Kevin Lawrence

World traveller. Train & History nerd. Pro acceptance, tolerance, discussion, assistance, respect, learning. The only thing I won't tolerate is intolerance.

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Yup

[Kevin Lawrence @Krel4203]

@colonelhogans Finally, some good news. Thanks Rick and congratulations Brittany. :-)

[Rick @colonelhogans]

If there is one woman in Australia over many years who has endured the most disgusting, putrid, sexist, misogyny, it’s Brittany Higgins.

I congratulate on her new role and I am confident she will do an outstanding job

Brittany Higgins has been appointed as the executive director of the Vida Fund, with her role focused on “countering the rise of misogyny and far-right political movements in Australia”.

The role will see Higgins lead an effort to put gender equality “firmly on the electoral agenda” and support “values-aligned” independent female candidates in upcoming elections, both statewide and federally.

She said in a statement:

Vida Fund was created to ensure gender equity remains a defining political issue in Australia, not just a one-off moment. We are entering a period where misogyny, extremism are becoming increasingly organised and visible. Vida intends to meet that moment with evidence-based advocacy, strategic campaigning and community-backed action.

The Vida Fund will also undertake new research into the role of gender in the rise of far-right political movements.

The Guardian

[‏ً @itsnwts]

My coworker really used to take the long way home every night. Two extra bus stops, more walking, more money, more time. One day I asked her why she didn’t just take the shortcut alley behind our building.
She laughed and said, “Oh, because a guy followed me there once and told me he could ‘do whatever he wanted’ and no one would hear me scream.”
So now, every night, she calls a male friend and pretends she’s on the phone with her “boyfriend.” Sometimes she even laughs loudly and says things like, “Yeah, I’ll see you in five minutes, babe,” even when she’s completely alone.
Not because she wants attention.
Not because she’s dramatic.
Because sounding “taken” and “protected” is safer than sounding like a woman by herself.
Men cannot even begin to understand the calculations women make every day just to get home alive.

[Kenny Devine @TheKennyDevine]

What I've learned from Sky News After Dark over the past month:

We need to make housing more affordable without making houses cheaper or having people earning more.

The government should be doing more because it's their job but also less because socialism.

Negative gearing and the CGT discount have played a big part in what got us to this point, but they shouldn't be changed at all.

Young Australians being able to afford their first home is almost as important as an investor being able to negatively gear their twelfth.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

Referee denied entry.

Officials denied entry.

Players denied entry.

Fans denied entry.

The U.S. is proving exactly why it never should’ve been chosen to host the World Cup.

[Craig Hill @CraigHill01]

I get that many people feel disillusioned with both Labor and the coalition, because that's the way the media have played you, but One Nation are not a realistic alternative. If you want to make a protest vote against the two major parties, vote for an Independent instead.

[Misinformation Fact Checker. @MisinfoFact]

@Dazzaat The Statement from Julia Gillard on Instagram.

[Kevin Lawrence @Krel4203]

Poorlean Hanson One Nation Extremist Yobbos - PHONEYs.

[Craig Hill @CraigHill01]

PHON supporters should be known as PHONIES, just like the party members who get elected.

[Margie Jones @MargieJay50]

@news_australian I’d say Keating could see into the future because this was written in 1996.👇

[Marty Fargo @MartinRolfe2]

Hey Albo! Can you explain why the Jewish community gets $604m and the Muslim community $24m?
Or:
$5209 per Jewish Australian.
$29 per Muslim Australian.
I'm sure there's a really good reason, so what is it?

[Dave Donovan @davrosz]

Australians are not antisemitic, apart from some startlingly rare exceptions. We are demonstrably bigoted against First Nations people (and Africans and Muslims).
But Indigenous Australians especially. I find this Royal Commission into Antisemitism a disgraceful affront to them.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

“Teachers who make physics boring are criminals”

Walter Lewin

[Kevin Lawrence @Krel4203]

@PhillipAdams_1 From Nero to Zero!!!

[ꪝe @_wej01]

Just saw a TikTok where the lady was saying, When I worked on fighter jets, I walked into a meeting with a room of only men, and one straight up walked up to me and said, “can you take notes during the meeting.”

I was shocked. It was the first time in my career I experienced this. I looked taken a back but I said, “I’m sorry no I’m going to be busy.”

I later walked to the front of the room and introduced myself as the Lead Engineer for this project. The amount of red on this gentleman’s face is something I’ll never forget.

[Restoring Your Faith in Humanity @HumanityChad]

A Polish dance group, Fair Play Crew, drew global attention by recreating on stage the stiff and synchronized movements of 1980s fighting video games, such as the classic International Karate.

I've seen this so many times, still cracks me up 😂

[Kevin Lawrence @Krel4203]

@AaronDodd Could they form a coalition in opposition and thus outnumber the Liberals (remember them?).