social commentary | TJ Withers

If you’re ready for a hilarious and engaging listen this weekend, start with Pod Like A Girl’s breakdown of the charity fails by “The Better Blokes” podcast.

You can listen to Pod Like A Girl on all the podcast apps, or visit the website to listen to it there:

Pod Like a Girl: 07. Why are the Australian podcast bros crashing out? With Rach McQueen

Or you can watch this important conversation with video on YouTube:

Image from video of Mia and Rach speaking about how the Better Blokes project has been encouraging men's violence against women.

Or you can even download the mp3 file to listen to it another way.

Full disclosure, it’s not just amazing, it’s also enraging, but only because we’re talking about the unashamed misogyny and idiocy of these two man childs.

And Rach and Mia are absolutely the right women for the job, because they’re intelligent and informed.

They’ve also spent years advocating to eliminate misogyny, sexism, and violence from Australia’s culture – and advocating for victims of this misogyny, which we know also harms men themselves.

The men who are going to The Better Blokes project for advice are more likely to be harmed, not helped, by what these blokes are spouting.

It’s the Aussie brand of the Andrew Tate manosphere, where men are encouraged to be a real man, and women are NOT welcome.

Like their videos telling women to “shut the f*** up” and let men speak (direct quote). 🤢 🤮

Which is a problem, because their governing legal documents, their charity charter, says they exist to improve men’s mental health… Not to indoctrinate men with misogyny and encourage violence against women, non-binary people, and even kids.

Cover image of the Better Blokes podcast.

So are they actually helping men’s mental health?

Let’s see…

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How to edit truly bad stories
Image source: Fonts and Fiction Blogspot

This post is a long one, sorry, but stick with it! I really believe this is something we need to make time for.

Recently, I was looking for inspiration for a part of my novel where one character interrupts a battle to give a passionate speech that marks the beginning of the road to peace. One of the first results when you Google “speech about peace and war” is Martin Luther King Jr.’s little-remembered 1967 speech opposing American involvement in the Vietnam War, ‘A Time to Break Silence’.

I had no idea that reading this speech would change the topic that I would blog on today.

“A time comes when silence is betrayal. In Vietnam, that time has come for us.” – Martin Luther King Jr., ‘A Time to Break Silence’, 1967

Many of you, upon reading the title of this post, assumed that I’m talking simply about my profession of editing. “I say there are bad stories being written out there, and we gonna git ‘em fixed!”

I wish I was.

In the world today, as there has been every year since the dawn of man, there are bad stories being written. By governments and individuals. By my government in Australia. By individuals who I know who think that the government is doing the right thing.

And I need to talk about it. I need to tell you about it. I need to talk about why we are writing a “bad” story and how we can edit it so that we aren’t ashamed of what we have written.

“I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” – George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’ Essay

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