Daria Morgendorffer, it’s time to stand up and be counted. Often topping lists compiled on the best examples of strong women in pop culture, cartoon hero Daria is strong, smart and sarcastic. She rejects the notion held by most of the women of Lawndale that a girl’s body is a commodity, is known for speaking up for herself, and by her staunch refusal to participate in unethical behaviour she exposes society’s injustices and hypocracies more times than you would think possible in a twenty-minute episode. Feminist icon, right? Not so much.

‘People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute,’ Daria says in one episode, separating herself from the label everyone else wants to stick her with. This reluctance to identify Daria with ‘the F word’ probably stems from a desire to make Daria accessible to a wider audience. For any television show, even one renowned for being niche or alternative, accessibility is really the key. In creating a traditionally unfeminine female lead, the writers and creators of the show allowed Daria strength without threatening the masculinity of either the male characters or the male viewers. They positioned the show with remarkable savvy – whether your high school experience was more in line with that of Daria’s popular sister Quinn or jock superstar Kevin, any high-schooler could relate to the themes of the show. Despite it being understood that Daria is unpopular, Daria and best friend/fellow outcast Jane regularly interact on good terms with all ‘popular’ characters, helping them with personal projects, exchanging one-liners in the hallways of Lawndale High. There is nothing essentially unlikeable about the character, and she manages to hold the unflinching respect of everyone else on the show. It’s accessibility at its most brilliant.

The show hasn’t been on air for ten years now, but with the Daria DVD released in the United States last year and in Australia this June, Daria is once again fresh in its fans’ minds. The themes that the show addresses are just as relevant to a 2011 audience as they were a decade ago, and new viewers are quickly embracing Daria as a feminist pop culture icon, whether Daria herself would want them to or not.

New audiences – like her long-time viewers – might not be able to help noticing that Daria almost always has a book in her hand, and unlike in other cartoons, where the book titles might be mere squiggles or in-jokes inserted by cartoonists, it’s nothing but the classics for Ms. Morgendorffer. As the character is portrayed as incredibly literary and is a writer herself, diehard viewers have naturally taken note of Daria’s reading habits. Run a Google search and you’ll find many websites detailing Daria’s literary choices over the course of the five seasons. For instance, the Sick Sad World website lists Daria’s reading list as follows:

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• The Iliad by Homer
• In Memoriam by Alfred Tennyson
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories by Edgar Allen Poe
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• On Moral Fiction by John Gardener
• The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa
• Howl by Allen Ginsberg
• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
• A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel DeFoe
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

The representation of women in literature has been a hot topic of late (see The Stella Prize, The Meanjin Tournament of Books), and the one thing that stuck out when I was perusing the list – other than deep-founded admiration; in high school I was still reading Animorphs – was that there is not a single female author on it. The fact that the writers couldn’t think of any female-authored texts that a character like Daria would consider worth her time speaks volumes, if you’ll excuse the pun. Daria may be ‘just a cartoon’, but this absence of women writers (in a show about the life of a female character intent on becoming a professional author) is an accurate representation of the way women and literature are considered within society. Many high schools – both in Australia and internationally – have student reading lists that are consistently failing to include valuable texts by female authors.

Daria is not by any stretch of the imagination an anti-feminist television show. In a time when Beavis and Butthead were our role models, Daria took over our televisions and taught us that it was better to be smart than beautiful, better to be outspoken and ostracised than stay silent and adored. It remains one of my favourites because it is also insightful, hilarious and brilliantly written. And just like the original Star Wars trilogy remains firmly lodged in place as my top three films of all time, despite there seeming to be only one female character in the entire galaxy, Daria will always go down as one of my favourite cartoons. What media we consume matters – our exposure to popular culture and sexist material has a recognised impact.

Looking back on Daria gives us an opportunity to realise that you have to be aware of what came before in order to get it right the next time. And so maybe the next time someone creates a wise-talking, influential young adult female character, she can come to terms with her feminism and read some Atwood, Morrison, Woolf, Plath or Lee.

– Sian Campbell is a Brisbane writer and has recently completed a Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at QUT. She blogs sporadically at siancampbell.wordpress.com.

