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Legal Proceedings | Portrayal of Men in the Media
One of the contradictions in the treatment of gender issues by establishments such as the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), is that in order to achieve the politically correct outcome, procedures other than those that would be used in other legal proceedings must be used. There is resistance, then (by men at least), to implementing decisions that are not seen as legally valid. For example, in sexual harassment cases, it is not the alleged perpetrator who must defend the suit, but the employer, who often has no interest in proving the accused innocent, but merely in distancing themselves from the alleged harassment. The accused may then face loss of reputation or dismissal, without ever being allowed to appear in court. Similarly, the HREOC has no legal power to enforce its decisions, as it is not a court; however, with the shift of some of its powers to the Federal Court, the human rights commissioner has suggested that the Federal Court now has to show itself able to hear cases "appropriately". This is the very point of challenges to the HREOCs' jurisdiction, that the HREOC makes decisions in a way that would not hold up in regular court proceedings.
Although most law is written in gender-neutral terms, some of the assumptions under which it is interpreted are so deep-rooted that people are not conscious of them, much less inclined to question them. For example, where the man of a divorcing couple works and the woman does not, the court is likely to require that he pay her some form of maintenance, on the grounds that she "gave up her career". By contrast, where she works and he does not, the court is likely to take into account that he is a poor provider, or did not contribute to the household. Both these interpretations are perfectly consistent with the law as written, and judges are probably not even aware of the underlying sexism that produces the two different rulings. Similarly, women convicted of criminal offences may be given lighter, non-custodial sentences so that they can care for children; no such latitude is extended to fathers.
An exception to the gender-neutral phrasing of most laws is the Federal Anti-Discrimination Act, which generally allows that men are only discriminated against when money changes hands, as if the only discrimination that could affect men relates to provider issues.
The reason that a man was once legally able to apply corporal punishment to his wife, was because he was held legally responsible for her actions; if she committed a crime, he went to jail for it. Even in those unenlightened times, society recognised that it would be unjust to hold a man responsible for that which he was not allowed to control. One generation after corporal punishment was outlawed, male responsibility for female crimes was repealed. However, vestigal traces of it appear in the different treatment of men and women. Women are deemed responsible for child-rearing, until something goes wrong, when it suddenly becomes the "parents" responsibility, which in practice is the mans' responsibility. When a man supports his family through crime, only he is punished, even if she knew what he was doing and benefitted from his crimes. A man whose children turn out wrong is negligent, and hence criminally culpable; a woman who lives off ill-gotten gains is innocent, and hence not held to account. Had their husbands been alive to take the blame for their joint crimes, Rosemary West and Kathleen Lister might never have gone to jail. In Canada, Karla Holmolka knew about and counted on the different treatment of men and women, and very nearly sent her ex-lover to jail without her, except that the police found the videotapes she had made of the sex-murders the two of them had committed (interestingly, it was about at this point that the judge in the case decreed a media blackout). Whenever a man is arrested and charged with a crime, his wife is regarded as an innocent; whenever a woman is arrested and charged with a crime, her husband will often be charged shortly thereafter with something - anything, whether related to her crime or not (eg. Nicolette Leigh's husband).
Ads like the MBF series negatively stereotype men. In one, a daughter is discussing with a female counsellor her fathers' dating behaviour, it being "five years since mum died". As usual, the only valid way a man can be single and have a child is if the mother is dead. The suggestion is that a teenage girl and any strange woman are more competent to run a man's emotional life than he is himself. The other ad of note, shows a mother trying to cope with a child who keeps climbing into bed with its parents by ringing (again) a female counsellor; when the husband wakes up and speaks, she sharply barks at him to go back to sleep. The message is that it is not their child, but her child, and she would rather talk to a strange woman than involve her husband in child-rearing.
The movie Indecent Proposal, with Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, is widely discussed in terms of the morality of the man selling his wife. Such discussions overlook the fact that it was mostly her decision, and that she had the power in the relationship generally; there was a scene near the beginning of the movie where she subjected him to a harrowing sequence of domestic violence, including throwing plates and stabbing at him with a knife, that is not often mentioned in reviews of the film.
Similarly, Ang Lees' The Wedding Banquet, shows a rape scene, where a woman forces herself onto a man who is helpless with alcohol. She falls pregnant, and makes it quite clear that it is her, not their, baby.
The determination not to portray women in stereotyped roles, has the side effect of devaluing the good that men do. While banner headlines will describe a man who has gone off the rails and committed mass murder, they will rarely mention the hundred other men who helped bring him under control, or if they do, will carefully describe them in gender-neutral terms; there is (as far as I know) not a single female member of any police special response team, yet they are still "police officers". When a plaque was unveiled commemmorating the emergency service workers who have died on the job in Queensland, the media made a point of not mentioning the gender of the names on the plaque. The only time in the last decade I have heard the term "fireman" instead of "fire officer" was in the context, "fireman goes berserk" after he had shot his ex-partner and several co-workers. When a planeload of Japanese tourists crashed on the coast, the media spoke of the police officers and heroic bystanders who rushed to help, while the pictures showed a large number of men and only a single woman (a uniformed police officer). It is ironic, then, that men are told by feminists to take responsibility for male violence, as if women had so far had to deal with it on their own.