Alice Coster: Anger among women has turned to rage and you need to listen

Grappling for dear life to ensure my RM Williams belt remained fastened against the determined hand of a panting adolescent male pretty much sums up my coming of age in the ’90s.

Picture: Jason Edwards

Grappling for dear life to ensure my RM Williams belt remained fastened against the determined hand of a panting adolescent male pretty much sums up my coming of age in the ’90s.

You would never want to leave to chance what might happen if the buttons of your Levi 501s were prized open.

A friend used to wear a maroon jumpsuit to parties, not because it looked great, but because it made it practically impossible for wandering hands to get their grip.

At the time it didn’t seem odd or abusive to create such defensive tactics.

Instead we applauded her for such a brilliant manoeuvre and went shopping for jumpsuits.

“It was worse in my day,” Mum would say, regaling stories of being left out in the ute at night on the long drive home from a day’s fishing trip in the ’60s, just so the boys could knock back drinks at the country pub where the women weren’t allowed in.

“That was the law, we didn’t even question it.”

For me, having grown up riding the back of not the first, but the second wave of feminism, Mum’s world felt so far removed.

Protesters March on the liberal party headquarters. Picture: Jason Edwards

It didn’t seem fathomable that in her lifetime females were legally banned from a pub just because they were women. For my generation, signs pointing to the Ladies Bar were just a way to find the lavatory.

It felt equal growing up. It never felt like there was that much sexism. You grew up thinking you could have it all.

But just as it was “normal” for Mum to be banned from going into the pub, my friends and I also lived with what shouldn’t ever be considered “normal”.

Looking back, littered throughout the so-called liberated, empowered times of my youth, are a litany of stories of latent sexual abuse and toxic masculinity.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, one in five Australian women has experienced sexual violence from the age of 15.

Sadly, those figures ring true among my friends.

Most of my circle of women still keep their stories in the shadows. There is a still dormant shame of you “let it happen”, “it wasn’t that bad”, “other people have been through far worse” or “did it really happen like that?”.

I personally know of women who have drunkenly woken up, just like former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins allegedly did, “mid-rape”.

In years gone by, my friends and I have laughed awkwardly to cover embarrassment and shame as we shared stories about the heavy-handed tactics of high school boys.

But, gradually, the laughs became grimaces as our emotions moved from embarrassment and shame to confusion and then anger.

Recent narratives of “she shouldn’t have been drunk” or “she shouldn’t have walked home alone” didn’t sit well. Surely we should be able to drink what we want or walk where we want?

School students at the recent women’s march in Melbourne. Picture: Jason Edwards

It was somewhere between reading about Higgins’ brave story and reading the words of Australia’s top military officer, General Angus Campbell, telling recruits how not to make themselves “prey” to sexual predators while being out late at night “alone” and “attractive”, that our anger turned to rage. And not just for my friends and I.

On Monday I went with my mother, along with tens of thousands of other ordinary Australians, daughters, sisters and women around the country, to the March4Justice rallies demanding cultural change.

Described by the world’s media as a significant moment in Australian history, the Time Magazine’s headline read “Furious Australian women force a reckoning on sexism after a rape allegation in the government”.

Giggling at placards reading “big swinging dicks, small stagnant pricks”, “electile dysfunction” and “I’ve seen better cabinets at IKEA #enough”, it was a placard that read “Not saying no isn’t the same as consent” that hit home.

A girl in her school uniform standing behind me whispered to what looked like her own mother, “I feel angry all the time”.

It made me want to weep.

Because while Levi 501s are back like a ’90s trend, the systemic sexual harassment, abuse and latent misogyny of women in Australia has never gone out of fashion.

Alice Coster is a Herald Sun columnist

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Originally published as Alice Coster: Anger among women has turned to rage and you need to listen