Daria Morgendorffer, it’s time to stand up and be counted. Often topping lists compiled on the best examples of strong women in pop culture, cartoon hero Daria is strong, smart and sarcastic. She rejects the notion held by most of the women of Lawndale that a girl’s body is a commodity, is known for speaking up for herself, and by her staunch refusal to participate in unethical behaviour she exposes society’s injustices and hypocracies more times than you would think possible in a twenty-minute episode. Feminist icon, right? Not so much.

‘People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute,’ Daria says in one episode, separating herself from the label everyone else wants to stick her with. This reluctance to identify Daria with ‘the F word’ probably stems from a desire to make Daria accessible to a wider audience. For any television show, even one renowned for being niche or alternative, accessibility is really the key. In creating a traditionally unfeminine female lead, the writers and creators of the show allowed Daria strength without threatening the masculinity of either the male characters or the male viewers. They positioned the show with remarkable savvy – whether your high school experience was more in line with that of Daria’s popular sister Quinn or jock superstar Kevin, any high-schooler could relate to the themes of the show. Despite it being understood that Daria is unpopular, Daria and best friend/fellow outcast Jane regularly interact on good terms with all ‘popular’ characters, helping them with personal projects, exchanging one-liners in the hallways of Lawndale High. There is nothing essentially unlikeable about the character, and she manages to hold the unflinching respect of everyone else on the show. It’s accessibility at its most brilliant.

The show hasn’t been on air for ten years now, but with the Daria DVD released in the United States last year and in Australia this June, Daria is once again fresh in its fans’ minds. The themes that the show addresses are just as relevant to a 2011 audience as they were a decade ago, and new viewers are quickly embracing Daria as a feminist pop culture icon, whether Daria herself would want them to or not.

New audiences – like her long-time viewers – might not be able to help noticing that Daria almost always has a book in her hand, and unlike in other cartoons, where the book titles might be mere squiggles or in-jokes inserted by cartoonists, it’s nothing but the classics for Ms. Morgendorffer. As the character is portrayed as incredibly literary and is a writer herself, diehard viewers have naturally taken note of Daria’s reading habits. Run a Google search and you’ll find many websites detailing Daria’s literary choices over the course of the five seasons. For instance, the Sick Sad World website lists Daria’s reading list as follows:

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• The Iliad by Homer
• In Memoriam by Alfred Tennyson
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories by Edgar Allen Poe
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• On Moral Fiction by John Gardener
• The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa
• Howl by Allen Ginsberg
• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
• A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel DeFoe
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

The representation of women in literature has been a hot topic of late (see The Stella Prize, The Meanjin Tournament of Books), and the one thing that stuck out when I was perusing the list – other than deep-founded admiration; in high school I was still reading Animorphs – was that there is not a single female author on it. The fact that the writers couldn’t think of any female-authored texts that a character like Daria would consider worth her time speaks volumes, if you’ll excuse the pun. Daria may be ‘just a cartoon’, but this absence of women writers (in a show about the life of a female character intent on becoming a professional author) is an accurate representation of the way women and literature are considered within society. Many high schools – both in Australia and internationally – have student reading lists that are consistently failing to include valuable texts by female authors.

Daria is not by any stretch of the imagination an anti-feminist television show. In a time when Beavis and Butthead were our role models, Daria took over our televisions and taught us that it was better to be smart than beautiful, better to be outspoken and ostracised than stay silent and adored. It remains one of my favourites because it is also insightful, hilarious and brilliantly written. And just like the original Star Wars trilogy remains firmly lodged in place as my top three films of all time, despite there seeming to be only one female character in the entire galaxy, Daria will always go down as one of my favourite cartoons. What media we consume matters – our exposure to popular culture and sexist material has a recognised impact.

Looking back on Daria gives us an opportunity to realise that you have to be aware of what came before in order to get it right the next time. And so maybe the next time someone creates a wise-talking, influential young adult female character, she can come to terms with her feminism and read some Atwood, Morrison, Woolf, Plath or Lee.

– Sian Campbell is a Brisbane writer and has recently completed a Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at QUT. She blogs sporadically at siancampbell.wordpress.com.

