was important to remember the violence was being perpetrated by the security agencies not the protesters.

She said now that the couple had been freed, she was hopeful Aotearoa would take a stronger stance.

“Yes we have been too kind but I’m hoping that as we come out of this period and everybody’s back to normal diplomacy we will take stronger action against the Islamic republic,” she said.

“As the prime minister mentioned as well, this was a delicate diplomatic situation … we did have two New Zealanders inside Iran detained and I think that [strong criticism of Iran] would create more complications.”

Expulsion of ambassador
The expulsion of the ambassador, campaigning for oil embargoes, speaking out publicly to support the rights of Iranian women and human rights lobbying at the United Nations were among measures New Zealand should be considering.

“Now that we have been the victim of hostage crisis in the Islamic Republic that should give us much more importance into the project and we should actually work on it,” she said.

As for advice for potential visitors, she said: “Definitely not. Iran is in the middle of a revolution.”

Ordinary citizens were not in a position to offer help to foreign tourists and it was far better that they stayed away.

She said as the revolution approached the six-week mark, the response from authorities to the demonstrations was becoming even more violent and oppressive.

Asked about Act’s move to block a motion calling for a unified condemnation of Iran’s oppression of women’s rights unless Greens MP Golriz Ghahraman apologised for interrupting a speech made by party leader David Seymour in the House, she said it should be remembered that the Iranian government was now killing children and this was a more important consideration.

Deputy PM pleased couple released
The government is remaining tight lipped about what it took to secure the release of the couple.

Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said Iran was a dangerous place and New Zealanders should obey the travel warnings not to go there.

Consular officials around the world did not judge New Zealanders who got into trouble —  instead they got on with the job of helping them regain their freedom.

“I’m just pleased we’ve been able to get them out.”

Robertson told RNZ First Up he could not comment specifically on the couple’s case — but he said it was important to understand the customs and rules of other countries — and to understand whether you should be there at all.

He said no doubt the pair would reflect on what they have been through.

Call for NZ govt to take strong stand
An Iranian-Kurdish journalist now living in New Zealand said the government needed to do more regarding the actions of Iran’s government.

Behrouz Boochani, who was granted refugee status in New Zealand in July 2020, said New Zealand should speak out loudly against the Iranian regime.

He said the current unrest was a revolution and was a call for regime change in Iran.

While there had been mass protests in the past, this year felt different because it involved more people and more cities.

He said he was delighted the couple had been freed. However, the Iranian community in New Zealand had been disappointed in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the unrest in Iran to this point.

He said since Mahsa Amini’s death another 250 people had been killed, including more than 20 children.

“So we expect the New Zealand government to strongly condemn this violence and strongly support the protesters on the street and the people of Iran.”

The US and Australia have criticised the Iranian government’s actions and it was time New Zealand followed suit.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Philippine media described him as “Steady Eddie,” a warrior and survivor, and an accidental hero of the world-renowned People Power revolution who later became probably the country’s best president.

But Fidel V. Ramos, or FVR, was also a study of contradictions.

Also called Eddie by his friends, Ramos died on the last day of July, a month after the namesake son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted in the popular uprising in 1986 that Ramos led, took his oath as the new president in what observers believed was an election that was far from fair due to voting and election irregularities.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the Philippine elections

The former armed forces chief died at 94 from a heart condition and dementia, unimaginable to his admirers who saw him as “cool,” “steady,” athletic, maintaining his military bearing until his old age.

He was also a multi-tasking workaholic who played golf and jogged regularly while briefing journalists or preparing for his next travel to the communities under a rigorous schedule.

He succeeded Corazon “Cory” Aquino as president of the Philippines from 1992 to 1998 and was instrumental in boosting the Southeast Asian developing country’s growth through economic policies of deregulation, liberalisation and foreign investment, his Social Reform Agenda that reduced poverty and an anti-oligarch and anti-monopoly stance.

The only Protestant president of the predominantly Roman Catholic country was also known for his transition from a military general who fought leftist and right-wing dissidents and entering into peace agreements with Islamic separatist groups and Communist insurgents.

