Bringing the 'gynocide' home to Aurukun

Feminists hit upon the idea of “gynocide” because they saw that groups of women had already been made ineligible for a viewpoint different to men. Women in prostitution were the major group of women in this category. Sexualised racism made Aboriginal women another group.

Feminists then saw more and more groups of women become ineligible for a viewpoint different to men. Rape conviction rates plummeted. The way that Helen Garner described university college women in 1997 (as effectively asking for sexual harassment) drew an angry response from feminists because it told us that another group of women had been “lost”.

Still, feminists wrote about gynocide mainly as a dystopia. But the Werribee and Aurukun cases have changed this. Girls, women and girls with a cognitive impairment, and women and girls targeted for gang rape by men were thought to be outside the group of women who weren’t allowed to say no. Feminists saw them as a final frontier of women who couldn’t possibly be painted with happy smiling faces “consenting” to whatever men did to them. But now the judiciary, as a major social institution, has said that even 10-year-old Aboriginal girls are part of the female group that men can legally buy for abuse.

The Werribee and Aurukun cases therefore leave feminists facing a bleak reality. If male society sees consent for the girls from Aurukun and Werribee, it sees consent for every single one of us. So feminists now have to admit to each other that the gynocide is here. We have to talk to each other using the name of our own gynocide: “consent”.