Ten years after her Orange Prize-winning novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett returns to South America with State of Wonder. Marina – a forty-something, divorced pharmacologist – is engaged in a less-than-ideal affair with her boss, Mr Fox, head of large drug company Vogel. Vogel is funding some highly secretive research on a fertility drug, led by the formidable Dr Annick Swenson in an undisclosed location in the Amazon. Swenson refuses to report on her progress, and Mr Fox wants answers. He sends Marina’s colleague, Anders, to investigate, but when news comes of Anders’ death by tropical fever, Mr Fox asks Marina to take over where Anders left off.

As she undergoes a course of antimalarial drugs in preparation for the journey, Marina endures the same recurring, drug-induced nightmare she suffered as a child: the father who abandoned her slips away again and again into a crowd of strangers. But as she journeys further into the jungle and further into herself, the prevalence of these nightmares wanes, while the more recent traumas of her past surface. As a young obstetrician, through an error of professional judgment, Marina blinded someone else’s child – an event that led her to change her career path. Then there is her failed marriage, her barely there relationship with Mr Fox and the issue she doesn’t want to have to think about: if she’s going to have kids, she’d better do it soon.

State of Wonder’s thematic concerns bear a remarkable resemblance to those in Margaret Atwood’s breakthrough 1972 novel Surfacing. Like Marina, Atwood’s unnamed protagonist is the veteran of a failed relationship and, like in State of Wonder, the destruction of a child (in Atwood’s novel, an abortion) results in emotional repression. For both women, immersion in the wilderness serves to dredge up their repressed memories, and both entertain the idea of ‘going native’ in order to escape the pain and complexities of the choices they have made, and will continue to face, in their lives. If Surfacing has been classified as a proto-feminist novel, State of Wonder reflects the difficulties of ‘choice feminism’: women today may have more choices than in the past, but that doesn’t mean the choices are easy to make.

Dr Swenson’s research focuses on the Lakashi tribe, whose ritualistic eating of bark from the nearby Martin trees not only allows them to bear children into old age, but also inoculates them against malaria. Patchett’s ethereal description of ‘the morning sun coming through the Martins at an easterly slant, the full illumination of the thin yellow trunks, the high crowns of pink flowers brushing the edges of the barely blue sky’ suggests the trees are a kind of scientific Holy Grail. And their promise of eternal fertility would mean freeing women from the constraints of their biological clocks, allowing them to postpone indefinitely the difficult choices between career and family. But the scientists’ attempts to reproduce the plants elsewhere have failed and, ever the martyr for science, the ageing Dr Swenson experiments on herself before concluding, ‘We’re fine just the way we are, Marina.’

Dr Swenson’s invitation for Marina to stay on at the research base is compelling: it would be the last of these choices she’d ever have to make. But does Marina’s retreat into the jungle represent a rejection of society, or society’s rejection of women like her and Dr Swenson: successful, intelligent, older, single, childless? Marina undertakes her Amazonian mission partly because she feels she has no excuse: with no family to speak of, there will be no one to miss her.

While State of Wonder suggests a continuing subordination of women, it does not condemn men. Dr Swenson evidently loved and respected Dr Martin Rapp, after whom the miraculous trees were named, and whose child she carried; her continuation of his research feels less sacrificial than Marina’s submission to Mr Fox’s wishes. Then there is Anders, whose devotion for his family is evident in his continued letters home.

Atwood expresses a more radical notion of feminism in Surfacing, as its protagonist is driven by social circumstances not just to the isolation of the wilderness, but to madness. State of Wonder depicts a more inclusive world than Atwood’s tale, which ultimately rejects the society of its time. This may be an indication of how far women have come since then, yet State of Wonder’s subtle mood of loneliness still doesn’t suggest a positive world.

While Surfacing is heavily literary from the get-go, the literary qualities of State of Wonder are more understated, slow to unfold, and made accessible through the foregrounding of a vivid setting and compelling plot. When I arrived at its spectacular crescendo, I was forced to take a deep breath as its many layers of meaning converged. State of Wonder isn’t perfect: some of the passages dwelling on Anders’ disappearance are a little corny and incongruous considering Marina’s otherwise emotionally detached character. But Patchett does a good job at distilling an awful lot of emotional and social concerns into what is an eminently readable, magical text.

Hannah Francis is a bookseller, freelance writer and blogger at www.culturedanimal.com.