Contrast to ruthless military chief
His commendable turn as president after Aquino was a contrast to his past as a hardline, ruthless Marcos military commander who led a security force that rounded up dissidents and violated human rights.

His leadership also saw the harassment, incarceration and exile of Aquino’s husband Benigno, who was assassinated on his return to the country in 1983.

The confluence of events in the years that followed, until the 1986 uprising, was marked by Ramos’ decision to break away from Marcos and to support Aquino, who was cheated massively in the elections.

He and his military comrades, along with Catholic bishops, called on Filipinos to mount a peaceful revolution, making him a people power hero.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipino journalist Manny Mogato, who covered Ramos when he headed the Defence Department and the military, said in a social media post that the late president was “a man of action… he even (did) push-ups with 300 soldiers who took part in an attempt to overthrow Cory Aquino”.

Ramos neutralised rogue soldiers who attempted multiple coups against Aquino during her presidency.

Ramos attended the US military academy at West Point, fought in the Korean War in the 1950s as a platoon leader and led the Philippine contingent in the late 1960s in the Vietnam War.

‘Best president ever’
“Ramos was the best president the country ever had, guarded democracy, broke monopolies and made peace, ending right-wing rebellion, half finishing the Muslim secessionist war and almost reaching a peace deal with Maoist-led rebels,” Mogato said.

“FVR left behind a legacy of peace, stability and prosperity Filipinos now enjoy.”

Anastacio Corpuz, an 80-year-old war veteran, said he was saddened by Ramos’ passing, saying that he should have continued as a vocal authority and statesman.

“Through the years, he was always vocal against corruption in government and abuses by the political elite — including the new government under the dictator’s son,” he lamented.

“He will be greatly missed.”

Diana G. Mendoza filed this report for Pacific Island Times in Guam. Republished with permission.

Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama has visited Guava village in the heartland of the Panguna mine in Central Bougainville to pay his respects to the resting place of Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) leader Francis Ona.

It was the first time President Toroama had visited Guava in 25 years after the 1997 Roreinang coup that split the BRA into two factions.

Ona, who was president and supreme commander of the BRA, favoured a “fight to the last man’’ strategy.

• READ MORE: Bougainville war and peace

The other faction, headed by his second-in-command Joseph Kabui, wanted a peaceful solution to the Bougainville Civil War.

President Toroama, who was then the BRA’s chief of defence, sided with Kabui and so began the peace talks that would result in a ceasefire and the eventual signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001.

Ona remained in Panguna with his Mekamui faction.

“As a young man, in 1989 I joined many others in the Bougainville Civil War,” Toroama said.

“We were not called, nor were we recruited.

‘Revolutionary ideals’
“We simply believed in Francis Ona’s revolutionary ideals to protect the land and our people,’’ Toroama said.

“Within the first 18 months, we had closed the Panguna mine and began our fight for political independence.

“We started the revolution with bows and arrows in 1989 but towards the end we were launching offensives against the security forces with better equipment and tactics.

“From 1989 to 1997 we gave our lives to protect Francis Ona and his dreams of independence for Bougainville,’’ President Toroama said.

“I am here today to remind the family of Francis Ona and the people of Guava and Panguna that my commitment to the revolutionary ideals of our leader has not wavered.’’

Republished with permission.

Children should not pay for the sins of their parents. But in some cases, a healthy suspicion of the offspring is needed, notably when it comes to profiting off ill-gotten gains.

It is certainly needed in the case of Filipino politician and presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, who stands to win today if opinion polls are to be believed.

Bongbong’s father was the notorious martial law strongman Ferdinand Marcos; his mother, the avaricious, shoe-crazed Imelda.

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Elected president in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos indulged in murder, torture and looting. He thrived on the terrain of violent, corrupt oligarchic politics, characterised by a telling remark from the dejected Sergio Osmenã Jr, whom he defeated in 1969: “We were outgunned, outgooned, and outgold.”

