Bounce Titty Bounce Paper

Manifesting Literary Feminisms Conf Melb 13-15/12/07

BOUNCE TITTY BOUNCE: Representations of and by Women in Some 1970s Student Newspapers

1 [title slide]
2650 words@ 11/8/07
Abstract: At the beginning of the 1970s women writers were not acknowledged in the by-lines of student newspapers; there was only one piece of creative writing by a woman in 1970 in Tharunka and none in Honi Soit or The Digger. As the decade progressed, women began to gain more acknowledgment for their work, and by the end of the decade had almost equal representation in these newspapers. However, creative writing was rarely included. This analysis of student newspapers in the 1970s, and the accumulation and dissemination of cultural capital by them in the field of liberal youth politics, provides insights into the importance given to women’s writing during the decade. It explores, as Sheridan’s work does, ‘the faultlines of how writers might simultaneously work within and against conventions’.

BOUNCE TITTY BOUNCE – Paper
This paper analyses student newspapers from the 1970s and the accumulation and dissemination of cultural capital by them in the field of liberal youth politics. It provides insights into the importance given to women’s writing during the decade.

At the beginning of the 1970s editorial boards of student newspapers were male dominated. An examination of the two Sydney based newspapers, Tharunka (University of New South Wales) and Honi Soit (Sydney University), reveals an interesting representation of student politics and investigative journalism that formed and reflected the culture of the decade.

Women writers were rarely acknowledged in the by-lines. There was only one representation of creative writing by a woman in 1970 in Tharunka and none in Honi Soit. As the decade progressed, women began to gain more acknowledgment for their work, and by the end of the decade had almost equal representation in these newspapers. Creative writing, however, was rarely included.

Student newspapers enabled young journalists and budding academics to gain exposure. Articles reflecting the ebullient politics of the decade reported on issues across campus and the broader community. They included attacks on censorship laws, military dictatorships, South Africa, apartheid, Bathurst Gaol, Chile, racism, and religion (Christian and others). Support for Aboriginal issues (education, land rights, women’s rights), gay and lesbian rights, women in prison, media issues, Lebanon and the Middle East, nuclear disarmament, peace marches, IVF, and ecology/green issues such as logging old rainforest in the Daintree, were common.

David Taylor, the Features editor of Tharunka wrote in 1969: “[i]t is becoming increasingly apparent that the Australian student newspapers, as one of their functions, now have an extremely important and valuable role to play in the political processes of both the universities and the country”. The editors of Tharunka were not interested in simply editing a newspaper for students, but in “reaching a broad intellectual readership”, Judith Brett asserted, and in challenging the censorship laws.

Frank Moorhouse, who edited Tharunka during the 1970s, recollected in a recent 2007 seminar, “The Great Censorship Fights of the 1970s”, how new writers’ “growing awareness of the frustrations and limitations” of the literary scene spurred them to fight for freedom of expression. Their motivation, he explained, was “not intended as a conspiracy to overthrow society and the family, rather a destabilising of political controls of obscenity and erotic writing” and “the ways of being in Australia.” They shifted from advocating free speech to “communicating freely” in order, he added “to challenge the misuse of power and rank”.

2 [slide of Mary- Anne ]

At the same time, women were most often represented by a photo of an on-campus woman, usually with long hair, unnamed and titled only “The Bird”: either a head and shoulders shot, or to the knees if the woman was wearing a short skirt. Feminist literary critic Maaike Meijer suggested in 1995, “…to recognize sexist images of women is not enough. The point is how these images function in the text”. “The Bird” was rarely named, and if so, only by her first name, such as “Mary Anne”.

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More often the photo had no descriptor, positioning her as a sexual object. As Kate Borrett points out in “Satisfaction Guaranteed”, “a union of long blonde hair and sexual desirability [in newspaper and magazines images of women] became the symbol of vivacious femininity and Australian womanhood” in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1969, embarking on what historians Gerster and Bassett described as “a long campaign of guerrilla warfare”, the Tharunka editors, Wendy Bacon, a sociology postgraduate student, Liz Fell, who had been active in The Push, Alan Rees and Val Hodgson from the campus Labor Club, and the following year Frank Moorhouse, made a concerted effort to flout censorship laws. In efforts of provocation, Bacon wrote to the Letters to the Editor column, signing herself, “Chastity Prudence”. Later Bacon dressed in a nun’s habit to appear in court on obscenity charges after publishing a poem called ‘Cunt is a Christian Word’. In 1970 Moorhouse reviewed Anne Koendt’s pamphlet ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’ in his article “In Search of the Orgasm”. With characteristic (masculine) certainty, he wrote:

But why a man to review a pamphlet on the vaginal orgasm? Well, apart from having more than passing interest in sexual theory, like any man, I have had more sexual experience of women than any woman (except perhaps the lesbian) would have of women [his emphasis].

