NZ Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson - the one who previously had Kellie-Jay Keen as "the Trojan Horse of the far right" - produced this effort after the violence in Auckland:
What was clearly meant to be a right-on celebration of Kiwi defiance in the face of nasty far-right transphobic propaganda (Georgina Beyer was the NZ's first transgender member of parliament) turned out, tellingly, to be all too accurate in its symbolism: a huge male fist thrust in the face of a tiny women telling her in no uncertain terms to shut the fuck up.
Victoria Smith at The Critic:
So, it’s still a male person intimidating a female person, but with apparent justification. It’s fine to tell women to be small and pitiful and silent as long as it’s in the name of smashing the gender binary...
It all feels so very familiar, yet we’re meant to believe the rage — a very male rage — is of a different order to that of the past.
We’re meant to think that this time, it comes from a good place, because these particular women, TERFs, are bad. Even if the same group (male people) are expressing fury that the same other group (female people) are doing the same things (organising politically, talking without their permission, saying “no”), this time the fury is progressive. We’re meant to think it’s progressive because the male people don’t call themselves male people. Or because the female people are all right-wing, even though some of them aren’t. Or because the male people claim to be demolishing gender norms in ways the female people wouldn’t understand. This is despite the fact that I have never seen anything more gender normative in my life than these global, public tantrums about women doing literally anything that doesn’t centre men....
One of the most disturbing things about mob violence against women is that, as in witch trials, once it becomes a spectacle, it becomes self-justifying. No one on your side would do this, would they, unless they had good reason? The worse it looks — the more obvious it becomes that these are just men, shouting at women, threatening them, abusing them, same as always — the more necessary it becomes to dig in your heels, to insist that the targets are real witches, this time.
Witches don’t exist, though. What is happening right now is exactly what it looks like. It’s a male hand, pointing down, trying to silence. It’s a male fist meeting a female face. It’s the same anger, the same misplaced sense of virtue. There’s nothing more to it than that.
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