In 1972, martial law was imposed on the pretext of a failed assassination attempt against the defence secretary, an attack which saw no injuries nor apprehension of suspects. It was only formally lifted in 1981.

Under the blood-soaked stewardship of the Marcos regime, 70,000 warrantless arrests were made, and 4000 people killed.

The Philippines duly declined in the face of monstrous cronyism, institutional unaccountability and graft, becoming one of the poorest in Southeast Asia. While Marcos Sr’s own official salary never rose above US$13,500 a year, he and his cronies made off with $10 billion. (Estimates vary.)

Garish portraits, designer shoes
When revolutionaries took over the Presidential palace, they found garishly ornate portraits, 15 mink coats, 508 couture gowns and more than 3000 pairs of Imelda’s designer shoes.

Fleeing the Philippines in the wake of the “people power” popular insurrection of 1986 led by supporters of Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the Marcoses found sanctuary in the bosom of US protection, taking up residence in Hawai’i.

Opinion polls show that Bongbong is breezing his way to office, a phenomenon that has little to do with his personality, sense of mind, or presence.

A Pulse Asia survey conducted in February showed voter approval at an enviable 60 percent. This would suggest that the various petitions seeking to disqualify him have had little effect on perceptions lost in the miasma of myth and speculation.

All this points to a dark combination of factors that have served to rehabilitate his family’s legacy.

For the student aware of the country’s oligarchic politics, this is unlikely to come as shocking. For one, the Marcoses have inexorably found their way back into politics, making their way through the dynastic jungle.

Imelda, for all her thieving ways, found herself serving in the House of Representatives four times and unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 1992. Daughter Imee became governor of the province of Ilocos Norte in 2010, and has been serving as a senator since 2019.

Contested the vice-presidency – and lost
Marcos Jr followed a similar trajectory, becoming a member of congress and senator and doing so with little distinction. In 2016, he contested the vice-presidency and lost.

Bongbong has already done his father proud at various levels, not least exhibiting a tendency to fabricate his past. On the touchy issue of education, Oxford University has stated at various points that Marcos Jr, while matriculating at St Edmund Hall in 1975, never took a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics — as he claims.

According to the institution’s records, “he did not complete his degree, but was awarded a special diploma in Social Studies in 1978″.

A statement from the Oxford Philippines Society remarks that, “Marcos failed his degree’s preliminary examinations at the first attempt. Passing the preliminary examinations is a prerequisite for continuing one’s studies and completing a degree at Oxford University”.

The issue was known as far back as 1983, when a disturbed sister from the Religious of the Good Shepherd wrote to the university inquiring about the politician’s credentials and received a letter confirming that fact.

Outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, whose own rule has been characterised by populist violence and impunity, has played his role in the rehabilitative process. In 2016, almost three decades after the former dictator died in Hawai’i, Duterte gave permission for Ferdinand Marcos to be buried with full military honours in Manila’s National Heroes’ Cemetery.

The timing of the burial was kept secret, prompting Vice-President Leni Robredo to describe the ceremony as “a thief in the night”.

‘Legitimising’ massive violations of human rights
A coalition of Jesuit groups claimed that the interring of Marcos in Manila “buries human dignity by legitimising the massive violations of human and civil rights… that took place under his regime.” Duterte would have appreciated the mirror-effect of the move, a respectful nod from one human rights abuser to another.

Under his direction, thousands of drug suspects have been summarily butchered.

Bongbong has also taken the cue, rehabilitating his parents using a polished, digital campaign of re-invention that trucks in “golden age” nostalgia and delusion.

Political raw material has presented itself. The gap between the wealthy and impoverished, which his father did everything to widen, has not been closed by successive governments. According to 2021 figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority, 24 percent of Filipinos — some 26 million people — live below the poverty line.

Videos abound claiming that his parents were philanthropists rather than figures of predation. The issue of martial law brutality has all but vanished in the narrative.

Social media and online influencers have managed the growth of this image through a coordinated campaign of disinformation waged across multiple platforms.

