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Image by Tina Tiller
Image by Tina Tiller

MediaMay 25, 2022

On the frontlines of the war on men

Image by Tina Tiller
Image by Tina Tiller

After decades of battle, the war on men is finally being recognised. A soldier reports.

We’ve been fighting the war on men for so long we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a chattel. I’ve been on the frontlines since I was a child, recruited by my feminist primary school teacher and indoctrinated into the army of women. The army is underfunded but the propaganda is strong, with war cries of “girls can throw” and “the doctor was his mother”.

There are millions of us. Walk down a darkened alleyway at night and you’ll hear whispers that there are in fact billions of us. It never ends, and it won’t end until every man is gone. Until every man has been cancelled. Until every man has stopped being a little bit shit. In this week’s Listener magazine, the skin of a man – flayed in the midsts of battle and visibly dry – is stretched across the cover, a warning to the few men remaining. The skin is white, signalling the key target. “THE WAR ON MEN: Isn’t it time it stopped?” A question for all people, followed by the lesser advertised articles about menopause diets and wine. The holy woman trinity.

The message is spreading. This week it’s the Listener, next week, the world.

First there was the war on drugs – a heavy-handed approach to a harmful substance, with questionable results. The war on men is the same. We know they’re out there. We know some people – even young people! – use them for pleasure, and in moderation they can be harmless, even enjoyable. But overall, they’re dangerous. They hurt people, they kill people, and they’re not going away. That’s what this war is about: clearing our streets of the things that harm us the most.

Hello yes that is human skin (Image: a sad and weary Mad Chapman)

If you don’t think you’re part of the war on men, think again. Everything is a weapon and everyone is a target. Are you a man saying dumb shit? You’re a target. Are you a man obsessed with beef and trans people? You’re a target. Are you in a position of immense power and privilege and have you also behaved questionably? Uh oh, watch your back, buddy.

Every man is a target and every woman is nearby, hiding, ready to lob grenades like hey, that’s gross and please stop saying that gross thing and please stop doing the gross things when you’re born with an innate advantage in both social standing and upward mobility. You men won’t see it coming and it’ll ruin your life. So many lives have already been ruined. Jobs lost, fortunes seized, livelihoods threatened. It’s happened to so many men and it could happen to you.

But it takes two sides to have a war. And while the war on men has been dramatic, with the deadliest social media posts, violent business boycotts, placards and the most high level forces deployed at protests, the army against men isn’t invincible.

We’ve lost hundreds and thousands of soldiers in the war. Some cannot enlist because they’re too busy being underpaid. Others pull out of the army, too busy raising young boys who they’ll sadly have to brutally fight when they’re older. Many have been wounded on the streets, raped, murdered in their own homes, during this war on men. Isn’t it time it stopped?

Keep going!
McAuley High School is a Catholic girls secondary school in Ōtāhuhu. (Image: Tina Tiller)
McAuley High School is a Catholic girls secondary school in Ōtāhuhu. (Image: Tina Tiller)

MediaMay 23, 2022

I was a McAuley High School student. It was no ‘joke’

McAuley High School is a Catholic girls secondary school in Ōtāhuhu. (Image: Tina Tiller)
McAuley High School is a Catholic girls secondary school in Ōtāhuhu. (Image: Tina Tiller)

Influencer Jordan Simi’s latest podcast episode went viral over the weekend – for all the wrong reasons. Sela Jane Hopgood responds.

Over the weekend, as Australia elected a new prime minister and Beauden Barrett landed a drop goal to secure the Blues a win against the Brumbies, a clip from an Australian podcast went viral on TikTok.

On the latest episode of Jordan Simi’s Grouse & A Few Reds podcast, released on May 20, the topic of “New Zealand girls” came up. Simi, a Sydney social media influencer and former rugby league player, described New Zealand women as “not looking nice” compared to UK women, who he described as the “cream of the crop”.

