Review of Bodyjamming: Sexual Harassment, Feminism and Public Life, edited by Jenna Mead

Abstract

It's now over two years since Helen Gamer's The First Stone was published, producing widespread media controversy, healthy sales, and offering an aestheticised and potent refrain for anti-feminist diatribes. Remember the Op.Ed columnists' frenzy, the amusing though depressing sight of what Mark Davis in Gangland describes as 'the usual suspects' (for example, Manne, Faust, Henderson, Doogue, McGuinness, Arndt, and so on and so on) holding up The First Stone as 'hard' evidence of the excesses of feminism and its role in the general decay of Western civilisation? So Jenna Mead's edited anthology, Bodyjamming, provides some timely, welcome and dissenting voices to Gamer's raising of some questions about sex and power (and the neo-conservatives' answers).