Gemma B. Mendoza of the Philippine news platform Rappler has noted the more sinister element of these efforts. Even as the legacy of a family dictatorship is being burnished, the press and critics are being hounded.

Robredo the only challenge
The only movement standing in the way of the Marcos family is Vice-President Robredo, who triumphed over Marcos Jr in 2016. Her hope is a brand of politics nourished by grassroots participation rather than shameless patronage.

The same cannot be said of the political classes who operate on the central principle of Philippine politics: impunity.

This, at least, is how political scientist Dr Aries Arugay, an associate professor of the University of Philippines, sees it: “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.”

The opposite is the case, and as the voters make it to the ballot today, the country, if polls are to be believed, will see another Marcos in the presidential palace.

Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. 

“The world”, declares Laurie Penny on the first page of their new book, “is in the middle of a sexual revolution.” And unlike earlier sexual revolutions, this one is for real — provided we eradicate capitalism, fascism and the patriarchy.

With this call, it’s business as usual for British writer and activist Penny, who has never sugar-coated their feminist and radical politics.

Penny — who is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns — first came to public attention in the 2000s with the blog Penny Red and regular columns in left-leaning outlets like The Guardian and New Statesman.

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A steady stream of books followed, with arresting titles like Unspeakable Things (2014) and Bitch Doctrine (2017), in which Penny dared to call out the sexism of the radical-left circles in which they moved.

Anticipating the first-person feminism of Australia’s Clementine Ford, among others — and updating the 1970s mantra “the personal is political” for a new generation — Penny has often shared difficult and intimate personal experiences, from anorexia to masturbation to sexual assault. And while they have been what would now be described as “extremely online”, they have also gone in person to where the action is, whether taking part in the Occupy movement or travelling to Greece to observe the financial crisis up close.

Given all that Penny has been writing and protesting about for well over a decade, it was inevitable that they would write what could broadly be described as a #MeToo book — indeed, most of their six previous books have been #MeToo books of a kind.

Penny deserves recognition for writing about sex and power in unapologetically feminist terms when mainstream feminism was widely considered to be in the doldrums, passé, and/or no longer necessary.

Still, it’s no longer 2007 — which, as well as being the year Penny started blogging, was also the year that African American activist and survivor Tarana Burke launched the #MeToo movement, her hashtag raising awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault.

Since 2017, when #MeToo went viral and then global, countless words have been written about it by feminists, including Burke, whose memoir Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (2021) is essential reading. Penny is entering a crowded field, inviting the question of what is new and distinctive about the grandiosely titled Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback.

At their best, Penny offers a rousing and enticing prediction for what sits on the other side of the #MeToo era. For Penny, the present moment is one in which “sex and gender are in crisis”. #MeToo is part of a “Great Reckoning” that almost nobody saw coming, because “when it came, it came from women”.

We are now “living through a profound and permanent alteration in what gender means, what sex means, and whose bodies matter”.

Everywhere “women, men and LGBTQ people … are walking quietly away from the expectations posed on them by thousands of years of patriarchy”. The changes underway promise “ways of life that are not based on competition, coercion and dominance but on consent, community and pleasure”.

Yet rather than telling us more about the “paradigm shift” that is remaking “our civilisation”, Penny’s book mostly explains the present moment by covering similar terrain to their earlier titles, with some new piecemeal research and updated terminology.

Frequently, Penny’s declarative mode undercuts rather than generates analysis. The abrupt pivots throughout suggest a book written in some haste. Anecdotal evidence and personal experience drive the narrative and analysis, so much so that Penny’s own journalism is alluded to rather than showcased.

For instance, Penny tells the reader that they have spent years “researching and attempting to understand the mindset behind the incel and ‘men’s rights’ and ‘seduction’ communities” and that the “problem is getting worse”. But rather than properly extrapolate, Penny references a few random studies and concludes with an ode to the heroes of the global pandemic – “not fighters or soldiers”, but “doctors, nurses, care workers and community leaders”.