This has been an essay which has kept writing – and rewriting – itself. I was approached by Rebecca Starford about it after she chaired a panel I appeared in, discussing the under-representation of women in print. That panel was organised by Melbourne independent bookshop Readings, on International Women’s Day. Preparing for it, and the writing of this essay, led me to a sense of real despair. I have been having versions of these conversations for some 30 years and here I was, yet again, publicly bemoaning the treatment of women. The parameters of the debate never change. In fact, I think they’re getting worse. Writer and critic Kerryn Goldsworthy captured the feeling many women have about the repetition inherent in these kinds of debates on her blog, Still Life With Cat, back in April 2009:

I am supposed to be a grown-up, and because I made a promise, I’m not buying into the question of the literary stag night 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award all-male shortlist beyond offering the odd brief neutral fact in other people’s comments threads, and observing here, because I really cannot help myself, that if what spokesjudge Morag Fraser says is true and the judges did not realise what they had done until their shortlist was already set in stone, then the gender-blindness we thought we had diagnosed and exposed by about 1985 is actually still as bad as it ever was, even at these upper levels of cultural and intellectual endeavour … the howling restraint is making my ears bleed.

Howling restraint is, indeed, stressful. Because here’s the thing that makes this subject really hard to write about. Disinterest in women – the overlooking of them, the walking out of the room without noticing their exclusion, the disavowal of them, the occasional hatred of them – is a profound and deep problem. It does not only affect women in publishing; it affects women in every industry, and women who work at home. Here are a few statistics quoted by Annie Lennox on International Women’s Day this year:

Across the globe, gender-based violence causes more deaths and disabilities among women of childbearing age than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war combined. Even in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s safer to be a soldier than a woman. Women do two-thirds of the world’s work for a paltry 10 per cent of the world’s income, and own just 1 per cent of the means of production. Until recently, in the British Parliament, there were more men called David and Nick than female MPs… Of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide, the vast majority are female.

Closer to home – and, I concede, less life threateningly – publishing is a predominantly female industry (62 per cent) yet most senior positions are held by men. That is, according to The Bloom Report in 2007, 68 per cent of men who work in the industry earn more than $100,000 as opposed to 32 per cent of the women.

The shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award in 2011 was announced after I’d first drafted this essay. It is an all-male one, just as it was in 2009 when Goldsworthy wrote the post I quoted above. Literary blogger Angela Meyer dubbed the 2009 award, somewhat memorably, as a ‘sausage fest’. This year Benjamin Law has coined the fairly wonderful term ‘cock-forest’.

The question I had back in 2009 was whether the judges (Robert Dixon, Morag Fraser, Lesley McKay, Regina Sutton and Murray Waldren) were really suggesting that not a single one of the following female writers, who all had a book published in that year, deserved a shortlisting: Michelle de Kretser, Helen Garner, Amanda Lohrey, Joan London, Kate Grenville. And that’s just to mention the women who didn’t make the longlist. Several did, which meant, presumably, that the judges liked them. Those writers were Toni Jordan, Claire Thomas and Sofie Laguna.

When announcing the list, Morag Fraser said she and her fellow judges had ‘walked out of our two-hour shortlist meeting without realising what we had done’. She went on to say, ‘I’m sorry, you can draw no conclusions from it.’

- Pre-order Kill Your Darlings Issue Six or subscribe to the print journal here.

When I ask women I know if they call themselves feminists, the answer is often ‘no’. However, when I ask if they believe women should have the same rights as men, freedom from sexual violence, and support each other to achieve these things, the answer quickly changes to ‘yes, of course’. This observation that feminism has become a dirty word is not new: entire books have been dedicated to this phenomenon (including Jane Caro and Catherine Fox’s The F Word and Monica Dux and Zora Simic’s The Great Feminist Denial). Feminism has been criticised for being outdated, alienating and impenetrable – trapped in academia. But perhaps one of the movement’s biggest flaws has been the lack of inclusivity: of young women, of men, and of people previously relegated to the fringes of feminism – sex workers, transgendered people and those belonging to racial minorities. Over the past few months, however, a new kind of feminist discourse has surged in the mainstream media, and no event has achieved more attention than the SlutWalks.

These marches began in Toronto at the beginning of 2011 after a police officer told a group of university students that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. This provoked an outcry, with women the world over taking to the streets in a call to stop victim blaming and eliminate the double standard relating to women’s sexuality (as one sign at the Melbourne march eloquently put it: ‘Man with many sexual partners = stud, woman = slut’).