Simi, who is Sāmoan and originally from South Auckland, went on to say: “shout out to South Auckland, where there was an all girls school there and you would look at them and think, is that a girl?” His two male co-hosts roared with laughter. 

South Aucklander Mariner Fagaiava-Muller posted the audio clip on TikTok, commenting that hearing it made his blood boil. Fagaiava-Muller’s video has been viewed over 47,000 times and counting. Simi later replied to Fagaiava-Muller’s video, saying his comments were “just a joke”. 

There’s only one all girls school in South Auckland and it’s McAuley High School.

McAuley High School’s ERO reports concludes that it’s a high performing school, well led and governed. (Photo: Supplied)

I went to McAuley High School. The “joke” that was directed at McAuley students is nothing new.

If you attended McAuley, you were labelled a bulldog. You were barked at if you were spotted in your school uniform out in public. Students from other schools mocked us saying we looked manly or for having legs with big taro calves. I lost count of how many times my school bus had its window smashed by a rock from another school student. Someone even wasted a mince and cheese pie throwing it at the bus window.

McAuley students, like many South Auckland students at decile one schools, experience marginalisation on a daily basis. We experience the kind of adversity where a joke about our appearance is just another stress we have to deal with. McAuley is a school with limited resources, limited subject options, where the majority of families come from low income households. They don’t have the privilege of choosing whatever they want for lunch, having the top stationery brands, or being able to afford a blazer as part of the complete school uniform.

When you are a Pasifika girl from a household juggling study, errands and cultural responsibilities; when self-confidence is already a rarity; and you hear someone from your own community, on a platform with a large following, insult young girls for not looking a certain way – that their dark-coloured eyes, brown skin and black thick hair isn’t seen as beautiful – it destroys what little self-belief you had left.

This is why the “joke” is not funny.

Because of those comments made throughout my years in high school, I, like many McAuley students, used it as unspoken motivation to do better, be better. Since the early 2000s, McAuley has worked extra hard to prove its worth, to prove people wrong about the stereotypes placed on us by others. McAuley featured in Metro a few times for their high academic rates for a decile one school. In 2016, the school was awarded with both Excellence in Engaging and Education Supreme Awards by the prime minister. 

Elisapeta Toeava of the Northern Mystics; Annetta Nu’uausala from the women’s Newcastle Knights NRL team; Niu FM afternoon radio presenter Sia Petelo; prominent New Zealand multi-disciplinary artist Salome Tanuvasa; senior urban planner Eseta Maka-Fonokalafi; Bernadette Robertson, a member of the South Pacific Professional Engineering Excellence group; and myself, Pacific communities editor at The Spinoff. All schooled at McAuley. All the while maintaining our reputation as “one of the schools to beat” at the largest Polynesian dance competition in the world, ASB Polyfest.

Lusia Petelo, host on Niu FM’s ‘The Rush’ and McAuley alumnus. (Photo: Supplied)

Of course, every high school has students who have gone off to do incredible, headlining, awe-inspiring things. So why do I bring up McAuley alumni’s achievements? It’s because a lot of these women have had to face huge obstacles to get where they’re at now, have had to work three times harder than students from wealthier schools. They’ve had to face the culture shock of leaving their family, their community and a predominantly Pasifika high school to attend a university where being Pacific is a minority, where being humble – a virtue ingrained in Pasifika people – isn’t going to cut it if you want to stand out in a class of over 600.

Casually making a “joke” about the appearance of young girls won’t affect Simi and his podcast co-hosts, but it will surely hurt the confidence of many of those McAuley students targeted. I worry they’ll lose pride in a school uniform now associated with the “manly” insult lobbed at them by those deemed more powerful because they have a following larger than their ego. 

To all past, present and future McAuley students, Domine In Te Speravi – Lord in you I hoped. It’s a motto that lives on for us, alongside our memories of beating the odds in Tāmaki Makaurau.

This is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.

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