The flashpoints of sexual and gender politics
There’s no doubting Penny’s ambition. Across 14 chapters, most with an arresting if formulaic opening (“Pain is political, and so is pleasure”; “Heterosexuality is in trouble”; “Sooner or later, every revolution comes down to who does the dishes”), Penny covers the flashpoints of contemporary sexual and gender politics, including #MeToo and the backlash against it.

Much of what is argued is easy to agree with: capitalism exploits some people and bodies more than others; women continue to carry the weight of domestic and caring labour; economic and sexual exploitation are not separate issues, but are intimately linked.

In the chapter focussed on work, Penny refreshingly moves #MeToo beyond the realm of celebrity to other industries, such as hospitality, agriculture and domestic work. They devote the most attention to sex work as paradigmatic of all labour under capitalism.

Yet Penny cuts short rather than enhances another promising thread by focusing on arguments that have been made more powerfully by others. These include sex workers themselves, as showcased in the anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival (2021).

The organising themes of sexual revolution, modern fascism and feminist fightback provide some cohesion, but not in an especially sustained or persuasive fashion.

In Penny’s telling, “modern fascism” is a catch-all term that includes “neo-masculinist” strongmen like Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump and Johnson, the “overwhelmingly White men” who voted for them (a claim in need of some qualifications), incels, the far right, and any man experiencing a crisis or threat to his masculinity.

It is a “brutal political backlash” provoked by “changes in the balance of power between men and women”.

Now, it is clear that authoritarian governments everywhere are much more likely to take away women’s rights than extend them, as Penny covers in a chapter on reproduction that focuses mostly on the US. But to make the case that “modern fascism” is best understood as a backlash against feminism requires more work than Penny is willing to do.

Other feminist thinkers have offered far more probing and genuinely disturbing accounts of contemporary misogyny, including another British journalist Laura Bates, in her book Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pick-up Artists (2020).

The genealogies of #MeToo
Like “modern fascism”, the “feminist fightback” is taken as a given, rather than something to be accounted for or documented. Penny prefers sweeping statements about “the greatest challenge to the social order in this century” coming from

women, girls and queer people, particularly women, girls and queer people of colour, finally coming together to talk about sexual violence and structural abuse of power.

Furthermore, the “feminism” most often referenced is not the left, black or trans feminisms Penny seems most aligned with. It is the “choice”, neoliberal, mainstream feminism she criticises (as have many other feminists in far more encompassing fashion). For a self-proclaimed feminist book, Sexual Revolution is sparsely populated with actual feminists and largely bereft of feminist history. It is as though #MeToo came from nowhere.

Genealogies have been identified and scrutinised by Tania Serisier in her important book Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Sexual Politics (2018), among many others, including Tarana Burke. Yet in place of proper details about “feminist fightback”, we get Penny’s intervention: sexual revolution.

Cognisant that the concept of “sexual revolution” comes with hefty historical and cultural baggage (though not to the extent that they engage with relevant critiques), Penny attempts to rehabilitate it anyway. This sexual revolution, writes Penny, will deal “not just with sexual licence but with sexual liberation” — as though they are the first rather than umpteenth person to make this argument. This “new sexual revolution is a feminist one”.

The idea of sexual revolution as unfinished business is decades old. So are expressions of what a “feminist” sexual revolution might entail. Penny’s update is to advocate for consent as the fundamental basis of the new sexual and economic order. Of course! But if we are at the midpoint of a sexual revolution, as Penny suggests, there is very little sense of positive developments in the sexual sphere.

Instead, Penny’s focus is overwhelmingly on how dire heterosexual relations are and how abhorrent the sexually desiring woman continues to be.

Sexual Revolution is a bulldozer of a book in which Penny opts for full-throttled polemic instead of nuanced analysis at almost every turn. There has always been a place for such books in the feminist canon, and Penny brings flair and spirit to the task. But beyond its potential value as a primer for contemporary feminism, it is difficult to discern who Sexual Revolution is written for.