Coincidently, the 1970 issues of Tharunka contained more literary elements, giving it, as Gerster and Bassett asserted, “more cultural credibility”. By June of that year a Literary Supplement was inserted into each weekly issue. Poems and articles appeared by Don Anderson, Thomas Keneally, Thomas Shapcott, J. Riviere Morris, Michael Wilding, A.D. Hope, Frank Moorhouse, Robert Adamson and Michael Dransfield, whose poem “Fugue in C Minor” was still banned in Queensland because it used the words ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’.

A story under the heading, “Wrappings”, in the June 16th Literary Supplement stands out because it is the only one by-lined by a woman in any of the 1970 Literary Supplements. Written by Vicki Viidikas, it later appeared in her second volume, Wrappings, under the title “Wired Out”. It begins, “He’d come in asking to see some prints of Michelangelo, some line drawings of male nudes-.” To challenge the censor, it portrays the protagonist Anna falling in love and having an affair with a gay man.

4 Slide Wrappings
Viidikas’ story is typeset across the lower half of a double page. Above it a picture of a woman’s torso occupies the upper half of the page. Projecting Borrett’s image of desirability, her face is not visible, we see only from her neck to her knees. Her body is clad in a tiny bikini, and she lies voluptuously on the wet sand at the edge of the sea, inviting the male gaze that wanted, as Teresa de Lauretis suggested, “an illusion cut to the measure of desire”. While perhaps intending to signal that the story is about female sexuality, in reality the image negates the seriousness of the literary work. The cartoon of the lascivious man drinking Pyms adds to this negation. Perhaps this is why, when Wilding showed her the double page spread, Viidikas only “smiled wryly, with a certain satisfaction … folded the paper, stashed it in her scuffed and battered cardboard suitcase beneath the bed along with other things in manuscript and print. And that was it”.

The Literary Supplement was dropped the following year, although occasional poetry pages appeared thereafter, with some poems by women.
5 [Slide Jennings]

A 1971 (undated) issue (17: 4) of Tharunka printed three poems by Kate Jennings, super-imposed once again with a full-length photo of a nude woman (back-view), with waist-length, flowing blonde hair. The poems, later published in Come to Me My Melancholy Baby, recount the narrator’s experience of mental illness.

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By issue 17: 7 of that year, Germaine Greer hit the paper with “Bounce Titty Bounce”, but only a first name by-line. ‘Germaine’ exhorted women readers to “Let it all hang free…If you love yourself, use no hooks, no armatures, no bindings. Your paps are not too small, or too low, or too soft, or too droopy. They’re you, and you are beautiful”.

By issue 17: 16 she told her readers in an article entitled “Ladies Get On Top For Better Orgasms”: “Once you throw a leg over your man, you have made a political gesture”.

7 Slide copulating couple

Pictures of “The Bird” were replaced with explicit pictures of copulating couples (with the woman on the top) in an effort to express visual liberation and ‘equality’. In reality, it exacerbated the invitation of the male gaze. And apart from women writing on women’s issues, the by-lines were still dominated by men.

However, by 1974 women began to gain by-lines; they wrote about the opening of the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre, lesbianism, violence in marriage, women in religion and women in education. In the same year a few poems by Lorraine Roche and “cocabola brown” were printed on a one-page spread. Pamela Brown went on to become a well-known poet and story writer, represented in many anthologies including Jennings’ Mother I’m Rooted. Despite the success of several poets such as Pam Brown and Kate Jennings, as Barbara Caine lamented in Crossing Boundaries, in the 1970s “women still remained largely absent from mainstream representations, relegated to mere appendages and helpmates for men and ignored as such in political and theoretical strategies and policies”.

Following International Women’s Year in 1975 changes were evident and by 1984 Tharunka had two male and two female editors. Women claimed almost as many by-lines as men, but there were no literary articles outside of reviews of theatre, movies and occasionally books. Signifying male resistance to women’s power, a cartoon in the “Women’s Pages” of issue 30: 4 showed two men holding the door of the student union shut against a woman’s foot clad in a high heel trying to force the door open.

[slide]
This was the year Bron Brown became the first woman representative on the Student Council.

Honi Soit [slide of a front page]
Honi Soit tells the same story about the representation of women writers. The only woman to gain a by-line in 1970 was Patsi Dunn who scored a double page for her article “The Ins and Outs of Incest”. She had also organised a by-line in a double page poetry spread in 1969: “Purifying the Dialect: A Collection of Recent Works by Some Members of This University (Arranged by Patsi Dunn)”. There are two fifteen-line poems by her; the others are by John Tranter, Martin Johnston, Ian Channell and Robert Greaves. Later known as Irina Dunn, she became the Executive Director of the NSW Writers’ Centre (with Michael Wilding as Chairman), a position she still holds at the time of writing.

In 1971 there were forty writers on the editorial staff of Honi Soit (including Nick Enright) of whom only six were women. Girlie photos of unnamed women, with even less clothes on than those in Tharunka, appeared in each issue, under the headings “Chic Pics” or “Ambrose’s Aviary”. In the July issue Deborah Ehrlich rated a double page and by-line with a review of the movie “Lawrence of Arabia”. There were occasionally all-male pages of poetry, but none by women.

