You can take a woman out of a grievance, but you can’t take a grievance out of a woman.

The former Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs just keeps on keeping on, most recently at an International Women’s Day event in Melbourne:

We’ve absorbed the values of a male-dominated world, but we’re yet to receive the benefits. I think we’ve played by the rules far too long. I’ve worn the pearl earrings and the snappy jackets. I’ve done everything that was required, but it isn’t breaking the cycle of disempowerment and poverty that traps so many women. I think it’s time we rethought some of these rules, rather than play by the rules.

All of which prompted some thoughts (which I kept to myself rather than air them at the kitchen table, just in case Tim Soutphommasane was hiding underneath).

1. Triggs received plenty of benefits, including $417,800 a year for five years, so $2 million for her stint as the President.
2. I’m not sure how Triggs wearing “the pearl earrings and the snappy jackets” was supposed to break “the cycle of disempowerment and poverty that traps so many women”. Is it meant to be some sort of a magic ritual – “if you wear it, they will come (into money)”?
3. Women who wear pearl earrings and snappy jackets can be reasonably safely assumed to be neither poor nor disempowered. So the attire seems to be working.
4. When reading my copy of “The Male’s Short Guide to the Male-Dominated World” that all of us males are required to read and memorise by our eighteenth birthdays, I must have missed that provision, which says that in order to succeed in a world dominated by me women have to dress according to specifications contained in Schedule 15C.
5. However, it is a general rule that applies to both genders that if you want to succeed in life you dress for success. This is why men wear expensive suits and Swiss watches.
6. I’m looking forward to seeing what Triggs will wear once she rethinks the rules.
7. Actually, I’m not really.

Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk where this piece also appears.

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