I suspect most readers are already familiar with “patriarchy”, “rape culture”, “toxic masculinity”, “intersectionality”, and other key terms.

From the rote to the muddled

Though Penny was once a welcome feminist voice at a time of “post-feminism”, Sexual Revolution reads as outdated, or not up to its proclaimed task, despite its contemporary focus. It suffers from comparison with other books which have tackled similar material with more depth and insight.

The major titles of the #MeToo era have involved forensic investigative reporting. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Started a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, and Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow, both released in 2019, focussed on the case of film producer Harvey Weinstein and the women he targeted.

Penny promises a more wide-ranging and grassroots approach to sex and power, but only really skims the surface. In contrast to the polyphonic format of numerous anthologies, including the edited collection #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement (2019), Penny’s voice eclipses the voices of people she knows have often been marginalised, including Indigenous women, women of colour, and trans, queer and non-binary people.

Penny is attentive to the racial and racist dynamics of both the far right and mainstream (or White or carceral) feminism. But these discussions are too condensed to take root and sometimes read as rote. “Quite apart from being ethnically suspect,” Penny states, “any movement to end exploitation that fails to centre race is intellectually useless.”

In terms of connecting the dots between White feminism and political Whiteness, a more illuminating book is Alison Phipps’ Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (2020). Phipps carefully and powerfully draws out the racist logic of what has come to be known as “carceral feminism” — an approach that advocates for increased policing, prosecution and imprisonment as key strategies for combating violence against women — evident in some parts of the #MeToo movement.

Penny’s book is muddled by comparison in the solutions it offers for dealing with perpetrators of sexual violence. As for the victims, Penny is sensitive to how and why they are often dismissed as “mad” or unreliable, but Sara Ahmed’s recent book Complaint! (2021) takes the subject much further and in new directions.

Proper comprehension of what consent entails is at the heart of Penny’s sexual revolution. Given that it was only last year that NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller thought a consent phone app was a good idea, Penny’s promotion of “real, continuous, enthusiastic sexual consent” is welcome.

Yet as Kathleen Angel persuasively argues in Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021), the contemporary fixation on consent as the solution to the pervasive problem of sexual violence can place additional burdens on women, including the need to know emphatically what they want sexually.

In making this argument, Angel hardly disavows the “bare minimum” of consent as central to contemporary sexual ethics. But she’s also sceptical about the very notion of “sexual revolution” that Penny so heartily advocates. Her book’s title is a reference to philosopher Michel Foucault’s highly influential critique of what he saw as one of the delusions of the earlier so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s — that tomorrow sex will be good again.

As Penny recognises, #MeToo is not a stand-alone event or movement, but an expression of wider social patterns. It is a tipping point in understanding the ubiquity of sexual and gendered violence. It has galvanised feminism, and redirected and refocused contemporary discourses around gender and sex.

But its effects are too varied, diffuse and contradictory for the sledgehammer treatment Penny favours. Other feminist thinkers, such as British academics Amia Srinivasan and Jacqueline Rose, have pursued far more generative approaches. Srinivasan has productively revisted the feminist “sex wars” in The Right To Sex (2021), while Rose has consistently turned to psychoanalysis, most recently in On Violence and Violence Against Women (2021).

A reckoning
Penny is more successful in capturing the affective dimensions of the #MeToo era. On this front, Sexual Revolution is a worthy successor or companion to Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018) and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018), two early responses to #MeToo and the Trump presidency. These books are clearly part of the same zeitgeist, as their almost identical subtitles indicate.

While Penny clearly shares their faith in the political potential of rage (not all feminists do), Sexual Revolution is more useful is in its reflections, right at the end of the book in an extended endnote, on “trauma politics”.

Penny writes that “pain is not supposed to be part of the political conversation”. But it has become so, and the connections or continuities between intimate and structural forms of violence have become much more explicit.

Where Penny leaves us is where Australian journalist Amy Remeikis begins in On Reckoning (2022), her recently released and already bestselling monograph: the moment at which the complicity of modern politics in gendered violence is made starkly and painfully apparent.