[slide of ambrose’s aviary]

By International women’s Year, 1975, eleven journalists were named on the editorial board of Honi Soit, of whom five were women, but while feminist notions were strongly evident, by-lines for women were still rare. In April two women did gain by-lines: Sarah McDonald for “Abortion on Request” and Jane Rawlings for “Dope at Parties” about the politics of pot smoking. In June of 1975 Paula Taylor wrote a double page, “Elsie: Appeal for Funds”, on the women’s refuge at Leichhardt. It ends with a strongly feminist plea: “Think about why there is a need for Elsie, about why and how women have the oppressive roles they have and then do something. Contribute to the total change that is necessary”.

[slide of surfer chicks]
A satirical full-page article titled “Surfer Girl” appeared, also in April 1975, signed by “an ex-surfy chick”, and accompanied by a drawing of several breasty young women in bikinis. Pre-empting sentiments espoused in the novel Puberty Blues (1979), it challenged the male domain: “[f]irst of all you’ve got to look a certain way …[or] … your fuckability declines, and fuckability is what gets you to where it’s all at” and ends, “the problem for women – is that it’s a mecca women can’t live in”.

The 1978 issues did not list editors, and although there were no “Chic Pics”, there were still few by-lines for women. In the university context, white middle class males still controlled the publications, even as women applied pressure on the editorial board. By 1984 the situation at Honi Soit had changed in that of the seventeen people of the editorial “collective”, (including Jose Borghino), eight were women, and women received by-lines as often as men. In a 1984 October issue, poems and excerpts by Tina Harris, Sylvia Plath, Héléne Cixous, Françoise Parturier, Robert Greaves and Adrienne Rich were reproduced on a double page spread titled: “Anger and Tenderness”. However, while journalistic reportage continued, literary representations of women remained largely absent, although Honi Soit was proudly proclaiming its very own Rude Girls.
[slide]

The Digger
In 1988 Judith Brett argued that the challenge to censorship by the underground press was possible because of new offset printing methods, which led to “an explosion of publications – little magazines, newsletters, poetry and short story collections”. Frank Moorhouse confirmed this analysis when he described the rise of new methods of roneo-ing, xeroxing and other offset printing methods that avoided intervention by the typesetter or an interfering editor.

Speaking to Clare Colebrook’s notion of a “refusal to see the text as a sign of some prior and stable context” with an emphasis on the “dynamic and productive character of representation”, The Digger newspaper was another publication that avoided mainstream editorial intervention to produce its own ‘dynamic character of representation’. It ran from 1972 to 1975, published by a Melbourne counter-cultural publishing cooperative headed by Phillip Frazer, who began his editorial career as editor and publisher of Go-Set, an underground music newspaper aimed at Australian teenagers in the 1960s.

Frazer wanted The Digger to be an Australian version of Rolling Stone, reporting on alternative music, theatre, books and politics to a more mature audience. The Digger offered more opportunities for women writers and while it did not publish fiction, it published more poetry than either Tharunka or Honi Soit, and it provided a voice for alternative political issues. As examples, in the September/October issue (1972), Susan McCulloch gained a by-line with “Busted For Incitement” on law and order, Beatrice Faust for “New Tool for Abortions” and also for a three-page spread with illustrations, “Porn”.

Appearing anonymously in The Digger in a November 1972 issue is Helen Garner’s account of the lesson she gave to a mixed gender first year high school class, “Why Does the Women Have All the Pain, Miss?: Sex Explodes in First Form”. Garner was later sacked from the Victorian Department of Education for its explicit content. Describing her moral stand, Gerster and Bassett argued that the lesson and the ensuing article shocked conservatives “not only because of its frank language… but because she encouraged young women to question sex roles and to speculate on their sexual futures”. The story appeared later in Garner’s 1996 anthology True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction.

In the same (November) issue of The Digger Pat Woolley (later to establish publishing company Wild and Woolley with Michael Wilding) reviewed the music band Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Pamela Cocabola Brown reviewed a music album by Pamela Pollard, “The Hot One Hundred Girl Strikes Out Alone”. Another left wing newspaper, Nation Review provided, according to Susan Lever, a “focus for the social, cultural and political arguments of the time”. Lever recounts Garner’s 1972 letter to Nation Review objecting to the use of the word ‘cunt’ as a term of abuse, arguing that Garner’s objection enunciated the male undergrad kind of humour and sensitivity apparent in Nation Review.

Susan Sheridan suggested in Grafts that “feminist cultural criticism pays attention to the ways in which reality is always discursively constructed for us, to the how rather than only the what of cultural representations”. This analysis of the ‘how’ demonstrates that as the decade progressed, while women did not appear as by-lined authors except with reviews of theatre, film, music and books, nevertheless they gained practice writing about contemporary issues and gained representation on editorial boards. Their work prefaced what became in the 1980s a flood of original non-fiction, poetry and prose by women on issues of interest to women. This writing, while not often showcased in mainstream venues, achieved exposure in other ways, including in literary and feminist journals, anthologies and small presses.