In the weeks leading up to the march, it was furiously debated what message the Melbourne SlutWalk would impart. Its supporters believed it would reclaim a word that has often had the power to ‘criticise and judge a person’s sexual expression’. Its detractors declared that organisers were in fact ‘making life harder for girls’ and should instead take to the streets for the right not to be called a slut. Despite my support for the march, it was exciting to follow the debate and to see feminism, and its various means of expression, on the agenda and being redefined by the next generation.

The SlutWalk began at 1pm outside Melbourne Town Hall, and consisted of so many people that it was difficult to see, or even hear, the speakers (The Age estimated that around 3000 people attended). Organiser Clem Bastow spoke about the ‘blaming’ of victims of sexual assault, which still widely occurs within both the media and the general public. A young transgender man, Cody Smith, spoke movingly of his rape as both a female and later as a male, and how it had taken him years to stop blaming himself for the abuse. Writers Monica Dux and Leslie Cannold spoke of ending the judgments placed on female sexuality and their belief that reclaiming the word ‘slut’ would ultimately disempower it.

During the march I was pleased to discover that what many critics’ predicted – scantily clad women and ogling groups of men – were not in evidence. While there were a few eccentric outfits, the majority of women wore clothing fitting for a cold day in Melbourne. Attendees at the march were diverse: women of all ages, mothers with young children, and, most surprisingly, men.

Despite many comparisons to the Reclaim the Night marches, which prohibit men from participating, it is SlutWalk’s inclusiveness and encouragement of diversity that has proved its point of difference. How can we achieve gender equality and freedom from sexual violence when we exclude men from participating in marches and feminist debate? The only way to stop violence against women is to educate both sexes and allow men and women to stand up together against inequality and violence. Perhaps this is what the revival is essentially about: inclusion, of different schools of feminism, of young and old women, and men.

On the same day as the SlutWalk, the Feminist Futures Conference was held in Melbourne. Organised by the Melbourne Feminist Collective, and inspired by the F Conference in Sydney in 2010, the FFC aims to provide a safe and supportive space for anyone interested in ‘imagining and creating feminist futures’. As a young feminist in a so-called ‘post-feminist’ world I jumped at the chance to take part.

I was surprised not only at the large number of women at the conference but also at the predominance of young women. Held over two days, the conference was organised around four main panel discussions, followed by a series of workshops on a wide range of issues such as equal pay, multiculturalism, sex work, pornography and even Facebook.

The ‘Why Feminism Matters’ panel began with Professor Raewyn Connell declaring that feminism must have a balance of ‘cultural radicalism and a commitment to social justice’. Elena Jeffreys, sex worker and President of Scarlet Alliance (the Australian Sex Workers Association), then spoke about the disjuncture between feminism and sex work. Domestic violence activist Ludo McFerran discussed the difficulties of unity within feminism, believing it to have become a ‘movement of specialists’, and Alison Thorne from the Freedom Socialist Party ended the panel with a discussion of the connection between capitalism and patriarchy.

During question time it became clear that the speakers did not generally agree with each other about why feminism mattered or how the movement should progress. However, unlike in the debates raging about the SlutWalk, there was no open discussion of these conflicting feminist ideologies; instead, participants avoided engaging with each other’s points of view. During group discussion in a workshop on the increase of pornographic images and the prevailing taboo on critiquing these images, I encountered a similar absence of debate, and also a distinct lack of diversity. Despite the wide range of topics covered in the workshops, the conference consisted of predominantly young, white women.

What the SlutWalk achieved that the conference didn’t was diversity and the opportunity for debate. Disagreement does not a failed movement make. Instead, debate ensures that a movement is not only alive, but thriving.

- Photo courtesy of Jess Rizzi.

On Tuesday evening, Associate Editor Jo Case drew Monica Dux, Leslie Cannold and Karen Pickering into discussion of this seminal text. What has its legacy been? Is it still relevant? And why is The Female Eunuch – and Germaine Greer – still so compelling forty years on? See Jo’s Q & A with Monica from before the event, kindly produced by Readings.

When: Tuesday 27 July, 6.30pm
Where: Readings Carlton
Cost: Free
Bookings: Appreciated. Email info@killyourdarlingsjournal.com.

View the Facebook page for this event here.