For Remeikis, this was the day after former parliamentary staffer Brittany Higgins went public on 15 February 2021 with the allegation that she had been raped by a male colleague in Parliament House in March 2019. Some 24 hours later, Prime Minister Scott Morrison addressed the nation.

At the prompting of his wife Jenny, Morrison declared that “he’d been reminded to think of the situation as a father”.

A parliamentary reporter, Remeikis was at work, typing out the Prime Minister’s words. She was first traumatised, then enraged by them: “Somebody else’s daughter. We always have to be somebody else’s daughter.”

Soon after, Remeikis shared her own experience of sexual violence in The Guardian, becoming a spokesperson for survivors in the process. On Reckoning powerfully reiterates and extends her key point that being “thought of as someone else’s daughter is not empathy”.

It obliterates the experiences of real, rather than imagined victims. It sets limits on whose pain can even be conceived. Is it any wonder then, writes Remeikis, that “First Nations women, women of colour, trans and culturally and religiously diverse women have found it so hard to be heard?”

In the #MeToo era, the word “reckoning” has been used so often it can slip into meaninglessness. But Remiekis — like another Australian journalist Jess Hill, in another recently released essay with an almost identical title The Reckoning: How #MeToo is Changing Australia (2021) — imbues it with fresh force.

As records of Australia at a moment of profound cultural change, they offer vital local and personal perspectives of a global phenomenon that has — among its many effects — reinvigorated feminist writing for the mainstream, mostly for the better.

Dr Zora Simic is a senior lecturer, School of Humanities, UNSW Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

• Review: Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, by Laurie Penny (Bloomsbury)

Every time I wrote a sentence to describe the slow motion collision of social, economic and political forces that are simultaneously destroying and reshaping societies around the world, I would erase it .

Not “writer’s block” so much as “writer’s inadequacy” – feeling torn between using “revolution” or “evolution” to describe the events on my news feeds over the last few days.

READ MORE: Towards a global intifada

I tried writing a list. (An old trick I have when trying to find a pattern in an apparent chaos):

• America has an absentee President
• The murder of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter.
• Stock markets are on the rise.
• Peaceful Whitehouse protest attacked by police so Trump can hold up a Bible for a photo op.
• Houses are selling again – some below CV, some ridiculously above.
• Worldwide covid-19 is still killing thousands of people everyday .
• A second virus wave is a real fear so our borders are closed… except, entertainment is suddenly deemed an essential industry and Hollywood moguls get a free pass.
• Essential workers who helped keep us alive during the lockdown still receive the lowest pay.
• China is back to a 90 percent economy.
• America has the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.
• Locally there are a lot of empty shops, a sudden rash of “for lease signs” on office and warehouse properties, and evidence of a hotel industry in trouble.

The list doesn’t help.

For every positive sign I find suggesting a new more egalitarian post-covid-19 world will emerge, contra-indicators reveal the vested interests in the old order are still very much alive and kicking.

Another old trick
So I try another old trick. The History Review:

I ask myself is this moment unique? Have we been here before?

Answer? Yes and no.

Yes – in some societies there have been moments of very rapid social change when the existing social order has been suddenly overthrown. The French, American and Russian revolutions being three obvious examples.

No – because, this time, whatever is happening is a global phenomenon made possible by the invention of the internet and global air travel – two technologies that have transformed our mental and physical world so that Queen Street is now just around our mental corner from Wall Street and a virus born in Wuhan today can fly to Washington or Wellington and be living in us tomorrow.

So where are the words to describe what is happening ?

I turn to some old friends for help.

Charles Dickens:

“It was the best times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period.” (A Tale of Two Cities)

W.B. Yeats writing after the chaos of WW1:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” (The Second Coming)

Pandemics are not new.

Social chaos is not new.

The battle between Good and Evil is as old as human conscience.

Somehow, despite all our short comings as a species, we are still here.

Perhaps, in that, there is some hope.

