A girl is any female human from birth through childhood and adolescence to attainment of adulthood. The term may also be used to mean a young woman...
... Girl has meant any young unmarried woman since about 1530. Its first noted meaning for sweetheart is 1648. The earliest known appearance of girl-friend is in 1892 and girl next door, meant as a teenaged female or young woman with a kind of wholesome appeal, dates only to 1961.
... The word girl is sometimes used to refer to an adult female. This usage may be considered derogatory or disrespectful in professional or other formal contexts, just as the term boy can be considered disparaging when applied to an adult man. (here)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
That's how new Liberal leader Tony Abbott described his deputy, Julie Bishop, on Tuesday.
Calling the 53-year-old former lawyer a "girl" might not go down well with many Australian women but it didn't seem to bother Bishop.
The deputy, who's pledged her support to three leaders in two years, took the comment with a grain of salt and moved on. (Tony's 'loyal girl' Julie and her nine lives).
Meanwhile, over at The Punch, Chairman Rupert's short upper cut to the chin of intelligent conversation, David Penberthy on Gail Kelly as CEO of bank Westpac:
When she was appointed as CEO in August 2007, one female journalist shouted excitedly at the press conference: “There’s hope for us yet!”. There is hope you yet, girls, if your idea of equality is seeing female chief executives demonstrate that they can be every bit as foolish and as flint-hearted as their overwhelmingly male equivalents (sic).
So much for Gail Kelly's innate feminine compassion, he scribbles, as he cannily shifts from "female journalist" to hope for flint-hearted foolish girls.
It's an excuse for a standard bit of tabloid bank bashing, of a standard hypocritical Chairman Rupert kind, but with a neat bit of bonus girl bashing thrown in for Kristina Keneally's ascendancy:
All in all, it’s been shocking and ill-conceived corporate gluttony. It was a nice coincidence that it came in the same week as another superficial win for girl power with the elevation of Kristina Keneally as our first female premier.
Girl power? Is that the same as boy power? Should I think of Tony Abbott and David Penberthy as members of a boy band?
Penberthy's fatuous conclusion?
As with the motherhood treatment of Gail Kelly on her elevation, the public has a well-tuned radar for fatuous sentiment which is not backed by actions, and we have seen plenty of that this past week where the women have shown themselves to be no better than the blokes on a bad day.
Well pardon me if I say fuck you and the fucking girlie, sexist, girl power 'bunch of girls' horse shit that you rode in on.
But then I'm hopelessly confused. Because you see I've just now discovered Kristina Keneally isn't a girl at all, and she doesn't play like a girl:
Kristina Keneally's father, John Kerscher, told her from an early age she shouldn't play ''like a girl''. As her school soccer coach in Ohio, he urged his teenage daughter to go for broke.
''I was pushing her to excel,'' he told the Herald recently.
''I knew that if she didn't play like a girl, but played to her capabilities, she would be a very successful player. Mothers from other teams used to say: 'That big blonde out there is playing dirty'. She wasn't playing dirty - she was playing soccer the way soccer should be played.''
Oh dear. Could I be beginning to sound like Virginia Haussegger. Isn't she in the bitter bra burning harpie brigade?
Australia no longer has room at the top for men who hug their female colleagues like baby sisters and call them loyal girls. Or mutter "that's bullshit" to their female opponents, while smiling for the cameras and refusing to look them in the eye. We've long passed the time when women will tolerate having their reproductive choices taken away from them: when they will accept a male health minister blocking their access to safe termination options. Women are well beyond being lectured to by men about unwanted pregnancies and told they must be "ashamed". (We've moved on from Abbott's conservative chorus).
What a bitter twisted girlie. Why she gets quite carried away:
Flick back now to Tuesday, and it's another leadership duo in front of the cameras. This time it's the perennial Liberal bridesmaid Julie Bishop, standing next to her newest partner Tony Abbott. The impeccably dressed Bishop smiles awkwardly as Abbott throws an arm around her shoulders, squeezes a few times, and tells the media mob before them, "She's a loyal girl". His grin is wide and goofy. And just in case we haven't all caught the message about who is boss, he squeezes Bishop one more time. She didn't show it on the outside, but surely Bishop flinched on the inside, knowing she wasn't a "loyal" girl at all. She hadn't voted for Abbott in the leadership ballot, and only the night before she'd been mocking him with her ex. She'd been laughing about his budgie smugglers and – according to a jilted Malcolm Turnbull – saying a whole lot more.
Oh dear, perhaps in her righteous anger she shouldn't have mentioned the budgie smugglers, or likened Malcolm on the outer to a jilted lover. After all, whatever Tony Abbott's inner budgie smuggler fantasies are, on the outside he's a trim 52 year old man. Oh dear, is it proper to call him trim?
That sort of talk, or hesitation is so unlike Tony Abbott and David Penberthy, who just love the girlies, and who love to give them a push up the ladder of life.
Listen to the ever so fair minded Penberthy:
This is most definitely not written as a call to abandon the push to get more women onto boards and into the most senior positions of our companies, and the most senior positions of public life. Far from it. The few women who hold senior positions are generally doing a terrific or adequate job. There should be many more of them. And 50 per cent seems a realistic kind of target, given that every second person I see around the place appears to be a woman.