Hysteria about adolescent female sexuality is at fever pitch at the moment. You can’t open a newspaper without having some self-proclaimed figurehead like Michael Carr-Gregg shrilling about teenagers having orgies, tween stars pole dancing on MTV and the effect singing along to that Britney song about threesomes has on five-year-olds.

When reading this fear mongering, I have to remind myself that at that age I was doing dance routines to Salt’n’Pepa’s ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’ and hitching my high school uniform up above my knees as soon as I got out of view of my house, Stephanie Kaye style. This particular ruse came unstuck one day when my older sister caught me and pulled the offending hem down with the warning: ‘People will think you’re a slut.’

So basically, none of this is really new. People have been fighting over women’s sexuality since Eve did the dirty and got everyone locked out of paradise by submitting to her ‘desires’. Thanks a lot, Eve, you slut.

During the early nineties, this fight left the women’s rooms and consciousness raising meetings of the seventies, and stumbled into the publishing world. While affording the debate a larger audience, a lot of these books were inflammatory and divisive, taking pot shots at ideologues as opposed to finding a common way for women to engage with sexuality. The lines were drawn very plainly in the sand. For the pro-sex feminists it was: ‘You either agree with us or you hate sex’, and for the radical feminists it was: ‘You either agree with us or you hate women’. Take your pick.

This decade, however, has produced a number of refreshingly balanced texts for women who want (and rightly so) to pick both. Ariel Levy’s superbly accessible Female Chauvinist Pigs was the opening shot in a new form of feminist debate, one which questions but does not lecture. Emily Maguire’s Your Skirt’s Too Short is a welcome addition to this arena.

Your Skirt is Too Short is a revised edition of Maguire’s first book, Princesses and Pornstars – Sex, Power and Identity, aimed at the young adult market. The book is largely the same, notwithstanding some language tweaks, a far superior cover and some thrown in references to ‘your teacher’ and ‘your parents’. Maguire explores a number of issues facing women today, including sexism in the workplace, sex education and body image.

It does not surprise me that Maguire is a journalist by trade. Like fellow scribe Levy, Maguire has a talent for interviewing an idea, turning it over in her words, but ultimately letting it speak for itself. She does not become overly patronising or morally dualistic, which is a common failing in books written for this age group – Girlosophy, anybody?

Her tone is light and the content highly personal. She describes her own teenage years growing up in her suburban middle class high school as ‘the slut’. The chapter entitled ‘Your Vagina Is Not a Car’ is by far the most engaging and thought provoking, not merely because of her passion but also the rather unique viewpoint from which she is writing:

I know now that when most people see a teenage girl with bruised shins, dirty knees and chafed skin they think poor kid or slut. But when I was that girl, I walked tall. I felt beautiful and I felt good.

It is a well written defence of the slut – and it’s about time too.

Maguire’s chapter about pornography, ‘Pornstars and the Women Who Love Them’ is less impressive. She begins by looking at the problematic nature of the production of pornography explaining, ‘you’re not watching actors pretending to be double penetrated; those women are really experiencing that pain’. However, these very real concerns seem to be lost to an ideological debate when the consumption of pornography is discussed. The focus switches firmly to the impact pornography has on the consumer – does it turn her on? Does it make her feel bad about her body? She includes Kath Albury’s checklist for ‘ethical porn consumption’, which focuses largely on narrative concerns – ‘Does it imply that it’s OK to trick or manipulate women?’ but, disappointingly, none of these questions consider whether the woman on the screen is ‘really experiencing that pain’.

However, it is ultimately these contradictions that make the book such a worthwhile read. Maguire is different to Katie Roiphe, Catherine Lumby and Andrea Dworkin – she is not trying to liberate you or berate you; she does not offer you all the answers, because, frankly, she doesn’t have them. She is just trying to ask the questions, a worthy quest that is far too often overlooked in this field.

With its thorough and invigorated exploration of a wide range of issues, Your Skirt’s Too Short works as an introduction to feminism for the modern girl. One that you are allowed to and perhaps even encouraged to disagree with at times.

Publisher: Text Publishing
RRP: $24.95
ISBN: 9781921520822

Anna Barnes lives in Melbourne and writes plays, fiction and really good text messages; and will be taking part in the 2010 Emerging Writers’ Festival 24 Hour Play Generator.