Bryan Bruce is one of New Zealand’s most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed the NZ neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social problems. He blogs at The Daily Blog where this column was first published here. Republished with the author’s permission.

• New Zealand relaxes covid restrictions after ‘remarkable’ virus fight

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro’s contribution to global social justice and dignity, and to developing nations worldwide – including the Pacific, was praised in New Zealand tonight.

Activists, politicians, academics, journalists, teachers, trade unionists and community workers were among about 100 people gathered at the Auckland Trades Hall to hear Cuban Ambassador Mario Alzugaray and other speakers give tributes to Castro’s life.

Alzugaray challenged the audience to continue Castro’s half century of struggle for a better society: “The best way to remember Fidel is to carry on his legacy and keep it alive.”

The ambassador said Castro had social justice at the core of his ideals and action.

“He was an internationalist since the very beginning,” Alzugaray said.

“He was involved in every movement connected to the anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America.”

Before and after the Moncada garrison attack in 1953, Castro had recognised the importance of launching an appeal to the Cuban people.

Revolutionary spark
The Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba was named after General Guillermón Moncada, a hero during the war of independence against the Spanish.

The attack by a small group led by Castro failed but this is regarded as the spark that fired the socialist Cuban Revolution, which eventually overthrew the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista six years later.

Castro died, aged 90, on November 25 and his funeral will be in Santiago tomorrow after the four-day cortege around the country.

“Fidel was the first one to effectively and successfully unite Cubans around the revolution,” Ambassador Alzugaray said.

The envoy praised Castro’s social policies in Cuba, such as agrarian reform, education and health.

“Fidel’s determination and involvement in international affairs made him possibly the most important leader to look after and represent the interests of developing nations,” Alzugaray said.

“His influence is huge and although CNN and other media organisations are trying to focus on the reaction of Cuban-American extremists in Miami, there are millions of people mourning the death of Fidel.”

Media ‘bias’
Alzugaray was critical of the “bias” of many news media in New Zealand and other Western countries.

“I was asked if Fidel was divisive. We live in a divisive world,” Alzugaray said.

“Greed and personal interest are driving society in many parts of the world.

“It is completely biased to raise this opinion and to be silent about the United States embargo and permanent hostility towards Cuba.”

Alzugaray said people had to decide whether they were on the side of the poor, starving, or the rich and powerful. Fundamental rights needed to come before a narrow Western concept of human rights.

“What Western powers and oligarchs can’t forgive is the huge impact of Fidel’s personality and, more importantly, his ideas, in international politics.

“Most of us will have people supporting or expressing their dissent. You just have to decide which side you’re joining.

Issues of humanity
“Fidel was very much involved in every important international issue affecting humanity.

“Environment, international financial order, independence and liberation movements, peace and global disarmament as well as human development as a comprehensive concept are some of the issues.

“He understood you can’t be poor, starving, homeless or lacking the fundamental right of proper access to public health and considered being part of an effective democracy.”

“Fidel never took a rest. He was until the end very much involved in food security issues.”

Other speakers included Unite Union director Mike Treen, of the Cuban Friendship Society, organisers of the celebration, who said Castro had played a central role as a leader of the Cuban revolution for more than 50 years.

“In that time Cuba has literally saved the lives of millions of people through their medical aid programme,” he said.

“They have helped liberate southern Africa from apartheid and colonialism. They have ended illiteracy in their own country and repeated the practice across the globe.

“They have helped create the possibility for other countries in Latin America and the world to join them on the march to national independence and social justice.”

Treen also praised Castro’s support for independence movements in the Pacific, such as in Vanuatu and Kanaky/New Caledonia, and health care in Timor-Leste and across the region.

• Fidel Castro’s ashes begin journey across Cuba
• Fidel Castro’s anti-colonialist legacy
• Castro’s funeral procession reaches Santiago
• Video clip of ambassador’s speech
• Sope praises Castro over Vanuatu

Cuban Ambassador Mario Alzugaray speaking at the Auckland Trades Hall tonight.
Video clip: Café Pacific