Oh dear, it seems he means terribly well. Such charming condescension. Terrific or adequate job! Bring on the adequate girlies. There should be more girlies. The few women around are doing a terrific job, except for the woman who isn't, who is an eternal shame to girl power.
But why then do I get this unnerving urge to either vomit or tell him to shove it where the sun doesn't shine? Must hold down the bile, so I can read on:
... the performance of Gail Kelly has exposed the gulf between the argument for encouraging more women into senior corporate and public positions, and the soppy rhetorical presumption that they will automatically bring some heartwarming feminine otherness to the role.
Well who would have that kind of soppy rhetorical presumption about a rise in interest rates? Which either works for the bank, or produces blow back, in a strictly commercial, business-like way?
Ah, I get it. Dumb fuck journalists doing colour pieces, much like David Penberthy, conflating all sorts of crap to fill up a blank page. So having written the piece of colour crap, you can then blame the victim for the colour crap written by the journalists, who then have a straw girlie to club over the head the next time they need a piece of colourful crap about interest rates.
But hang on, this is all about a rise in interest rates, isn't it, and a commercial decision by Westpac?
ANZ has joined Commonwealth Bank and Westpac in increasing its home loan rates by more than the last official rate rise.
ANZ this afternoon said it would increase interest rates on its standard variable rate by 0.35 percentage points. The Reserve Bank on Tuesday lifted its cash rate by 0.25 percentage points to 3.75 per cent.
Also today, CBA lifted its mortgage rates by 37 basis rates, while Westpac on Tuesday increased by 45 basis points. Westpac-owned St George Bank this afternoon announced a 39 basis point lift in home loan rates. The only bank to keep in line with the RBA rate rise is NAB, which raised rates by 25 basis points yesterday. (ANZ tops RBA rate rise too).
Uh huh. So where are all the dumb fuck colour pieces about the heads of ANZ and CBA (let's forget St George, since it's Westpac owned), and their willingness to rape their customers by jumping ahead of the Reserve?
Where's the piece about that boy Michael Smith, CEO of ANZ?
Why not a piece about those boys John M Schubert, Chairman of the Commonwealth, or Ralph J Norris, KNZM, Managing director and CEO? Why, it turns out that Ralph Norris was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago, and now has worked out an impeccable set of solutions (and you can find them here). Perhaps that has some bearing on the CBA's interest rates?
No, no, no, it's all about the girlie who is the villain in the whole sordid affair:
Quite obviously this decision was totally the wrong thing to do by customers and families. It was flint-hearted. It sits oddly with the kind of rhetoric we saw from Gail Kelly upon her appointment as CEO, where she talked at length about her family-minded approach to work.
“I’m a big believer in work-life balance,” she said. “Practices of flexibility and practices of encouraging people to live whole lives are principles which I have believed in my whole life.”
That has largely been true of Ms Kelly’s workplace – Westpac does seem a happy and stable environment, it has suffered no industrial tensions under her tenure, and it has led the way with commendably generous parenting leave and flexible hours and work practices.
Oh mother knows best, she knows how to keep the whole bank one great big happy family. Such a nice girlie. Except when she paddy whacks the customers:
But through her actions Ms Kelly has now shown that she doesn’t want to extend to her customers the same compassionate approach that she shows to her staff. Families have lost flexibility as a result of her decision. There will be mums who are working extra shifts or dads who are putting in for overtime to cover the cost of this over-the-odds whack.
Enough already. Let me sob into my weetbix at the thought of all those CBA and ANZ customers suffering under the male hegemony.
It's hard to know who's more offensive, Tony Abbott because he knows he should know better, but loves to sin, so he can claim forgiveness and redemption, or Penberthy, because in his tabloid foggery and simple minded analysis, he clearly doesn't have a clue.
As it so happens, Kristina Keneally has already shot herself in the foot by trawling through the back benches to come up with a mix of the same loveable rogues that have run NSW into the ground over the past decade with their incompetence and cronyism. She's almost been a match for Tony Abbott in her desire to get back to the future.
And Westpac might have taken a step too far in its desire to gouge its customers, but that's best left to their customers to respond how they will. Once you're locked into the embrace of a bank, you have about as much chance of escaping them as escaping the mother alien's nest, unless you happen to be Sigourney Weaver.
And if you want to go trawling through corporate history, then the role of Meredith Hellicar in the matter of James Hardie is no shining example of corporate governance, even if she was only one of ten former James Hardie board members found to have breached the Corporations Act (here).
But enough already with the girlie crap. Women doing jobs are women doing jobs, and tempting as it might be, there's nothing to be gained by suggesting that Penberthy is a boy doing a man's job. He's just a male journalist writing and thinking baldly and badly about women in power.
Time to get over it, but all the same, I still can't stifle the urge to suggest he and Tony Abbott can take their talk of girls and shove it.
Oh, and instead of don't call me girlie, or I'll hit you with my handbag, one for the geeks who suffer:
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